Neoliberal globalisation, the personal contract, encountering bodily pasts
This final chapter explores two contemporary thrillers, Carancho/Vulture (Argentina/Chile/France/South Korea, 2010) and Chinjeolhan geumjassi/Lady Vengeance (South Korea, 2005). The time-images in these films illustrate how bodies inhabit a temporal undecidability with regard to the future. As stores of personal pasts, interacting with global forces (after the withdrawal of the social contract), they hold out the offer of an alternative to the (Orwellian) perpetually static present of the so-called end of history.
The transnational history which is engaged with through temporal bodies is that of the forty-five years – and counting – of neoliberalism, if we allow the 1973 coup in Chile to mark the start of its rapid global spread. Commencing in many places with authoritarian rule during the Cold War, under neoliberalism the nation-state was superseded by the border-crossing flows of capital which characterise globalisation. As the latest phase of colonial modernity increasingly creates a universal form of economic precarity, these films indicate how neoliberalism reduces all bodies to the status of meat to be exchanged for money. Bodies, disconnected from an informing past, are resituated in terms of individual contracts, requiring personal debts to be paid in flesh. Under neoliberalism, universal precarity means that the border (as per É tienne Balibar, discussed in Chapter 1) now runs throughout society, just as it does under colonial rule (the minority elite atop the majority impoverished and exhausted). Neoliberalism, as a transnational history, then, is one of neo-colonial economic disparity being propagated as global societal design.
The chosen films emerge from nations with recent histories of transitioning from (US-backed) military rule to democracy, only to swiftly realise a disenfranchising of the populace under neoliberalism (a continuation or worsening of the inequality fostered under military rule). They act as a flash-forward with respect to the implementation of the state of exception during the Cold War (see Chapter 5) that enables global capital to cross national borders without impediment. The global trend of films of which they are a part engages with precarious labour under neoliberalism and its impact upon bodies – beaten, broken, drugged, addicted, abandoned, kidnapped, mutilated, battered, incarcerated, enslaved, tortured, abused and exhausted.
Such films emphasise the two poles of the time-image of the body – their everyday postures (seen here in Carancho), their theatrical gestures (in Lady Vengeance). This is done to demonstrate the impact of this recent period of world history on individuals. The hesitation offered concerns whether world history might take shape in a different way due to different bodily actions in the present. Thus the films offer encounters with global peaks of the present in which recent histories are embodied in the protagonists. In Carancho it is the characteristic postures of the principal characters – slumping and stretching – which show their everyday tiredness but also reveal their personal histories of living under neoliberalism (the presence of a before and after to the static present). These time-images show the physical insistence of the past, its potential to inform a present otherwise determined to shut off an individual’s access to history (determined, that is, to enclose the destabilising potential of the pause between perception and action wherein the virtual whole of time, of duration, might otherwise (re)emerge) via perpetual physical exhaustion. In Lady Vengeance, the theatrical transformation of the protagonist is emphasised, amidst a flashback structure which throws doubt onto her motives in every present moment. Her everyday postures of penitence indicate the latent ability of bodies constrained by neoliberalism’s static present to nevertheless influence history (reconsidering the past – via a trance-like pause in sensory-motor continuity – to better influence the future).
In neither instance do we learn about the history of neoliberalism per se. But we do encounter the awareness that it has denied coevalness to the recent history of those whose abused bodies (their movements, their positions) record colonial modernity’s creation of a perpetual present in the service of neoliberal capital. Indeed, both films explore whether bodies, as physical repositories of time, contain the possibility for a more representative, democratic society to emerge from amidst the individual contracts of neoliberalism. To do so, bodies reconnect to lost pasts: in Carancho, exploring whether a remembered national past might re-inform the present; in Lady Vengeance, a notion of justice obtained via physical equivalence from the Christian past. In both, however, success is limited, as working within the constraints of neoliberalism to foster collective opposition to it is figured as only enabling of temporary change.
Time-images: Bodily pasts
Deleuze understands the body in time-image cinemas to exist in two states, or rather, at two poles: the everyday and the ceremonial (1985, 182–183). These poles exemplify two modes of existence capable of rejuvenating humanity’s connection to the world. Thus, the body in time-image cinema is a way of engaging with the unthought in life (‘To think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures’ (182)), but also to understand the temporal nature of the body. As will be seen, its temporal expression is antithetical to the eternally static present for which neoliberalism aims.
The first pole is the everyday body, whose attitudes (including tiredness, ‘fatigue, vertigo and depression’ (185)), demonstrate the presence of time as series. For Deleuze:
The body is never in the present, it contains the before and the after, tiredness and waiting. Tiredness and waiting, even despair are the attitudes of the body. [… ] This is a time-image, the series of time. The daily attitude is what puts the before and after into the body, time into the body. [… ] The attitude of the body relates thought to time as to that outside which is infinitely further than the outside world.
(182)
The other pole, the ceremonial, occurs when the everyday body is made to ‘pass through a ceremony’ (183), everyday postures and attitudes proceeding through an ‘everyday theatricalization’ (185) in which they become ‘gest’. This latter term, from Bertolt Brecht, is adapted by Deleuze to indicate how a body can become a spectacle in its own right, a ‘dramatization’ composed of the ‘link or knot of attitudes between themselves, their coordination with each other’ (185). As Ronald Bogue indicates, what is important for Deleuze (and what we find in the films analysed) is the passage from everyday attitudes to gest: ‘each series of interconnected attitudes forms a pattern, a continuous flourish or movement that constitutes a kind of “mega-gesture”, or gest’ (2003, 158). Gest, then, encapsulates a string of everyday postures, giving an overview of the pattern of attitudes or postures through which the body’s existence in time is understood to be a connection of ‘attitudes in series’ (160).
In Carancho, from the postures of the two world-weary protagonists’ bodies, overburdened by tiredness, beatings and addiction, emerge the respective gests of slumping (perpetually defeated by labour) and stretching (the need to perpetually re-awaken and labour further). These are the gests which encapsulate theatrically the resilience required of bodies under neoliberalism. Beyond this, ultimately, these bodies become car crash victims, the ultimate ‘mega-gesture’ of a film focusing on devastated bodies inhabiting a world in which the borders of the hospital have expanded to include all of society.
In Lady Vengeance, everyday postures of willing servitude (in particular, kneeling) designed to deliberately manipulate others into a sense of indebtedness that can be called upon in the future, find their ultimate ‘mega-gestures’ in acts of penitence which are – appropriately, due to the manipulation required by a world in which society and prison are one – aborted (a curtailed attempt to cut off fingers) or fake (symbolic tofu consumption re-enacted with cake).
As opposed to the series of time found in the everyday body, the ceremonial body is a different time-image. It demonstrates duration’s peaks of present or sheets of time (Deleuze 1985, 188). The gests of the ceremonial body demonstrate that it is a store of the past (its sheets) or indicates the future potential of the present (its peaks). Thus, for Deleuze, time-image films of the body indicate the ungrounding presence of what he considers ‘the pure or empty form of time’ (1968, 110) (effectively, the Nietzschean eternal return (Bogue 1989, 66; Deamer 2014, 264)). This empty form of time is one in which the future remains open, to be informed by the potential for newness contained within the virtual whole of time, as distinct from the past as linear history. Put succinctly, the empty form of time indicates the virtual possibility of the past that is, rather than the actualised version of the past that was which constitutes the official story of history (Martin-Jones 2006, 59). This is, then, a cinema of the powers of the false, in which an awareness of other, supposedly lost pasts, can potentially inform a new idea of the future.1
Transnational history: Neoliberalism
Neoliberal doctrine extols the benefits of individual entrepreneurialism and the free market as the most effective regulator of societal wealth distribution. The role of the state in this model is one of limited interference with the market. Historically, neoliberalism is synonymous with globalisation, as multinational capital in the form of transnational corporations encourages: the withdrawal of (often democratically elected) national governments from the managing of states; the privatisation and sale (at times, effectively, stripping) of national assets to foreign buyers; the (often aggressive) promotion of free trade across borders in ways which disadvantage nations economically or indirectly reduce their democratic freedoms; the imposition of austerity measures by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (damaging in various parts of Latin America and Africa since the 1980s (Klein 2007, 161–167)); and the avoidance of tax payments by multinationals within nations where their operations are based.
Whilst the global spread of neoliberalism accelerated after the Cold War ended in Europe and North America, its roots remain in this preceding conflict (Kiely 2005, 88–119; Westad 2010). The most infamous example is the US-backed coup ousting democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile, 1973, where the ideas of US economist Milton Friedman and the ‘Chicago Boys’ were then put into practice under General Augusto Pinochet. As Chapter 5 showed, this was part of a process of eradicating left-wing political thought, globally, underway in the 1960s and 1970s (Klein 2007, 66–71). In this sense, the way was paved for neoliberalism by the Cold War, as: ‘The capitalist world stumbled towards neoliberalization [… ] through a series of gyrations and chaotic experiments that [… ] converged as a new orthodoxy with the articulation of [… ] the “Washington Consensus” in the mid 1990s’ (Harvey 2005, 13).
