The multifold intertextuality in Lee Chang Dong’s burning

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The multifold intertextuality in Lee Chang Dong ’s burning

Bj€orn Boman

Department of Education, Stockholm University, Frescativ€agen 54, 106 91, Stockholm, Sweden

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:

South Korea Burning Haruki Murakami Intertextuality William Faulkner

A B S T R A C T

The study focuses on how the South Korean drama/mysteryfilm Burning (2018) intertextually draws from Wil- liam Faulkner’s short story ‘Barn burning’ and Haruki Murakami’s short story ‘Barn burning’ and related sociohistorical contexts. Burning does quite impressionistically and freely draw from these two short stories as well as adding new features, while simultaneously removing much of the core of Faulkner’s work and some of Mur- akami’s counterpart. By means of intertextual borrowing and re-contextualization, it has used the global discursivefield and consequently hybridized and localized elements and themes from American-Western and Japanese works and discourses to perhaps make them better suited for the South Korean context. Burning has included and excluded various elements from both short stories but emphasized class and gender issues. These two major elements reflect upon the structural inequalities in the contemporary South Korean society.

1. Introduction

South Koreanﬁlms have evoked both academic and public interest (e.g,Chang, 2010) in part related to instances of intertextuality, trans- nationality, and hybridization. Further, they provide an accessible way to a potential understanding of contemporary cultures that travel, merge, intersect and are being re-contextualized in and across various locations of the world (Chua, 2012;Fujiki, 2019;Hamer, 2011;Lin& Tong, 2008).

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to South Korean films (K-film), TV drama (K-drama), literature (K-literature), and pop music (K-pop), and to Japanese literature (e.g.,Orgad, 2017;Starrs, 1994) and visual and audiovisual popular culture, including the borrowing of western elements (e.g.,Jin& Ryoo, 2014; Jun, 2017;Lie, 2014;Schulze, 2019;Shim, 2006;Yoon, 2017). In afilm studies context this process is typically understood as adaptation (e.g.,Denison, 2014;Diffrient, 2009;

Shin, 2019).

For instance,Shin (2019)has examined how Park Chan-wook’s film The Handmaiden has been adapted from the 1930s (based on British writer Sarah Waters’s novel Fingersmith), whereasChang (2010)has paid attention to how Korean masculinity is interpreted among Western au- diences of Park Chan-wook’s film Oldboy (2003). Park (2011) has focused on the labor movement under Park Chung-hee’s regime as it is constituted in thefilm Single Spark (1995). Some content analysts have directly compared gender and socioeconomic disparities in Korean dramas with corresponding conditions in real life by means of exhaustive analytical models (Lee& Park, 2015). It seems that content analysis becomes more pertinent if it draws upon the discursivefield (Fairclough,

1992,2003) rather than merely interpreting popular cultural material as atomistic and isolated phenomena (Boman, 2020).

However, the multidirectionalflows of culture, mediated by manifest intertextual chains and influences, are yet to be further explored, at least with regard to the nexus between literature andfilm in South Korea, Japan, and the United States, and in relation to deeper social issues than pop cultural genre hybridity often in the focal point of analyses and critical discussions onfilm, TV drama, and music. An instance of such a multifold intertextuality is Lee Chang Dong’s (b. 1954) drama/mystery film Burning (2018), which draws upon William Faulkner’s short story

‘Barn burning’ (1993, originally released in 1939) and Murakami Har- kuki’s short story ‘Barn barning’ (1992, first published in 1983) (Fujiki, 2019;Yamada, 2020). This work is of particular interest because it is manifestly linked to these two works, perhaps Murakami’s short story in particular, and simultaneously highlights important social topics in present South Korea if not beyond. Further, it exemplifies how intertextuality might be constituted when it both travels from one disparate time and place to another (America in the late 1930s to South Korea in the 2010s) and uses influences or bricolage from a more recent and culturally proximate country (Japan in the early 1980s). Therefore, it requires a deeper analytical procedure to examine such preliminary tendencies.

