QUIET RAGE The Fire and Finesse of Lee Chang-dong’s Cinema

What would a president see in Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)? When, at the end of 2018, Barack Obama made like any self-respecting cinephile and posted a films-of-the-year list on his socials,¹ he showed plenty of cred, listing acclaimed arthouse and indie movies, like Burning, alongside the all-conquering Black Panther (Ryan Coogler, 2018). It’s interesting to contemplate what a man who once occupied a seat of such supreme power would love in Lee’s drifting 148-minute tone poem. Its central device, the disappearance of a young woman, Hae-mi (Jun Jong-seo), is never resolved; instead, it’s a mystery that, in staying unsolved, leaves everything about the film mysterious. The thematic subtext of the screenplay, economic inequality, definitely gives it universal resonance. But it was nonetheless surprising, upon scanning the former US president’s faves, to see just how universal that resonance is.

There is a president in Burning, but it’s not Obama. It is, of course, his successor, Donald Trump, a totemic embodiment of economic inequality. Lee could’ve used a more Korean figure, like Park Geun-hye, the daughter of a former totalitarian leader, who found herself impeached as South Korean president in 2016 and eventually imprisoned in 2018 for collusion, corruption and abuses of power. But Trump, that human sign-o’-the-times, is both more ubiquitous and more specific. In Burning, we hear a presidential speech playing on the television owned by Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), an aspiring writer who’s been forced – by his father’s legal troubles – to return to his downtrodden hometown and work the family farm. While Trump, in all his grotesque buffoonery, is often deployed as a punchline, here, he’s evoked as a more complex figure: he may embody economic inequality, but his appeal transcends it – or, at least, plays to both sides of the crowd. A simpler film would’ve made him a mirroring symbol for the movie’s ostensible antagonist, Ben (Steven Yeun), Jong-su’s rival for Hae-mi’s affections. Ben is an amoral, aloof, handsome, Americanised, globetrotting rich kid – and possible arsonist and/or murderer – who dwells not in some dust bowl by the Korean border, but in a high-rise in Gangnam. While Trump’s tax policies cater to such one-percenters, his rhetoric is aimed at ‘The two [characters] exist on opposite ends of the spectrum. But a lot of young people today live somewhere between these two poles. Many feel the helplessness that [Jong-su] feels, but they want to live like Ben.’