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3 Iron (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea)
By Chuck Stephens
"The Freddie Mercury of Korean cinema."
That’s how Tony Rayns rather mischievously—if altogether pointedly—described controversial South Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-duk, at the conclusion of a rather scathing profile of the director I’d commissioned for a special Korea-focused subsection of the November/December issue of Film Comment last year. The article, entitled “Sexual Terrorism: The Strange Case of Kim Ki-duk,” wasn’t the first opportunity the critic/programmer had enjoyed to call this sham cineaste’s bluff in print. In Korea, where his writing is regularly published in the glossy film magazine Cine 2.0, and his high-profile advisorial capacity at a variety of film festivals has made him something of a celebrity iconoclast, the outspoken Rayns’ corrosive disdain for Kim’s films has long been well-known. (Somewhat less well-known is that Rayns and Kim nevertheless remain on cordial personal terms.) Nor, I felt reasonably confident at the time, was this attack on Kim’s egregious self-indulgences and profoundly nasty gender politics likely to be Rayns’ last.
Despite the growing reputation Kim has been enjoying internationally during the last few years, and more in keeping with the tepid appeal most of his films continue to have at the Korean box office—two topics which Rayns addresses at length in his writings on Kim—it’s certainly gratifying to learn that there remains as large an appetite for destruction among the director’s detractors as the one that fuels the gusto for macho narcissism, virgin/whore misogyny, and fine-art-as-French-postcard posturing that riddle his films. In a world where certain viewers find the rape-is-so-romantic impulses behind a film like Bad Guy (2001)—or behind a hateful teenaged fantasy like 3 Iron (known, appropriately, in Korean as Bin-jip: “empty house”), where criminality seems liberating as long as, once the end-credits start rolling, it hasn’t disrupted the status quo—irresistibly appealing, it’s more than a little comforting to be reminded that there are two or three others who certainly don’t.
Exactly what Rayns may have intended by his concluding line’s comparison of the Korean cineaste with Queen’s flamboyant frontman remains as specific in origin as it is elusive in after-effect. Obviously, it was the insipidly bombastic epigraph with which 3 Iron finally fades to black—something about it being sometimes hard to separate fantasy from reality—that had prompted Rayns’ analogy. But whatever additional attributes, affectations, and enlargements one wishes to extrapolate from such a comparison remain fertilely unfixed—in retrospect, Rayns was right to resist qualifying, quantifying, or elucidating his analogy. That one’s mind might drift toward the conditions of sexual contradiction, sub-operatic ego-inflation, and underdog anthems steroidally production-enhanced as jackboot thunder-rock that mark the works of both of those merchants of mass seduction is all just fine. But such a reading has little to do with the specificity of what Rayns wrote, nor do most of the muddled outrage and spittle-flecked defenses of the director that Rayns’ article continues to inspire online. Those convinced that Rayns’ lambaste of Kim’s films stems from some resentment over Kim succeeding without Rayns’ imprimatur should be reminded that he programmed Kim’s first film, Crocodile, at the Vancouver International Film Festival in 1996, long before programmers elsewhere had begun to take notice. And those foolish enough to claim that Rayns uses the article as a forum to “critique Kim’s physique” when in fact he’s calling attention to the director’s own self-regard—or is expressing envy rather than amusement at Spike Lee’s endorsement of 3 Iron as “Strong, man! Strong!”—are simply in need of remedial reading drills.
And yet it’s the part of Rayns’ article that one might have thought so irreducibly obvious —that 3 Iron borrows shamelessly, though altogether leadenly, from Tsai Ming-liang’s Vive l’amour (1994)—that seems to have stuck most tenaciously in the Internet’s greasy craw. From its basic set-up to its final conclusion, 3 Iron clings desperately to his unacknowledged source—even if, like a monkey who’s stolen a monkey wrench, Kim can think of little more to do with his boodle than bang it desperately on the ground. But no matter how thoroughly he bangs it about during the burglary, the contours of the looted movie inside his rucksack remain recognizable all the same. Of course, the tone of the two films is wildly dissimilar: no one would think Tsai capable of making as preposterous a point about art-and-violence and crass class warfare as 3 Iron’s hilariously clueless opening image, with golf balls smacking into the netting of a driving cage, just beyond which looms a plaster of Paris reproduction of a renaissance sculpture serving double duty as a lawn ornament.