Neoliberalism, then, is class war waged by the richest against everyone else, a system designed to foster global structural inequality by redistributing wealth upwards (Harvey 2005, 16). Accordingly, it has been accompanied by increasingly authoritarian government, limiting of expressions of freedom of assembly and protest, and the consolidation of power in a political elite aligned with the corporate business interests of their backers. The creation of economic precarity for all but the rich (Berlant 2011, 7) indicates the neo-colonial dimension of colonial modernity’s most historical era, for Walter Mignolo the latest phase of this five-centuries-old ‘civilizing design’ (2000, 278–280) (see Chapter 1). With neoliberalism, then, emerge ‘new forms of nonterritorial colonialism [… ] colonialism without a colonising nation, or global coloniality’ (280–281), what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri dub ‘Empire’ (2000). The former centres and peripheries of the world, previously so geographically distinct under imperialism, now exist side-by-side in the same spaces (Mignolo 2000, ix). The new neo-colonial border runs right through society, dividing Global North and South, often in the same space.
Under neoliberalism the prevailing contract is not a social contract between individuals and the state, but between individuals understood as corporations. Steven Shaviro summarises: ‘For neoliberalism, the legitimate role of the State is precisely to destroy civil society, and instead to incite a war of all against all in the form of unfettered economic competition’ (2011, 77). Thus the dominant characteristic which neoliberalism seeks to inculcate in citizens is resilience: the acceptance, endurance and adaptability to a seemingly unknowable world which individuals are unable to change (Chandler and Reid 2016, 1–5). For this reason, neoliberalism emphasises living in a present undisturbed by the past.
The neoliberal body is not supposed to be beholden to, or even linked to, the historical past. Or not in any sense that might allow it to offer access to alternative modes of being which might question the legitimacy of neoliberal orthodoxy. Even the potentially unruly nature of the personal past – as noted in Chapter 5, of great importance in unthinking doublethink – is something which neoliberalism looks to control (Vä liaho 2014, 61–88).2 Neoliberalism is inherently undemocratic, then, in that it plays upon the vastness of globalisation to render uncertain a person’s place within the world, fostering ‘a resilient, humble, and disempowered being that lives a life of permanent ignorance and insecurity’ (Chandler and Reid 2016, 3). This increases voter apathy when confronted by candidates who represent a continuation of the same neoliberal system in different guises (Klein 2017, 114), a disempowerment played upon by unscrupulous politicians who seek to spread hesitation over the truth.
Against such pessimism, Mark Purcell indicates the potential for democratic action that neoliberal bodies nonetheless contain. Within a system composed of individual contracts, the potential always exists for it to be appropriated by these individuals, if they all begin to act in accord (2013, 56–57). As Purcell’s Hardt and Negri-inspired analysis illustrates, the same ungrounding potential of the past which Deleuze considers evident in bodies in time-image films, also exists for multitude under conditions of Empire. In theory, according to Purcell, it is no longer necessary to take control of the means of production to constitute a revolution, because people are already dispersed (whilst interlocking individually) within this system. Instead, multitude must assert its power through collectives of its own imagining. Yet in practice, these films show, this is not a simple matter. Although such collectives can be constructed, their potential to function effectively under neoliberalism is limited to isolated, and temporary, instances.
Encountering embodied pasts: The individual contract (in the control society)
The films discussed in this chapter offer encounters with bodies which, in a present seemingly disconnected from the past (bodies at the supposed end of history), attempt to act out the resurgence of a new future from lost pasts.3 They present this encounter with lost pasts via a focus on the individual contracts which are negotiated in a time rendered static by neoliberalism. Thus they explore whether there might be workable alternatives to the post-Cold War situation of a seemingly unalterable, interminable and ubiquitous global capitalism (what Mark Fisher has dubbed ‘capitalist realism’ (2009)). What the apparently past-less bodies depicted indicate, then, is the difficulties of functioning effectively in control societies via personal contracts.
The place of the individual contract in the control society requires some unpacking. Deleuze’s ‘Societies of Control’ (1992) outlines how contemporary society is shaped by the ‘ultrarapid forms of free-floating control’ (4), which replace the institutions that organised life and regulated behaviour in disciplinary societies. As outlined by Michel Foucault, these are the family, school, barracks, and factory, and, Deleuze concludes: ‘from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the closed environment’ (3–7). In the control society, the corporation replaces factories, prisons (and so on), using competition and perpetual training to modulate behaviour. The ‘man enclosed’ of the disciplinary society gives way to the ‘man in debt’ of the control society (5).
The figure of indebted man has taken centre stage in the society of control (Lazzarato 2011; 2013). With the reduction of the state and the promotion of the entrepreneurial self forever in need of improvement, ‘Everyone is a “debtor”, accountable to and guilty before capital’ (Lazzarato 2011, 7). Neoliberalism, for Maurizio Lazzarato, thus gives the lie to the illusion that society is based on a social contract. The creditor-debtor relationship is now the basis on which societal relations are organised (37). Whether individual firms or public institutions, all are enmeshed in ‘a set of individual contracts linking different actors who, in the pursuit of their own individual interest, are all equal’ (2011, 102). Rights to education, health care, and other state welfare has been replaced with solely the right to credit, the right to accrue debt in the interest of self-development (2013, 66).
The indebted individual Deleuze terms the ‘dividual’ (1992, 5; Shaviro 2011, 74) to express the multiple and ever-modulating nature of identity. The dividual can accommodate to the flexibility required of post-Fordist capital, demonstrating an entrepreneurial bent, self-asserting competitive targets and training needs. For Lazzarato: ‘the “dividual” [… ] is infinitely divisible, infinitely dividable, that is, infinitely composable and, therefore, infinitely “amenable”’ (2013, 194). Noticeably, it is the body which becomes the locus for measuring self-development under neoliberalism. In lifestyle, how many calories, units of alcohol, miles run in the gym? In the workplace, how productive, successful, resilient? And so on.
Importantly for this book, for Lazzarato, neoliberalism aims to create a ‘society without time’ (2011, 47). This is done to neutralise the market risk involved in the emergence of an unforeseen future. If future replicates present, after all, credit relations entered into now will have the maximum chance of being paid off later (2011, 45). Replacing the time of progress of industrial (disciplinary) society is the stasis of a static or ‘frozen’ time – the eternal present – under neoliberalism (49).
In contemporary cinema the impact of neoliberalism on bodies is often figured through personal contracts (Berlant 2011, 161–189; Martin-Jones 2013a). This has been amply explored in scholarship on neoliberalism and global cinema (Kapur and Wagner 2011), especially in work on the body in so-called ‘extreme’ cinemas which render human bodies as meat (Kendall and Horeck 2011; Brown 2012; Scott 2014; Martin 2015; Del Rio 2016; Frey 2016; Kerner and Knapp 2016). Films exploring neoliberalism through bodies express how this temporal stasis might be challenged, establishing scenarios in which new collectives might be shaped by personal contracts, drawing on disparate, seemingly disconnected pasts which bodies may try to reconnect with. Amidst the ubiquitous possible examples, the two analysed films, set in institutions exemplifying the disciplinary society (prison and hospital, respectively), explore how these institutions no longer function for the collective, their walls having become porous to the flows of global capital.
Instead, the films show how these institutions function differently under neoliberalism than they did previously. They ‘are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner – state or private power – but coded figures – deformable and transformable – of a single corporation that now has only stockholders’ (Deleuze 1992, 5). After all, such institutions, for Loï c Wacquant (2009) and Michelle Alexander (2010), are integral to neoliberal societies like the USA.4 In a context of perpetual indebtedness to capital, the two films explore how the institutions of the prison and the hospital are increasingly disembedded across society. They no longer discipline and observe (regulating the individual within the mass), but only modulate the behaviour of the dividual. They are now sites where individual contracts are made by people who criss-cross their spaces, whose physical bodies provide their exchange value within such institutions. In these films, people are no longer ‘prisoners’ or ‘patients’ within institutions, being disciplined or healed. They are dividuals pulled in various directions, physically, by the individual contracts they negotiate. The ultimate limit of entrepreneurial human capital is shown to be, precisely, its physicality: the body.
The individual contract is crucial to both films, which respectively expose how its functioning to perpetuate neoliberalism’s divisive competitiveness is a failed enterprise. Instead, in both, the individual contract is deployed to create a rhizomatic assemblage of inter-contractually engaged individuals, each acting for individual gain, who find themselves temporarily working together (without longer-term aims) as default collectives. Through this examination of the individual contract, the time-image indicates what limited (democratic) resistance may be possible to the intolerable ‘frozen’ time of neoliberalism. This is the encounter offered by these films, then, of the revelation of neoliberalism’s (lost) bodily pasts and how they may yet indicate the kinds of new collectives which can potentially form under neoliberalism.