Some earlier studies have focused on Lee Chang Dong’s Burning (Beoning, 2018):Min and Moon (2019),Yamane (2019),Fujiki (2019), Boman (2020) and Yamada (2020) with the three ﬁrst emphasizing intertextual patterns andMin and Moon (2019)as well asBoman (2020) focusing on character development. Both Yamane (2019) and Fujiki

E-mail address:bjorn.boman@edu.su.se.

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2021.100119

Received 19 January 2020; Received in revised form 12 January 2021; Accepted 18 January 2021 Available online xxxx

& Humanities Open 3 (2021) 100119

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(2019)have examined intertextual and ideological aspects of Burning, such as geopolitics (South Korea–North Korea relations, see especially Fujiki, 2019), but the readings do partly deviate from the ones in the present article. The current contribution is mainly related to 1) literature–film intertextuality (Faulkner – Murakami – Lee), 2) class, gender, and tertiary race (as related to Faulkner’s short story in relation to Burning as a localized adaptation), 3) and globalization as either hybridization/localization, homogenization, or polarization and how this relates to the cultural-ideological themes in Burning. As such it adds to earlier studies on Burning, as well as research onfilm adaptation and film–literature intertextuality. Furthermore, by focusing on issues such as class and gender it complements the literature on contemporary Korean culture.

2. Theoretical framework

2.1. The sociohistorical context in South Korea

South Korea has made a rapid development from a Confucian to a democratic society. This process has implied that educational opportunities were extended from a small elite to virtually all segments of society within the span ofﬁve decades. Formal class inequality was eroded in the late nineteenth century in the aftermath of western inﬂuences that were retrieved from Japan, prior to and during the colonial period (1910–1945), when Korea was annexed by Japan. Democracy was introduced in 1987 (Chang, 2010;Jang& Kim, 2013;Lie, 2014;Savada& Shaw, 1992).

As several historians have noted, modernization in post-World War II Korea (i.e., South Korea) was intimately connected to evangelization, urbanization, and westernization. One may also add nationalism and women’s movements to this triad. In other words, when Korea became Christianized throughout the twentieth century, it granted women an opportunity to be involved in social life to a greater extent than during the Chosun era (1392–1910). Further, it provided an attempt of collec- tive resistance to the Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945), and after the permanent partition in 1953, South Korean Christianity (both Catholi- cism and Protestantism) grew in parallel with millions of Koreans relo- cating to the Seoul metropolitan area were they regularly attended church services on Sundays (Baker, 2003;Jung, 2003). Later, the country has leaned more towards atheism and increased westernization (Baker, 2008), often manifested by the emergence of hallyu (Korean wave), the regional and global rise of South Korean popular cultural products, like ﬁlms, TV dramas, music, food, beauty items, and electronics (Chua, 2008, 2012; Dutta, 2014; Kim, 2015; Lie, 2014). Overall, this reﬂects a neoliberal society in which the individual’s body is marketized (Lee&

Lee, 2017).

An oft-repeated notion is that Korea remains Confucian and conser- vative even in modern times, which indeed is questionable given the prominence of Western, democratic, capitalist, and secular elements which have only but grew throughout the lastﬁve decades (Baker, 2008;

Lie, 2014). Things are, however, not unambiguous in that respect and some Confucian residues remain, at least among the oldest family members and relatives in the Korean community (Chang, 2010;Jang&

Kim, 2013). WhileJang and Kim (2013)underscore the Confucian residues within the present Korean society, especially among the earlier generations still alive, as a crucial sociocultural factor, Lie (2014) is skeptical about the presence of such elements in contemporary South Korea. Be that as it may, as noted byYamada (2020), the Korean divisive past affects contemporaryﬁlms such as Burning where both Confucian residues and neoliberal capitalism are present.

