still failed the class on an attendance rule (missed three classes, but the professor allowed me to keep attending and turn in the paper and grade it [I would have passed if not for the instant F for missing three classes and had I known, I wouldn't have bothered]). Sometimes I have thoughts I would like to pursue with intense and focused effort. Those times come and go, but the yearning to share, critique, explore, and pick apart, and build mind never fades. Came across this while browsing some old rough drafts and sharing is caring. Still very upset at Eric Velasquez. If you run into him with his skinny jeans on CMU's campus, punch him in the face and offer him a shot afterward on my behalf. Fakehawkwearing side saddle hugging wannabe sumbleotch! Seriously though. If not for that stupid attendance rule... nothing like knowing you've failed three weeks into a semester to motivate you. Not that people have different ways of learning and contributing. Penalize the shy... =sigh=... Not at all. i will kill you in the face-> I do wish I had more time to work on it. I suppose I do now. It was fun. Spent several days ramping up to it and then banged it out with a few cans of red bull and a couple packs of cigarettes when I realized there was no more time to play with the idea and it was time to shove something out for a grade. B+ is fine by me. If it had counted on my transcript I might've actually graduated and gotten my paper only two years late instead of never.
09 May 2008
The Anti Hero:
Asian Extreme Cinema’s Impact
The anti hero genre was built by the hard boiled detective film and the film noir movement and many of its characteristics and nuances have been firmly established by a long line of films, most notably by films like Kiss Me Deadly, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Maltese Falcon. Furthermore, these traits, established through character, plot, mise-en-scene, and cinematography, have become cultural signifiers in identifying and delimiting the anti hero genre; the genre surpassing the film in ideological importance. The anti hero is no longer a part and parcel of the hard boiled detective film as much as the hard boiled detective film has become a part of the anti hero genre, leaving space for the expansion of the genre into other cinema besides the hard boiled detective films of the early and mid Twentieth century. New to the genre is the movement known as “Asian extreme” cinema, featuring notable directors like Park Chan- Wook and Takashi Miike. Asian extreme cinema is changing the ideology of the anti hero, eroding some tropes and reinforcing others, while at the same time affecting the American understanding of the anti hero in ways that fundamentally challenge the anti hero’s origin in hard boiled cinema and film noir. Arguably leading the charge of this new movement is a trio of films directed by Park Chan-Wook known as Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. These films together form the Vengeance trilogy and a challenge to the hard boiled, gangster, and noir pedigree of the anti hero genre, but before a filmic discourse can be established in detail, the genre itself must be explored and delimited to properly frame the discussion.
The anti hero genre is not composed of a single archetypal character from which all others can be derived. It instead originated with a collection of characters from film noir and hard boiled detective films, beginning with, of course, the intrepid hard boiled detective of the mid 40’s and 50’s novels and screen productions. Productions like The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Kiss Me Deadly and T-Men. In each of these productions there is presented the figure of the detective or agent who must seek out the truth to reveal evil doers and bring them to justice often while simultaneously juggling their own self interests in the process; sometimes with success and sometimes with extreme failure in their self interests, be it greed, or wealth, or power, getting the better of them. Some productions, like Kiss Me Deadly, even dropped the detective embroiled in personal scruples altogether, presenting a new kind of detective who could often be confused for those he sought to bring to justice. A detective who straddled the line between good and evil with little to tie him to one side or the other and little in the way of a conscience in his pursuit of truth. Adding to the genre is the noir gangster of films like Angels with Dirty Faces, The Big Heat, and Asphalt Jungle. The noir gangster forms the core of the story of the disaffected business man or common blue collar citizen, jilted by society with nothing to fall back on but his own wits and ruthlessness to achieve status in a world of darkness. Crime becomes his business and his downfall. Further fleshing out the anti hero genre is the story of the couple on the run, the fatal couple, appearing in films like This Gun for Hire, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Blue Dahlia, and Bonnie and Clyde. Sometimes driven to crime, sometimes falsely accused, sometimes misunderstood, and always linked by a shared passion for one another, the fatal couple forms an integral part of the anti hero genre as one of the most retold and rescreened character combinations in film noir. The viewer is endeared to the commitment between the couple, often lovers, and their desire to remain together in the face
of all odds even though they are pursued by, and often operating on the wrong side of, the law. The anti hero genre is composed of these major characters, with each character contributing to the tropes of the genre; tropes like the fallible hero, the hero who stands on murky moral ground, the protagonist who is simultaneously a vigilante, the corruptible hero, the couple destroyed by their lust, the protagonist whose motivations are clouded by passion, and the hero who exercises no restraint in his quest to achieve his personal goals. These tropes do not exist in a vacuum, but are constantly being interpreted, reproduced, encoded and decoded, through mise-en-scene and cinematography and the act of watching film, allowing the anti hero genre to take on denotative substance as a genre.