Carancho
Carancho is set in the conurbano, the urban sprawl of Greater Buenos Aires. It commences with still images of a car crash, prone bodies glimpsed amongst the wreckage. Intertitle statistics inform us that, concerning traffic accidents, there were ‘22 deaths a day, 683 a month, over 8,000 a year, 100,000 over the last decade. The compensation market is booming.’ Immediately the body is linked to its market value.
We are introduced to Hé ctor Sosa (Ricado Darí n), a former lawyer who lost his licence and is now an employee of the ‘Foundation’. The Foundation represents people who have been in traffic accidents, but retains the majority of the insurance pay-out. Sosa spends much of his time at crash sites or in hospitals (falsely) advising victims on how to maximise on their insurance. His activities also stretch to more dubious activities, including helping people to fake accidents and cash in on policies, from which the Foundation takes its substantial cut. Carancho means, literally translated, ‘vulture’, the film’s title commenting both on Sosa’s dubious ethics and foregrounding a spectre overhanging the inhabitants of neoliberal Argentina. Greater Buenos Aires is depicted as a place where bodies are subject to exhaustive work practices (hospital and insurance workers alike), and where the sight of bloodied, prone figures in the road seems commonplace. By evoking this overhanging shadow of carrion, Carancho intimates that under neoliberalism the body is commodified meat, as noted by the association made in the intertitles between the number of deaths and the market for compensation claims.
Sosa’s desire to leave the Foundation’s employ comes to a head when he inadvertently kills a client, a musician called Vega (José Marí a Rivara) for whom he is trying to help obtain an illegal pay-out. Filled with remorse, Sosa hands over all the compensation money to Vega’s grieving wife, much to the chagrin of Casal (José Luis Arias) at the Foundation, who sends his henchmen to beat Sosa and threaten further violence if the Foundation is not paid. When another bereaved family looks set to lose out to the Foundation, Sosa and the young doctor he is courting (his counterpart for much of the film), Lujá n Olivera (Martina Gusman), attempt to secure them the entire insurance pay-out. Casal beats Lujá n with a belt as a warning, and Sosa retaliates by beating Casal to death with the metal tray from a filing cabinet. In the finale, the Foundation pay off the police to ensure that Sosa can secure the insurance pay-out due to the family, which they intend to keep for themselves. Backed into a corner, Sosa sets up a crude sting, a traffic ‘accident’ involving both himself and the head of the Foundation. This results in several fatalities and leaves Sosa injured. As Sosa and Lujá n attempt to escape, their standby car is also involved in an accident. The final radio communications of the ambulance on the scene suggests that Sosa may be dead and Lujá n alive. Like a Shakespearean tragedy, with most central and incidental characters dead, Carancho demonstrates that there is no escape from neoliberal Buenos Aires.
This kind of critique of neoliberalism’s impact upon society has been a consistent feature of Argentine cinema’s resurgence over the past two decades (epitomised by touchstone films like Nueve reinas/Nine Queens (2000) and La Cié naga/The Swamp (2001)).5 This is in large part due to the economic crisis of 2001 that followed the Carlos Menem government’s turn to this economic doctrine in the 1990s (Falicov 2007, 95–113; Aguilar 2008, 117–182; Page 2009, 180–194; Rocha 2012, 1–18). What the following analysis of Carancho adds to existing scholarship on this topic is a greater understanding of how the body as a temporal site is central to the critique of neoliberalism.
The hospital is everywhere/everywhere is the hospital
In Carancho, the main location for much of the action is the municipal hospital. This space is shot so as to indicate the decrepitude of such an institution under neoliberalism. When we first encounter it through the eyes of the newly arrived Lujá n, there are not enough doctors on call to help her patient, who in any case cannot be admitted due to lack of space. Characters enter and leave via an ill-lit entrance in the rear of the building, the corridors are characterised by the ubiquity of patients on trolleys (there is not even space to quarantine a patient who has tuberculosis), and the cinematography repeatedly decentres humans to focus on overflowing bins and medical waste on the floor, dilapidated paint work, and the dirt which has accumulated on the doors.
The hospital does not function in the manner of a disciplinary institution, as described by Foucault. Rather, illustrative of the control society, flowing across this dilapidated space the individual contracts of neoliberalism are seen to form. Three instances of the negotiation of such contracts are revealing of the film’s engagement with the impact of the transnational history of neoliberalism via the exhausted bodies of its protagonists.
Firstly, there is Lujá n pursuing her career. She is gradually moved up from the ambulance night shift to ER. She works Saturdays, and when a more senior doctor encourages her to take on extra hours in order to get appointed, she also sacrifices her day off on Fridays: this, despite noting that she is generally exhausted. For Lujá n the hospital has effectively taken over her entire life. Several scenes commence with her being awoken in the building, in her work clothes, where she has fallen asleep. The individual contract that Lujá n agrees, then, is one which sees her renounce home and social life for conspicuous production.
Secondly, Sosa plies his trade by preying on unsuspecting relatives of the injured. We see him artfully drop the information that he is a lawyer able to represent victims of accidents to a stranger in a waiting room. Various scenes revolve around the importance of people signing to give the Foundation the power of attorney. This is such a prosaic event in everyday reality that the film does well to make it suspenseful.
Thirdly, in a scene which seems intended solely to illustrate the lack of any national cohesion within the space of the hospital, two men who are badly wounded and bleeding attack each other in ER. It is not made explicitly clear, but they may have been admitted as a result of injuries sustained when fighting each other. Their violence spills out of the treatment room, as the friends of one man attempt to join in the fray, before shots are fired and everyone disperses. It is not clear whether this is a skirmish due to football team loyalties or some other feudal issue, but this particular societal system is shown to be clannish or tribal. Its individual scores also criss-cross the boundaries of the hospital, the same as those of the business deals outlined by the behaviour of Lujá n and Sosa.
In all three instances, individual interests propel people to act, irrespective of the hospital’s actual function (which it struggles to maintain) of tending to the sick and injured. Their individual contracts, scores, and debts intersect in the hospital, but do not function as part of an institution integral to a collective-enhancing social contract. Rather it is a porous space across which the ‘open, fluid and rhizomatic’ (Shaviro 2011, 77) control society flows, enabling momentary intersections of aspects of each dividual – the career in Lujá n’s case (her debt to be paid in working hours), the job in Sosa’s case (the debt he must pay to regain his licence) and the feudal in the case of the anonymous men (their debt to their clan or tribal identities). These ‘sides’ of the dividual intersect in the hospital, rendering it not a ‘closed environment’ designed to regulate behaviour, as in the disciplinary society, but a node indicative of how business is done, and of how humans interact more generally without the collective sense of belonging offered by a dedicated welfare state.
The Foundation, for its part, has moved into an empty space created by the withdrawal of the state, and taken on the role of offering a (falsely represented) social service to the families of those in hospital. Ambulance driver Pico (Fabio Ronzano), describes the Foundation as the closest thing that many accident victims will get to a social worker. Indeed, Sosa is repeatedly shown, at his desk, consoling distraught relatives in their stress and grief, and offering his services at funerals. Yet the reality is that the Foundation encourages the commodification of the bodies of those without the education to obtain sufficient money to get by. The scam that Sosa sets up, which leads to the death of Vega, is the pivotal case in point.
Vega agrees to be involved in a fake accident, his consent being shown in his signing of a contract. Sosa then injects Vega with painkillers and breaks his leg with a sledgehammer, before helping him out into the road to be run over by an accomplice. Pico, also in on the sting, is waiting nearby in his ambulance. The accidental death of Vega, however, shows the high-risk nature of both individual contracts and neoliberalism’s reduction of bodies to the value of meat to be traded on the market. It is after Vega’s death, significantly, that Sosa and Lujá n (after first breaking up) eventually come to explore a (collective) alternative to the individual contract, of which more momentarily.
Exhausted everyday bodies
How are these time-image bodies depicted? Both Sosa and Lujá n are characterised by recurring gestures: Sosa, a slumped posture, head hanging or head in hands (he massages his head tentatively after numerous beatings (see Figure 6.1)); Lujá n by exhausted sleeping, close-ups of injections which disembody her legs and feet, and a slow stretching of her neck muscles. These tired postures demonstrate time as series, but they also provide a glimpse of their (lost) personal pasts.
FIGURE 6.1 Tired all the time, in Carancho/Vulture (Pablo Trapero, 2010).
The opening introduces Sosa, who is being beaten by the family of a man whose funeral he has crashed. As he picks himself up he holds his head, the gesture solidifying a posture we will see him repeat: at work (his head in his hands on the desk), at the hospital after Vega’s death (leaning forward on a handrail), after being beaten by Casal’s men, and when he finds his car has been torched. This opening montage intercuts with Lujá n, who is introduced as a dissected body. The first image is of her foot filling the frame in close-up as she injects drugs. Later we see her seemingly disembodied hands tapping pills into cups as she self-medicates, and various close-ups dissecting her body follow (see Figure 6.2). Thus both central characters are bodies moving woozily through life due to the exhaustion of their work, their physical tiredness the result of the perpetual drive of the static present.
