Bong Joon Ho

With the release of Parasite (2019), recipient of the Palme d'Or and an Academy Award for Best Picture, the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho secured his place as one of his generation's leading filmmakers. Yet while scholars and critics have long appreciated his penetrating critique of Korean society and global capitalism, his oeuvre has not been considered from a philosophical perspective. This book argues, however, that Bong's cinema is philosophical and in a radical and original rather than derivative sense.
Anthony Curtis Adler shows that for Bong Joon Ho, cinema doubles the ambiguity of philosophy. Supreme apparatus of control and domination, it also presents the aesthetic means to represent, and thus liberate, anarchic movements. From the humble apartment building of Barking Dogs Never Bite to the train in Snowpiercer and the mansion in Parasite, Bong's films stages interior spaces as representations of the cinematic apparatus in all its ambiguity. Writing as an intimate outsider to Korea, a "resident alien" married into a Korean family and teaching at Bong's own alma mater, Adler explores Bong's visionary and re-visionary treatment of spatiality, temporality, myth, memory, genre, and the semiotics of monstrosity.
Nor is philosophy, for Bong, not just a Western thing: the ambiguity of cinema also parallels deep-lying tensions between Confucianism and Daoism with their very different perspectives on family, authority, happiness, purpose, and the relation between human beings and the rest of nature. Even while confronting globalism head-on, Bong's films never cease to engage with the specific challenges faced by modern Korea, and, above all, the struggle of the Korean people for political representation and economic justice. By employing the motif of adoption as radical openness to the non-related and even non-human Other, Bong points toward a Korean way of Being, more Daoist than Confucian, that can resist the false, homogenizing universal of globalization without doubling down on the repressive family or myths of ethno-racial purity.

Anthony Curtis Adler is a Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University's Underwood International College, South Korea. His most recent books include Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (2016), and Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: 'Hyperion' and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (2021).