Here, Stuart Hall’s model of the communicative circuit becomes useful in explicating just how the tropes of the anti hero genre are created, communicated, and deconstructed by the film’s viewer. The communicative circuit is composed of a multitude of steps that serve differing purposes, purposes that must be defined. These steps, in order, are technical infrastructure of production, the knowledge frameworks of production, the relations of production, encoding, the message that is transmitted, decoding on the part of the receiver, again the relationships of production, then the knowledge frameworks of the recipient, and then the technical infrastructure of the recipient, and finally reproduction (Hall 94). There are two highly distinct sides to the communicative circuit as well; the production and distribution side and the reception and reproduction side (Hall 91). Each side and step is vital to the transmission and mediation of the discourse that takes place between the origination of a message and the reception of that message, a discourse that structures the anti hero genre. The production side of the technical infrastructure limits the frameworks of knowledge, in this case frameworks that inform the genre, which can be encoded into a production and transmitted via a medium to the recipients.
On the recipients side the technical infrastructure limits the frameworks of knowledge that can be used to decode a message, the message being that of who and what an anti hero is. In the middle is where the idea of media actually happens, media like radio, television, newspapers, and most importantly in this case, cinema that convey the message (Hall 94). Stuart Hall stresses the importance of encoding and decoding above the other steps of the circuit because it is, for him, where meaning actually occurs. For Hall the medium is largely arbitrary to the knowledge frameworks and technical infrastructure that go into encoding and decoding the tropes of the anti hero genre. Mise-en-scene and cinematography are tools of production, but also act dually as tools of reception and reproduction on the opposing end of the communicative circuit. Around the middle of the communicative circuit, the message’s transmission, is where cinema takes place in theaters and is received by viewers. The viewer’s ability to decode mise-en-scene and cinematographic devices directly impacts how they are able to interpret and regenerate the tropes of the anti hero genre on the reception side of the communicative circuit. Recognizing the meaning behind the use of perspective relations, framing, on screen and off screen space, angle, level and height of framing, the movement of the frame, lighting, shot composition, and the duration of the image are all critical to understanding and interpreting the tropes that are encoded into production (Bordwell, Thompson 1993). For instance framing the main character with a high angle shot can convey a sense of powerlessness in the greater scheme of the plot while framing the character with a low angle shot can convey a sense of power, agency, and even menace. Composing a shot of the main character with a mirror image of the character in the same shot, looking into the mirror, can convey a duplicitous personality or a sense of inner conflict, indicative of the anti hero’s plight of dealing with inner demons while struggling to maintain some sense of a moral compass. Introducing the main character with high contrast
lighting, keeping him in shadow and others in bright, washed out, light can convey a sense of the main character’s darker traits overtaking his noble questing for truth. Bisecting a frame with straight lines like staircase banisters, wall elements, and fixtures can convey divisions between the character’s intentions and the character’s actions and can also convey a closing in of the main character’s world, the tightening of the noose of justice around the anti hero’s neck, or can convey the bars of prison that lie in the character’s future. Using a long take can portray the circuitous and ultimately futile flight of the impassioned couple running from the law. Or using a long focal length can frame the main character in the foreground with other characters in the background, splitting the focal points of the shot to bring oppositional forces in the background into the same frame of realization as the main character’s efforts to establish control over his destiny. A widely cropped take of the main character can convey his isolation and weakness in his efforts to exercise control over the dark world around him (Saada 175). The information, the tropes of the anti hero genre, are all encoded during the production of the film, and are later received through cinema, decoded by the viewer, and reproduced in the recognition of the hard boiled detective, the noir gangster, and the fatal couple as characters within the genre of the anti hero. While earlier hard boiled and gangster films build the anti hero genre from within its limits, Asian extreme cinema, more specifically Park Chan-Wook’s films, forms a departure from the typical coding of the anti hero in ways that fundamentally change how the genre can be understood in terms of mise-en-scene, cinematography, and character.
