The Great Hunger: Class Rage and Toxic Masculinity in Burning
**SPOILERS AHEAD**
Writing for Inverse, Ted Meyer defines class rage as the following: “Fury at the difference between the haves and the have-nots. Anger at the walls that enclose and protect the super-rich.” I stumbled upon this article shortly after watching Lee Chang-dong’s 2018 film Burning, a jazz-fused neo-noir that gradually morphs into a muted thriller by the end. The article covered various films throughout the 2010s, which “showcase a diverse range of mainstream voices getting angrier and angrier over income inequality”. However, Burning was absent from this discussion. Though it doesn’t seem to be recognized for its handling of the theme, Burning proved to be one of the sharpest depictions of class rage that I’ve ever encountered in a film. The film smolders, gathers embers under its skin until a violent, masculine rage subsumes in its final scene. Burning is a study of a young man under capitalism who has been walled out of the prosperity he was promised by the society in which he grew up.
The film opens on a crowded Seoul street, our gaze fixed upon the dark back of an everyman emerging from the churn of strangers - only because the camera has chosen him. We meet his childhood friend, Hai-mei. She’s an actress, and plastic surgery has rendered her with a beauty that’s exquisitely artificial. She initiates a sexual relationship with Jong-su shortly before leaving for a soul-searching journey through an unspecified African country. Of course, the perimeters of this relationship are left ambiguous. It is at this point of departure that Burning concaves; the internal and the external pitching into the same hazy frequency. Hai-mei’s cat, whom Jong-su was instructed to feed, leaves traces of waste pellets in her apartment every day, but it never shows itself when Jong-su is there. Perhaps there is no cat.
Yet despite the enigma of this romantic enterprise, Jong-su believes he’s in control of his newfound relationship. He masturbates to memories of sex with Hai-mei while he fixates on the thick black spire of Namasan Tower silhouetting a pale sky. Though the rest of the world is full of vagueness - bald farmlands; cities inhabited by unknown faces; a blackened barn housing an unmated cow - Jong-su continues reenacting the past as if to preserve a moment in which things made sense. He lives in an undefined world but is convinced of the validity of his own masculine perspective. This incongruence of setting and character becomes ever more complicated and hangs over the entire film.
Hai-mei returns to Seoul with Ben, a man who seems to outclass Jong-su in a myriad of ways. Ben lives in a luxurious apartment, drives a Porsche, and smoothly inhabits the socialite world of South Korea’s new rich, or as Jong-su calls them, the ‘Gatsbys.’ Yet Ben does not bear the hubris of Jay Gatsby. He does not seem to love Hai-mei, nor the young woman he is with at the end of the film. Still, a scrim of mystery coats him throughout. His face is unmarred by any sliver of emotion - he tells Jong-su that he has never cried. Perhaps Ben is a villain; he keeps a collection of watches, trinkets, and other valuables from the women he has encountered in a drawer in his bathroom, and he never tells Jong-su of Hai-mei’s whereabouts after she disappears. Moreover, when he reveals to Jong-su that he burns greenhouses along the countryside as a pastime, his reasoning relates primarily to their ugly appearance. When I finished watching Burning for the first time, I fell in line with Jong-su’s eye. Ben is obviously an incarnation of capitalism’s greatest faults: a man with little personal identity whose value is solely determined by wealth and its various manifestations. Why wouldn’t he kill unsuspecting women who haven’t figured out how to play the system like him? He could be read as some sort of Hitchcockian loan shark, lending the promise of prosperity only to drain, (or perhaps inflame), his victims like a stock-market crash.
Despite this, Burning avoids plummeting into a glib fantasy. Ben lacks an identity, and becomes a vessel onto which Jong-su can project his own self-hatred. There is a scene in which Ben invites Jong-su to define ‘metaphor’ after Hai-mei asks about it. Jong-su is unable to do this, while Ben does so cogently. In another scene, after telling Ben his favorite writer is William Faulkner, Jong-su is only able to explain his choice through emotional language unrelated to the craft of literature. The educated, charming and privileged Ben is the antithesis of Jong-su, who, despite having earned a university degree in writing, is unable to create a successful novel. This is not to antagonize either character, but to emphasize that while the film’s antagonist is Ben, the true villain is not a physical entity but a multiplicity of systems churning underneath Jong-su’s perspective. Having lost Hai-mei to Ben because of his market value, Jong-su is devoured by a kind of rage fed by socially-cultivated toxic masculinity. He projects a violent character onto Ben, and uses this to justify his murder of him at the film’s conclusion.
Perhaps that is not the correct way to interpret Burning. If I’m honest, I haven’t exactly pinned down the film. Maybe my interpretation is too vague, too broad, symbolic and open. I could be reading into it too much. But then again, what’s the fun in a film that’s worked it all out for you before you even experience its language?