2.2. The South Korean response to globalization

Jan NederveenPieterse (1995;2015)has outlined three major cultural tendencies in the age of globalization which function as a point of departure and terminological focal point: homogenization, hybridization, and polarization. Homogenization basically implies a westernized

imposition of culture and consumer products on virtually all societies which are reached by its neoliberal framework, while hybridization means the merging of local and global practices or local and other local elements. Polarization is related to conﬂicts within or between societies (Pieterse, 1995). In South Korea, westernized features such as Protes- tantism, liberal democracy, consumerism, secularism, and neoliberal capitalism co-exist with Confucian residues (Jang& Kim, 2013), Bud- dhism (Baker, 2008), and politeness culture (Kim, 2011), which are not typically western elements. Polarization has been identiﬁed in regard to the relationships with China and North Korea (Jun, 2017), whereas American culture has more smoothly become integrated and merged with the‘traditional’ Korean and East Asian cultural elements (Baker, 2008;Lie, 2014). The parallel presence of these three major cultural globalization tendencies in various contexts has been discussed in recent scholarship (Boman, 2021).

Regardingfilm adaptations (e.g.,Allen, 2011;Shin, 2019;Yamada, 2020), not just hybridization (Jung, 2010) but localization (Schulze, 2019) may be of significance. For instance, a Korean director and screenwriter might be influenced by western or Japanese literature (e.g., Yamada, 2020). When a Korean director borrows from an American writer and a Japanese writer but adapts the manuscript to some extent to fit the local context, hybridization and localization (i.e., contextual adaptation) co-exist. Kim (2012) underlines South Korea’s general response to globalization:

It is ironic that the obsession with global opinion is indeed motivated by nationalist concerns. To understand this contradiction, I need to brieﬂy explain how globalization is conceptualized in Korean society. In fact, the Korean government took the initiative to promote globalization (segyehwa) in the early 1990s with its nationalist intention to enhance Korea’s development in order to reach the most advanced level in the world. In the Korean context, globalization has been‘a strategic princi- ple, a mobilizing slogan, a hegemonic ideology or a new national-identity badge for a state aspiring to advanced world-class status’.

Whereas these ideological proclivities are signiﬁcant for the broader social, political, cultural, and economic contexts, the less polarized and competitive aspects tend to be downplayed with regard to the production and dissemination of Korean pop culture (Jun, 2017; Jung, 2010). At least if transcultural borrowing or bricolages are used as positive or

‘harmless’ sources of inspiration. Yet, one cannot automatically assume that polarization towards Japanese, North Korean or American elements, ideologies or individuals will not be evoked for the sake of benign global hybridity. Therefore, the reading of the material, in this case Burning, is open-ended in that respect.

3. Findings

3.1. Constitutive elements of burning

Burning begins with the simple narrative drive in which Jong-su un- expectedly meets Hae-mi– who also grew up in the small city of Paju near the North Korean border– in an area of Seoul. Hae-mi admits that she is cuter these days because of plastic surgery (for a critical examination of plastic surgery and beauty ideals in South Korea, seeSwami, Hwang,&

Jung, 2012; Epstein & Joo, 2012; Boman, 2019). They talk open-heartedly and later have sex in Hae-mi’s apartment near Seoul Tower in the city center. When Hae-mi leaves for a trip to the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa, Jong-su promises to feed her cat, which is reluctant to manifest itself. Thus, Jong-su wonders if the cat really exists or is just an artistic imagination of Hae-mi. In another scene, Hae-mi

‘eats’ an imaginary fruit in front of Jong-su as an expression of her penchant for pantomime. She attends such classes in her leisure time.

Later in thefilm, the rich and good-looing Ben, whom Hae-mi meets during her trip, reveals to Jong-su that he has a strong urge to set greenhouses onfire, which he apparently does frequently (approximately one every two month). The act itself triggers his‘inner bass’, he explains to Jong-su. He reiterates this phrase later in thefilm when advising Jong-

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su to take a more careless life stance. This sub-theme may capture the polarization between their respective socioeconomic statuses, as Ben has the freedom and means to act impetuously, while Jong-su is restricted by both his moral sensibilities and monetary difﬁculties.