As examples of how earlier hard boiled and gangster films build the anti hero genre consider Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon. Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) and Clyde Barrow (Warren Beaty) represent the fatal couple in Bonnie and Clyde while Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) represents the hard boiled detective, all of
whom operate within the anti hero genre. The cinematography, mise-en-scene, and character elements encoded into these films production clue the viewer in to the genre’s elements present in the films. Bonnie and Clyde opens with Clyde considering stealing Bonnie’s mother’s car as Bonnie looks on, nude, from her bedroom window. Bonnie comes down from her room to talk to Clyde and Clyde begins talking about his past time in prison. The two together head into town for a soda and as they talk Clyde flashes a gun. Bonnie claims that he does not have the fortitude to use it and Clyde, rising to Bonnie’s challenge, immediately heads across the street to hold up a convenience store, commanding Bonnie to stay put. Here the viewer gets the first hint that the two are destined to become the story’s anti heroes. A very wide angle shot dwarfs Bonnie as she stands alone in the street on the far right while Clyde, at the far left, disappears into the store.
Their love at first sight is destined to fail as a fatal couple, doomed and dwarfed by their future deeds and ultimately they will be separated by death dealt at the hands of the law. After the heist the two race away and Bonnie, impassioned by the experience, ravenously attempts to have relations with Clyde as they speed away, symbolizing the path of reckless love they have embarked upon and imploring the viewer to sympathize with their passion though they have just brazenly violated the law. The viewer must decode the character’s actions and only then can the conflict of love and violence be seen for what it is; an encoded trope of the anti hero genre as represented by the fatal couple. In a following scene, the couple is hiding out in a run down farm reclaimed by the bank and attempting to share a moment of intimacy. In the scene Clyde tries to respond to Bonnie’s advances, but cannot because he is not a “lover boy.” As Bonnie turns away from him, disgusted and hurt, a medium close up crops her from the chest up as she turns and holds onto a gun instead, clutching it close to her heart, reiterating that the pair’s volatile relationship with its somewhat innocent beginnings revolves around violence and crime,
distancing the viewer from the couple and their abnormal relationship. The viewer is further distanced, both literally and figuratively, from the anti heroes in a scene in which Bonnie flees from Clyde to attempt to go home and see her mother. By this point the two have committed several crimes and slain multiple police officers and there is no way they can continue to slip away from the officers unscathed indefinitely. As Clyde finally manages to track Bonnie down in a corn field a high extreme wide angle shot captures the weight of their situation. Their actions have distanced them from all hope of redemption as the drag net of the law looms all about them, encoded in the bleak vastness of the distance framed in the shot. The forced alienation of the protagonist pair further encodes them as anti heroes, operating on the wrong side of the law, consumed by the violence that parallels their passion, their powerlessness to change their heading, and distanced from the viewer by their abnormal actions. The Maltese Falcon presents more evidence of the encoding of the anti hero genre in cinema and the building blocks, its tropes. In an earlier scene the hard boiled detective Sam Spade is speaking with a potential client, Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), when Cairo pulls a gun on him and insists he be allowed to search Spade’s office for the Maltese falcon. Spade begins to comply and places his hands on the nape of his neck, but then as Cairo jams his pistol into the small of Spade’s back Sam turns on him disabling his gun hand. There is a short sequence in which Sam continues to advance toward the now helpless and physically diminutive Cairo with a sadistic grin on his face before finally knocking him out unconscious with a single blow to the face. The cruelty Spade exercises in dispatching Cairo evidences his murky moral compass. He is signified, through his character’s actions, as an anti hero very early on in the film. In a later scene Sam Spade confronts another possible client, Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), about what she knows about his partner’s death. When she insists that Spade should trust her because she bought his
