Drug War (2012, Johnnie To)

 

If the stars had lined up when I was born so that I could have the career of my dreams, I would be a story editor in the movie industry. Seriously. I care about logic and believability in stories. I care about characters making sense and acting like humans. I care about internal consistency. I would catch all kinds of problems at the screenplay stage with just one question: Why would he do that? 

Johnnie To's 2012 movie "Drug War", starring Louis Koo and Hong-lei Sun, is a mirror image of another Milkyway movie, "Expect the Unexpected" from 1998. Although To was not credited as the director of that movie, he was heavily involved and was the director in effect (according to To's own claim). In the earlier movie, a group of heavily armed robbers from the Mainland wreaked havoc in Hong Kong, ending in a massive shootout in the street. In the later movie, it is a group of drug dealers from Hong Kong who caused a massive and prolonged shootout with Mainland police. Both shootout scenes are obviously inspired by Michael Mann's "Heat", which was in turn inspired by the real-life bank robbery in Los Angeles. 

It is curious that, in both movies, the Mainland characters are wooden automatons, even though they are portrayed as dichotomous bad guys (1998) and good guys (2012), respectively. Although one could argue that he was constrained by the film censorship board in the Mainland, where "Drug War" was made, that the police must be morally unimpeachable, I don't think To and his writers would have been interested in humanizing them at all anyway. Instead, the only somewhat interesting character is the evil Louis Koo, who would do anything to survive. Ultimately, this character does not pass the "Why would he do that?" sniff test, but the underlying theme of surviving at any cost, by hook or by crook, willing to throw anyone under the bus (literally), has its own barely disguised meaning for the Hong Kong film industry as it was slowly absorbed into the Mainland system. One could view this character as an ironic personification of the once-brilliant Hong Kong filmmakers in the post-1997 world. 

Nevertheless, the action scene is completely ridiculous! While technically proficient, it is as nonsensical as the stoic Mainland characters. Even though I am all for cynical symbolism, I still need action scenes to be driven by human logic and well made. 

Sisyphus: The Myth (Korean, 2021), An Interpretation

 

"Sisyphus: The Myth" is by no means a perfect series. If we expect a fresh take on the time travel trope or a K-drama version of "The Terminator," we are destined to be disappointed. It has all the inherent problems of a 16-episode Netflix K-drama, such as mandatory romantic plot at the center (teary hugs alert!), inadequate action scenes (despite expensive sets and special effects), and casting popular actors and actresses who can't fight and have no time to train. Not to mention the impossibility of a logical solution to the time-travel paradox. It doesn't exist, as the movie "Primer" has clearly shown us. Either we make allowance for all the plot holes in the depiction of the "uploader" and "downloader" or we throw up our hands and dismiss the premise from the start. That's a lot to set aside, but if you can indeed set these issues aside, you would be rewarded with a moody story with a profound message. 

<Spoilers ahead>

By the end of the series, in the climax, the writers (the husband-and-wife team Lee Je-in and Jeon Chan-ho) reveal the true villain of the story, which is none other than the hero Han Tae-sul. I am willing to bet that the vast majority of viewers, regardless of whether they are steeped in the Eastern or Western culture, would never agree with or spontaneously realize this point. On paper, the line between the good guys and bad guys are very clear. The cause of all the mayhem and suffering is petty jealousy and insecurity of a couple of losers, aided and abetted by the selfishness of people around them. Perhaps many viewers are annoyed by the endless excuses made for every bad guy's motivation: Everyone has a sob story, childhood trauma, attachment to family, etc., etc., which adds up to the end of the world. Oh well, here we go again, just like other mushy sentimental K-dramas, always promising salvation through love and forgiveness and other trite stuff that nobody believes any more in the year of 2021. Losers are always full of excuses. It's their hatred and envy toward the winners in our society, ie, Tae-sul, that lead to all the crime and violence. In this familiar narrative, we identify with the heroic Tae-sul and the woman who loves him, Kang Seo-hae,  and goes back in time to save him, and lament his cleverness and sacrifice. Indeed, the chief villain, Sigma, has all the hallmarks of a supervillain, from the evil grin to shiny golden pajamas. We want the good guys to beat the bad guys. We want them to win win win.