In relation to this, there are many potential metaphors discussed by Jong-su and Ben and the audience is consequently encouraged to reﬂect upon their meanings. For instance, does a greenhouse signify something else, like a human being (speciﬁcally the bodies of killed females)?

(Boman, 2020;Fujiki, 2019).

In regard to the encounters between Jong-su, Hae-mi and Ben in Gangnam, the materially afﬂuent parts of the South Korean capital Seoul is emphasized, asYamada (2020)notes:

Much like adaptations of Murakami’s ﬁction set in Japan, Burning upsets the self-evidence of the highly developed condition of present-day South Korea by making the material experience of an afﬂuent Seoul landscape somehow less real, while giving tangible form instead to the virtual effects of the nation’s divisive history. The melding of the virtual dimensions of the past with the materiality of the present in Murakami adaptations set in both Japan and Korea suggests a similar experience with the illusory nature of rapid development in the historical imagination of both these national traditions.

Similar to many other fairly complex ﬁlms, discerned themes and narrative components complement rather than oppose each other. If anything, they struggle for the position as nodal points in a particular narrative or are linked to a broader ‘external’ discourse from the discursive ﬁeld (Fairclough, 1992,2003; Laclau& Mouffe, 2001). As such, Burning could at least cultural-ideologically be read as a class-based criticism of contemporary South Korean capitalism. Most notably in that regard, both the male protagonist Jong-su and the female character Hae-mi are asymmetrically interpellated as vertically inferior subjects in relation to the wealthy Ben, who subtlety plays with his two new friends (Boman, 2020).

As I argue in this article, there are both class- and gender-related themes present in theﬁlm, but South Korea’s approach to globalization is mainly related to the socioeconomic issues, such as income inequality.

To the extent that Ben represents something foreign or external, one may consider that he is highly Americanized, urbane, and urban while Jong- su appears like a rural residue of Korea’s pre-modern past, although struggling for a place in the urban epicenter. Such an oversimpliﬁed binary would be evoked more effortlessly if Jong-su was not also an aspiring young author who is an avid reader of William Faulkner and F.

Scott Fitzgerald, which indicates a cosmopolitan leaning. He and his disagreeable and angry hostile father, who gets convicted for assault, are not just significantly lower in socioeconomic status compared to Ben and other upper-class Koreans but a reflection of the earlier post-colonial period, prior to the transition into industrialist capitalism and rapid urbanization (Boman, 2020). On the other hand, to remain or become a farmer is currently an active choice more than a predestined fate for most South Koreans. This is underlined by the lawyer to Jong-su’s father who ponders about the father’s bad financial and vocational decisions throughout life (this and other information indicate that the lawyer and the father have some personal ties). He could have bought an apartment in the fancy Gangnam district in Seoul when they used to be cheap but chose to remain a farmer in Paju.

Burning consists of several such implicit or explicit class or socioeconomic indicators. The most palpable is the vast wealth differences between Ben and Jong-su, whereas more subtle such include the chants from the North Korean side of the northern border near Paju, as well as the meta comments on substantial unemployment rates among younger people. Thus, it may be regarded as a main theme or element within the ﬁlm’s discourse.

3.2. Burning in relation to Murakami and Faulkner’s short stories Burning builds upon the Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s short story‘Barn Burning’ (1992) as well as William Faulkner’s short story with

the same name (1993), but barn is substituted for greenhouse in this more extensive and exhaustive ﬁlm adaptation which stretches over approximately two-and-a-half hours. Nevertheless, some elements of both short stories are present in theﬁlm, although Burning explores class and gender, with class being the nodal point, while Faulkner leans towards the class–race nexus and Murakami perhaps neither.

