Paul Petrovic
While South Korean filmmaker Lee Chang-dong’s films are central to the narrative of the new
hallyu of Korean cinema, specific critical narratives unfold depending on which of Lee’s films receives consideration. His breakthrough,
Bakha Satang (
Peppermint Candy, 1999), a film that moves backwards from the IMF economic crisis of 1997 to the military’s aggressive suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, remains the work that has attracted the most scholarly attention. The majority of criticism analyses its innovative approach to reverse-chronology narration even as the film highlights the impotence of individual masculinity amidst South Korea’s contemporary history.
1 Critics often judge Lee’s filmography by foregrounding his early films’ insistence on their male protagonist’s traumatic experience. Soyoung Kim, for example, contends that
Peppermint Candy is ‘predicated on male trauma, privileging a sense of a gendered trauma of Korean society, rather than universal human trauma. This gendered trauma, hidden under the veil of universalist narration and the weight of history, prevents women’s trauma from being exposed’ (2010: 180). However, Lee’s films have undergone a gender inversion.
The tropes of masculinity and male anxiety that foreground Lee’s first two films
Chorok Mulgogi (
Green Fish, 1997) and
Peppermint Candy, which critic Kyung Hyun Kim explores expertly in
The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, contract as Lee expands his oeuvre (2004: 45).
Milyang (
Secret Sunshine, 2007) and
Shi (
Poetry, 2010), Lee’s two most recent films at the time of writing, concentrate on women’s experiences and relegate male trauma to the margins. As a result,
Oasiseu (
Oasis, 2002) exists as the connective tissue between these two gendered modalities, simultaneously spotlighting a male crisis while anticipating a more expansive take on female subjectivity.
Oasis frames discourses of disability, especially visual rhetorics of physical disability, articulating a longing for societal acceptance for those non-able-bodied citizens ostracised by their family, community and nation even as those same forces materially prey upon them. To dismiss the film, then, as advocating for a male hegemony or power fantasy alone, as a first reading may suggest, is to overlook the rigour with which it indicts a patriarchal system of abuse.
As Oasis begins to be critically understood within the apparatus of disability studies, seen especially in the scholarly work of Eunjung Kim and Katarzyna Rukojć, its reception has been likewise marked by opposition. This critical perspective is perhaps not unexpected. Lee’s film, concerning the relationship between the mentally stunted ex-con Hong Jong-du (Sol Kyung-gu) and the physically handicapped Han Gong-ju (Moon So-ri), who has cerebral palsy, is abrasive and inherently problematic, framed around an attempted rape that then develops into a romantic relationship. Oasis’s sexual politics deserve to appear at the head of any discussion of the film, as do Gong-ju’s five separate fantasy sequences where she transforms reality and often re-imagines herself as able-bodied. Often filmed as single-takes, these sequences amend the inherent melodrama of such wish-fulfilment, but nonetheless open up Lee’s film to charges of victim-blaming. Oasis’s filmic challenge with these sequences lies in the uneasy balance they establish between subjective representation and the semblance of desire regulated through normative bodily experiences, such as flirting, dancing and singing. Yet more nuanced criticism on Oasis is needed to complicate the early readings on the film since these treatments often neglect key particulars of the narrative structure. For example, Gong-ju does not at first conjure for herself greater command of her voice or mental intelligence in these fantasy sequences. Rather, the only change in her character in these scenes is her ability to stand and clarify intent that she already possesses. Her last fantasy sequence even incorporates the wheelchair that has been an avatar of her disability throughout the film, but, significantly, relocates Jong-du as the necessary recipient for the device. This transplanting of physical agency, with Jong-du represented as the disabled occupant, allows Lee to critique the constructedness of essentialist privilege.
