Oldboy an Analysis of Chan-Wook

Oldboy

An Analysis of Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy

Chan-wook Park's Oldboy (2003) is a South Korean film that is one part mystery and one part Greek tragedy. One might easily compare it to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, but doing so still leaves much to be said of the Asian tour-de-force of the heart. The subject matter is, of course, taboo -- but the taboo is not really revealed into the final moments of the film, and then it is pressed home with a hammer. But even it is not the real theme of the film -- neither is revenge -- and Oldboy is often quoted as a being a "revenge film." It is a film about revenge -- and the twist at the end which reveals just who is being revenged on whom actually delivers more than the satisfaction of vengeance: it delivers a near-paralyzing moral about gossip. In other words, Chan-wook Park crafts a film that appears to be many things at once -- or at least at intervals -- but in the final analysis Oldboy is a warning film more than anything else. This paper will analyze the different elements of Oldboy to show how effectively transitions from genre to genre and slowly peels back the layers of itself to reveal that at its core it is a simple morality play.

Time

The flashback/flashforward sequence is used to open the film and get the viewer up-to-speed on everything that he is needed to know in order to allow the film to proceed as a mystery. The use of time is then used again in the final revelatory portion of Oldboy in order to give the viewer even more information on the title character's past actions.

Chan-wook Park's Oldboy begins with a close-up of a fist clenched around a necktie. The head at the other end of the necktie is out of frame and, in fact, provides the perspective for the camera, which pans up to reveal the silhouette of a man, nearly eclipsing the shining sun overhead. This is Park's introductory shot and what it reveals is a dark, menacing figure whose identity is indiscernible -- unless shaggy hair and rage are characteristics that may be used to identify someone. The shot cuts to the menacing figure's perspective and we now see the man belonging to the necktie: he is clutching a white poodle to his chest and dangling (or, rather, it appears that he is being dangled) from the rooftop of a skyscraper. He seems to know no more about what is happening than we do -- and he demands to know the identity of the man holding him by the necktie, who has thus far only stated that he wants to tell his story. The silhouetted stranger now begins to stammer, and Park then flashes back in time to a much less mangier stranger as he drunkenly pronounces his name "Oh Dae-su" in a police station. Tissue paper is stuffed up one side of his nostril. His eyes are glazed. Obviously, some transformation has taken place -- and we assume that what we are now witnessing is the story that Oh Dae-su wants to tell.

Several jump cuts are used to illustrate the riotous and contentious nature of the man we are meeting now. At one moment he is sitting, pestering those next to him; the next minute he is up attempting to urinate in the corner; the next he is being collared by a couple of cops; the next he is attempting to joust with a coat hanger; then he is shouting obscenities drunkenly -- and so on. The scene is humorously and jarringly constructed with handheld camera work that is as off-balance as Oh Dae-su, who is continuously within the framework of the jump cuts. The mise-en-scene reveals a station room whose interior low-key lighting is a stark contrast to the exterior scene that preceded it. Judging from the blackness in the windows directly behind Oh Dae-su, it is night. The walls and costumes of the characters are a combination of brightness and drab, slightly depressed colors. At one point in his drunken spectacle, Oh Dae-su rips off his shirt and rolls on the floor topless. He is a man, we surmise, who has no control over himself -- and who will allow himself to play the fool. Yet twenty minutes into the narrative, this same Oh Dae-su, whose story (beginning with his disappearance on the night of his release from the police station) up till now has been re-capped, now states derisively (after a glance around at his surrounding from the skyscraper rooftop) that his captor was a fool for releasing him there. It is a moment of significance for two reasons: 1) it is the pot calling the kettle black, and 2) it foreshadows the greater mystery and ultimate revelation in the climax -- when Oh Dae-su learns the reason for both his captivity and his release. Till that moment he has remained in ignorance of both himself and the consequences of his actions. Park gives us this subtle reminder of Oh Dae-su's ignorance lest we forget (by his transformation) that he is the same ignorant fool depicted in the opening sequence 15 years earlier in the police station.

