#153 Wed (11/23/22) - Burning (2018) dir. Lee Chang-dong, based on Haruki Murakami's "Barn Burning" with essay by Madeline Popelka
Burning (2018) directed by Lee Chang-dong
Written by Jungmi Oh (screenplay by) Lee Chang-dong (screenplay by) Haruki Murakami(based on the short story "Barn Burning" by)
Deliveryman Jongsu is out on a job when he runs into Haemi, a girl who once lived in his neighbourhood. She asks if he'd mind looking after her cat while she's away on a trip to Africa. On her return, she introduces to Jongsu an enigmatic young man named Ben, who she met during her trip. One day Ben tells Jongsu about his most unusual hobby.
According to Lee Chang-Dong, there was something very cinematic about the mysteriousness included in Murakami's story. For Chang-Dong, a small mystery from the short story could be expanded to bigger mysteries in multiple layers in cinematic way. For example, with Chang-Dong's words, "the gaping holes in the chain of events -the missing piece from which we can never know the truth- alludes to the mysterious world we live in now; the world in which we sense that something is wrong but cannot quite put a finger on what the problem is".
Quote: Hae Mi: Do you know Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert, Africa? It is said that Bushmen have two types of hungry people. Little hunger and great hunger. Little hunger people are physically hungry, The great hunger is a person who is hungry for survival. Why do we live, What is the significance of living? People who are always looking for these answers. This kind of person is really hungry, They called the great hunger.
Soundtrack Credits include
Générique written by Miles Davis (uncredited)
From the soundtrack of Lift to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l'échafaud).
Played during the dance scene with a background of a sunset (In the Murakami story, the author mentions listening to some Miles Davis jazz while talking with Ben at the farm. I assumed it would be Miles Davis' album "Kind of Blue" which seems to have the right vibe (and is mentioned specifically in Norwegian Wood, chapter 8) - check out Flamenco Sketches. Oddly, then they listen to some Strauss waltzes. I cannot figure out which ones.
In one scene Ben is seen reading a collection of William Faulkner which contains the story "Barn Burning." This is after Jongsu mentions that Faulkner is his favorite author.
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How Burning’s Literary Influences Explain its Ending
January 21, 2019 ~ Madeline Popelka
Burning, the South Korean film by Lee Chang-dong, is a film deeply indebted to three literary inspirations. Without reading these stories, Burning could be dismissed as a melodramatic thriller, albeit one that is filmed with a mysterious and eye-pleasing aesthetic. Analyzing its influences reveals Burning to be a sizzling commentary on class struggle and resentment, the recent history of the Korean peninsula, and the paralyzing way that poverty robs individuals of free will.
Haruki Murakami’s “Barn Burning”
When I first saw Burning, I was struck by the discordance between the dreamy, contemplative cinematography and the plot, which towards the end felt like an old-fashioned thriller. In the opening credits, the film lists itself as an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story called “Barn Burning.” I had read Murakami’s other works and was familiar with his style of ghostly magic realism and original stories. I was curious how his short story handled the tale a jilted lover seeking revenge against his love’s killer. But in reading it, I discovered that the film diverged significantly from its listed inspiration.
The short story and film share the same core character dynamics. In Murakami, there is the same trio, the same confessional moment on the farm where the protagonist learns of the other man’s barn burning, and the subsequent disappearance of the girl. But the power dynamics have shifted. Murakami’s protagonist is a successful, married writer; he spends time with the woman, who in the short story is younger than him, more so as a way to have fun than out of genuine love for her. And after the woman disappears and the writer has spoken with the other man, the story ends. There is no attempt to avenge his girlfriend’s disappearance by murdering the wealthy man. The writer only continues searching for a burnt-out barn he’ll never find. The short story is consistent with Murakami’s usual style; it is full of mystery and an undercurrent of violence that never quite breaches the surface. The film’s ending, with its jealous murder, is decidedly not. It feels like it’s adapted from an entirely different story.
William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning:”
The ending’s inspiration can loosely be found in another short story—one that shares the same name as Murakami’s. William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” set in the late 19th century American South, is about a young boy and his agrarian family as they struggle to support themselves off the income from sharecropping. The patriarch of the family, a civil war veteran, is prone to rage and resentment; he retaliates against his land-owning employers for any perceived slight. The story begins in a courtroom, where he is on trial for burning down a barn. Only plausible deniability and his own son’s refusal to testify save him from a guilty sentence. The son doesn’t want to lie, but his family pressures him to be complicit in his father’s crimes. They relocate to a different farm, but the father quickly butts heads with the owner there. The story culminates with his father storming off to burn down yet another barn. The son is restrained by his mother, but he breaks free and rushes off to warn the landowner. The landowner takes off after the father on horseback, and in the distance the boy hears a gunshot. The story ends with the son alone in the gloom of a nearby woods, grieving his father’s death.
In the film, Jong-su’s father resembles the one in Faulkner story-he is on trial for attacking a government employee, and at the trial he smolders with rage, refusing to speak when asked direct questions. Like his Faulknerian counterpart, Jong-su tries to support his father’s legal battle, petitioning his neighbors to vouch for his father’s character. Like Faulkner’s protagonist, Jong-su witnessed his father committing acts of arson when he was young–setting all his mother’s belongings on fire when she abandoned the family. The family owns a farm, but they are not much better off than Faulkner’s sharecropping family. They live far outside of Seoul, in a rural town within earshot of the border to North Korea, a country of abject poverty and ruthless oppression. Jong-su is aspirational; he wants to be a cosmopolitan writer. But even his literary tastes betray him-he lists Faulkner as his favorite writer, a nod to the story’s influence. Jong-su’s upbringing is as constricting as Faulkner’s tales of poverty; his family’s social class holds him back and fills him with shame. He sees himself as a writer like the one in Murakami’s story, but in the shadow of Ben’s opulence, he has more in common financially with Faulkner’s hapless young boy.
For two short stories named after the same act of arson, Murakami and Faulkner’s works could not be more different, and Burning simmers with a narrative tension generated by the combination of two conflicting stories. The dissonance is inherent in the meaning behind the stories’ titles. In Murakami, ‘barn burning’ is a metaphor for the careless exploitation the upper class against the lower class. The wealthy man already has everything he could ever want, but he still feels drawn to acts of destruction against the lower class, whether it be arson or murder. The message of the story is that the wealthy cannot help but take from the poor, even when there is nothing of value the poor can give. In Faulkner, ‘barn burning’ as a concept works in the opposite way. It is an act of retaliation perpetrated by the otherwise disenfranchised poor against their oppressors. The father attacks his employers as payback for the indignity of working as a sharecropper, a position of indentured servitude. The father is a man so fully without agency that he acts out in violence as his only form of protest. The message of the story is that poverty and disenfranchisement can rob a man of his humanity, leaving him a husk of rage and resentment.
The root of Burning’s dissonance can be found in the choice to combine the works of Murakami and Faulkner. The film’s cinematography is luxurious, soft, and patient. It is drawn from Murakami’s tale of mannered bourgeois violence, where all the ugliness is hidden away. But the film’s plot grows increasingly tawdry, almost like a boilerplate thriller. It feels like the coarseness of Faulkner’s doomed poverty is struggling to break out against Murakami’s style of veiled drama. Faulkner’s burning resentment lashes out in reaction to Murakami’s burning exploitation. And the result is explosive-a violent murder and a blazing fire.
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