The push to protect minorities’ rights has been central in contemporary South Korea. Nonetheless, rhetorical gaps and areas of slippage have proliferated in the rush to secure protection for those with disabilities. Disabilities critic Eunjung Kim, for one, laments how the 2006 National Human Rights Commission of the Republic of Korea defines disability ‘as the complete lack of capability’ (2009: 231). This designation lobotomises the selfhood of those with physical disabilities and codifies a negative value onto those with mental handicaps. These citizens are thereby cast as marginal subjects, reified as vulnerable and lacking power. Representing disability on film carries with it a great responsibility since film is a cultural apparatus that legitimises cultural practices, including how the Other, that is, the non-normative, is perceived. With a transgressor like Lee Chang-dong, however, film can also criticise the societal conditions that lead to what Harlan Hahn terms the ‘asexual objectification’ (in Garland-Thomson 2002: 18) of those with disabilities. Lee’s film works to record the abject powerlessness that the disabled can feel, and though it relies on normalising the disabled body via fantasy to secure a romantic courtship,
Oasis pointedly refuses to represent sexual intimacy through the façade of a fantasy sequence. Jong-du’s early attempted rape captures the grotesque brutality of sexual assault on people who cannot easily repel such attacks. Similarly, the culminating sex scene that testifies to the fulfilment of their courtship is misinterpreted by Gong-ju’s family, who walk in to celebrate her birthday, precisely because they cannot fathom subjective desires for sex in Gong-ju.
Oasis thus records the cultural and social abuse that lead to Jongdu and Gong-ju’s status as marginalised subjects, documenting the caustic reaction that the disabled receive from Korean society.
A summary of the film is necessary before continuing. It opens on Jong-du, who has been released from prison after serving a sentence for a hit-and-run killing that, in point of fact, his elder brother committed. Even after Jong-du receives a brick of tofu from a kind storeowner, a cultural tradition connoting society’s offering of a fresh new start to ex-convicts (see Fenkl 2007: 340), his family continues to view him as a social pariah. Lerita Coleman Brown highlights how inhibiting is the general stigmatisation ‘of treating people, such as the ex-con and ex-mental patient who are attempting to reintegrate themselves into society, as if they still had the stigma’ (2013: 154). Jong-du struggles to navigate within this toxic climate and, in a spectacular bid of misunderstanding, elects to visit the family home of the man ‘he’ killed, bearing flowers and asking forgiveness. There, he sees Gong-ju and her brother Sang-shik, the latter of whom is understandably disturbed and runs him off. The apartment where she stays is a suburban space that has atrophied, becoming a place of waste and decay. Lee frames the space so that whenever Jong-du walks up the stairway to Gong-ju’s apartment, someone is always leaving or transitioning away from the building. Jong-du returns, sensing some connection with Gong-ju, and tries to force himself upon her. When she passes out, he flees. Gong-ju, for her part, has been preyed upon by her brother and his wife for the monetary benefits paid out by the South Korean government to the disabled. Her brother co-opts the house that the state provides, designates that space for himself and his family and deposits Gong-ju in the squalid apartment complex where she starts the film, visiting only rarely, paying a neighbour to look in on her. Those neighbours, though, look upon Gong-ju as subhuman and use her apartment for their own ends, having sex in front of her. That encounter causes Gong-ju to sift through her emotions regarding Jong-du’s attack on her, and she calls him up and invites him back to the apartment. From there, their relationship nurtures, to such an extent that Jong-du introduces her to a family birthday celebration for his mother, generating distaste from his elder brother. When they finally culminate their relationship sexually, Gong-ju’s family walks in on them and call the police; Jong-du is arrested and the film ends with him corresponding with her by mail while Gong-ju cleans the apartment.
Most pieces of scholarship on Oasis compartmentalise their analysis of Lee’s film into cross-cultural studies of disability-related issues. Eunjung Kim and Katarzyna Rukojć operate within this critical lens, submitting comparative readings on how gender and the nation-state complicate Oasis amidst other texts. Their critical approach, however, runs the risk of denying them the room necessary to register and respond to more minute aspects of the filmic text. In their assessment concerning the representation of disability in the film, Kim and Rukojć do not analyse how the cinematic elements of the film challenge, synthesise or complicate earlier iterations of disability within the narrative structure of Oasis. These moments, however, are vital in documenting how Oasis resurrects a counter-narrative to the repressed silence imposed on them by society and family. For example, Kim Young-jin, a Korean film critic, suggests that Oasis ‘is not stylized’ (2007: 36), but that contention neglects how Lee’s film utilises the quotidian nature of urban environment to signify how these characters are segmented apart from it.
