Historical Reproductions Turn Monstrous: “The Host” and American Domination
Through the intellectual work of Antonio Gramschi and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Host” (2006) maps hegemony and silence onto the Korean Peninsula
Let us start from the “beginning.”
Mortuary, 8th U.S. Army, Yongsan Camp, February 9, 2000 — as set in The Host
To his Korean subordinate, “Let’s just dump them in the Han River,” says the unnamed American head of the U.S. Army Mortuary about the countless bottles of “dirty” formaldehyde.
How much formalin — no, formaldehyde, to be precise — do you think that the average human being could consume?
“But, you know, that is not just any toxic chemicals –,” objects Mr. Kim.
According to the U.S. Center of Disease Control,“Ingestion of as little as 30 mL (1 oz.) of a solution containing 37% formaldehyde has been reported to cause death in an adult. Ingestion may cause corrosive injury to the gastrointestinal mucosa, with nausea, vomiting, pain, bleeding, and perforation.”
“The Han River is very broad, Mr. Kim. Let’s try to be broad-minded about this. Hm?
Anyway, that’s an order. So… start pouring.”
How much formaldehyde can the Korean body consume?
For the U.S 8th Division, on February 9, 2000 (in the real world), perhaps 20 boxes of corpse preservatives, formaldehyde and methanol, without treatment in the “very broad” Han River. According to the deposition, as delineated by Korean newspaper The Dong-a Ilbo, the deputy head of the mortuary Albert Mcfarland abused and forced the private to dump the corpse preservative chemicals in the sink, where it would flow into the Han River, despite similar warnings of this made by the subordinate private to ones made by Mr. Kim. In spite of popular outrage, spearheaded by Green Korea United, Mcfarland won his appeal in 2005, winning a reprieve from six months in jail, and a U.S. Forces Korea spokeswoman confirmed that McFarland was still employed by the U.S. military in Seoul.
In February 2000, approximately 192 16-ounce bottles containing a mixture with formaldehyde were dumped into the Han River without any regard for the Korean people and their livelihoods. However, the widely acclaimed 2006 film The Host, or 괴물, directed by Bong Joon Ho, begins at the filmic reproduction of this dumping. While we may not be able to recognize or measure the lasting consequences of the dumping of these toxic corpse preservatives on the Korean people nor the Korean body, we can and must understand this as not an isolated event, but the consequences of US imperialism and hegemony. The Host’s creature — an incredibly large and fast amphibious mutated monster –serves as a monstrous manifestation of the dumping’s consequences.
Set 6 years later, the emergence of the creature from the Han River is a murderous one, resulting in several deaths and ultimately, the kidnapping of Hyunseo, the beloved child, grandchild and niece of the Park family. The film follows this charming working-class family on their harrowing journey to rescue the baby of their family from the creature. Working at one of the many snack shops that reside by the Han River, the owner and Park patriarch Park Hee Bong and his son Gang-du earn their keep, and they have raised Gang-du’s daughter Hyeonseo with the support of the archer aunt Park Nam-joo and the “unemployed university graduate” uncle Park Nam-il. From the state-sponsored premature funeral and to the family’s forced quarantine, the family grieve together, but after Hyunseo calls and proves her survival, the family embark on their tumultuous journey that ultimately ends in mostly tragedy.
I hope to analyze The Host, facilitated through the intellectual works of Antonio Gramsci and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, through the interactions between American dominance and Korean subjects (as named by Trouillot) in order to construct and illuminate the ways in hegemony and historization operate in south Korea, or the ROK. The two interactions with American dominance that I will inspect will be the Korean subhuman through the experimentation on Gang-du and the Korean news apparatus through the news dissemination of the death of an American soldier, following the death of the Park patriarch, Park Hee Bong. I will conclude by pivoting to the film’s interesting choice of the re-appropriation of the intellectual activist through the character Nam-il. I hope to ultimately construct The Host as an interruption to the silences constructed by US hegemony and also as a medium to raise the consciousness of the populace.
I hope to utilize and facilitate the cultural work of Gramsci, to map out hegemony as the concept and to contextualize the film’s material moment, and Trouillot, to utilize his concept of silence and subjectivity and to contextualize and name the silence that The Host is interrupting.
