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aslouie -> RE: Have you watched any foreign language movies? (3/18/2008 12:02:25 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Abschlusszahlung
We just rented a Korean film called "Old Boy". It was quite fascinating , and extremely well done, but I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. Its really quite disturbing, I had my eyes closed for the last ten minutes of the film and husband just described the action on the screen. In the west we like our happy endings, we like our tragedies to be tragic but with a redeeming quality at the end. From what I've seen, oriental audiences like their tragedies to be proper, completly and utterly debasing the characters, until the individual is as low as a human being can get; much like greek tragedy. I suppose the way to describe this film and its plot: its like a modern Korean version of Oedipus: Oedipus' sin was his hubris, which led to his downfall, in the modern film pride was the least of the character's sin (because he'd done a lot worse), but it was what ended up condemning him to his fate. There was a very interesting line in it that really spoke to me as a Christian: "whether its a stone or a grain of sand, both end up sinking the same".
Infact, thinking about it, the movie was almost exacly like Oedipus-incest, self mutilation and all! I don't think Disney will be making their own version any time soon.
I guess regarding the Western/American audience psychology vs. the Asian audience psychology have me offering a litany of sociological theories, stances on how us Asians approach film violence, or for that matter film endings.
With violence, I don't know if it's something akin to the passive-aggressive consequences of Eastern/Zen culture, kind of like resigning to one's dismal fate, no matter how grisly and depressing things can be (being Chinese taught me a lot about what it meant to face the Hegelian farce that is sometimes, Asian life).
At the same time, I can't help but speculate the reason why Asian extreme films are notoriously ultra-violent and depraved: given how much emphasis is vested in harmony and balance, one had to wonder if holding a karmic balance means to keep both evil and good balancing itself like some kind of cosmic scale, sort of like the morality/theology in the Star Wars movies: good needs evil, or something like it, to sort of skewed the biblical concept of free will.
So in the case Oldboy, etc... I'm opining that perhaps Asian audiences were programmed/indoctrinated since day one, to sort of allow film obscenities to run rampant, to complement perhaps our emphasis for pacifism (i.e. don't upset the status quo, be conformist, and just for the sake of going anti-war, etc...). I had a similar thread from a year or two ago, questioning if Asian misogyny in films are symptomatic of that socio-religious paradigm. I'll take this one great leap forward and include movie violence into this concoction.
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