Fig. 1: Jong-du on the bus, partitioned from the city around him.
Oasis announces its concern for Seoul’s social milieu in its opening frames, focusing on newly released convict Jong-du as he gazes out of a bus window while the cityscape reflects in the window. Cinematically, this scene operates as shorthand for Jong-du and his re-entrance into an alienated city, where the physical boundaries of the bus obstruct any organic engagement with the culture. The visuals that Jong-du sees are at a remove, partitioned by the bus windows so that he is passive and immediately positioned apart from the city culture, even as he longs to integrate himself back into the nation. This sense echoes midway through the film, when Gong-ju’s brother and sister-in-law take her from her dank apartment; stricken with continual spasms, she presses against the car window and gazes out at a world that her family denies her from knowing. After Sang-shik presents Gong-ju in front of state officials and pacifies them that the funds they allocate to him are a material benefit to Gong-Ju, he discards her back in the apartment. When she cannot fulfill any economic purpose, her brother’s apathy is transparent, for he states curtly: ‘Call me if the neighbours don’t feed you properly or anything else.’ Her resignation to this embarrassing reality is evident, as she struggles to articulate her first translated words: ‘Alright, you go now.’ In each circumstance before they meet each other, Jong-du and Gong-ju acquiesce to a worldview in which they are tossed and flung about, relegated to insignificance by their families because of their respective disabilities.
While Oasis charts the ways in which the South Korean nation does not step in to repel the stigma levelled at those with disabilities, the film’s biggest perpetrator remains the prejudiced and predatory capitalistic family across South Korean society. Rukojć contends that such a shift ‘points out that the misuse is on the side of the family, whereas the Korean Government does a lot to provide decent standard of living and rehabilitation. The State guarantees accommodation, money in a form of a disability pension and, most of all, it ensures that there is and will be a guardian in the vicinity of the disabled one’ (2013: 345). In this manner, Lee’s film refuses to objectively lessen the experience of the disabled. Rather, it is the family members alone who revel in devaluing and marginalising their kin. This negotiation allows Oasis and Lee’s script a narrative pathway in which to record interactions but never to justify their fallow perspective. Lee’s films since Oasis – that is, Secret Sunshine and Poetry – have similarly defended the marginalised in the face of overwhelming misconduct and oppression.
For her part, Gong-ju especially internalises the projections of shame and humiliation emanating from her family. Susan Wendell powerfully writes about the disabled body in order to assess the discomfiture that can arise, for ‘disabled people can participate in marginalizing ourselves. We can wish for bodies we do not have, with frustration, shame, self-hatred. We can feel trapped in the negative body; it is our internalized oppression to feel this’ (1989: 113). Gong-ju’s fantasising an able-bodied persona for herself epitomises this trend, but
Oasis also wisely circumvents the disability-related issues with this ethical choice when Gong-ju stops relying on the fantasy sequences to represent her romantic awakening. Her refusal to embed reality within the regulatory politics of subjective fantasy during the mutually desired sex with Jong-du testifies to her newfound acceptance and delight in her body. As Brown writes: ‘For stigmatized people, the idea of normality takes on an exaggerated importance. Normality becomes the supreme goal for many stigmatized individuals until they realize that there is no precise definition of normality except what they would be without their stigma’ (2013: 155). In
Oasis, Gong-ju negotiates a path for herself away from what she had perceived as the essentialist negativity levelled at the disabled.
