All Monsters Must Die (21 page)

AFTER YEARS IN
a work camp and then being forced to make films in North Korea, it's almost incomprehensible that the director would choose to recreate the creative visions of his prison warden. Was he diminishing cruelty by embracing childishness and cuteness?

During a visit to Tokyo in 2006, we contacted
Godzilla
actor Kenpachiro Satsuma's agent and found out that in the mid-1990s Shin had made inquiries as to whether Satsuma would consider wearing the Galgameth costume. Kenpachiro politely declined.

Perhaps Shin had a vision — the same actor in three different monster suits representing three political systems.

* * *

IT IS THE
morning of our last day in North Korea. The bus takes us to the train station and we are guided to the platform, past the queueing North Koreans, who have to present their travel documents before they are let through. Masses of people are on the go. For the first time, we find ourselves among regular citizens. A tense and overwrought mood pervades the station. Travelling isn't part of daily life; you have to have a special permit.

Mr. Song and Ms. Kim manage to get us on a Chinese train to Beijing. The train's cars are comfortable. The guides look relieved; they have completed their assignment. They say farewell and everyone in the group shakes their hands. Mr. Song jokes and laughs, then he and Ms. Kim plod off.

We take this rare opportunity to see more of the station and film the crowd. When we raise our camera, people look at us suspiciously and with hostility. Suddenly, Mr. Song leaps out from the shadows. “What are you doing?” he asks sharply. He gives us a disappointed look that says:
What opportunists!

Mr. Song and Ms. Kim escort us back to our train car and wait until we roll out of the station. Ms. Kim waves and smiles inscrutably; she is wearing her pink dress. Mr. Song isn't smiling, but he's raised his hand somewhere in between the signal to stop and a farewell.

WE ROLL SLOWLY
through Pyongyang's suburbs. It's unclear where the countryside begins. We see railway workers covered in soot fixing the tracks; women washing clothes in a ditch. Houses out here are in worse condition than in Pyongyang. The plaster is flaking off the walls and they're not being maintained. We pass by rice paddies and cornfields. Little egrets stand still as statues, watching for frogs. Farmers stack newly harvested corn on tarps. This is our eighth day in the country and in a few hours we'll be crossing over the border to China. We can hardly say that we've come to understand what life is like here. We know that everything they eat is grown here, that essentially all their tools are manufactured here, and the work is done by hand. On a good day, they have a domestic beer after a long day's work and then sleep under a Vinalon blanket. Kim Il-sung is the light in their isolated solar system. Their history is passed down with his radiance. Anything that threatens to overshadow this radiance must be eradicated. No acts of heroism, other than his, are possible.

But what is
really
going on in the minds of the people living in this country?

We didn't think we'd find an answer to this question during our trip, but the question is always on our minds.

Twenty-four million people live in North Korea. They live completely different lives, depending on where they are in the social hierarchy, and they live in different realities and think different thoughts. They are not robots. For many, life must be a daily struggle for survival. Not just for those in the work camps, but also those in isolated rural areas that don't have access to relief consignments because they are the people who belong to the “hostile class.”

The Chinese government fears an invasion of North Korean refugees should the borders to the country open up, and wants things to stay as they are. In South Korea, fewer and fewer seem to think reunification is possible. And in the West, we shake our heads at North Korea. The country is absurd. Human rights activists around the world are sidelined on the North Korea question, because they disrupt the existing “balance of terror” while attempts are made to lure Kim Jong-il to the negotiation table for six-party talks with China, the United States, Japan, South Korea, and Russia. Meanwhile, Kim Jong-il continues to threaten to unleash his atomic monster.

When we look out the window at the landscape rushing past us, everything feels veiled and distant. But would it have helped if we had been here eighty times eight days? Would we have gotten a better understanding? Madame and Shin were here for eight years but were never allowed to engage in conversation with North Koreans who weren't high-ranking.