confidence earlier on in the film Spade replies that his confidence is not so easily won, but before the issue is dropped he grabs hold of Brigid and places a kiss squarely on her lips hinting that where money has failed a sexual liaison might suffice. Here again Spade’s character as the story’s protagonist must be called into question and here again his actions code him as the corruptible anti hero standing on shaky moral ground. In yet another scene Sam Spade is being questioned by two detectives, Lt. Dundy (Barton McLane) and Tom Polhaus (Ward Bond), about his whereabouts during the time his partner was murdered. The use of shot reverse shot during the questioning reveals the fine line Sam Spade is walking in his pursuit of the truth behind the Maltese falcon and his partner’s murder. The first low angle shot has Sam Spade’s back to the camera appearing much larger than the two officers as he easily dodges their efforts to pin the murder on him, but as they threaten to pinch him and take him down to the station for questioning the reverse low angle shot has Sam Spade framed on either side by the now much more menacing, much larger, detectives. The shift from manipulator to manipulated and back again is indicative of the lack of control the anti hero can exercise over his destiny as events that are larger than him dictate his future. Though Sam is able to exercise some agency in his existence he is still unable to control most aspects as a common man would. Bonnie and Clyde and The Maltese Falcon are both examples of how the anti hero genre is built up through the use of tropes encoded into cinema and decoded by the film’s viewer. Asian extreme cinema forms a departure from the encoding established by the hard boiled detective film and the gangster film, altering the genre to make the anti hero appear more normal, human, and accessible to the viewer where hard boiled and gangster films have served to make the anti hero less normal and more distant.
In Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, the main character Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) is a deaf mute who must raise enough money for a kidney transplant for his ailing unnamed sister. Through the course of the film he becomes the victim of the circumstances he creates for himself in his efforts to secure the transplant. He first turns to normal hospital channels, but finds that an organ donor is not readily available and that his blood type does not match the blood type of his sister. He then turns to illegal organ dealers to give up a kidney and
$10,000 to secure a kidney for his sister, but the organ dealers take his money and his kidney and do not hold up their end of the bargain. Penniless and without a kidney Ryu then learns that a donor kidney has become available at the hospital for the sum of money he lost to the black market organ dealers. He then turns to kidnapping out of desperation and kidnaps the daughter of Dong-jin (Kang-ho Song), a prominent businessman, to hold her for ransom enough to pay for the transplant. However, when his sister learns of the lengths he has gone to she commits suicide to unburden her brother. Ryu then takes her body to a river bed, with Dong-jin’s daughter in tow, to bury her and in the process Dong-jin’s daughter slips into the river without his knowledge and drowns, her cries for help falling on Ryu’s deaf ears. Ryu fills the role of the film’s anti hero, but his actions are as moral as his circumstances allow them to be. Here the tropes of the anti hero genre are not as helpful in describing Ryu’s behavior. Ryu is almost a complete victim of circumstance with nothing going as he originally intends. He is forced to make the best out of the worst outcomes and eventually pays with his life by the films end as Dong-jin seeks him out and ultimately kills him in the same river bed where his daughter perished. Regardless, he still represents the film’s anti hero because his moral decisions, though influenced by outside forces, are still decisions that are questionable; decisions such as choosing to fall to kidnapping to make up the money he needs, resorting to black market organ dealers in
the first place, and even swearing vengeance on Dong-jin after Dong-jin murders his fiancé in his efforts to track him down. Ryu clearly stands on murky moral ground, even though it is the only traction afforded him by Chan-wook’s plot. In Park Chan-wook’s follow up to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Old Boy, a melding of roles takes place, casting the protagonist as an amateur hard boiled detective and a revenge seeker. In the story Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik) is imprisoned in an undisclosed location away from all human contact, but for feeding times, for 15 years, his wife is murdered while he is imprisoned, and his three-year-old daughter is sent away to foster parents. Upon his release he falls for a sushi chef named Mi-do (Hye-jeong Kang) and finds out this his former captor now tormentor, Lee Woo-jin (Yu Ji-tae), will kill her and every other woman he has and will ever love in