And yet, the only solution to the time loop in which the nuclear disaster inevitably happens again and again, as the writers point out, is to kill Tae-sul. I wonder if everyone secretly lets out a sigh of relief at this most logical (and fairly obvious) end point. Even though the writers somewhat conceal their intention by making him likable, cute, in love with the heroine, and played by the irresistible actor Cho Seung-woo, and, most important, telling half of the story from his point of view, they also repeatedly finger him as the root of everyone's problems. Both the primary villain, Sigma, and the secondary villain, Eddy Kim, accuse him of hurting them deeply with the contempt in his eyes, which gives them the nudge down the road of death and destruction. Even if you dismiss this reasoning as the usual whiny trope of villain psychology, there is no denying that Tae-sul's invention is the root cause of everything, and killing him is the only correct answer to prevent war it will always cause. From the start, Seo-hae's missions to save the world and to save Tae-sul are incompatible, and she indeed fails, fails, fails. 

What is curious about the series is that it can be interpreted both ways. If you are a believer of social Darwinism and the virtue of winners in society, the portrait of villains as pathetic losers could fit neatly into this world view. If you enjoy stories in which villains have their reasons and sob stories and identify with Thanos and Killmonger and pat yourself on the back for seeing "both sides", there is plenty of material to validate this view, too. But I see a third approach to look at this story. It is a story about not only regret but also responsibility. 

In nearly every subplot, a character's desire for time travel (limited to backward travel) is rooted in regret. Most of the key characters, except Seo-hae, want to travel back in time in order to erase their old mistakes and problems, be it past humiliation and failures or errors and omissions. Some recognize their own assholery, such as the owner of the Chinese grocery store and the young policeman who join the border police; some want to avenge other people's assholery, like Sigma and Eddie Kim. Tae-sul's journey is his progressive self-reflection on his own assholery, which culminates in his final act of saving the world. With the ending, the writers are saying that the solution for regret is NOT time travel and the erasure of your past mistakes but rather taking responsibility and remedial action NOW. 

Throughout the series, despite the obligatory romance and action scenes, there permeates a sense of melancholy. It is perhaps the main reason that drove me to watch and finish all 16 episodes, even though I realized early on that the writers are not too concerned about plot holes and world-building. Usually I would have given up half way. Even though the premise is to change the past, the characters all demonstrate how their regrets and grief live on and on. The series would have been an interesting mood piece if it were only about regrets, but the writers elevate the theme by having Tae-sul go through the internal journey and arrive at the final act.

One might argue that haters gonna hate and losers gonna lose. Should Tae-sul be blamed for provoking envy and resentment and hatred in others less fortunate than him? Ah, but that is not the point. Tae-sul cannot control how other people feel about him, nor can he prevent others' envy, but he can and should remember Eddie Kim's birthday. That's on him. No one is blameless. Everyone's selfishness, blind spot for one's own flaws, and obliviousness toward other people collectively contribute to this world of the brutal border bureau and the ultimate destruction. 

I have been thinking about the issue of personal responsibility for a while now, especially watching "The Sopranos", in which nobody considers himself/herself a bad person. Everyone has their reason to stay in their personal hell and never leave. As long as we refuse to look ourselves in the mirror and see the asshole looking back, warts and all, we will keep pushing the boulder up the hill just to watch it roll down again. We will keep making the same mistakes over and over and blame other people for our regrets. We will not change. Hence the title. 

------

It's so ironic as to be almost hilarious to compare this series with Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which superheroes do not die, and nothing is ever at stake, and any error or failure committed by you, dear audience who imagine yourself as a superhero, can be erased through magic stones that let heroes go back in time. You will always win win win.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

 

I am not interested in the rabbit hole of decoding all the symbols in the last movie by Kubrick. Rather, I'm going to side with the most obvious and straightforward interpretation of this movie: It is a dream. The movie is very closely adapted from a short novel by the Austrian Jewish author Arthur Schnitzler, who was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud and associated with Stefan Zweig. He even titled the novel "Dream Story" (Traumnovelle, 1926). Let's not outright dismiss the author's clue right in our faces, OK? 

That the doctor is stirred by sexual jealousy due to his wife's confession of her fantasy over a stranger is not in dispute. Even when there are verbal warnings threatening his life, his mental images we see are always of his wife having sex with the stranger. He is enraged by her confession and tormented by jealousy, and goes out all night in search of some sort of "revenge" on her "infidelity."

