overt intertextuality in JSA (& in the Sopranos incidentally)

Well, it's amazing how complex the poetics of a film are--and how many elements just stick in your mind. So here's another post on JSA. (The first two are here and here.)

In today's post, I'm going to talk about a very complex link made in JSA by the use of a repeated piece of the dialogue, and how this causes us to re-evaluate the perspective of an earlier scene. I'm calling such clear uses of repetition "overt intertextuality". I'll explain more later on.

(Just as an aside, I can't imagine why people worry about spoilers, given how much is actually left out in any basic review. Unless the movie is drivel, with little more to offer than some implausible deus-ex-machina at the climax, rewatching a film repays itself. Anyway, enough moralizing.)

One of the oppositions in JSA that I think I didn't do enough with in the other two posts, is that between the official story and the view of the soldiers. This is actually nicely worked out by Ch-WP (Chan-Wook Park): the soldiers don't see their enemy necessarily in the same way as their territory-jealous leaders do, at least not all the time. And, they can become confused by the contradiction between the official stance, and their own ability to befriend the soldier across the border. For example, the North Korean soldier, Sgt Oh, while eating the South Korean moon cake, asks why the (North Korean) republic can't make moon cakes like this. The South Korean soldier, Sgt. Su-Hyok, is tempted to ask him at this point if Oh wouldn't like to live in South Korea. Oh spits out the moon cake momentarily and states in good dogmatic fashion that he awaits the day that the Republic makes the best cakes--but until then, he'll have this one, and finishes it off. Nice stuff, and that's only one good example. As I expressed in the earlier posts, the other pole, the official tension, is rather poorly developed thanks to some bad acting and scripting.

So this exploration of the tensions of the border, often signaled by overhead shots depicting characters standing on the border, or other kinds of shots of soldiers at the border, leads Ch-WP to some interesting study of soldiers trying to live up to their ideal of soldiering. The soldiers are, after all, on the most heavily armed border in the world, and thus, represent their country's ideal image of itself to the familiar other across the boundary.

Sgt. Oh is the only one of the four friends to survive to the end, and is the most experienced soldier, having lived through overseas assignments. He is the cool-headed one who defuses the mine that Sy-Hyuk nearly sets off. He is the cool-headed one who nearly defuses the tense situation when his commander, Choi, walks in on the four friends during a friendly visit. That is, he is the one of the four friends most able to live up to his own soldierly ideal.

Throughout the sequence of shots where the soldiers are shown to become better friends, we see a focus on how soldiering and masculinity draws them together. They have arm wrestling and other strength competitions or perform other soldierly activities, as well as some general conviviality.

So, if soldiering and masculinity are the basic ideal for all these friends, and Sgt. Oh shows it, it is the inability to act according to such an ideal that eventually leads to Su-Hyok's suicide. This is partially because, from the S. Korean side, he is admired as being a brave soldier (esp. by Shun-Shik, who idolizes Su-Hyok), and Su Hyok feels undeserving. The S. Korean general and soldiers all praise Su-Hyok, supposedly a hero, when Maj. Jang arrives. This torment Su-Hyok. He knows its undeserved: he cried when he was left standing on the mine and couldn't find a way off--everyone back at the base admires him, b/c they believe he defused it himself. He breaks down in the failed "cross-examination," where Sgt Oh gets up in manly fashion, knocks over the table and goes into a high-falutin' rant of pure dogmatism (in the DVD extras, there's a wonderful scene of him rehearsing this). That's not all that torments Su-Hyok. He isn't able to think quickly when the shit hits the fan upon Choi's arrival, whereas Oh almost defuses the whole thing.

(I don't know anything about S. Korean popular depictions of the North vs the South , but I can't help but wonder if this film doesn't play with a (common?) perception of Northerners as poor yet not spoiled, somehow proud and ascetic, without the worldly goods that make the Southerners a little soft.)

I now come to my point. One of the moments where Su-Hyok feels his inadequacy uses a device I called above "overt intertextuality". Generally speaking, "intertextuality" refers to how different kind texts (like films) incorporate aspects of other texts. By "overt", I mean that the auteur, in this case Ch-WP, uses a high degree of resemblance for us to recognize the source. In the case at hand, a character repeats something significant said to her/him by another character (elsewhere), but without necessarily acknowledging the source.