In order to understand the ways in which social economies are working within Lee’s film, it is wise to first contextualise how network societies – which is to say, global capitalist societies – segment and territorialise first identity and then social relations. In his text The Power of Identity, social theorist Manuel Castells conceives of identity as ‘arrangements between individuals and…institutions and organizations’, wherein the root of identity is negotiated through a ‘process of individuation’, becoming an identity ‘only when and if social actors internalize them, and construct their meaning around this internalization’ (1997: 7). At the time in which people certify their identity, they typically lock themselves into that relationship with the social collective. Castells sees this range of identity as a triangulation, offering three main types, or forms, of identity building: legitimising identity, resistance identity and project identity, though this last form is least possible in the stratified world that Oasis chronicles. As such, this chapter focuses more on the other two forms, since Jong-du and Gong-ju attain project identity only briefly before the dominating institutions of society shove them back into an inferior social economy. The sense of a constant regulation that enforces lesser identities is key to Castells as he summarises the principles between the earlier forms: ‘legitimizing identity: introduced by the dominant institutions of society to extend and rationalize their domination vis à vis social actors’ (1997: 2). The second form is summarised as a ‘resistance identity: generated by those actors that are in positions/conditions devalued and/or stigmatized by the logic of domination’ (1997: 8). Insofar as society allocates agency to these actors, society nonetheless polices that sense of power, so that disabled individuals remain overmatched by the social relations that circumscribe their internalised identity. Tying Castells’ theorising into Lee’s Oasis, then, allows us to see Jong-du and Gong-ju as confined to the embryonic stage of resistance identity, always delineated and exerted upon by societal and institutional forces.
Indeed, Jong-du’s family similarly alienates him from its social and cultural economy. They try to secure him a job as a food deliveryman, thereby ingraining in him the ethos of a legitimising identity, but Lee films the scene in a way that repudiates any sense of familial attachment. Jong-du is nothing to them other than the capital that he might bring them. His eldest brother, Jong-il, verbally ridicules Jong-du at the job interview in front of his new boss, verifying that he is only suffering Jong-du’s existence. Indeed, Jong-il positions Jong-du as an adult, yet he maligns Jong-du’s mental faculties, locking him into a liminal space, a liminal economy. Jong-du wipes out the work delivery motorcycle on a night excursion chasing down a production crew filming an ostentatious car sequence that bears no semblance to the reality that he and other marginalised citizens recognise. This transgression ends his job prospects, and his sister-in-law cleans the blood and grime from his knees and matter-of-factly tells him: ‘I’m sorry to tell you this [but] I really don’t like you’ [and that] with you out of the way, I felt good about life.’ During this confession Jong-du’s mother sits and silently watches the television, symbolically forsaking her son. Even the sister-in-law’s candid critique is not an authentic representation of honesty, for her reproach is regulated by the fact that it does not occur until after Jong-du proves incapable of bettering their social condition. Only after she receives validation that Jong-du is an unstable worker does she articulate her coldness towards him. Thereafter, Jong-du’s family divorce themselves from direct contact with him by coercing him to stay the nights at his brother’s car repair shop.
Amidst Jong-du’s victimisation at the hands of his family, his attempted rape of Gong-ju can seem accidental rather than part of a pathological repetition. However, Jong-du has exhibited dangerous social mannerisms before. His legal record includes bouts of indecency and attempted rape, and early in the film he leers at two teenage schoolgirls giggling on a pay phone.
Oasis also highlights the potential threat of Jong-du by showcasing him threatening a woman on the street for a cell phone.