In short,Faulkner’s (1993)short story takes place in the American south around 1895. A boy named Sarty goes to court to testify because his father is accused of burning down a barn, which Sarty knows his father did but does not admit in court. The father later conveys that family loyalty is the most important thing in life. There are a number of racial slurs in this short story that evokes the biracial context in the American south. At a new location things become complicated as Sarty’s father considers burning down another barn to retaliate for a supposed misdeed. However, Sarty warns the owners of the barn and runs away.

Murakami’s (1992)work is situated in Japan in the 1980s where a 31-year-old man gets to know a 20-year-old woman who does pantomime among other things. Their relationship is Platonic. After a trip to Algiers in North Africa the woman returns with a somewhat mysterious Japanese man who on one occasion stresses that he, for ambiguous reasons, lights barns on ﬁre every now and then. The trio listen to Western music (i.e., Miles Davis) and smoke marijuana.

It is rather obvious that Murakami was inﬂuenced by Faulkner’s short story whereas Lee’s Burning is inspired by both Faulkner and Murakami’s works to different extents (Fujiki, 2019). At the intertextual level there are some manifest examples, such as this passage inMurakami’s (1992) short story which are almost identically visualized in Burning:

As I mentioned, when Iﬁrst met her she told me she was studying mime. One night, we were out at a bar, and she showed me the Tangerine Peeling. As the name says, it involves peeling a tangerine. On her left was a bowl piled high with tangerines; on her right, a bowl for the peels. At least that was the idea. Actually, there wasn’t anything there at all. She’d take an imaginary tangerine in her hand, slowly peel it, put one section in her mouth, and spit out the seeds. When she’d ﬁnished one tangerine, she’d wrap up all the seeds in the peel and deposit it in the bowl to her right. She repeated these movements over and over again. When you try to put it in words it doesn’t sound like anything special. But if you see it with your own eyes for ten or 20 min (almost without thinking, she kept on performing it) gradually the sense of reality is sucked right out of everything around you. It’s a very strange feeling.

There are also other borrowings from Murakami’s short story, but many things are partly replaced or altered: theﬁlm takes place in South Korea, not Japan; the girl Hae-mi went to Namibia, not North Africa (Algiers, the capital of Algeria) as the girl in the short story; the main character in the short story does have a wife while Jong-su is single; Ben is older than the male protagonist in theﬁlm but the opposite is the case in Murakami’s short story; Burning is partially a‘love triangle’ while Murakami’s work is not. On the other hand, other things are close to identical, such as Ben’s sports car and the reference to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The GreatGatsby, the weedsmoking and corresponding confession about barn/greenhouse burning, the male protagonists’ search for barns/greenhouses, the girls’ pantomime classes;

the brief dialogues about jealousy, the girls’ disappearances; and the protagonists’ visits to their apartments. Some of these similarities and differences have also been noted byFujiki (2019).

Moreover, Burning has more spatial-temporal afﬁnities with Mur- akami’s short story than with Faulkner’s piece from the southern parts of the United States, whose plot takes place around 1895 in a biracial context. Japan and South Korea are culturally, ethnically, and geographically quite similar, and the early 1980s and late 2010s– if we take the publication dates at their respective face values in relation to their plots and mise-en-scene – are not particularly distant in time, either.

While class, family, and race issues are the major social matters at display in Faulkner’s work, the South Korean and Japanese contexts do more effortlessly evoke class and gender issues. AsKim (2012)has emphasized, implicit racism has a role to play in contemporary South Korea but in part due to less ethnic heterogeneity and fractionalization (Moon,

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2015) race matters are downplayed compared to for instance the US context (Kim, 2017). Lee, the director of Burning, could for instance have included an ethnic minority individual in the ﬁlm adaptation, as a counterpart to the black individual mentioned in Faulkner’s ‘Barn burning’, but preferred not to. On the other hand, Murakami’s short story is not saturated with neither class, nor gender and racial issues, although Tanaka has stressed that barns could be interpreted as girl(s), which would make the short story and Burning even more similar.