FIGURE 6.2 A leg up the corporate ladder, in Carancho/Vulture (Pablo Trapero, 2010).
Both bodies also speak of how their respective pasts are embodied in these everyday postures. It transpires that Sosa’s recurring slump is due to regret: at losing his license and having to work for the Foundation, and over the deaths he profits from. Lujá n, for her part, repeats certain micro gestures (including her neck stretches, along with the pressing together of her lips) after injecting herself with drugs. Lujá n’s movements relate to her arrival in Buenos Aires, when she met an anaesthetist who started her drug habit. Her posture, then, indicates the self-inflicted numbness she requires to cope with the environment, and her gruesome and exhausting career treadmill. These are the glimpses of (lost) pasts found in the encounter with bodies in cinema under neoliberalism.
As both characters are attempting to ‘rise’ within society (Lujá n to a more permanent appointment, Sosa to return to his former practice), their respective ‘trademark’ postures become gests which demonstrate the difficulties they have in the present, due to their respective pasts. Thus the postures these bourgeois professionals repeat in their moments of tiredness are indicative of the series of time which insists along with (but, untapped, is subordinate to) neoliberalism’s manufacture of an eternal, static present.
Neither Sosa nor Lujá n is able to adopt the correct posture to conform to the debt economy, in which, Lazzarato notes, the ‘“debtor” is not expected to reimburse in actual money but rather in conduct, attitudes, ways of behaving’ (2011, 104). Instead, Sosa and Lujá n are decidedly deficient in their bodily attitudes. As a result, Sosa ultimately descends into murderous rebellion against the Foundation, whilst Lujá n torpedoes her career by helping the family of the deceased husband against her boss’s wishes. Indeed, it is in this failure of physical conformity that an alternative future is explored, in which a collective will might replace individual contracts. Here the crystal of time becomes all-important.
Sosa and Lujá n, although estranged after the death of Vega, strike up a new individual contract (again, in the hospital). They agree to help the latest family the Foundation is targeting. The change of direction prompting this contract is emphasised when Lujá n twice insists that Sosa promise to act honourably, which he duly does, to seal the deal. Consequently, they each explore an altruistic side to their respective positions as dividuals. This is a ‘side’ to Sosa’s (previously vulture-like) personality which he develops on meeting Lujá n, seemingly in the hope of some sort of redemption from the past he regrets. Lujá n, for her part, goes against her career-oriented aspect, against the warning she receives from her senior colleague (the hospital, it is intimated, works in league with the Foundation). It is as though Lujá n is finally acknowledging that the numbness she seeks in drugs is an escape from the compromises and sacrifices she makes to pursue her career.
Noticeably, in this process, the two central characters each adopt the other’s trademark posture: they become mirror images of each other, creating a crystalline structure through which they together attempt to reconnect to the (national) past. When Lujá n is warned off her enterprise by her boss, she leans forward on a table, mirroring Sosa’s head-down slump. Indeed, shortly afterwards Lujá n collapses after an injection. The shot of her foot on the dirty toilet floor, surrounded by hospital detritus, directly equates her via a graphic match with the partially out-of-shot corpses seen in the opening shots of the car crash. For his part, in the final crash scene, before he (along with Lujá n) ultimately becomes a car crash victim, Sosa injects himself just as we have seen Lujá n do many times previously. The closing scenes are a sting in which Sosa and Lujá n thus perform the roles that the other would normally adopt, so as to con the Foundation. In this role-reversal process, their respective trademark postures are rendered, theatrically, as gest. Together they pass through the crystal, escaping their static presents to (re)connect to another past from the virtual whole of time.
Yet, in this instance, by not conforming to the postures expected of professionals under neoliberalism, attempting instead to recreate a social justice no longer considered of value by the state, only returns their bodies to its status as meat. Their attempt to escape is a dead end. The disorienting car crash finale emphasises this, in the recreation of the same scam through which Sosa inadvertently caused the death of Vega, with himself in the role of victim. Formerly a shady entrepreneur ‘trading’ in bodily injuries, the risk to his own body – that he ultimately has to put on the line as his remaining capital – demonstrates its commodity status. Even so, despite this pessimistic ending, although we witness a failed individual contract unable to out-manoeuvre neoliberalism’s commodification of the body as asset (or indeed, the exhaustion of its static present), there is a glimmer of hope amidst the carnage. The ‘altruistic’ side explored by each character is not entirely for naught. To uncover why, we need to explore the rare moments where a collective is depicted that offsets the emphasis on individuality so beloved of neoliberalism.
Carancho’s critique of neoliberalism could be interpreted as functioning within a national allegorical reading, much as films like Nine Queens (et al.) before it. When Sosa loses control and beats Casal to death, the Argentine flag is central to the shot, in a rather obvious placement. As Sosa pummels Casal’s head into a pulp, he punctuates his blows with the words ‘nunca má s’. This is the slogan associated with the aftermath of the dictatorship, and the return to democracy in the 1980s. A national allegorical reading, then, would see the film as (morally) equating the neoliberal Foundation, and its robbery of the disenfranchised through insurance scams, with the dictatorship – or at any rate, as a continuation of it. Sosa, for his part, is presumably rather like those who suffered under military rule and protested for a return to democracy, or is their present-day representative. However, if we consider the temporal nature of the bodies on display, a more nuanced reading of engagement with transnational history (i.e. that of neoliberalism more broadly) emerges.
In Carancho, the characters attempt to reconnect with the potential of the past to offer an alternative future – the virtual potential of past that is, as opposed to the actualised, singular past that was. Only, in doing so they connect with a decisive moment in the national past (‘nunca má s’), the return to democracy, which no longer provides the potential it once did. How so?
The undecidability of the body in time retains the possibility of thinking the unthought, of remembering a past which can inform a new future. Hence, although constrained by fatigue, Sosa regains a memory of resistance, from a time when imagining a new future was at the forefront of collective politics (‘nunca má s’). In this statement he chooses to reconnect with the national past, as opposed to his own personal destiny (of a static present of Sisyphusian deceptions), via the altruistic aspect that has been activated in Sosa (the dividual) by his contract with Lujá n. Sosa and Lujá n’s contract, after all, is to believe in a form of collective identity other than that of neoliberal individualism.
This becomes clear when Sosa begins to help the family the Foundation is targeting. Sosa is pictured attending a funeral, as an ally of the family. For the first time he is genuinely involved, rather than just using the family’s grief to cynically seek a new deal. His alignment with the family at this point is emphasised by the Foundation’s torching of Sosa’s car to warn him off their case. In this, the undecidability we initially feel seeing Sosa in the crowd of mourners (as we have previously, in his vulture aspect) is created by a suspicion as to his actual motives. Has he really changed, or is he just trying to woo Lujá n again with whatever lies he can? Yet this tension is usefully deployed to emphasise that Sosa is, precisely, a body in time, whose very existence is one of undecidability. In short, he has within him the potential to change and, we are ultimately reassured, that is what we are seeing.
As a result of this engagement, Sosa and Lujá n experience a rare moment of happiness, at the ‘Sweet Fifteen’/Felices 15 Añ os celebrations of the family’s daughter. Sosa and Lujá n dance together amongst the other guests, smiling, enjoying the company at the festivities before retiring to (finally) have sex. The collective envisioned in this scene, then, is one of a dedicated professional class (lawyer Sosa, doctor Lujá n), united in their desire to obtain social justice (as much as one can from a financial pay-out) for the working-class family which – as they themselves assert – does not understand the legal situation they are in. This is an attempt to imagine an alternative form of societal collective, one that brings a relaxed happiness (dancing, smiling, laughing, sex) so contrasting to the tiredness (and numbness to the suffering of others) of individualistic neoliberalism.
This is not entirely a return to a former model of Argentine society, of a united middle and working class. Rather, it is an attempt to create a slightly different collective from amidst the enmeshed individual contracts of neoliberalism. Noticeably, when advising the family on how to best obtain their fair due from the insurance company, Sosa advises them of the need to learn a quality that pertains to the constant pressures of this situation: not resilience to over-production and its accompanying exhaustion (as per neoliberal orthodoxy), but patience. Noting indirectly the financial value of time which mitigates against the working-class family, Sosa states of the Foundation that: ‘They have a lot of money, a lot of cases like yours, and they have time. They can wait.’ Accordingly, his advice to the family is: ‘Just don’t be in a rush, that’s when you lose. The key is knowing how to be patient.’ In contrast to the individual contract, then, is an idea of communal solidarity which can counteract the over-demanding treadmill of the present. Patience will provide, literally, the full value of a life, providing there is a community that can support the family through the time needed to win individual cases. Although this may be only positive in so far as it enables the maximising of the market value of the body as commodity (and indeed, it retains the idea of the family and the market as the primary players, as opposed to any more inclusive sense of society), at least it can enable this degree of social equality, which is more than is otherwise possible under the carrion shadow of neoliberalism.