Oasis challenges spectators because the film never reconciles whether Jong-du’s legal charges were misinterpreted by a society that never noticed his mental inhibitions enough to pardon his oddness or whether they were legitimate transgressions. Eunjung Kim adopts this latter reading and assesses how that perspective leads to the film’s representation of Gong-ju, such as how ‘the non-disabled audience is supposed to see the attack as one of the benign mistakes of a fool that makes his antisocial characteristics more humane’ (2010: 150). Kim, though, glosses over particular moments of agency that are afforded to Gong-ju’s character. For example, after Gong-ju calls Jong-du back to her dilapidated apartment, he expresses misgivings and yearns to be pardoned for his attempted sexual assault. He promises to relax ‘Only if you’ll say you forgive me’. However, Gong-ju never affords him this luxury. She remains silent on this issue and even though the two move on approximating a normal romantic relationship, his efforts are always predicated on his earlier interaction with Gong-ju. Jong-du’s treatment of her thereafter is as a real subject, wherein she is not marginalised or used for profit through any social exchange, and leads to his assertion that ‘From now on I’m going to call you Your Highness’. Gong-ju returns the honorific terminology, giggling as she says that ‘Then I will call you…General’. This consideration is not intended sardonically but is instead an investment in constituting each other apart from the cultural logic of Seoul’s stratified society. Indeed, during this encounter, Lee’s camera appraises them in a medium long shot, with Jong-du and Gong-ju each afforded half of the frame. This shot places them on equal footing, a setting which
Oasis maintains for the rest of its duration.
Fig. 2: Gong-ju and Jong-du occupy equal placement in the frame.
In turn, Jong-du and Gong-ju demonstrate in this sequence the strongest correlative back to Castells’ third form of identity building: ‘project identity: when social actors, on the basis of whichever cultural materials are available to them, build a new identity that redefines their position in society in society and, by so doing, seek the transformation of overall social structure’ (1997: 8). Jong-du not only re-names Gong-ju, reconstructing and prioritising her worth in his social imagination apart from her disability, but he also begins to entrench in himself economies of authentic behaviour. Afterward, the two go onto the apartment’s rooftop, which is the first sense of spatial liberation that she experiences. Lee’s camera frames her smiling through the cerebral palsy as she gazes up at the expansiveness of the open blue sky. This moment is not only spatially transformative, for here Jong-du is seen counteracting any aggressiveness as the two discursively find in each other the real sense of interdependence, wherein they mobilise a resistance to the orthodoxy.
Even as Jong-du and Gong-ju mobilise their strength, though, the hegemonic social institutions work to regulate differentials of power and exploit their authority over these disabled outcasts. Representing just one instance is a scene that explicitly renders the city culture of Seoul itself as repudiating any legitimate connection to Jong-du and Gong-ju. When the two enter a restaurant and settle in to be served, a waitress comes over to them and deprives them of the ability to eat there, manufacturing a claim about closing after lunch in order to circumvent their customers having to endure the sight of Gong-ju in spasm. Here the restaurant asserts full hierarchal exertion, territorialising its social economy as the antithesis of Jong-du and Gong-ju’s marginalised culture. Though Jong-du lingers in the restaurant and incenses a few customers, the two devalued outcasts ultimately settle on a meal delivered to his brother’s car repair shop, accepting of their alienated cultural status.
Gong-ju orchestrates a fantasy sequence here, disrupting the social realist space that otherwise informs her fears and anxieties. The first instance was benign enough, with Gong-ju early on playing with sunlight with a broken handheld mirror in her apartment. Spots of light project onto the ceiling from the mirror and transform from objective reality, reflecting the outside sunlight, to subjective reality, with the spots mutating into doves or butterflies in flight. Other instances have her imagining herself healed from her cerebral palsy and innocently flirting with Jong-du in the subway or in his brother’s car repair shop. This latter incident, however, is more complicated than it first appears. Kyung Hyun Kim writes how this scene compounds exclusively realist expectation, since spectators must reconcile ‘the fact that the boundary between reality and fantasy has collapsed (the reality in which Jong-du is talking on the phone merges with the fantasy in which Gong-ju gets out of her wheelchair and walks), but Jong-du must also participate in Gong-ju’s illusion in order to fully realize their romantic union’ (2011: 160). In turn, Oasis complicates the strictly subjective, and thus essentialist, perspective that it had earlier adopted regarding Gong-ju’s internalisation of fantasy. As Jong-du likewise places himself into this reverie, the film situates how Gong-ju’s fantasy pervades and incorporates his subjective experience into it as well. The last two instances are the most exhaustive fantasy sequences and utilise single-takes with Gong-ju kissing Jong-du while real-life images of an oasis art tapestry dance around them or have her placing Jong-du into her wheelchair and singing him a South Korean pop song.