The reader also understands that the girl in Murakami’s story has somefinancial difficulties, much like Hae-mi in Burning (seeFig. 1). It does unhesitatingly have a social backdrop to some degree, but it is mostly as a coulisse for the events and characters. Thus, Burning expands quite impressionistically on these two stories and adds new features, while simultaneously removing much of the core of Faulkner’s work. By means of re-contextualization (e.g.,Fujiki, 2019), it has used the global discursivefield as a resource and consequently hybridized and localized elements and themes from American-Western and Japanese works and discourses that are perhaps better suited for the contemporary South Korean context (seeFig. 2).

The most striking source of inspiration from Faulkner, besides the class dimension, is on the one hand the rural aspect, in the context of Burning being transhistorically, transculturally and transgeographically re-contextualized in Paju, located about 30 km from the Seoul Capital Area. The urban/rural binary is present in Burning, and overlaps the socioeconomic dimension related to inequality, while Faulkner’s ‘Barn burning’ exclusively takes place in a rural setting in the late nineteenth century. The other major aspect of similarity is the dysfunctional and disagreeable fathers present in both texts, although the father plays a peripheral role in Burning. Some Korean cultural scholars (e.g., Kim, 2017) have emphasized the subordinate afﬁnity between Koreans (in relation to the Japanese) and African Americans (in relation to Euro-Americans). However, such a theme is in both discourses quite far-fetched because not even Faulkner’s story presents race as a nodal point but rather as a peripheral topic. It is a part of the broader socio-historical context, entrenched by racism against black Americans, which the work hinges upon but is nonetheless placed at the fringe of the plot. Moreover, in Burning class is the key differentiator among co-ethnics. Ben may be Americanized, an interpretation which Korean American actor Steven Yeun agrees with (Yeun, 2018), but he is not American (or Japanese). South Korea’s economic issues have a global and thus external component, but the struggle is chieﬂy internal.

Furthermore, Jong-su is perhaps more similar to Colonel Sartoris

‘Sarty’ Snopes, the protagonist in Faulkner’s short story, compared to the male storyteller and protagonist in Murakami’s work. They both struggle with various troubles and do literally run to find solutions to their problems. Moreover, the protagonist as a child in Faulkner’s work might be reminiscent of the young Jong-su, who briefly appears in some dreamlike scenes of thefilm. Ben, on the other hand, is a blend of the arsonist father Abner Snoops inFaulkner (1993)and the male arsonist in Murakami (1992). It seems that elements of both characters have merged within the frames of Burning, an instance of hybridized intertextuality.

This may have come naturally as Murakami seems to have been, to some degree at least, inﬂuenced by Faulkner and alluded his work (Tanaka;

Fujiki, 2019;Yamada, 2020).

The general hybridity present in Burning stems from its intertextual links to Murakami and Faulkner, which implies latent and manifest elements of transcultural and transnational borrowing. Thus, Lee draws from the Japanese and American contexts. But these are not all components; there are additive features of a more contemporary character, such as South Korea as an OECD member (an indication of global homogenization) and the brief manifestation of Donald Trump as the face of present America. Ben, the assertive, wealthy, and handsome antagonist who easily outcompetes Jong-su and his equals on the‘dating market’, is indeed more Americanized and cosmopolitan than the rural protagonist.

In fact, many of Murakami’s novels are associated with western culture, inclusive of cosmopolitan ingredients (e.g., Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the shore, Sputnik Sweetheart, After Dark, and‘Barn Barning’ with its intertextual references to Miles Davis) but these are majorly re-contextualized as benign inﬂuences rather than malign elements related to a hostile exterior. Even though (un)employment rates are similar across the OECD countries (OECD, 2018, p. 85), Lee has preferred to evoke the class dimension as the most signiﬁcant obstacle facing the country’s in- habitants. Perhaps the most urgent issue with contemporary South Korea is not unemployment rates per se but the fact that many young people have to rely upon part-time jobs (아르바이트, arubaitu) and that tertiary education does not guarantee a safe and long-term position in con- glomerates or small- and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs (Hultberg, Santandreu Calogne,& Kim, 2017).

