Cruelty and The Human Condition

My previous post reported on the latest annual "greats" issue of T, The New York Times Style Magazine,  in which one of the chosen seven was South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-Wook.

According to T editor Hanya Yanagihara, "greats" are people who have made an impact so significant that the rest of us of us begin to categorize their field of art in terms of what came before them and what came afterward.





One might think of, say, Picasso, or perhaps Duchamp, as examples.

And, as we know, man is a categorizing animal, much to the delight of the magazine industry, which thrives on list journalism.

So, just who is Mr. Park and what does he do?  He's a self-taught filmmaker because South Korea lacked the film-school infrastructure of the U.S. or France, and that presumably makes his accomplishments more notable than would otherwise be the case.

But first and foremost, according to the article about Mr. Park in T, he has been "a fearless investigator of the violence in people's hearts," as best evidenced by what has become known as his Vengeance trilogy. These are "three devastating films about revenge and survival, so bloody they seem to be almost painted in it."  In them, underdogs fight back against despair -- the sort of sentiments a person can feel growing up under the rule of a dictator, Mr. Park explained.

So these films are not just gratuitous violence, which often does well at the box office, but a political statement.

They are also, according to Alexander Chee, author of the profile, great art.

Mr. Park, Chee said, has an eye for detail and composition that "is nearly unmatched, and so when he mines visceral horror -- a tongue curt out with scissors, teeth pulled out with the claw end of a hammer -- the images are so spell-binding they pull you in rather than repel you."

This, one could argue, is perhaps akin to the work of painter Francis Bacon, who is much discussed in a book mentioned in my next paragraph.

I haven't seen any of Mr. Park's vengeance films and probably never will, but T's choice of the Korean filmmaker  as a "great" interested me because I recently read "The Art of Cruelty" by Maggie Nelson and because of the recent seemly purposeless massacre in Las Vegas.

"It is quite banally human both to perpetrate violence and to find oneself a victim of it," Ms Nelson says at one point. 

This, presumably, is the human condition and since there is then no getting around it, mayhem can at least be transformed into great art. In so doing, Mr. Park, we are lead to believe, has re-categorized filmmaking.

What's next for Mr. Park?  According to Chee, it's films about sex -- another familiar aspect of the human condition.