On Burning
Crisp, understated drama prevails in Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning, an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami story “Barn Burning.” The film operates in a tradition outside of horror, slowly mounting dread.
Ben burns barns. The countryside is full of them. They’re an absence that nobody ever really notices. “There is no right or wrong, just the morals of nature,” Ben says.
Such crisp, understated drama prevails in Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning, an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami story “Barn Burning.” The film operates in a tradition outside of horror, slowly mounting dread. Murakami stories have the great trappings for heady, psychological suspense, and “Barn Burning” exposes our instinctual discomfort. In an essay on Murakami’s fiction, the writer Mieko Kawakami says, “We’re repeatedly shown that what we see, what we believe to be reality, has a shadow to it, and by passing through a ‘well’ that unexpectedly appears in our daily life, our existence can easily be thrown into an unfamiliar place.” Just as the short story, the film draws upon several uncanny devices, its horror dwelling in a deeply unsettling uncertainty: how well can we ever know the people around us?
A Murakami fan, I listened to the story on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast when a friend recommended it to me. I was gripped, pulled inside the story told to the narrator, this dark appeal and fear of barns burning. I had to watch the movie, too.
Jong-su and Hae-mi grew up together in Paju, a small city with views of North Korea from Jong-su’s family’s farm. The pair bumps into each other one day in Seoul and they catch up over a drink. Jong-su’s quiet, observational, a writer — the classic Murakami type. Hae-mi is a bit rootless; she pantomimes peeling tangerines — she can eat them anytime she likes. Underscoring the film is this thread of youth unemployment in South Korea. Jong-su goes for job interviews and routinely returns to Paju to tend to his family’s farm. Hae-mi works for a department store, only called in when they need her. Unsettled, uprooted by the current climate, Hae-mi decides to embark on a trip around Africa. They’re transient, drifting just as alone both away and at home. In the film, the uncanny creates openings; Jong-su and Hae-mi begin to feel the pressures of evolving society without always articulating it to themselves.
This is something I’ve been circling in my own writing — how do we evoke the inarticulable? How can we draw upon the uncanny — doubles, the return of the repressed, the air feeling slightly off — without hitting readers over the head? What can be revealed in the dark gems of dreams? Done well, the uncanny asks us to feel, to hover over, the characters’ dark depths alongside them.
Jong-su’s attraction to Hae-mi blooms. Hae-mi reminds him of memories from their childhood — she fell in the well, he saved her; he called her ugly, does he remember. Their tryst unfolds over a few days prior to Hae-mi’s departure. In need of a cat-sitter, she invites Jong-su over. Her cat hides when Jong-su visits, and quickly he and Hae-mi end up in bed. Hae-mi tells him how once a day the light reflects off of Seoul Tower into her room. It flares on the wall while they’re having sex, and Jong-su can’t look away. After she leaves, Jong-su comes to feed the unseen cat, masturbating in Hae-mi’s bed, hoping he’ll catch the light again.
The light fires on some subterranean cylinder. I can feel a longing escaping from grasp. Watching Burning, I don’t immediately identify what’s wrong, instead feeling internally the anxieties of the film. There’s a particular fear that accompanies primal uncertainties. How do we risk exposing ourselves when we illuminate the contour of our deepest worries for someone else? How well really can anybody ever know us?
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Hae-mi returns with Ben, a wealthy man who lives in a beautiful apartment in Gangnam. Jong-su compares him to Gatsby, derisively. Ben and Hae-mi met in Nairobi, hunkered down for a few days during a bomb scare. Upon their return to Seoul, the trio goes for tripe soup, Hae-mi falls asleep at the table, and Ben speaks as if in the three days he’s known Hae-mi, he knows her better than anyone. Jong-su watches Hae-mi go home with Ben.
Love triangle stories can be so appealing — enter Cabaret, enter Heartbeats — there’s something destabilizing, uncanny, for an audience conditioned for monogamy. In Burning, there’s something deeply sinister felt within the group’s tension. Ben’s this magnetic, enigmatic wealthy young person, a standout in this class drama. One night, she and Jong-su join Ben’s friends for dinner and she recounts what she learned about hunger on her trip. Some people have little hunger — a physical hunger, a need to satiate something tangible — and sometimes the hunger grows; it’s philosophical, deeply-rooted, inarticulable, the great hunger. She shares that it’s ineffable: “I can’t explain it in words. You need to see it for yourselves.” One of Ben’s friends asks her to show them, then. She demonstrates the hunger dance, asking them to clap out a beat, and Ben’s friends lose interest. Their interest only ever patronizes. Jong-su watches Ben and catches him yawning. The scene cuts, the trio moves to the club, and the next cut brings Jong-su back to the barn, the calf groaning.
Hae-mi attempts to plunge the depths. The uncanny, the uncertainty of the film makes itself felt so much more when we can see the shadow of the questions the characters are asking, of their own existence. That what could be known, like Jong-su and Hae-mi’s shared history, remains unverifiable, unattainable, these darker questions become all the more imperative. They might provide a place to anchor. Burning shows what can happen when we’re rebuffed, when we feel so cosmically alone and nothing changes. The night she returns from her impromptu trip to Kenya, Hae-mi shares how she watched the sun set over the desert and wished she could disappear like it.
Hae-mi and Jong-su share in something their society cannot give them. Ben offers a dangerous, unattainable alternative. In one of the film’s most stunning sequences, the trio gets high outside of Jong-su’s house. Hae-mi rises, pulls off her shirt, and begins dancing, Miles Davis’s “Générique” scoring her performance. At first, she pantomimes a bird flying over the violet dusk, then unburdening herself with the great hunger dance, the dance which seeks the meaning of life. There’s some deep appeal to finding something not your own to find guidance, to think there might just be a different system to organize your life that you have not yet encountered. Then, just then, everything might click into place.
Hae-mi is, at first blush, a trademark Murakami girl, but in this moment we see inside her desire, her lonesomeness, too. She’s crying when the dance is done, and the camera pans over the landscape that contains them.
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On the New Yorker Fiction Podcast, Andrea Lee and Deborah Treisman discuss the original story, how Murakami opens these fractures of uncertainty. We can’t really be sure of what happens in the story’s end, but the film makes things more concrete. There’s something dangerous to the loneliness, something unwelcoming, unfeeling to the society around them. Hae-mi goes missing, leaving Jong-su only with uncertainty. Was the story she told about falling in the well true? Did she really have a cat? How could it be that he — this old neighbor — was the person she claimed knew her best?
The film, though, offers something more conclusive, a concrete answer to inarticulable fears, to patterns and obsessions we lean into. In the end, something must burn.
