If a sign is a premonition, it points to a future; if it’s a clue, a past. But sometimes a sign is just a coincidence, the echo of an elsewhere that only points nowhere. In Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, signs ricochet between all three possibilities, their meanings caught up in a vague matrix of maybes. The story opens just before Jongsu (Yoo Ah-in), a recent university graduate, returns to live on his family farm in the Paju countryside. He runs into childhood acquaintance Haemi (Jeon Jong-seo) in a busy Seoul marketplace, where she’s advertising tickets for a raffle and sashaying to sugar pop in a hot pink miniskirt. At first, chance is serendipitous, even funny: the lucky numbers are called and Jongsu wins a tacky plastic watch, which he gifts her. But later, when Haemi returns from a holiday with slick new boyfriend Ben (Steven Yeun), endearing vagaries turn sinister.
Over dinner, Jongsu asks him what he does for a living – after all, he seems only a few years older, but has a Porsche parked outside and a Gangnam apartment teeming with sunlight. “To put it simply,” Ben replies, “I play. Nowadays, there is no distinction between working and playing”. How sweet a dictum of leisure, delivered with the pathological ease of one who has never encountered any of the world’s infinite discomforts. To play is to perform a certain surrender – of seriousness, of the belief that someone stands to gain from your loss. A ludic mode of being that says: some ventures are disposable. As with a raffle, so with a pretty girl who lives alone in a shoebox, her future blurred by credit card debt.
If you know Burning is adapted from a Murakami short story, however loosely, you know that Haemi will vanish. The trope of the missing woman is built into Murakami’s narrative DNA: her vanishing will preoccupy the protagonist, neurotically at first, then fade over the months and years to a dull malaise. Time has abstracted her, but the lacuna structures his life. Both Lee Chang-dong’s previous films see tragedy trail women young and old; his last effort, Poetry (2010), opens with the corpse of a schoolgirl floating downstream in the sun. But where Poetry is generous with the characterisation of its protagonist, a newly amnesia-stricken grandmother to a cruel and thankless boy, Burning sees Haemi sidelined and essentialised as the locus of all mystery. She invites Jongsu over with instructions to feed her cat while she’s away; it never materialises, so they fuck instead. He returns in her absence to cat-sit as promised and to tend to certain fantasies – innocuous bedroom things are made erotic by the sheer force of his imagination. Ben, on the other hand, replaces Haemi with another bright-eyed naïf as soon as she vanishes. She is inducted into his clique with all the same motions: daytime coffee dates, an invitation to group dinner, and there, an incitation to entertain. From the very beginning, Haemi is at the mercy of men who cling to the illusory promises they embed in her body, relations of devotion and disposability each as stultifying as the other.
There’s the sense that Haemi, too, is in search of necessary enchantments. Early on, at drinks with Jongsu, she tells him that she’s been studying pantomime. With deft hands, she tosses and catches a tangerine spun out of air, carefully peeling away its skin before biting into it. The secret, she says, isn’t to believe there is a tangerine, but to forget that there isn’t one. She spits out an imaginary pit; “the important thing is that you have to really want it”. In the yellow light of the dim bar, you almost believe she has found a way to live off fantasy made literal. After all, one of her very first lines in the film is an admission to plastic surgery. “Pretty, right?”, she asks Jongsu at their first run-in, her face unrecognisable from hopeful tweaking. Haemi is far from alone – the famous ubiquity of surgery in South Korea is a symptom of the aspirational momentum that runs alongside its hypercapitalist booms. Like the logic of investment, it asks you to defer happiness to a future face. But where to from there? She is poor, young, and a woman. None of these are incidental to her disposability.
Unravelled mysteries always appear obvious in retrospect, but Burning is filled with clues too forthcoming to be anything but red herrings; then again, things are so often exactly what they seem. There is the telling confession to playful arson – “Sometimes I burn down greenhouses”, says Ben to Jongsu. Once every two months, Ben chooses an abandoned greenhouse and sets it alight. He smiles, a little sheepish; “you can make it disappear as if it never existed”. Other clues surface: a stifled yawn; a conspiratorial smile; a drawer full of women’s bracelets. To read this film is to use suspicion as a cipher.
Although nothing is explicitly surreal, there are enough off-kilter intrusions to cast the everyday in an odd light, where the inexplicable opens a story to unseen possibilities. The phone rings at dusk, but no one is on the other end. A story of a child lost in a well goes uncorroborated – sentimental manipulation or an otherworldly excursion? Critic Mark Fisher describes the aesthetic experience of the eerie as distinct from the weird and the uncanny.¹ Where the latter herald the presence of something incongruous, the eerie is marked by absence and unintelligibility. Structures like ruins are eerie because they speak of agency – which inscrutable forces built and abandoned them? The eerie has much in common with the strangeness of capital itself, a power that seems beholden to market rationality but embodies the obscure inevitability of an agent like fate. In the Paju countryside, these greenhouses are wild with weeds, their dusty plastic sheaths propped up by skeletal frames. Lying in wait for collapse, or a fire.
This metaphor of neglect plays into the film’s critique of entitlement. The same impulse underlies both Ben and Jongsu’s performances of masculinity as an act of taking; it’s just that one of them has the guts to take a little more. In a moment of amateur sleuthing, Jongsu, with his beat-up truck, trails Ben as he drives from the heart of the city to its leafy outskirts. He sees nothing incriminating; Ben parks his Porsche by a mountainside lake, standing face to sun like the star of a luxury car ad, so picturesque as to border on absurd. While he watches the view, as if even this is his to take in, Jongsu, our aspiring writer cum delivery truck driver, watches him. Is there a single scene where the rich aren’t at play?
Jongsu’s rage simmers but rarely surfaces. His father is currently on trial for assaulting a police officer, and his mother left them years ago, unable to cope. But his anger – like the solace that Haemi finds in materialism – is less personal and more symptomatic. In an interview with Variety, Lee observes the generational decline in economic stability and the disoriented anger of Korean millennials – some early writings on the film were even titled ‘Project Rage’. This is a story about young people, Lee stresses, and their impotence before a world that pretends simplicity – more convenience, more innovation – but remains a puzzle. The world is illegible, both within Burning and without, turning by strange design. When Jongsu asks Ben how he judges a greenhouse useless and ready for burning, Ben tells him it’s simple – he doesn’t judge anything, just accepts that they’re waiting to be burned down. There are so many of them. There’s no right or wrong, Ben reiterates, just the morals of nature. He likens his justice to the rain.
Burning unfolds on a path seemingly entropic but organised by the suffering of precarious lives under capitalism. At the end, there is narrative resolution but no hard-won satisfaction of suspicions confirmed; its signs have ricocheted a little too hard between clue and coincidence, left us too tired for revelation. The mystery of Haemi’s disappearance is technically ‘solved’, but becomes supplanted by one grander: the mystery of a world that tantalises with the hope of futurity while locking its millions of subjects in a cold impasse.
1 Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater, 2011.
Phoebe Chen is a graduate student at Columbia University. In another life, she studied law and wrote fiction.
