Korean vs. Hollywood Cinematic Violence

As many of my friends know my filmic interests are not bound by our national borders.  In fact, four of my ten favorite films listed on my Movie Mash profile are foreign films.  One of my favorite countries for cinema with subtitles is South Korea.  Pretty much anything done by director Chan-wook Park is bound for my DVD collection.  To name a few of his amazing works, please check out Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, Lady Vengeance and Thirst.  The first three films are all from Park’s Vengeance Trilogy, three movies connected by betrayal and lust for revenge.  The last one is about a priest turned vampire who must grapple with his new hunger for blood and an attractive young woman.  If giant mutant fish are more your style, check out The Host, a monster movie that has something to say.  The Chaser was my most recent viewing; a detective turned pimp has to find the guy who has been killing his girls.

One of my reasons for favoring Korean films is because I took the language for a requirement at the University of Minnesota.  In one class my professor told the class something interesting about Korean culture, guns are almost completely banned.  We were told that citizens can own guns for hunting but that those weapons must be kept at a police station and signed out when used.  With access to firearms being so limited, it’s no wonder that many Korean thrillers or action movies lack the bang (pun completely intended) of Hollywood flicks.  This is not to say that there is not violence, there certainly is, and quite a bit of it, it just means that the violence is more in your face, more personal, less ignorable.

One of the advantages of using guns in Hollywood cinema is that they allow for much greater physical distance from the camera.  This lack of proximity makes the violence less personal and also allows the filmmakers to be less graphic when depicting gunshots.  Most gunshot special effects are created by small explosives placed under the clothes called squibs.  In some cases, mostly films with R ratings, a blood pack is placed over the top of the explosive to simulate the bullet’s impact.  However, if the distance is great enough, or if the victim is facing the other way, a squib is unnecessary, making gunshots appear to be completely nonintrusive, even banal, the avada kedavra of the real world.

Korean cinema, with the general lack of guns, is compelled to utilize other weapons when characters wish to hurt each other.  Oldboy protagonist, Oh Dae-su favors the claw hammer and broken tooth brush, the hooker killer in The Chaser uses a hammer and chisel to dispatch his victims, Mr. Vengeance hones his killing skills at the batting cage.  All of these weapons require the wielder to get up close and personal with his victim and by extension the audience is forced to be a witness to the savage violence as if they were in the room.  Compared to the options allowed when filming gun violence, when filming a murder by chisel, there is no way to soften the blow without cutting away all together.  We are essentially made an accomplice to the crime.  The violence is shot in a very straight forward manner.  There are few close ups of injuries, nothing is slowed down; the scene is allowed to play out as though you were watching a fight at a bar.  Sometimes it is a quick scuffle just one punch and done, other times we watch inept assassins flounder over their writhing prey.  From a production standpoint, the violence is allowed to speak for itself and is not embellished by CGI or special camera set ups.

Perhaps I have been lucky with my encounters with Korean cinematic violence.  Maybe I have happened upon the films that show what violence is really like and there are plenty of films that depict violence the same way as Hollywood action movies.  However, the unflinching portrayals of savage brutality in certain fight sequences (watch the Oldboy corridor fight for an example) are far from romanticized.  I shudder to say that the closest Hollywood has come to creating the same bodily effect in the audience comes from films like Hostel or the Saw franchise.  But even these fall under the category of torture porn, violence specifically for violence’s sake, no good reason to show it other than the spectacle.  It would seem that violence in Korean thrillers is calculated and utilized for more than just cheap thrills.  I actually find nothing sadistic in the motives for violence in these films; I see well thought out characters pushed to unimaginable limits and directors ready to take chances on movies that are not easy to watch.  Sit through one; you might see what I see.

What Do You Think? Discuss.