Fig. 3: Gong-ju places Jong-du in her wheelchair and highlights the constructedness of disability.
This final fantasy sequence also adds a layer in that Gong-ju places Jongdu in the wheelchair and definitively treats his condition as worthy of the same victimisation status that are more overtly signalised in Gong-ju’s physical appearance. Lee’s approach with a single-take legitimises the unity between Gong-ju’s and Jong-du’s representational space, signifying an alternate economy of knowledge that cannot be otherwise objectively revealed.
When Jong-du brings Gong-ju to his mother’s birthday in a surprise that makes public his attraction to her, Lee’s script engineers the first true revelation of the narrative. Jong-du’s intentions here may be virtuous, for he is not physically cognisant of any social repercussions or discomfiture, but for Lee they also act as an ideological indictment. When Jong-du’s brothers object to her presence, he validates his decision to bring her because he felt guilty. Jongil, however, responds by saying: ‘If anyone should feel guilty, it should be me!’ The film in turn discloses its chief narrative conceit, that Jong-du accepted jail time for the hit-and-run in order to save his older brother’s business prospects in the city. In this personal acquiescence to better the family name, Oasis situates how Hong’s family produces authenticity. To return to Castells’ phrasing, with the family having conceived of Jong-il as a legitimising identity, it falls on Jong-du to assume the social stigmatisation and feign liability.
Jong-du’s younger brother, Jong-sae, while ostensibly a gentler relative who is willing to engage his disabled brother, administers a harsh psychological rebuke in private. As he tells Jong-du, shadowed by Jong-il: ‘Listen to me carefully. No one forced you to go to prison. You volunteered, didn’t you? After Jong-il ran over that guy, you were the first to say it. That he had a family to feed and had a future. So you’d go in for him. You also said you had prior convictions, had no job. And knew the way to jail. Isn’t that what you said?’ Jong-sae underpins his rhetoric so that Jong-du is presented with false agency, colouring Jong-du’s decision, deceptively, as being his own. This subterfuge ultimately allows Jong-sae the ability to act with more aggression and underhanded belligerence toward his brother. Jong-du’s self-sacrifice, then, is not merely a familial decision, but it is also an institutional decision, so that, as Castells writes, matters of inequality are normalised through a ‘political logic’ (1978: 19). By authoring Jong-du’s liability, which includes with it all the various prescripts of social construction, the Hong family retains the larger family unit, sacrificing their underachieving, disabled sibling and in turn projecting publicly their resentment of him so that both Jong-du and Gong-ju are ostracised from the dinner.
Lee’s directorial choices embed a symbolic echo in this larger narrative event. During the family’s birthday celebration for Jong-du’s mother, a young child in a white sweater and blue cap sits in a chair, his face slack-jawed and altogether ignored. This character, who has no lines in the film, nonetheless operates as another indictment regarding the position of the disabled in South Korean society: he is physically present but effectively eliminated from their public record. When the family gathers together for a picture to commemorate the occasion, this child never appears, a cultural omission itself occasioned by the family’s refusal to incorporate Otherness into their record. Jong-du’s attempt to include Gong-ju in the picture as his significant other is similar rebuffed. The disabled are denied access to the cultural record by those who perpetuate their own legitimacy.