* * *

AFTER FOUR YEARS
in Hollywood, the longing for South Korea grew too strong for Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok. They tried to return in 1988 but were barred from entering the country; the suspicion around them was too great. The following year they were allowed entry after passing a lie detector test and handing over the gifts they had been given by Kim Jong-il. South Korean officials made a point of taking Shin's Rolex, because it was assumed to be a present from the North Korean leader.

Years of ostracism followed. It was if they had been infected by their close contact with the enemy. But in spite of everything, Shin was still a legendary director. No one could deny his contribution to South Korean cinema. There was only one way for him to gain acceptance and demonstrate his loyalty: to serve those in power. His 1990 film
Mayumi: Virgin Terrorist
was his ideological penance.
Mayumi
is often cited as his worst film, grotesque in its patriotism and shameless in its propaganda on behalf of the South Korean regime. The film is about the 1987 bombing of a South Korean passenger plane by a North Korean agent — the same story that would later provide the foundation for the mega-hit
Shiri
.

IN 1994 THE
couple was finally able to settle permanently in Seoul. The film that Shin made that year had completely different political content.
Disappeared
(
Jeungbal
) is a searing criticism of the political violence during General Park's reign. The kidnapping theme is explored here, but the perpetrator is not Kim Jong-il — it's Park's agents. The story is about the former head of South Korean security, who is about to publish his memoir. But he is kidnapped in Paris and taken to the presidential palace, the Blue House in Seoul. While in captivity, the man has flashbacks of the military coup that brought the dictator to power. Perhaps
Disappeared
was Shin's revenge on General Park, who once tried to end his film career.

IN 1998, PULGASARI
was shown in a few theatres in Japan. The film was marketed as “forbidden for a decade.” Kim Jong-il's idea of reproducing the monster as a plastic toy was finally realized by his arch-enemy. The Tokyo company Marmit made three versions — one red, one black, and one in gold — which could only be bought in cinemas.

During Kim Dae-jung's presidency (1998–2003), there was a period of détente between the countries, until 2008, when Lee Myung-bak, “The Bulldozer,” came into power. Certain exchanges were made possible on both sides, not least the reunion of a few families who had been torn apart during the war. In 2000,
Pulgasari
was shown in South Korea for the first time, but it flopped. No one was interested.

That same year, a reporter from the
Financial Times
wrote that Kim Jong-il's image was being reappraised in South Korea after a decade of the Sunshine Policy. What had previously been considered pathetic — his short, chubby body, his blow-dried hair, his platform shoes — had now become a cherished combination: “South Korean schoolchildren are emailing pictures of Mr Kim as a cute cartoon figure and comparing him to the Teletubbies because he ‘has a pot belly and is cheerful.'”

Kim Jong-il's first-born son, Kim Jong-nam, so longed for cuteness that in 2001, at the age of thirty, he tried to sneak into Japan using a fake passport in order to visit Disneyland. He was caught at customs. In his fake passport he had given himself a Chinese alias: Pang Xiong, or “Fat Bear.”

* * *

THE CUSTOMS PROCEDURE
at the border is thorough. We share a compartment with Nils and the tattooed baker. The agents rummage through our luggage. Our camera is inspected. The customs officers look at all the pictures on the digital cameras. Pictures that are not suitable are deleted, but it happens randomly. No one gets to keep pictures of ox-drawn carts — that might imply the country is behind in its development. A few images of certain military men are approved, but our pictures of the colonel who was supposed to show us the wall in the fog are deleted without hesitation. The customs officer points at our analogue
SLR
s. When he understands that there's nothing to look at, he simply shrugs. We are worried about our video camera, which contains the most interesting material. Our first instinct was to hide it under a blanket, but then we changed our minds. We left it out in the open on the table. No one asked to view its contents.

AFTER A FEW
hours of inspection, the train rolls over the bridge to China. The last we see of North Korea is an empty playground with a rusty carousel. Out in the middle of the Yalu River we pass a bridge that suddenly stops short. The bridge was bombed during the Korean War. The Chinese have rebuilt their side, but the North Koreans have shown no interested in rebuilding the bridge to China. We see Chinese people standing on the bridge, binoculars in hand, searching for a glimpse of life on the other side.