five days if he does not find out the reason for his imprisonment. So begins Dae-su’s quest for the truth as a hard boiled detective who must stop at nothing to find out the secret of his imprisonment, but also his quest for vengeance against Woo- jin (though he cannot kill him until he finds out the truth). The vengeful slant of the otherwise typical hard boiled detective film clues the viewer in to the fact that Dae-su signifies some kind of incarnation of the anti hero genre, but the coercive elements of the plot, the fact that Mi-do and others lives are at stake, here again shed new and somewhat contradictory light on the anti hero genre, stretching its former boundaries anew. On the one hand Dae-su’s no holds barred pursuit of the truth is indicative of the anti hero trope of the hard boiled detective’s lack of scruples, but on the other hand he is pushed to that point by circumstances largely out of his control. In addition the viewer is brought into Dae-su’s world on a very intimate level with use of many close ups. He is portrayed as being human in spite of his violent efforts to save Mi-do from the over arching clutches of Lee Woo-jin. An example of the intimate portrait is a scene in which Mi-do and Dae-su make love with Mi-do insisting that all she wants is to be good to and
for Dae-su even though the scene is portrayed as being a painful experience for her. Dae-su is painted as a protagonist full of human emotion and in dire need of Mi-do’s love, even though the scene is preceded by scene’s of almost shocking callousness and reckless abandon on Dae-su’s part; scenes such as when he forgoes the opportunity to talk down a suicidal man on a roof top, allowing him to jump instead, and when he starts a fight with street toughs for the simple pleasure of knowing his shadow boxing while in seclusion could equip him to properly fight should the situation arise. In an act of utter humility and compassion, Dae-su goes so far as remove his own tongue to protect Mi-do from Woo-jin’s efforts to reveal the truth of Dae-su and Mi-do’s incestuous relationship. Such acts force the viewer to identify with the anti hero in ways that the hard boiled detective films like The Maltese Falcon and Bonnie and Clyde fail to do, establishing an intimate link between the viewer and the anti hero.
Asian extreme cinema is changing the ideology of the anti hero genre, making the characters it is composed of more, not less, human as the tropes of the genre have done through the mid and late Twentieth century. The anti hero genre was built by the hard boiled detective film and the film noir movement and the majority of its characteristics have been firmly established by a long line of films, a pair of particularly notable films being Bonnie and Clyde, and The Maltese Falcon. The traits of the genre, established through character, plot, mise-en- scene, and cinematography, traits like the morally ambiguous quest for truth, the impassioned couple on the run, the disillusioned common man turned gangster, the detective clouded by greed, ambition, and lust, and the hard boiled unscrupulous detective have become cultural signifiers in identifying and delimiting the anti hero genre. New to the genre, and a force for change within the genre is the new movement known as Asian extreme cinema featuring the likes of Takashi Miike, director of Iichi The Killer, and Chan-wook Park, director of the
Vengeance trilogy. While Asian extreme cinema has served to reinforce some aspects of the genre it has also served to broaden and humanize the characters within the American understanding of the genre’s limitations through films like Old Boy and Sympathy for Mr.
Vengeance. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance and Old Boy are simply the tip of the mountain of Asian extreme cinema and while they are prime examples they are by no means the only ones. Every film that could be helpful in showcasing the changes caused by the advance of Asian extreme cinema could not be discussed because of breadth constraints, but further study of the anti hero genre and Asian extreme cinema’s role within it would certainly reveal even more impact than what is explored in these pages.
Works Cited
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art an Introduction. U.S.A.: McGraw-Hill, 1993.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader Ed. Simon During. New York: Routledge, 1993. 90-101.
Huston, John, dir. The Maltese Falcon. 1941. Warner Brothers Pictures. 2008. Park, Chan-wook, dir. Oldboy. 2003. CJ Entertainment. 2008.
Park, Chan-wook, dir. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. 2002. CJ Entertainment. 2008. Penn, Arthur, dir. Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. Warner Brothers Pictures. 2008
Saada, Nicolas. “The Noir Style.” Film Noir Reader 4. Ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini.
New Jersey: Limelight, 2004. 175-191.
original works of parts