In Burning, both Jong-su and Hae-mi are affected by such socioeconomic conditions, including inequality, debt, and uncertainty. Jong-su’s passion and academic subject, creative writing, is devalued at the beneﬁt of other sectors such as technology (e.g.,Hultberg et al., 2017). Hae-mi is at best an imitator of a pretty female K-pop idol (e.g.,Boman, 2019). The rage and resentment towards Ben and other‘Great Gatsby’s in South Korea might be an expression and extension of Ben’s materially privileged while undeserved position in the local socioeconomic hierarchy.

However, Burning is in part also an intense love triangle drama and Jong-su’s decisions may reﬂect passion or obsession (Min& Moon, 2019) as much as a search for socioeconomic justice.

The processes of homogenization associated with the US and more recently the OECD, have been understood in the light of a rather smooth yet gradual localization and adaption of American culture and customs (Lie, 2014), but there is an ambiguous element present in Burning (2018) in that respect. Indeed, it is not an anti-Americanﬁlm per se but there is a subtle critique and polarization present as latent sub-themes. AsJun Fig. 1. Nodal points and sub-themes.

Fig. 2. Intertextualﬂows and relationships.

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(2017) notes, the externally construed South Korean polarization is associated with North Korea and China. Throughout earlier phases, Japan was the country’s arch enemy but has transitioned into a sort of economic rival (Lie, 2014). The propaganda chants that Jong-su has become accustomed to, as he and his family have lived close to the 38th parallel (near the North Korean border) for decades, might motivate him to‘become someone’ (an author) in the South Korean neoliberal society.

Or it has, perhaps unconsciously, made him eager tofight inequality. The cultural-ideological ambiguity and subtleness complicate a definite interpretation in that regard. However, as underscored byFujiki (2019) there is a risk of reducing Burning to merely a superficial statement of class differences and resentment among South Korea’s less privileged youth. Nonetheless, class or socioeconomic status appears as one of the major main themes or nodal points, using a discourse analytical termi- nology, (Laclau& Mouffe, 2001, pp. 105–114).

3.3. Gender as a sub-theme in burning

What about gender, the secondary social element manifested in Burning? Despite the relative educational equality, at the macro-social level, that has been present in the country since at least the 1960s (Baker, 2008;Ministry of Education Korea, 2017;Savada& Shaw, 1992), there are still striking gender disparities in the current labor market (Lee

& Park, 2015;OECD, 2018). Some South Korean TV dramas, such as Live (2018) and Something in the Rain (2018), have emphasized these conditions and Burning appears to build upon a similar cultural-ideological premise. However, in this regard the more subtle aspects of rich narcis- sistic males who effortlessly outshine poorer and less attractive males (Ben as opposed to Jong-su) and treat young and pretty women largely as sexual objects (Hae-mi and Ben’s other disposable girlfriends) are in the focal point.

The initial scene, when Hae-mi and another young female wear short skirts and excessive makeup and dance to the K-pop girl group Sistar’s song‘Touch my body’ (2014), is a manifestation of the constitution of generic gender roles in South Korea, although nuances and complexities are at display both throughout the movie and in the broader society (Brown, 2017;Lee& Lee, 2017;Lee& Park, 2015). The audience quickly learns that Hae-mi has an interesting or at least peculiar personality that transcends the constitution of merely having a pretty face and body.

Nonetheless, there are several instances of the sexualization of her body, such as the intercourse scene with Jong-su in her apartment, and the naked dance scene during a marijuana trip outside Jong-su’s house in Paju.

The more disturbing issue implied in Burning and perhaps Murakami’s short story too according to some interpretations (Tanaka;Fujiki, 2019), is that young women are killed and disposed of and that few seek them after they suddenly disappear. In that regard the genre and entertainment aspects are important to consider– such components make literature and ﬁlm more intriguing and thrilling. Yet, the harsh realities of South Korean females (Jung, 2003) make the narrative angle somewhat less improbable.