Vive l’amour concerns a trio of disenfranchised characters who cross paths in an empty apartment, where at least two of the three have come in search of love; it’s a film filled with libidinal possibilities and moments of joyful liberation, even if those moments finally prove but tentatively so. Formally audacious, frequently quite funny, and always delicately controlled, it’s a film about, among other things, the ways homosexual desire in late 20th-century Taiwan begins to find a sense of self-expression, even as the plight of sexually assertive women remains more or less unchanged. Overwrought and altogether joyless, 3 Iron concerns a sullen pretty boy—with a late-model BMW motorcycle and an expensively angled teen-avenger haircut— who breaks into temporarily unoccupied houses, hoping to mindfuck the owners who will eventually return to puzzle over the thief who appears to have taken nothing but the time to do his laundry, even as they fail to notice some tiny something the kid has changed. When eventually the kid comes across a battered woman in the house of a man he’d taken an instant disliking to—despite, or perhaps because of, the homeowner’s BMW sedan—the kid decides he ought to liberate her, though the scope of his imaginings results in only greater violence and more inconsequential tinkerings, and nothing at all is changed.
Unpleasant when it isn’t repellently brutal, 3 Iron closes with the woman back in her abusive husband’s arms, and though the lingering shadow of the boy seems to separate them slightly, it’s the most insulting of pseudo-progressive conclusions. With the man’s prize possession (his trophy-wife) returned to him, the kid’s lawlessness contained, and liberation rendered phantom, all we’re left with is the sense that Kim is stupid enough to actually believe he’s convinced us that the events we’ve just been watching — and by metaphysical extension, a thousand nights of video-rental escapism just like 3 Iron—could somehow serve to ameliorate anyone’s actual pain.
My initial hope in asking Rayns to rework his already familiar-in-Korea thesis was to sound a cautionary note at precisely the moment Kim stood on the verge of greatly expanding his American profile. Well aware that the welter of hardcore festival bloggers and region-free DVD-shoppers who’d been wowed by The Isle (2000) were the last minds we’d be likely to change, I found myself even more worried by the possible effect a typically overwrought, if thematically anomalous, Buddhist tchotchke like Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…Spring (2003) might have on Kim’s career. The umpteenth incarnation of exportable Asian cinema was the last thing anyone needed, with Kim cast as a more scabrous variation on Zhang Yimou. But critics everywhere were taking the bait, with only the perceptive Scott Foundas, in a double-edged piece of film criticism as hilarious as any published anywhere last year, sounding a cautious note in the LA Weekly. “A contemplation of the human experience,” Foundas wrote of the director’s “dimestore Buddhism”, “[Kim’s film is] suffused with lushly exotic vistas and accessible life lessons [and] unfolds at a deliberate pace, with a soundtrack occupied less by dialogue than by the sounds of water flowing and crickets chirping. And if you listen carefully enough, you might just hear the sound of one hand clapping.”
Much the way a Zen master might heuristically apply his wooden staff to the back of a dozing adept’s unenlightened head, Foundas so smartly smacked the film’s koan-encrusted surface that he split it wide open, exposing the mouldy kernel of cliché within. To whom might that single clapping hand have belonged, if not the fearlessly fecund Mr. Kim? Not surprisingly though, the film went on to find the other hand that was out there waiting: an audience and a critical establishment as impatient with imponderables as they were keen to shatter uncomfortable silence with unquestioning applause. Mr. Mercury would have recognized the drill: “I know you all know this one. Now let me hear you put your hands together!”
As it happens—and all too delightfully so—3 Iron reminds us that Kim Ki-duk likes those old songs as much as anyone, and my despair over his ascendance seems, temporarily at least, somewhat premature. Rayns was right, of course, though I’d known that from the get-go. But it was Kim Ki-duk who surprised me by staying so doggedly the same. And in that sense, and that sense alone, the dull throb of familiarity expressed in every frame of 3 Iron, along with every blustery blog-buddy eager to rush to its defense, proves such a golden oldie that I can’t help but clap along.
—Chuck Stephens
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3 Iron
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