Ultimately the ‘altruistic’ contract of Sosa and Lujá n fails. The moment from the (virtual) past (that is) which they attempt to connect to (‘nunca má s’) does not have sufficient potential to combat the neoliberal present. Or at least, it can only create a bloody stalemate in which both the Foundation and its discontents recreate in miniature the political violence of the former, recent era. However, if Lujá n has survived, it may well be that the money will be returned to the family, as she vowed. Indeed, amidst the carnage, the Foundation has been effectively destroyed. Whilst neoliberalism is a ‘trap’, then, and a situation too large for a single individual contract to irrevocably change (the Foundation are in league with the all-pervasive police and the hospital, and no doubt another ‘Foundation’ will soon arise), a challenge can be mounted. This, however, requires the fatigued bodies of the neoliberal present to remember that insisting along with their commodification (the physical status of their bodies as meat) is their temporal undecidability as bodies, precisely due to their status as multi-faceted dividuals.
Carancho shows that it is possible for these bodies to recover a past otherwise lost in the static present, and reactivate it via unconventional individual contracts not solely oriented towards self-interest. It is this point which is also picked up by Lady Vengeance, in South Korea: how to go beyond a critique of neoliberalism, how to imagine – if not its dismantling – then the use of its own structure (the individual contract) to create new collectives that function contrary to its aims?
Lady Vengeance
Lady Vengeance begins in the present, with the release of Geum-ja Lee (Yeong-ae Lee) from prison. She has served thirteen and a half years for murdering a young boy, Won-mo Park, that she helped kidnap. However, although she confessed to the murder, she is in fact innocent. The film then follows her execution of ‘the plan’ to take revenge upon her former lover, and school teacher, Mr Baek (Min-sik Choi), who murdered Won-mo (and later, it transpires, four other children). Baek blackmailed Geum-ja into confessing in his stead, by kidnapping her baby daughter. The story takes place predominantly in the present, but is interspersed with numerous flashbacks, especially to Geum-ja’s time in prison, and one noticeable flash-forward. Geum-ja’s story is that she became pregnant as a schoolgirl at eighteen and, unable to turn to either of her separated parents for help, she walked into the arms of her former teacher, Baek, for support. After the kidnapping of Won-mo led to his death, Geum-ja has spent her years in prison wracked with guilt. Her search for atonement has led her to devise a scheme (referred to by her former cellmates as ‘the plan’) to take revenge upon Baek.
The flashbacks to Geum-ja’s time incarcerated are triggered by reunions she has on the outside with people she encountered inside, including: the Christian preacher (Byeong-ok Kim) who was instrumental in her conversion into a saintly figure when in prison (albeit Geum-ja spurns him immediately on her release); the owner of the cake shop that she goes to work for; and, most importantly for ‘the plan’, her former cellmates. Each of these women owes Geum-ja a debt from their time in jail, due to a good deed that she did for them then. On the outside they pay back these debts in ways which further her vengeful plan. Indeed, Geum-ja proves hard-hearted in what she is willing to ask of those in her debt.
In addition, Geum-ja is reunited with her daughter, Jenny (Yea-young Kwon), who was given up for adoption by Baek. Jenny has grown up in Australia. Jenny travels to Seoul with Geum-ja. Whilst there, awaking from a dream momentarily, she sees the ghost of Won-mo, who is haunting Geum-ja. Jenny’s life is briefly put at risk when Baek attempts to have her abducted, only for Geum-ja to kill the would-be captors.
The film’s finale sees Geum-ja assemble the families of all the children that Baek has kidnapped and murdered (who learn that their children were dead before the ransoms were paid). She is aided by Detective Choi (Il-woo Nam), due to the guilt he feels over convicting Geum-ja even though he knew she was not guilty. In an abandoned school the families take it in turns to inflict pain on an incapacitated Baek, using a terrifying array of sharp objects. After Baek’s death, Geum-ja encounters Won-mo’s ghost, but is not forgiven. Instead, Jenny is called by Won-mo to assist her mother in seeking a new life after completion of ‘the plan’.
Lady Vengeance is the third part of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, the second part of which, the internationally renowned Oldboy (South Korea, 2003), won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes. Several works have analysed the first two films, focusing on their complex negotiations of neoliberalism in South Korea (Wagner 2011; Herbert 2012; Diffrient 2013).6 Such national-allegorical assessments of the Vengeance Trilogy are broadly consistent with the founding body of work (in Anglophone academia at least) which explores how contemporary South Korean cinema engages with the changes wrought on society by, and after, the IMF crisis of the late 1990s (Kim 2004, 233–258; Shin and Stringer 2005; Gateward 2007).
Yet, other scholars have pointed towards the less nationally specific aspects of Park’s films, indicating the trilogy’s more transnational engagement with neoliberal globalisation. For example: Park as both national celebrity and transnational auteur indelibly associated with the Cannes brand (Lee 2008); Park’s films as constituting a hyperviolent cinema of cruelty which deliberately effaces national history to reach international audiences (Choi 2010, 175–177); Oldboy as exploration of the ambiguous relationship of people to personal memories in a context where bodies have been reduced to their commodified worth under neoliberal globalisation (McSweeney 2011, 226); the trilogy as postmodern examination of the end of grand ideologies (e.g. humanism) and as exposition of the surface-level interpretation of the image as image with unknowable interpretive depth (K. H. Kim 2011, 178–199); Oldboy as a product of ‘international exchanges and borrowings’ stemming from the original Japanese manga on which it is based to its Bollywood remake (Smith 2013, 189); and Lady Vengeance as a meditation on the possibility of forgiving others, in a global context where considerations of ethics and politics may rely on Western definitions of such concepts (Choe 2016, 201–214). But, as was the case with Carancho, what the following analysis adds is the role of the body as a temporal entity in this critique of neoliberalism (whether understood as national-allegorical, or more global in intent) and its negotiation of a world of individual contracts.
Everywhere is prison or school/prison and school are everywhere
The key institutions featured in Lady Vengeance are, firstly the prison, and secondly the school. Once again, their former disciplinary functions have been replaced in the control society by the criss-crossing of individual contracts amongst people juggling their various facets as dividuals. However, in Lady Vengeance these spaces are also shown to be capable of producing new collectives, even if this is only via the shepherding of various individual contracts towards the same, temporary, goal.
The prison is depicted so as to suggest that its walls have stretched beyond their physical boundary, into society itself. The film opens with Geum-ja’s release, where she is greeted by the preacher. He offers her tofu, informing her (and, presumably, the international audience anticipated in the wake of Oldboy’s global success) of the tradition that eating tofu on your release enables you to: ‘live white and never sin again.’ In spite of the preacher’s flashback showing Geum-ja’s conversion into a model Christian when in jail, Geum-ja very dismissively tips the proffered tofu onto the ground and tells him to go and screw himself. Clearly, with ‘the plan’ to execute, she does not yet feel herself to have left prison. This is reinforced by her new abode (cell-like in proportion, makeshift within a cramped, single-room, illicit hairdressing salon beneath stairs) and her job, a continuation of the cake making she learned inside (employed by the same teacher). Only in the closing scene does Geum-ja eat a snow-white cake (in the falling snow) that she has baked in the shape of, and decorated to look like, tofu. She eats this with Jenny as though repeating the opening scene, only this time after re-establishing the family which should have greeted her on her release. She tells Jenny, in English: ‘Be white, and live white, like this’ before burying her head in the cake/tofu. Thus, only with ‘the plan’ complete, does Geum-ja allow that she has actually left the penitentiary.
Beyond this more obvious reading at the diegetic level, however, is the implication that the distinction between inside and outside of this institution has become very blurred in general. This is most clearly shown in Geum-ja’s calling in of her debts from other former inmates, once released. As discussed further below, each time Geum-ja reunites with former cellmates, flashbacks create a montage illustrating how the past in the prison is informing of the present on the outside. Thus, for the individual contracts of the control society, the space of the formerly disciplinary institution is not one isolated from the rest of society. Rather, the film suggests that all of the control society is now akin to a prison, or rather, that there is no longer any way to distinguish between the functioning of contracts within and outwith such disciplinary institutions.
The school, for its part, is an abandoned building wherein Geum-ja gathers the families of Baek’s victims. Its existence as a derelict space emphasises that its disciplinary function is not what it was. In fact, the film shows children to be people let down by both the institution of the family (Geum-ja cannot turn to her parents when pregnant, Jenny is given up for adoption) and the school (Geum-ja becomes pregnant when a schoolchild, schoolteacher Baek kills schoolchildren for ransom money). It is in the school that Baek’s motive is revealed to the parents, when Geum-ja drops the bombshell that he was saving up the ransom money to buy a yacht. What shocks the parents about this, aside from the naked greed of neoliberal aspiration, is that the only possible motive they could previously have conceived of as to why anyone would need so much money is that they had children to raise. The bereaved parents’ missed guess, of course, indicates the huge cost of bringing up children in a context where the level (and cost) of education provided is increasingly a matter for individual families, not the state.