* * *

IN 2006, SHIN
SANG-OK
died after battling the hepatitis that he had contracted in the North Korean prison camp. His life moved in cycles and circles. The same went for Madame. Her private life had been entangled in her acting life, and she came to embody a transitional character, a synthesis between the traditional Korean housewife and a modern, independent woman. She depicted the trials and ambiguities of female life during the post-war period. In
Confessions of a College Student
(1958), she played a lawyer who risks her career defending divorced women. Madame based her character on South Korea's first female lawyer, Lee Tai-young. They became lifelong friends. Madame called her “my second mother.”

Madame's portrait of Sonya in
Flower in Hell
contrasts with the widow in
My Mother and Her Guest
(
Sarangbang sonnimgwa eomeoni
) — her favourite among her own films. Whereas the widow is swaddled in her
hanbok
with her hair done in a widow's style, in a tight bun at her neck, Sonya wanders around in high heels and a low-cut dress. The widow can't admit her feelings for her guest. She is a prisoner of all the things that belong to her previous life: photographs, flowers, a piano.

Melodrama draws in audiences by tightening its grip on their emotions. Its aim is to make tears run. Melodrama isn't slick; it's stylized. Douglas Sirk, the great director of Hollywood melodrama, said that the genre “should function for society as Socrates's dialogues and Euripides's melodramas did in ancient Athens.” Melodrama plays us as if we were its instrument. We feel it in our bodies. There is also a sacramental element: fear and empathy reach their climax in the sacrifice of one of the characters in the story, a victim whose death cleanses someone else's life.

In melodrama, material things have a strong presence; clothes become transitional objects and markers for the dramatic changes in a character's mind. In his essay titled “Imitation of Life,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder, one of the most important directors in New German Cinema, says that Sirk's films are all about what it is possible to say and do in a restricted space. Fassbinder saw what almost no one else saw in Sirk, the German-American director of “weepies” — namely, that the characters in Sirk's films are placed in settings that are shaped by their social situations and have an exactness; you know the limitations of each room. Fassbinder writes:

Sirk has said: “You can't make films about something; you can only make films with something: with people, with light, with flowers, with mirrors, with blood, in fact with all the crazy things that are worth it.”

“We are the victims of history,” Madame wrote in her autobiography. She wasn't just talking about herself and Shin, but about all Koreans. “We survived for fifty years, but it feels like we survived for five hundred.”

Choi Eun-hee and Shin Sang-ok's lives are written into a political and geographic triangle: Communist dictator, right-wing dictator, and the United States. North, South, and West. Hollywood's influence on Shin Films, which was crushed by General Park and resurrected in North Korea. Within the same triangle are the atomic bomb and monster movies. The bomb was created in the United States, dropped on Japan, and is now being developed in North Korea. In North Korea, Godzilla became Pulgasari who became Galgameth in Hollywood.

* * *

THE TRAIN ROLLS
into the station of the Chinese border town of Dandong. After North Korea, the colours here seem shockingly bright. The cars are new — they flash and shine. Billboards clutter the façades. On one sign, an adorable manga policeman encourages drivers to use their seatbelts.
Kawaii
is invading China.

By the time the train leaves Dandong, we are famished. The Bromma boys are sitting in the dining car, gorging on food. Elias has suddenly become their butler. Dressed in an undershirt, he runs around with a wine bottle and serves them. As soon as we take a seat at a table, the waitress snorts at us and shouts: “Go away!” Her teeth point straight out. We try to get help from Bruno, whose size commands respect and who speaks a little Chinese, but Bruno mumbles and the waitress won't listen. We refuse to leave our seats and cast jealous glances at the Bromma boys' teeming table. We are too hungry to give up, and soon the waitress relents and starts procuring rice dishes and Chinese red wine, brusquely setting them on the table.