Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Relatives
and Other Monsters
(The Host, 4/16/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
There's
exactly a half-century between the original Japanese Godzilla
(1956) and The Host, Joon-ho Bong's cool new South Korean monster
movie. The films are worlds away in tone and style, but they have one
thing in common: the horror is triggered by the Americans. Godzilla
was awakened by a nuclear test, and the chimerical "host"
by a toxic chemical dump ordered by a US army doctor. Monstrous hell-spawn
may come and go, but it seems the outsized arrogance of the Americans
is immortal.
The Host is itself a strange
mutation of a movie: though it clearly harkens back to the dubious tradition
of Toho Studios monster flicks, where some guy in a monster costume
flattens a model Tokyo, it is equally a tale of family dysfunction,
government perfidy, and public paranoia. After the Americans empty a
supply of bad formaldehyde in Seoul's water supply, weekenders notice
something weird roosting under a bridge over the Han River. The creature
turns out to be a boxcar-sized combination of slug, carp, and weasel,
with a taste for abducting and regurgitating humans for later consumption.
The humble Park family, which owns
and operates a snack stand on the riverfront, takes it badly when their
little girl (Ah-sung Ko) is snatched by the monster. After being evacuated,
the ne'er-do-well father (Kang-ho Song) gets a call on his cell phone
from the victim, who's alive somewhere in Seoul's sewer system. The
barely-competent authorities are less interested in this news, however,
than in securing the population from a plague the Host is supposedly
spreading. The Park clan, which includes a cool uncle (Du-na Bae) and
(bizarrely) an Olympic-caliber archer (Hae-il Park), are forced to break
quarantine to seek out the monster's lair.
If all this sounds deadly earnest,
and terribly hackneyed, hold on. For The Host is that rare movie
so variable in tone, but consistent in vision, that it comes off seeming
edgy. The monster's first romp through a populated area, galumphing
here and there as it snacks on the snackers, is staged with ferocious
ambivalence, as if the filmmakers can't decide which species is more
ridiculous. Not since Godzilla's rampage—or the last Kylie Minogue
concert—have so many Asians been seen running so deliriously in
one direction.
The script is full of gallows humor,
playing in particular on bio-anxiety in post-SARS Asia. As fear of plague
grips Seoul, people wait for the bus with surgical masks. One man coughs
suspiciously, and spits in the gutter—just before the bus rolls
up to splash the viscous sputum on everybody. In perfect tune with the
zeitgeist, institutions and authorities are useless, seeming to put
more effort into arresting the Parks than in bagging the creature. One
wonders what FEMA would do in this situation.
Faced with such toxic satire, it's
hard not to see the movie as an allegory. What can the Host represent
but North Korean dictator/South Park fan Kim Jung-Il? Like the
monster, he menaces Seoul and kidnaps people; like not a few other petty
strongmen, he thrives on US antagonism. If there's a political message
in the film's resolution, it is that the monster won't be vanquished
by the Americans, but by the Koreans themselves, if the guys with guns
would just get out of the way.
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
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