Thus there is a debt shown needing to be honoured between parents and children. The abandoned school, like the prison, indicates that individual debts (this time, of parents to the memories of their children) also criss-cross the borders of educational institutions in the control society. This is emphasised when the parents are shown videos Baek made of the murders he committed and the past returns to haunt them, bringing back their grief with it. Whilst the point is made by Geum-ja that Baek targeted the children of schools situated in affluent neighbourhoods, and the families’ attire mostly indicates bourgeois wealth, one family stands out in its working-class dress. The daughter of this family (whose brother Baek murdered) notes that: ‘My mother had to scrub hotel floors to send my brother to that school. We ran around like dogs to come up with the ransom. Now we’ve lost our house and the relatives won’t see us.’ This particular murdered child is shown to be curiously out-of-place, then, a victim of their parents’ aspiration for them to join the wealthy elite, which leads directly to death. Via this particular contrast, the indebtedness of children to their parents in the attainment of a decent education under neoliberalism is emphasised, but so too the indebtedness of the parents to their children for not providing for their safety. Moreover, as Choi’s presence there further shows, the police did not catch the killer, even when they knew him to still be at large: another failing institution. This generational failing is what, at the film’s close, the ghost of Won-mo cannot forgive Geum-ja for. Rather, he briefly binds her – exactly as she previously had Baek – to show her that he has the same rights of vengeance over her as she over Baek. Instead of forgiveness, he indicates that she needs to atone by focusing on Jenny, indicating the importance of the generational debt – parents to children – as primary of all individual contracts.
The way in which individual contracts are figured as criss-crossing these two spaces functions, as it did in Carancho, to show how neoliberalism commodifies the body, rendering it so much meat to be traded. This is most evident in the motivation of Baek, who kidnaps and murders to buy a yacht. The children he murdered were stolen, their security (erroneously) traded for cash, their bodies expendable meat. However, this time the film contains a much broader examination of how this neoliberal commodification of the body itself opens a door for the particular form of vengeance that is enacted upon the body of Baek. The commodity value of the body is given an additional dimension in Lady Vengeance, in that its worth can only be traded for the equivalent, pound for pound.
Each of the families of the deceased children enters the schoolroom where Baek is bound, and exacts a portion of their revenge upon him with something pointed and sharp. However, they agree to leave the killer blow to the grandmother of one of the children, Eun-joo. Thus their revenge is the extraction of the, literal, ‘pound of flesh’ they are owed by Baek. This seemingly Old Testament idea, reminiscent of the notion that revenge might imply an equivalence (‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth’), re-appears in other scenes where debts are considered in bodily terms. For example, on release from prison, Geum-ja visits the parents of Won-mo, and cuts off her little finger in dramatic penance. She intends to remove all her fingers, the voiceover informs us, until she obtains their forgiveness. It is not a coincidence that the sum she has to pay to have her finger sewn back on is equal to every penny she has made whilst working in prison. Geum-ja’s debt is, precisely, the value of her time inside, but it is also, just as precisely, the value of one finger of her body.
To make this point clear, the film gives a pivotal speech regarding atonement to Geum-ja, as she explains her story to Jenny. She states: ‘My sins are too big and deep. I don’t deserve to have a sweet daughter like you. You’re innocent, but you had to grow up without a mother. But that’s also part of the punishment I must take. [… ] Everyone makes mistakes, but if you sin you have to make atonement for it. [… ] Big atonement for big sins, small atonement for small sins.’ This speech ‘makes sense’ of Geum-ja’s actions in prison, when apparently converted to Christianity, and, again, of her avenging angel femme fatale theatricality when implementing ‘the plan’ on her release.
However, it would be a mistake to consider this form of atonement (really retribution) to be the film revelling in a ‘retro’ idea of brutal justice. It would not make much sense of the film’s rather mocking tone with regard to Christianity in general, with the preacher rendered a devious if not spiteful character, who (snubbed by Geum-ja in her avenging angel guise) informs Baek of her release, accepting money in return for the tip-off. Tellingly, the welcome assembly the preacher has arranged for Geum-ja at the start all wear Santa Claus outfits, conflating Christianity with capitalism’s cashing in on such religious belief systems. Indeed, the first sight of the preacher is shot in such a way as to render ambiguous his very motivation for attempting to help Geum-ja, whom he sees on a news report. It may, in fact, contain an element of desire for the nineteen-year-old whom he believes is the presence of an angel. In which case, how should we consider this discourse on atonement?
It can be more usefully understood as a way of deploying an idea from the past that is, but one which stretches back much further than the national past (as was the case in Carancho). Instead, Geum-ja, quite literally, uses Christianity (as though an idea from world memory established long before nations were), as her callous dismissal of the preacher at the start shows, to destabilise the dominance of the individual contract. In a static present where everyone is a dividual, variously indebted by interconnecting individual contracts, the very old idea of revenge requiring an equivalent pound of flesh is used to inhabit the individual contract in a more personal and bloody manner. If a life can be valued financially, is but meat that can be weighed in this way, then Geum-ja’s contracts are designed to return life to its actual equivalent. Only a body can pay the debt owed to another body. This is the literal meaning of a pound of flesh, a much older idea of justice seemingly submerged in an era of deterritorialised capital, which is re-inscribed by Geum-ja into the individual contracts through which neoliberalism functions. In this way, we see, multitude is able to wrestle agency from within the control society, however briefly, by inhabiting the capitalist system of exchange in a very physical way.
Community-oriented ceremonial body
To understand how re-instatement of physical equivalency is used to create two temporary collectives, in two defunct disciplinary institutions, we need to consider how Geum-ja is depicted, temporally, as a ceremonial body. It is this, crucially, which enables her to (re)connect to an older idea of vengeance from the past that is. In the preacher’s flashback that accompanies Geum-ja’s release, her past connection with him in prison is (re)told. On her arrival in prison, the impressionable young Geum-ja is informed by the preacher that: ‘Behind that wicked witch face of yours, I saw the presence of an angel.’ Geum-ja then apparently transforms herself into a model Christian, believing that she can summon the presence of an angel. When speaking to the assembled inmates in prison she states: ‘The angel inside me only reveals itself when I invoke it [… ] the act of invoking an angel, this is what we call prayer.’ Yet she transforms herself again, on her release, into a black-clad, pink-eyeliner-wearing, designer-pistol-toting, avenging angel. Geum-ja thus explores how her dividual self can be used to a different purpose, by being a different kind of angel. Transforming from light to dark angel, Geum-ja passes through a crystal (as Deleuze describes of the construction of a ceremonial body) and enunciates herself from a different one of its facets. Geum-ja’s passage through the crystal enables her life to change, from existence in the (static) present that passes, to (re)connection with another past from the virtual whole of time (the past that is preserved).
When in prison, as a white angel of life, Geum-ja provides, for the cellmate Yang-hee (a prostitute who killed her pimp), faith in the redeeming power of prayer, in return for a place to live on her release. From Sun-sook, the North Korean spy with Alzheimer’s whose body she tends, she receives the blueprint for her stylish pistol and the prompt that she must seek vengeance. For So-young, an armed robber with chronic kidney failure, Geum-ja donates her own kidney, in return for the manufacture of her gun on her release. For Soo-hee, the adulterous artist she saved from a sexually predatory cellmate, she receives the silver-embossed handles for her gun. From Yi-jeong, whom she saved from violent bullying, Geum-ja receives access to Baek via Yi-jeong’s prostitution of herself (living as Baek’s girlfriend). Through these personal contracts the collective is constructed which helps Geum-ja implement ‘the plan’.
Alternatively, for Baek, she is the avenging angel, paying him back for his deeds with the collective she creates from the parents of the murdered children. For each of these families, and Detective Choi, she offers a chance at revenge, the justice for their children that will – following the logic of the ancient human notion of retribution, but here used to differently rearticulate a neoliberal structure of control – return them from commodified meat to sons and daughters once more.
It is very deliberately foregrounded, soon after Geum-ja’s release, that she passes through a crystal – transforming from everyday to ceremonial body. From angel of life – seen in the prison with light emanating from her face whilst praying – she becomes the all-in-black avenging angel of death. Here we see her, as Deleuze describes it, entering a masquerade. After being shown her new room by former cellmate Yang-hee (the hairdressing salon being a location marked by mirrors, scissors, combs, the construction of the outside face of identity), an extraordinary extra-diegetic moment sees Geum-ja seated in front of a mirror with bare lightbulbs above it, as though backstage at a theatre. She is depicted laughing wildly to herself, at the knowledge that ‘the plan’ commenced thirteen years ago (see Figure 6.3). This is a moment of spectacle which halts the narrative entirely (Yang-hee disappears from the scene) to revel in the theatricality of Geum-ja’s identity. It creates the sense that events are occurring in the empty form of time (with the potential it contains for a change to the future), Geum-ja’s laughter acting as a reminder of the ability of the powers of the false to unground time.7
FIGURE 6.3 A time to laugh, in Chinjeolhan geumjassi/Lady Vengeance (Cahn-wook Park, 2005).
