Reflections on "Burning" (2018)

The mysteries of life and creative meaning-making go beyond the Paju countryside.

I wrote the original version of this piece as a final project for a film criticism class I took my senior year of college, taught by NYT co-chief film critic A.O. Scott. I credit Prof. Scott for showing me that criticism can and should go beyond binary judgements of “good” and “bad,” and instead act as a vessel through which we can continuously engage art with more intention, curiosity, and care.

Thus, I see this piece as a perpetual work-in-progress. I will inevitably return to it as I continue to confront this film, which has had an indelible impact on me.

I watched Burning for the first time my junior year of college, at a screening for a class on contemporary east asian cinema. It was a rainy Sunday afternoon in March 2021 during the most stressful semester of my college career so far, so it made sense that I nearly talked myself out of attending to focus on midterms. Although I did ultimately force myself to brave the rain and attend the screening, my demeanor as I walked into the screening room was indifferent at best. I barely trusted myself to stay awake for the film’s protracted two-hour-and-thirty-minute runtime. 

To say this film moved me would be an understatement. As the credits rolled, I found myself lamenting my earlier temptation to skip the film altogether. Korean auteur director Lee Chang-dong’s triumphant return to filmmaking after an eight-year hiatus left me awestruck, uneasy, and, most of all, confused — but in the best way. Burning got under my skin and stayed there, festering in its understated existentialism and plentiful ambiguities, for at least a week. 

Perhaps it was just good timing; the tumultuous and often depressing social realities posed by the pandemic may have rendered me more vulnerable to the film’s ubiquitous malaise. Perhaps the film’s prominent themes of loss, loneliness and longing resonated with me because of my own then-recent losses and experiences on one end of a long-distance relationship. Or, perhaps the film’s technical beauty and enigmatic narrative merely left me inspired. I could never put my finger on it. I could barely even explain to my friends what actually happens in the film. While I didn’t fully understand it, Burning left — and continues to leave — an undeniable impact on me. Now, I aim to confront the film yet again, this time with the intent to better understand why. 

Burning is a loose adaptation of Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s short story Barn Burning (which, it is worth mentioning, is also based on a William Faulkner story of the same name), a work of postmodern fiction whose influence pervades the film. Upon reading the short story in tandem with various rewatches of the film, it became clear to me that Barn Burning struck a similar chord with Lee as his cinematic adaptation did with me. Burning is the resultant expression of its director’s captivation by its literary source material.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Lee was asked how he managed to strike a balance between intellectual and emotional approaches to crafting the film, to which he responded: 

“To me, it seems that the world we live in continues to become more and more sophisticated…but there are so many problems underneath that we can’t really discern—and that’s the nature of this post-modern world and its problems. I’ve always thought about how I can portray ambiguous issues of this kind in a film. I realized that Murakami’s story connected with this question, which is something I had been asking myself for a very long time.” 

This game of artistic telephone between Murakami’s and Lee’s works — the translation, transformation, and transcendence of diffuse emotion and universal ambiguity across the film and its literary counterpart — brings my own resonance with the film into focus. The seemingly inexplicable impact that Lee’s expansion of Murakami’s story had on me might be attributed to its ability to toe the line between realism and surrealism, to speak to the frustrating social complexities of the current moment, and to develop a rich emotional profile despite its commitment to maintaining a veneer of intense ambiguity. 

That’s a neat little thesis statement, but how does it explain why the film, which threw what seemed like endless questions at me with little to zero answers, still managed to fully engross rather than alienate me? The emotions are legible amidst an otherwise suppressed narrative, but what did they really amount to? What actually happened to Hae-mi? What is Ben up to? Did the ending actually happen? Was the cat real? What did it all mean?

I’ve come to realize that, as I returned to the film in hopes of finding answers to these questions, I played directly into Lee’s hands. Burning beckoned me with a challenge to decipher its many existential questions and left me with something more — or less. These questions are not meant to be answered concretely. Like the bright-eyed and introspective Hae-mi and her “Great Hunger” for the meaning of life, my emotional reaction to Burning was defined by the futile pursuit of these answers, which gave way to more abstract meditations on the film’s themes. 

In a way, the characters themselves undertake a similar pursuit. Our central protagonist, Jong-su, even before his quest to find Hae-mi and his obsessive investigation into Ben’s peculiar penchant for arson, seems passively desperate for meaning. While diffuse, his desire, dread, and simmering angst are nonetheless palpable as he navigates unemployment, creative paralysis, and a complicated relationship with his incarcerated father. Things only get weirder for Jong-su as he finds himself in a bizarre love triangle with Hae-mi and her inscrutable new friend Ben. Hae-mi’s sudden disappearance, in tandem with Ben’s offbeat confession to his tendency to burn down abandoned greenhouses, serves as the catalyst for Jong-su’s evolution into a more active character, and thus a vehicle for the film’s more deliberate subversions of his — and my — pursuit of answers. It is through Jong-su’s transition from passive to active that Burning states clearly its intentions to keep things close to the chest and proudly wear its ambiguities on its sleeve, encouraging the viewer to make peace with the fact that perhaps this was the point all along. Still, Lee nonetheless ensures that Jong-su’s emotional reactions to these ambiguities are felt, thus balancing the lack of narrative resolution with moments of profound emotional resonance, which are brought to a head in the film’s ultra-violent finale. 

