GENERIC INTERVENTIONS Tropes and Topicality in the Films of Bong Joon-ho
Okja’s an almost-family-film that, ultimately, talks about industrialised agribusiness, the peddling of genetically modified organisms, and ecoterrorism, while also taking terrifying trips into the forced insemination and mass slaughter of factory animals.
‘With my films,’ boasts Bong Joon-ho, ‘sometimes people don’t know whether to laugh or whether it’s a serious scene, and they’ll ask me: “Was it supposed to be funny?”’
Across six feature films – from 2000’s low-budget black comedy Barking Dogs Never Bite to 2017’s big-budget capitalist parable Okja – the Korean director has fashioned less a distinctive style, more a singular tone. Or, more to the point, a tonal plurality. Whether a monster movie (2006’s The Host), a serial-killer procedural (2003’s Memories Of Murder) or a post-apocalyptic action spectacle (2013’s Snowpiercer), each Bong film is at once comic and tragic, a dark social satire wrapped in goofy absurdity. They’re genre movies, or close enough, yet their quirky sense of humour, moments of sublime artfulness and sense of genuine adventure make them rise above – or sink below – genre’s standard tropes. Bong is renowned for his fastidiousness: having grown up loving comic books, he works with carefully plotted storyboards and goes into production knowing all his shots, never shooting coverage, effectively editing the movie while filming (his nickname in Korean is a pun on the word ‘detail’ ). Yet, for all his visionary bona fides and cinematic singularity, Bong demurs being called an auteur: ‘I think such praise is for arthouse masters like Michael Haneke,’ he says. ‘Rather, I would like to make films that excite the mass audience.’
And there’s real accessibility in Bong’s films. The Host, Snowpiercer and Okja could all be considered colourful fables, the last of which having such a Spielbergian sense of cinematic spectacle and wide-eyed wonder that it’s almost a family film. Yet Okja’s an almost-family-film that, ultimately, talks about industrialised agribusiness, the peddling of genetically modified organisms, and ecoterrorism, while also taking terrifying trips into the forced insemination and mass slaughter of factory animals. So, y’know, it’s cute and touching, but deeply disturbing. And it’s also hilarious, and ridiculous, and stylish. It’s Bong being Bong, on a grand stage.
Okja was made for US$50 million for Netflix, which offered the director total artistic freedom; the director is complimentary about the streaming giant: ‘If you want to make something strange, it is a good place to go.’ But this did mean that the