Shortly after this, the film’s most surreal moment occurs. Geum-ja kneels to pray in front of the shrine she has created to Won-mo. This posture is an everyday one, as she is repeatedly seen kneeling, praying, in prison. Geum-ja’s body begins to dip and sway, as she experiences a kind of ecstasy, and slips into a smiling trance in which we see – for the first time – her imagined black-clad avenging angel version of herself. Through a bleak, stormy, mountainous and snowy landscape she drags a strange creature, part dog, part sled, which has the head of Baek. This creature she then executes with a spectacular-looking pistol. Later on, when Baek is tied to a chair and dismembered by the parents of his victims, this fantasy has its material realisation. It is ‘the plan’ as vision, as is demonstrated when the smiling, black-clad avenging angel Geum-ja in the fantasy is match-cut with the same smile appearing on the entranced face of the white-clad saintly Geum-ja.
In this moment we are given insights into the ‘everyday theatricalisation’ of Geum-ja’s postures (in the prison she repeatedly adopts positions of supplication and subservience – praying, cleaning bodies, feeding people) into gest. Passing through these everyday postures of the angel of life, in prison, she reaches the other side of the crystal as avenging dark angel, one connected to an older idea of vengeance from the past that is. This standout moment of laughter, accompanied soon afterwards by the surreal vision, is thus used to demonstrate the theatrical nature of this masquerade. As avenging angel, Geum-ja’s body becomes a spectacle in its own right (there is more than one humorous incidence of someone questioning her choice of pink eyeliner) that shows through its postures the sheets of the past to which she connects. This is most clearly seen in the crystal image flashbacks that equate past and present as she reunites with her former cellmates. Here Geum-ja’s body demonstrates the ‘mega-gesture’ of her gest, as she transitions from light to dark angel.
For example, when Geum-ja re-unites with Soo-hee, her appearance in the present is matched with the moment in the prison when Geum-ja interceded to save Soo-hee from sexual exploitation. Seen in the past from the perspective of Soo-hee, Geum-ja walking into a room and holding up the bar of soap she has just used – once more on her knees – to make a bathroom floor slippery, intercuts rapidly with Geum-ja and Soo-hee embracing in the present. Geum-ja has come to call in a favour, and Soo-hee willingly agrees due to her debt from the past. Rather than a static present, then, via the personal contract the past remains alive in the present. Geum-ja’s is not the series of time seen in everyday postures of tiredness, as in Carancho, but the perpetual splitting of time into (virtual) past that is preserved and (actual) present that passes, seen in her crystalline guises. Moreover, the reconstruction of Geum-ja’s past in the film is not only non-chronological, but also almost entirely given from the viewpoint of others. Along with the flashbacks to all the personal contracts, the police reconstruction is Choi’s, and even the flashback to Geum-ja’s desperation over her pregnancy is not her own. Rather, the entire movie has a voiceover, which we finally discover to be Jenny’s. She is actually relating a giant memory within which lies even the story of her own conception.
A deliberately Rashomon-like uncertainty over Geum-ja’s past is thus introduced, which emphasises the undecidability of her temporal existence. On the one occasion when she does speak about the past and how Won-mo came to be killed and she incarcerated, there is no flashback to show events. Rather, the soundtrack replays the sounds of the past she describes with eyes closed, as though to illustrate how closely it haunts her present. These Rashomon-like uncertainties also exemplify how, through gest, the existence of the virtual peaks of the present which Geum-ja’s attitudes evidence imply the possible presents that exist in the dividual. The flashback perspectives of others again emphasise that this divided self is both temporally undecideable, as well as a product of Geum-ja’s various personal contracts. For each different contract, there is a different Geum-ja and a different past. Hence she is at once illustrative of the past as virtual layering and the present as potentially labyrinthine actuality.
The ceremonial nature of Geum-ja’s body is most evident in a particular crystal that emerges late on in the film, which explicitly matches her past and present, via her kneeling body. Firstly, a flashback from the perspective of Choi shows Geum-ja re-enacting the murder (she did not commit) of Won-mo, in a police reconstruction. In this doubly staged masquerade (a reconstruction, with an innocent masquerading as the murderer), Geum-ja requires stage directions from Choi. She does not know which pillow was used to suffocate Won-mo, so Choi taps his watch strap to indicate that she choose the brown one. As the frantic clicks and flashes of press cameras re-emphasise the theatricality involved, Geum-ja defiantly reveals her face whilst kneeling. Her posture and facial expression are then pointedly repeated on a second occasion when she finally captures Baek, and likewise kneels beside his prone body. Having at last brought the real perpetrator to justice, she has fulfilled the actual purpose of the initial re-enactment. This mirroring of the past in the present via Geum-ja’s face illustrates once more her crystalline nature as a ceremonial body, passing through a masquerade.
Finally, with the death of Baek, an extended close-up on Geum-ja’s face shows a remarkable series of micro-transitions, from grief to maniacal happiness to grief to maniacal happiness, and so on (transitions aided by the passing in front of her of the families tramping down the earth on Baek’s grave). It is as though Geum-ja’s face were working back and forth between the light and dark crystalline facets of her dividual personality. This scene slowly pixelates until Geum-ja’s face dissolves into a television screen showing snow, being watched by Jenny. Thus Deleuze’s ‘disappearance of the visible body’ (1985, 183) that occurs in the crystalline masquerade also indicates the overarching existence of Geum-ja as so many memories of others. She is becoming the memory of the film’s voiceover narrator, Jenny, her virtual existence as audiovisual image mirroring that of the murdered children, who insist in the past in Baek’s videotapes of their murders, always ready to return and haunt the present.
The shrine before which Geum-ja prays at this pivotal point of transition illustrates also the role of the haunting presence of a child in this space, the child being a figure noted by Deleuze to indicate the temporal undecidability of the body, the coexistence of its past with the present (1985, 196). It is the potential of the child as the insisting unthought that can return from the past which ultimately provides a new way for Geum-ja to engage with life. It is for this reason that Won-mo appears to Jenny initially, conflating his ghostly insistence of past with the present (that which drives Geum-ja’s quest for atonement) with Geum-ja’s parental debt to Jenny. When Won-mo finally appears to Geum-ja at the film’s close, she is applying make-up in a well-lit mirror: for the second time, a space evocative of the theatrical nature of her avenging angel guise. Won-mo there transforms from child to adult incarnation, and leaves Geum-ja sitting bound and gagged precisely in the manner of Baek. For Geum-ja there can be no forgiveness from the past by Won-mo. Her atonement only leaves her entrapped in her ceremonial body. Instead, Won-mo leaves Geum-ja to awaken Jenny, so that she can join her mother in the eating of the cake that functions as her long-postponed tofu. It is only now, in her role as a mother to her daughter, that Geum-ja may be able to atone (by repaying the generational debt) and, as such, to regain a direction in life. In this sense, a different future is envisioned to the static present of neoliberalism, one which can be more clearly understood if we explore the collective which forms around ‘the plan’.
The two temporary collectives that Geum-ja create rely upon the dividual nature of people living in the control society. The former cellmates are able to help with ‘the plan’ as dividuals with personal debts contracted to Geum-ja. They temporarily create a rhizomatic assemblage which, whilst contrary to the divisive aims of neoliberalism, is in no way a cohesive singular entity. Rather, Geum-ja constructs this first collective by creating individual debts for which a pound of flesh can be later extracted. As noted, the prostitute Yang-hee receives (at the very least) the physical embrace of Geum-ja; the robber So-young receives one of Geum-ja’s kidneys; the adulterous Soo-hee is saved from the disgust of performing oral sex; Yi-jeong from being physically pummelled; etc. Thus, to form a collective, Geum-ja plays upon the corporeal element of the personal contract which insists along with the financial dimension emphasised by neoliberalism. The body as commodity thereby enters into a form of physical barter, an alternative measure to solely its commodity value as meat. Within the body, moreover, the past is preserved to be called upon to honour its debts in the future as present.
But it is the second temporary grouping, coming together to kill Baek, which makes apparent how dividuals can temporarily work as one for a common end if the physical is emphasised over the financial. For this second collective, it is the debt to the memory of the child (once again, the generational debt) which brings them together in the killing of Baek. In this, the choice of the abandoned school adds to the theatricality of the gesture performed when Geum-ja shows the families the videos of their children dying, and the virtual past returns, along with their grief. This is shown in the use of match-cuts between events in the videos and the room. For instance, when the innocent little girl Eun-joo is brutally hanged by Baek in a video, the pulling away of the chair in the past matches – via an abrupt cut – the collapse to the floor of her grandmother in the abandoned school in the present. Once again, bodies are figured as the stores of the past which returns in the present to require repayment of all debts.