A major moment in JSA uses this device. It occurs when Maj Jang interrogates Su-Hyok, as she is trying to get him to load his gun (to see if he puts an extra bullet in the barrel). After she threatens to show him pictures of the dead bodies (btw, I made some notes on the use of photos in my last post), he agrees. She asks him if its true, as the other soldiers say, that he is very fast with his gun--thus explicitly addressing the issue of whether he deserves admiration as a soldier or not. He answers (from English subtitles): "What's important in battle isn't speed. It's carrying yourself with composure and bravery."

Only later, when we get the extended sequence of flashed back story, that shows us the four soldiers becoming friends, do we find out that this sentiment was expressed chronologically earlier to Su-Hyok by none other than Sgt. Oh. In that earlier moment, Su-Hyok and Shun-Shik were visiting their N. Korean friends, and Su-Hyok boasted about being quick with his gun. Oh replies to him that speed isn't important, composure and bravery are. Eventually, of course, Su-Hyok's (and Shun-Shik's) inability to act with composure in the heat of battle, to be brave, that leads to their downfall. Obviously there's an allegory here. (Please don't get me wrong, I'm not interested or dazzled by the bravery and composure shtick, but in the device used to signal a major development of character).

This use of overt intertextuality does two things. First, it marks a moment of character development. By crying to Sgt Oh to get his help with the mine, Su-Hyok already knows that he can't keep up the facade of soldierly ideal versus the more experienced Oh. The use of Oh's words by Su-Hyok to Maj Jang enables our auteur to show the affect Oh's reply had on Su-Hyok.

The second thing it does is enables us to re-interpret Su-Hyok's words from earlier in the movie, by drawing a parallel between the two scenes. When we watch Maj. Jang sitting across from Su-Hyok during the interrogation, we still have no way of evaluating Su-Hyok's resistance to her questions. Is he just being a South Korean chauvinist warhawk like the general who so praised him a bit earlier in the movie? It is only later, when we hear Oh challenging Su-Hyok's about speed as a soldierly ideal, that we know how Su-Hyok was taking Maj. Jang's question as a parallel moment. Only later can we appreciate that Ch-WP is presenting Su-Hyok as troubled by his rash actions during the heat of the tragic incident. That is, only later do we understand that Su-Hyok was using Sgt. Oh's terms for a good soldier to judge himself--he wasn't really being uncooperative with Maj Jang as he was upset by his own actions.

In short, it is only later that we as the audience can come to understand something about that interrogation from Su-Hyok's perspective, and it is the soldierly ideals of Oh, correcting Su-Hyok about his mistaken belief in speed, that reconstitutes Su-Hyok for us towards the end.

This unbelievably complex twist of narrative perspective is achieved by a little overt intertextuality, all internal to the movie. (A kind of double-voicing, as Bakhtin would call it.)

This isn't the first time I've run across this device. After years of ignorance, I've become a bit of a Sopranos' fan. And, this kind of overt intertextuality is used frequently. But never is the source revealed by the character when they repeat it. Usually it's character A saying something to B in the midst of a disagreement or as part of persuading him/her. Then character B finds him/herself in a similar discussion with C, and uses A's words to express the sentiment. But B won't say, "As A said..."--because that would constitute the little bit of text as reported dialogue. It's just said as if B invented the bit of dialogue him/herself.

At the beginning of the series (in Season 1, I assume), Tony repeats one-liners he's learned in therapy from Dr. Jennifer Melfi in other contexts. Of course, he would never attribute them, because he doesn't want to be discovered as a captain who sees a shrink. But it is used with different degrees of overtness in a variety of situations.

Just as Ch-WP's use marks the contradiction b/w knowing soldierly ideals and being able to act according to them, the overt intertextuality often marks a contradiction in the Sopranos. It often signals the tension between a working class and gangster upbringing and the upper middle class practices that the Sopranos are trying to espouse (sending the kids to private schools and university, etc). Every time Tony does it, every time he puts the sophisticated discourse of the psychiatrist into his own voice, his character potentially develops. One of James Gandolfini's many achievements with the character is his ability to pull off this little bit of discursive incorporation without it sounding contrived.

Ok, there's always more to say about a movie, and Chan-Wook Park is an interesting auteur. But enough about JSA.