It is not important to determine, specifically, whether each scene in his journey is either real or a dream. Freud has written that storytelling is a form of daydreaming, and fantasies are an integral part of our daily waking life. There is no such thing as an objective reality. The human reality is experienced through each person's own mind, which is distorted by our desires and biases, fears and shames, most of which subconscious.

If we explore the specific scenes in the doctor's dream, it becomes clear that they are a deeper examination of the nature of jealousy. What exactly is causing his rage? What is he frantically pursuing? His wife is obviously not planning to divorce him (even less likely in the 1920s Vienna) or have sex with another man for real, and he knows it. She has said nothing about being unsatisfied by her husband. In fact, her fantasy about the naval officer has nothing to do with her husband. Her fantasy is deliberately devoid of any implication of reality and is strictly an expression of her sexual desires, ie, a daydream, a collection of neurological activities caused by physiological/biochemical reactions in the body. It's something that everyone experiences from time to time, which cannot be regulated by any social forces and influences. I'm sure the doctor also fantasizes about sex all the time --- doesn't matter with whom. 

Just as the wife's daydream has nothing to do with him, the husband's reaction has very little to do with her either. Rather, it is a trigger that releases a bunch of feelings inside himself. What is generally tossed under the label jealousy is more complicated than cliches. In this case, it is less about possessing his wife, body and mind, and more about his fear of his own inadequacy and undesirability. This fear is externalized in his dream, in which he becomes the object of the desire of his dead patient's daughter, he is ogled by the costume shop owner's teenage daughter, and later a prostitute at the masquerade orgy heroically sacrifices herself to save his life. These elements are very typical wish fulfilment. He is in urgent need of being proven desirable to counter the threat of inadequacy, and these women in his dream serve such a function. 

What's curious is the frustration in his dream. Throughout the night, he watches other people have sex all around him, but he never gets any himself. He is either thwarted by circumstance or thrown out. When he propositions a (different) prostitute's friend in the morning, I could easily predict that he would be rejected yet again, but the excuse ("she is HIV positive!") still made me laugh out loud. 

His sense of impotence lies not only in sexual frustration but also social frustration. He is constantly reminded that a doctor is a service provider, ie, servant, to his wealthy clients. He is not Jewish (curiously, Sydney Pollack is, and so is Kubrick), which removes an important element of the original story, but the class gap is illustrated throughout the movie. It's unclear whether it was intentional, but the author obviously linked social status and sexual status, which is extremely interesting and, perhaps, beyond the realm of psychoanalysis. Indeed, the concept of jealousy is not only associated with possession (of one's spouse or partner) but also with the feeling of envy, which is rooted in social and economical stratification. Sex is never only about sex. As social animals, people often confuse social status and sexual attractiveness. 

Therefore, the story seems to suggest that the feeling of sexual jealousy is, deep down and/or in part, a sense of frustration and impotence. It is a feeling of separation between what you want to have (exclusive possession of your romantic partner's desire, for example) and what you actually have. The sense of frustration and impotence is rooted in the disappointment of realizing that you cannot have what you want. At this point, the common defense mechanism is to escape into fantasies, in which you do have full control of the entire world, which will give you everything you desire. Thus, the movie's title is "Eyes Wide Shut", with connotation of both sleeping and waking. The only path to waking is to accept one's limitations and the disappointment brought on by reality. That is the moment we awake and become a grownup person. 

In the first love-making scene, the wife looks into the mirror while being caressed by the husband. This suggests that, while love and sex involve two (or more) people, each person is stuck in his or her own world. Our desires and anxieties and fantasies are all about ourselves anyway, even under the illusion of converging minds. 

Nicole Kidman gives a complex and accomplished performance in the movie. Unfortunately, the story is not about her or her point of view. It is sad that a story merely acknowledging women's sexual fantasies and desires in a morality-free way is still pretty unusual 70 years after the original publication (maybe not so much in Europe?). When Kubrick made the movie, I suppose, it was impossible to resist the temptation of casting the real-life, high-profile, and physically beautiful couple with questionable sexual tension as the on-screen husband and wife. The downside is that Tom Cruise is not entirely capable of conveying the sense of impotence and self-doubt required by the character. His performance nearly turned the movie into a thriller, occasionally on the verge of bursting into the running lawyer in The Firm.