Throughout their negotiations as a temporary grouping of dividuals, the different families emphasise the other aspects of their lives which they must negotiate to temporarily join this collective. This includes their health, marital status (whether still a couple or now divorced), financial situations, loss of liberty should their vengeful deed be discovered, and the effect of the weather on the traffic. Indeed, when they decide to kill Baek they also decide to enter the room for their respective pound of flesh as individual families. What is important is that they decide to execute their revenge on Baek themselves because they do not have faith in the police to do this job effectively. If the state’s functionaries cannot handle Baek adequately to repay their debts to their children (Choi is there as living proof of this), they decide to do so in a way that honours personal contracts – generational blood debts – rather than as a unified entity with a social contract to honour or fulfil.
With the two collectives thus acting ‘together’ for exactly the same reasons, the walls of the prison are indeed shown to stretch around all of the neoliberal control society inclusively. However, within its borders so expanded, it is still possible for collectives to form from the dividuals with their personal debts to honour, when the price is recalculated in flesh and blood, rather than solely money.
As with Carancho, the model of envisaged collective under neoliberalism does not move much beyond families and the market (as opposed to imagining a form of more cohesive or democratically oriented social collective, say), but it is at least a temporary collective able to obtain justice in the absence of the state. The first, indeed, indicates how the carceral society fosters conditions in which individual contracts between women (most of whom, like Geum-ja, are incarcerated due to the actions of men) can potentially undermine the sexual contract – that which Carole Pateman exposed as presupposing the social contract, the latter being established upon patriarchal right and the subordination of women by the marriage contract (1988, x; Carver and Chambers 2011, xvi). The collective of families, moreover, is able to coalesce around its shared horror in Baek’s personal greed (his desire to buy a yacht), rather than the need for money to raise children of his own. The value of a child is, for them, a different kind of worth than the commodity which Baek made of it. It has a physical, flesh-and-blood dimension. For this debt to be honoured, they accordingly require a pound of flesh. Thus, whilst the dark humour with which the conclusion of this business is framed might suggest that a mercenary logic encompasses all of society (each family sheepishly writes down their bank account details for Geum-ja to return them the ransom money), in fact this is entirely at one with the dividual lives of the families in the temporary collective.
Ultimately, the potential this second collective has to break open the static present is illustrated by its ability to tap into a different temporality via the retrieval of its pound of flesh. This is shown in the montage which accompanies the parents’ arrival at the abandoned school. The events that are about to unfold are shown rapidly in a series of still images. As each of the five families sitting in the classroom is introduced, a flash-forward shows – for each – a reaction they will later have to either the video of their child dying, or an action they will undertake during the killing of Baek. In contrast to the previous temporal disturbances of the film (flashbacks to the past motivated by the arrival of Geum-ja’s ceremonial body in the present), here it is the temporary collective per se which creates the forward-looking temporal disruption, albeit as a montage collecting their individual reactions to the present. Thus the collective of families, however briefly, comes to function as the ceremonial body in the film. The montage collects together their reactions as a series of poses, turning them into a theatrical performance as a collective. They evidence another Rashomon-like construction of the past, wherein no one shares quite the same memories, but in communally watching all of Baek’s snuff videos they adhere as a group of individuals with a common need to avenge the past. With memory reinscribed into the present via the body, and the debt it carries weighted in pounds of flesh, the dividual is shown not solely to be distributed across a range of lateral connections to different people in a perpetual present, but also temporally in a present informed by pasts (containing generational debts) stored physically in the dividual.
As is pointed out in their discussion, they cannot each individually decide Baek’s fate, it can only be decided once and for all – as it is – by a majority show of hands. This vision of temporary democracy under neoliberalism, then, is one which taps into a much older idea of equivalent justice so as to provide community within multitude. In the execution of Baek, the static present is moved forward into the future due to a collective view on how best to avenge the past. This happens because the coming together of the families occurs through the structures that the neoliberal control society uses to keep them apart: the personal contract (now given a different worth, embodied as flesh and blood) and the static present (now imbued with an insisting past, replanted in the very physicality of those involved in the debt repayment by blood-letting).
Lady Vengeance is not solely a critique of neoliberalism, then, but an attempt to think past its static present. The film considers how a person like Geum-ja, who finds themselves required to be, as Lazzarato has it, ‘an entrepreneur of the self’ (2011, 145) in a carceral society, can still create collectives able to function towards a mutually agreed-upon end. As in Carancho, there is no utopian sense of multitude emerging. Rather, there is an exploration of how democratic actions might be possible, even in spite of the eradication of the past enacted on everyday bodies by the transnational history of neoliberalism.
In Carancho, the future is ultimately rendered impossible, as the bodies of the couple at the heart of the story (struggling to escape the uncertainty of their context) are destroyed. Thus the film critiques the damage caused by neoliberalism’s insistence on a static present, but cannot formalise an alternative, even if a glimpse of another kind of community is offered via a return to an inspirational democratic moment from the national past. Tragically, this is revealed to be a dead end.
In Lady Vengeance, by contrast, the theatrical foregrounding of the (virtual) possibility time offers for dividuals suggests a difficult future for the children inheriting the legacy of neoliberalism. The film’s sheets of the past (flashback) structure proposes that there is still another possible future accessible via the archived past stored in the body. This process, however, encapsulated in the notion of vengeance (understood in the film as the righting of a wrong from the recent past), requires a refusal of the definition of a static present upon which neoliberalism thrives. Personal contracts are shown to enable the creation of temporary collectives, in particular constituted by women,8 motivated by the past and able to create a different future. Layers of time are accessed to inform individual contracts, making them worth more than the personal gain they should serve. This is evident in the way in which the film renders bodies ceremonial, in the manner described by Deleuze as evidencing of their temporal complexity.
To summarise: two exhausted, everyday, slumping and stretching bodies, living without access to informing personal pasts, seek to rejuvenate a collective national past, but to no avail. A vengeful woman, transforming from her everyday postures of penitence, laughs theatrically as she temporarily rejoins the present to an ancient idea of equivalence – a process in which neoliberalism’s rendering of the body as so much meat to be traded meets the Old Testament notion (literally translated) of an eye for an eye. This chapter has explored these cinematic encounters with the transnational history of neoliberalism, and its exclusion of personal pasts in the pursuit of a static present. These are key examples from an all-pervasive category of films about the prevalence of the individual contract.
With this brief journey through the eradicated pasts of the world history of colonial modernity thus brought up to date, all that remains to be done – in the Conclusion – is to round off this discussion of transnational histories on film with a return to the opening discussion of their contrariness to doublethink.
Notes
1. The body’s temporal aspect, as critique of neoliberalism, is an emerging theme in US independent filmmaking (Stone 2013, 96–99; Backman Rogers 2015, 1–5) and China’s Sixth Generation films (Holtmeier 2014, 148–150).
2. The paradigmatic case of this temporal dislocation is Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), the amnesiac protagonist caught in a perpetual present in Memento (USA, 2000), who uses tattoos on his body and photographs to construct a sense of linear history. For Thomas Elsaesser, Memento indicates how contemporary cinema acclimatises viewers to life in the control society, providing an affective training for life in a perpetual present (009, 31).
3. The connection between control society and the time-image has very recently begun to be explored (Roberts 2017).
4. Contemporary US society has been engineered as a racial caste system which manufactures an ‘undercaste’ by mass incarceration, a situation not dissimilar to that of ‘Jim Crow’ in the wake of the abolishment of slavery (Wacquant 2009; Alexander 2010, 4). Propelled by the War on Drugs in the 1980s, the US prison population has risen dramatically: ‘mass incarceration is designed to warehouse a population deemed disposable – unnecessary to the functioning of the new global economy – while earlier systems of control were designed to exploit and control black labour’ (Alexander 2010, 18). Running prisons for profit solves the difficulty of housing the percentage of society no longer needed to produce goods and services (when there is a cheaper global working class to employ), keeping the nation’s share of the globally unemployed and homeless out of the elite’s gentrified spaces and unable to assemble and resist (Wacquant 2009, 41–75).
5. For example, Jens Andermann (2012), exploring Trapero’s earlier films, details how the conflation of a construction site with a penal colony in Mundo grú a/Crane World (1999) is ‘only the most extreme expression of labour’s exploitation in the age of neoliberal crisis’ (66).
6. Examinations of ‘the apathy, vileness, and corporate dilettantism of an elite that tout neoliberal policies in South Korea in the 1990s and 2000s’ and the impact on individual lives of the ‘recklessness of neoliberalization’ after the IMF crisis (Wagner 2011, 218–219); of the trilogy as a ‘historical narration’ of the nation, after Homi Bhabha (Herbert 2012, 183–186); and of how facial expression in Oldboy might ‘convey the existential dilemmas confronting millions of Koreans in the aftermath of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis’ (Diffrient 2013, 115).
7. The scene evokes Nietzschean laughter, in a film by former philosophy student, Park, which characterises the realisation that existence is underpinned by the eternal return and, in spite of all the suffering of life, it should be actively willed again (Nietzsche 1891, 180; Lippit 1992, 41).
8. For an in-depth consideration of female intimacy and the Deleuzian time-image of the body, see Pekerman (2011).