Throughout the film, time elapses at varying intervals: in an early fight sequence, the film is sped up momentarily in order to effect a sense of rapid movement. Towards the end of the film, when Oh Dae-su is given five days to find out why he has been released, time is marked by an automated calendar that rolls across the action as a means of supplying a sense of immediacy to Oh Dae-su's search for knowledge. Park plays with time at all moments in the film -- right up to the very end scene which takes place in a snowy forest at some point in the future. The sense is that time has disappeared following Oh Dae-su's self-inflicted punishment -- and like Oedipus who was accompanied by his daughter, Oh Dae-su (likewise accompanied by his daughter/lover) is freed from the memory of his incest and now exists on a different plane of being -- a plane of pure love where time has no place: the world is still, majestic -- and frozen like the landscape.

Narration

As James Berardinelli states, "Oldboy could be considered a mystery. Or a bloody revenge picture. Or a twisted romance. Or a tale of extreme karma." Narrowing it down as the narration unfolds is part of the fun -- but the one thing that holds the film together is its willingness to laugh at itself. Humor is the key to the film -- and it remains a factor throughout, until near the end, when Oh Dae-su's lovable friend (who bails him out of jail in the beginning) gets caught and murdered by Oh Dae-su's nemesis. Just as the fool disappears in Shakespeare's King Lear, leaving the rest of the drama without mirth -- the murder of Oh Dae-su's friend in the final denouement finally removes the glue of the narrative -- the humor -- and supplies the key to the lock of the narrative: the riddle of the picture is solved. Oldboy is not a comedy -- it is a story of accepted guilt.

Yet, when Berardinelli states that "Oldboy features a delightfully twisty story…told from Dae-su's point-of-view," he cuts to the narrative structure of the film -- which is indeed primarily set up as a mystery: Oh Dae-su is the man who has seemingly lost his identity and must work to understand why everything has happened to him and who is responsible. His journey is humorous, shocking, and violent at times -- but when we (like him) find out that he himself is responsible, the film reaches a level of narrative pathos that is unexpected. Sean Axmaker states that "the tough compassion and hard understanding of emotional impulses that start the dominoes tumbling are lost in the revenge opera overkill" -- but to say that anything is lost in Oldboy would be incorrect. The narrative never truly loses anything -- it simply peels back another layer of genre film to reveal an even older genre at its heart -- the Grecian tragedy and the necessity of love.

Indeed, Oldboy runs through several genres as it unburdens itself of its many layers. It spans crime/noir/mystery/martial arts/comedy/romance/action/revenge and horror before finally settling down with simple drama: the effects of gossip in adolescence come to revisit a man in his adulthood. As the film slips from genre to genre, Oh Dae-su's voice-over narration helps us to fill in the gaps that need filling: we hear his inner voice when no one else does. We experience what he experiences, first-hand -- compelling us to take the moral of the story even more to heart. At times the narration seems unreliable (as when in Oh Dae-su's madness during captivity he imagines himself crawling with ants) -- but these moments are at least recorded in his journal and confirmed by his daughter -- who then laughingly imagines a giant ant riding with her on the subway train.

Mise-en-scene

As Gerald Mast states, "Details develop the film's emotional dynamics" (138), and these details are everywhere in the mise-en-scene. The most important aspect of the mise-en-scene, of course, is the acting. Actors are the most obvious props -- and Oh Dae-su provides ample instances of buffoonery that keeps Oldboy from sinking into the mire of its own violence. Despite all the gore, the film harbors a gentleness and affection, thanks to the acting from Oh Dae-su and Mido. Even the villain provides a handsome face and charming smile -- and an affable voice; even he is hard not to like, as he plays cat and mouse with Oh Dae-su.

The low-key lighting also helps provide the audience with the emotional connection necessary for the kind of mystery the film attempts to be. Scenes are shrouded in darkness -- such as when the heroes find themselves working in the Internet cafe -- or when Oh Dae-su finds himself taking vengeance on a gang crooks. The color and lighting change in the final scene of the film -- when snow white light fills the frame with a promise of purity and painlessness. Only the bright red coat of Mido offers any suggestion of life or warmth -- and its color is significant because it is the color of blood. It acts as though a remembrance of the sacrifice that took place on Oh Dae-su's part to keep a secret from destroy Mido. The significance of that coat appears to be reflected in Oh Dae-su's eyes, even if he does not know why his eyes are filled with pain.