Ben, on the other hand, embodies the film’s affinity for ambiguity. His calmly menacing demeanor undoubtedly left me unsettled, thanks in no small part to Steven Yeun’s mesmerizing performance. A Gatsby-esque character with all the trappings of a certified psychopath, Ben not only acts as the privileged antithesis to the working-class Jong-su and thus a primary vessel through which Lee articulates an understated commentary on South Korea’s pervasive socioeconomic inequality, but he also serves as the primary subject of Jong-su’s bottled-up rage and insecurity. Regardless of his uncannily smug and self-satisfied manner, Ben’s very presence torments Jong-su — and the viewer — to the point of obsession. The ensuing psychological game of cat-and-mouse that he inflicts on Jong-su becomes the vehicle through which Lee externalizes the many ambiguities and mysteries that he seeks to explore. These mysteries and their elusive resolutions, as the film’s second half demonstrates, are simultaneously what grant Jong-su meaning and deny him of it — a paradox that inevitably drives him to the point of senseless violence. Thus, Ben functions as both the catalyst for Jong-su’s narrative transformation and the viewer’s concurrent emotional and intellectual experience. It is through him that Jong-su and the viewer are aligned. 

While some may lament Hae-mi’s role in the film as nothing more than a one-dimensional subject of the male protagonist’s sexual desires, or a plot device to motivate his emotional arc (valid criticisms to which Murakami and his body of work are frequently subjected), I found her character to be absolutely necessary to the film’s emotional profile and contemplative subtext. Hae-mi not only rounds out the film’s social awareness with subtle nods to the differential treatment women face in modern South Korea, but she transcends her male counterparts as a sort of omnipresent force. A buoyant and unapologetically free spirit, Hae-mi wears her emotions on her sleeve, treating every moment — no matter how mundane — as an opportunity for self-discovery. Thus, Hae-mi’s pursuit of meaning is far more ambitious and flagrant than Jong-su’s. In a way, Hae-mi is the emotional core of the film. Even in her physical absence, her presence is felt — her abrupt disappearance and enduring absence serving as a reminder of the fragility of optimism and earnest idealism under the oppressive weight of life’s many mysteries. 

Hae-mi’s indispensable role in crafting the film’s sophisticated emotional profile and abstract thematic meditations is perhaps best exemplified by her now-iconic “Great Hunger” dance at the film’s halfway point. Immediately preceding Ben and Jong-su’s momentous conversation about love, paternal hatred, and systematic arson, Hae-mi spontaneously dances topless under the solemn glow of the Paju sunset to a smooth Miles Davis tune. It is no coincidence that this scene has come to represent the film’s entire ethos. Hae-mi’s dance sees her bask in life’s many unanswerable mysteries, surrendering herself to forces out of her control. A rapturous ascension into the film’s metaphysical realm, this scene is perhaps the film’s only moment of true levity, when a character is truly free. It is as if Lee is trying to say that Hae-mi’s — and our — “Great Hunger” for meaning can only be satiated by a faithful capitulation to the possibility that the “Hunger” itself is enough. 

However, Jong-su never quite surrenders to this existential realization — in fact, he is borderline hostile to it, as demonstrated by his misanthropic resentment of Hae-mi’s dance (“Only whores do that”). But why would he? The film is unconcerned with making some sort of vague philosophical argument for the virtues of detaching oneself from one’s worldly pursuits. Hae-mi’s subsequent disappearance seems like a deliberate subversion of this potential reading. In reality, we all get bogged down in our deeply human tendency to obsess over ultimately trivial matters and the futile pursuit of “fulfillment” — whatever form that might come in. Jong-su is no different. Amidst all of the things out of his control — his socioeconomic status, his fractured familial relationships, his existence in a deeply ambiguous and contradictory world — his infatuation with and longing for Hae-mi and obsession over deciphering Ben’s peculiar hobby provide a new pursuit through which he may be able to find meaning. 

Or, perhaps it is all a fantasy. After all, Jong-su is a writer, and the film is interspersed with suggestive fades to black and digressive episodes of intense subjectivity. Lee leaves open the possibility that many of the film’s events are the product of Jong-su’s imagination, particularly his climactic killing of Ben in the film’s final scene, which might be interpreted as a cathartic act of justice. Still — and I will sound like a broken record here — this is left ambiguous. This is fitting given Lee’s own intellectual seduction by Murakami’s short story and his subsequent attempt to channel his abstract emotional reactions to it — Jong-su’s writing mirrors this on a metaphysical level, rendering the film an infinitely interpretable exercise in diffuse emotion and suggestive ambiguity. Perhaps the fact that it is so difficult to pin down is a testament to the success of Lee’s original objective in adapting Murakami’s work. Through absence, ambiguity, and abstraction, Lee crafts a film that resonates with the authentic — and often frustrating — human experience.

I believe this is why I had such a strong reaction to Burning. Its emotional and experiential authenticity breached the distance between myself and the characters, bypassed my learned boundaries of film viewership and tunneled directly into my subconscious. I like to think that Murakami’s story had a similar effect on Lee, whose intense psychological reaction and creative inspiration compelled him to make Burning. Perhaps my response to Burning will ultimately set me on a purposeful pursuit of my own creative reinterpretation. Or, perhaps the film will simply remain unanswerable, along with the many other mysteries of my life, gently reminding me that things will never fully make sense.