A less fatal gender aspect present in theﬁlm, partly associated with Korea’s Confucian past, are the bitter and resentful words uttered by Jong-su after Hae-mi has stripped naked and danced, in a way akin to people living in the Kalahari Desert, at Jong-su’s house in Paju during a marijuana trip. Jong-su asserts that only‘whores’ undress like that in front of other men (Boman, 2020;Fujiki, 2019). The parlance and atti- tude might be a consequence of the love triangle aspect of Burning because Jong-su does not want Ben to see her naked body, but it is also a reminder of that even relatively agreeable and conscientious men like Jong-su may be affected by the Confucian/modern hybridity linked to South Korea’s particular sociohistorical trajectory, which imposes a particular pressure and ambiguous standards on contemporary women.

As a colleague to Hae-mi stresses in a later scene when Jong-su looks for her whereabouts: Korean women might be criticized for dressing up or dressing down, looking too attractive or unattractive, leaving them in a

Catch-22 situation. Thus, (South) Korea is not a country made for women. Jong-su is unhesitatingly attracted to Hae-mi’s assertive undressing in her apartment, where they have sex, but is also repulsed by a similar corporeal gaiety in another context.

AsFujiki (2019)notes, the eventual male gaze of Jong-su and the male reader of Burning – and perhaps parts of Murakami’s broader authorship – which is magnified by specific camera angels, seems to reduce Hae-mi to a sexual object in several scenes. However, it is far from clear that this was the intention by either Murakami (in the short story) or Lee (in thefilm adaptation), or the final interpretation of Hae-mi’s personality and Jong-su’s understanding of her. As a relatively open-endedfilm, possible to read form different perspectives and with several ambiguous scenes and cultural-ideological elements (Boman, 2020; Fujiki, 2019; Yamane, 2019), it might be possible to regard Jong-su’s retaliation of Hae-mi as an act of transcendence from the more superficial sexual attraction that he first experiences.

4. Discussion and conclusion

This article set out to analyze how the intertextual nexus between Burning, Murakami’s ‘Barn burning’, and Faulkner’s ‘Barn burning’ is constituted, what major features from Murakami and Faulkner’s work have been included and excluded in Burning, and which major cultural- ideological themes have been identiﬁed and how are they constituted with regard to the triad of chief globalization propensities (hybridization, homogenization, polarization, seePieterse, 1995).

Burning does quite impressionistically and freely draw from these two short stories as well as adding new features, while simultaneously removing much of the core of Faulkner’s work and some of Murakami’s counterpart. By means of intertextual borrowing and re- contextualization (e.g., Shin, 2019; Yamada, 2020), it has used the global discursiveﬁeld and consequently hybridized and localized elements and themes from American-Western and Japanese works and discourses to perhaps make them better suited for the South Korean context. An element of polarization might, quite implicitly, be discerned in regard to the resentment against the Americanized Ben and the brief presence of Donald Trump in one early scene. All in all, this demonstrates a parallelization of hybridization and polarization (Boman, 2021). The relation to North Korea’s ideology appears more ambiguous. The ﬁlm is perhaps primarily about class and secondarily about gender with regard to social dominance and power relations, whereas Faulkner’s ‘Barn burning’ is primarily about class and secondarily about race, and Mur- akami’s work seems non-ideologically saturated, at least on the surface level.

As with content and discourse analyses in general, there are other elements and sub-themes at display or at least situated as latent such, and the earlier research, theoretical framework and related contexts evoke different cultural-ideological elements. Therefore, other aspects could be further explored in an analysis of the same material and by using a similar methodology.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Bj€orn Boman: The author and corresponding author is the sole author of this article and fully responsible for its accuracy.

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges two reviewers for their important critical comments on earlier versions of this article.

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