Cinematography and Composition

Roger Ebert notes one scene from the film in particular as cinematically significant: "a virtuoso sequence in which Oh fights with several of his former jailers, his rage so great that he is scarcely slowed by the knife sticking in his back." The perspective that Park gives us is that of an audience on the sidelines of fight in a corridor. The low-key lighting lends a stark contrast and chiaroscuro to the scene -- and the steady-cam medium long single take shot lets the action play out like a violent and comedic dance. One witnesses the beatings and the exhaustion of the hero and the criminals, without cut or discontinuity. The composition is brilliant and rhythmic -- just like the musical score, which is never unwelcome or unconvincing.

Another scene of brilliant composition and cinematography (aside from the end scene), is (by way of contrast) the moment in which Oh Dae-su wakes in Mido's apartment and for the first time in fifteen years finds that he has the opportunity to make an advance on a woman. She warns him against doing so and he seems to take the warning -- but when the scene cuts to the dingy bathroom, whose white-tiled walls are lit from above, and Oh Dae-su bursts in to take advantage of Mido, she bears a giant butcher knife and just barely manages to beat him off with the butt of it. Toilet paper streams from the roll and her red sweater, again, stands out in stark contrast to the rest of the surroundings. Mido's color is always one of passion and blood -- a foreshadowing of what she is becoming for Oh Dae-su, who himself is transitioning from the drunk buffoon who opens the film to a man of substance and honor at the close of the film.

Similarly the final fight scene between Oh Dae-su and his nemesis takes place in a perfectly shiny and tidy apartment in a modern high rise, where fountains and pools of water are elegantly placed in the floor off-setting the monochromatic black-and-white color scheme of the enormous loft. The stark black-and-white setting is effectively used as the backdrop for the spilling of Oh Dae-su's blood as he cuts off his own tongue in order to appease the wrath of his persecutor.

And in the beginning of the film, the expert use of the crane and tracking shots that allow us to lose Oh Dae-su (he vanishes while we watch his friend speak on the telephone) sets the film up with an ethereal quality that is reminiscent of Orson Welles' film noir masterpiece Touch of Evil. As the camera crane lifts the viewer high up over the telephone booth and allows us to see the rain falling from the perspective of the sky, we see the puzzle opening up below us (literally) as Oh Dae-su's friend searches frantically for him and finds nothing but the angel wings that have been left on the side of the street.

Sound and Editing

That opening sequence is accompanied by the dramatic scherzo orchestration and the sound diagetic of the ticking clocks used to emphasize the passing of time during Oh Dae-su's captivity. Such diagetics are not very many in the film, but in a subtle way (as in the film's opening) they are used to convey a significant element of the plot -- that Oh Dae-su has disappeared and that he has disappeared for quite a while.

The film also uses sound in as a means of reinforcing the setting. For example, the music in the restaurant is different from the music in the apartment -- both settings are particular, and the sounds of classical musical that gently emerge from the background make us feel as though we were in a restaurant. On the other hand, the sounds we hear in the apartment with Oh Dae-su are those of the television. Television provides the only noise for the captive -- other than his own voice-over narrative. The only other sound that we here while in captivity with Oh Dae-su is the music that plays during the gassings, when Oh Dae-su is put to sleep, changed, and groomed. This music serves as a reminder of the gas -- so that when we hear it later in the film we know immediately what to expect.

Park uses Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" as a perfect means of building tension in anticipation of explosive action. The rhythm of the violins striking in unison in a kind of schizophrenic sound, sets the viewer on edge. The scene in which Of Dae-su is about to have his own teeth pulled out by a criminal is made all the more tense and thrilling by the use of the Vivaldi score.

Park does make use of non-diagetics the way another filmmaker, like Terrence Malick, for example, does. Sound and scenes are basically synchronous -- and the main sources for sound come from the effects and the musical composition. The Vivaldi adds a classical beauty to the film that the original soundtrack cannot match -- and it also brings a quality of operatic charm to the brutal sequences that cause us to flinch.