Late that night, Gong-ju stops Jong-du from leaving her apartment to catch the bus home and instead asks him to sleep with her, entreating him with the pained statement: ‘You said I was quite pretty.’ Jong-du acquiesces to her plea and the two make love. As it happens, though, the day is her birthday and Gong-ju’s brother shows up with both a guilty conscience and a birthday cake. Naturally, when he and his wife stumble upon his sister’s intimacy they misinterpret it as rape and the institutional domination again rises up to suppress Gong-ju and Jong-du’s redefined and liberated identities. While the rage he feels at his sister’s perceived violation is authentic, it can also be read more simply as guarding his sacred cash-cow, for the operating profit that he secures from her habitual encounters with the city officials sustains him and his wife. This economic sense is further facilitated at the police station, where Gong-ju’s brother talks to Jong-du’s brothers about compensation for his sister’s emotional anguish, trying to transfigure emotional scars into economic profit. Tellingly, Jong-du’s family does not mention any prior exposure on their part to Gong-ju, faking innocence to the whole affair and abandoning him to the police bureaucracy; worse, Gong-ju’s brother ends up trying to coax capital from the man who genuinely murdered his father, even as Jong-il declares that Jong-du has gone ‘beyond forgiveness’, an irony that is built into Lee’s narrative.
Jong-du is able to get his handcuffs removed and flees the jail cell through an act of serendipity predicated on manipulating a pastor’s trust. Escaping to the streets, there is little surprise that he returns to Gong-ju’s even if he cannot visit her directly. Early in the narrative Gong-ju had complained about how a tree perpetually scrapes against her apartment window and terrorises her at night, stretching out its shadows over the tranquil oasis art tapestry that she finds solace in, and indeed the opening credits focus on this abstract scene. Thus, the tree becomes the catalyst for effecting change. Armed with a handsaw, Jong-du cuts off each tree branch that threatens to terrorise her, hailing her with ecstatic shouts of ‘Your Highness!’ Lee’s camera flashes back to Gong-ju, giddy by her window, and she communicates to him by turning up a pop song on her radio. In this way, despite the physical partitions of society that keep them apart, a metaphor that
Oasis invoked in the opening images with Jong-du on the bus, the two nonetheless resist the social institutions and organisations together. While the tree branches are admittedly a small gesture, they allow him a last act of mobilisation against the prevailing social economies, enabling him to reclaim the project identity that he had had denied by those around him before the police haul him away.
Lee’s film, then, examines not just the characterisation of the disempowered in Oasis, but also interrogates the ways in which the social economies of Seoul construct and stratify the weak and vulnerable. As Saskia Sassen concludes in her text Cities in a World Economy, the global city, which Seoul now belongs to, concentrates ‘a disproportionate share [of corporate power on] the disadvantaged and [is] one of the key sites for their devalorization’ (2006: 198). In legitimising their corporate and institutional identity, social economies monopolise the national consciousness and frame the traditional narrative. As one of the foremost films in the Korean New Wave, Oasis works as a filmic depiction of Jean-François Lyotard’s famous declaration of an ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’ (1984: xxiv). Rather than letting the social and corporate forces gentrify their depiction of the marginalised, Oasis acts as a counter-narrative to the social hegemony, privileging the authenticity found in disabled, marginalised society rather than the fakery that is dominant in the city economy. Ultimately, Lee Chang-dong’s film does not uncritically study the conditions or discourses of disability. Rather, Oasis works to underscore how the context of disability can overpower social realist conventions and strengthen the partnership and communion of knowing another with disabilities. Jong-du and Gong-ju are both resistant in small ways to the domination inherent to society, and together author a discourse of cultural resistance.
NOTE
FILMOGRAPHY
Chang-dong, Lee (dir) (1997) Chorok Mulgogi (Green Fish). 111 minutes. CJ Entertainment/ East Film Company. South Korea.
____ (dir) (1999) Bakha Satang (Peppermint Candy). 129 minutes. East Film Company. South Korea.
____ (dir) (2002)
Oasiseu (
Oasis). 133 minutes. UniKorea Pictures/East Film Company. South Korea.
____ (dir) (2007) Milyang (Secret Sunshine). 142 minutes. CJ Entertainment/Pine House Film. South Korea.
____ (dir) (2010) Shi (Poetry). 139 minutes. UniKorea Pictures/Pine House Film. South Korea.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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____ (1997) The Power of Identity. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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