Gramsci was an Italian Marxist intellectual and organizer, who wrote the foundational Prison Notebooks while imprisoned during the counterrevolution of fascist Italy. His theorization and construction of hegemony continues to be of relevance in this contemporary moment and here, even serves to better flesh out the pretext for Trouillot’s work. Hegemony is the general worldview and direction “imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group” through the consent by the great masses, but this consent is “‘historically’ caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production.” Generally, hegemony helps to naturalize ideologies, values, and hierarchies held by the dominant group, which is usually the ruling class, but hegemony is not stable nor static. In Gramsci’s construction of hegemony, the two major “superstructural ‘levels’” that function of hegemony can be ‘fixed’ or challenged by the masses are “civil society,” which entails the “private,” the sociocultural relations that fall outside the bounds of political society, and “political society,” or “the State” itself, the political relations and participation within and through the mechanics of the State. Gramsci names the material conditions that set the scene for this upheaval of ruling hegemony as “crises of authority,” where the ruling class does not have “spontaneous” consent (“leading” hegemony) and therefore, must rely on coercion and force (“dominant” hegemony). The Host finds itself in the middle of this “crisis of authority” in the Korean peninsula. With the tumultuous conditions of US dominant hegemony since the liberation from colonial Japan, the US-forced occupation of the Korean peninsula and continued aggression against popular movements instigated the Korean War, and in postwar Korea, US dominant hegemony enabled and emboldened the fascist ROK leaders that massacred their own people, quelling dissent and enforcing discipline. In response to the Gwangju Massacre and Uprising of May 18, 1980, the Minjung Movement, or the people’s democratization movement of the 80s, responded to the repressive Chun Doo Hwan regime (and his following successor, Roe Tae Woo) through mass refusal of consent, mostly through student activism, which ultimately ended this legacy of military dictatorship. However, the US dominant hegemony was not ousted in this moment, and quelled by liberal ideology, US hegemony continues to operate within the ROK under a “crisis of authority.” However, this does not necessarily construct the most suitable conditions for cultural revolution as seen through this crude history of the ROK. I think that Trouillot helps us understand this continued crisis of authority through his construction of “silence.”
Trouillot was a Haitian historian and intellectual, who theorized the constructions of history and historiography through power in Silencing the Past and beyond. Trouillot’s understanding and theorization of historization and historiography allows for the ambiguity of the overlap of the processes and conditions of the productions of historical narratives: Trouillot writes, “History, as social process, involves peoples in three distinct capacities: 1) as agents, or occupants of structural positions; 2) as actors in constant interface with a context; and 3) as subjects, that is, as voices aware of their vocality,” (23). As subjects, the subjectivity leans into the overlap of the processes and conditions of the production of history, and in this overlap and also in spite of it, the “differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences others” is also discovered. In Trouillot’s words, these silences are defined and constructed within the process of historical production:
“Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance),” (26).
With the understanding that power is inextricable from historical production, the four crucial moments of fact creation, assembly, retrieval, and retrospective significance are varied and interrelated. In Trouillot’s examination of the Haitian Revolution, silence is solidified and constructed through all of these moments, and because of the density of power relegated to the West, the ontology of Western thought made this revolution a “historical impossibility.” For the case of south Korea, the archives and the narratives have been diametrically opposed between the US (and Korean collaborationist) hegemony and the Korean masses, but what persists is differentiated by the nature of the masses that derive and learn from these archives and narratives. The retrospective significance is differentiated by the different goals of the makings of the archives and the narratives: as the average American student, the Korean War was the forgotten war that didn’t even take a full class period, and yet, the US was still constructed as the hero. Silence enters the historical production for the Korean peninsula at so many different points, but probably most relevantly, the hegemonic silence of the forced US occupation of the ROK through the naturalization and normalization of US military occupation across the globe. The Host interrupts this silence through the creature wreaking havoc and unsettles the naturalness of the US occupation and dominant hegemony through the different ways American dominance is constructed.
Interactions with American Hegemony
With this intellectual, historical, and cultural contextualization through the facilitation by the work of Gramsci and Trouillot, I return to the text to analyze the interactions between American dominance and Korean subjects to construct and illuminate the ways in hegemony operates in the ROK: the two interactions with American dominance that I will inspect will be through the Korean subhuman and through Korean news apparatus.
The Subhuman Status under US Hegemony:“My words are words too! Why won’t you listen to me?”
To return to the ontology of Western thought, the pathologization and characterization of Gang-du constructs him as an idiot unworthy of respect or dignity, and to the doctors, both Korean and American, he is even further degraded to subhuman under US hegemony. He is not worthy of being saved nor advocated for: being physically restrained by the Korean doctors at the unknown facility, this forceful treatment only ends at the request of the American doctors. Further, the duplicitous and traitorous switch of the demeanor of the American doctors and their illegitimate experimentation model the ways in which dominant groups phrase and shape “interpretations that force reality within the scope of the beliefs” of ontology of subhumanness and the nonexistent virus — both as pathology that can be scapegoated for anything outside of the scope of belief (Trouillot 72). As opposed to the rest of the film, the scenes at this classified facility are incredibly sterile and white, which adds to the unnerving and unsettling effect of the scenes. As the American doctors question and pretend to sympathize with Gang-du, the shots are extremely tight and suffocating: the two American doctors’ faces take up most of the screen, asking why he didn’t contact the police or any kind of authority, and in the shots with Gang-du, his face is so close to the screen as if we are apart of this inspection. Despite Gang-du’s cries for understanding and for someone to finally listen, the white American doctor patronizingly grabs him by the face to construct him as subhuman and confirm a pathology that is revealed to not even be discovered yet in the attempts to force reality within the scope of their US hegemonic beliefs. He is not even registered as a threat to their secret — because of language or the limits of his humanity– so they even have their highly confidential conversation within listening distance from him: the white American doctor confides to the Korean translator one, “The late Sergeant Donald, first one classified as a victim of the virus, who was given an extensive autopsy, and no virus was found. … Also, no traces of the virus were found in any of the patients quarantined. Simply put, so far, there is no virus whatsoever.” This intense conversation was constructed through uniform close up shots of the two American doctors, and Gang-du’s grunt and understanding interrupts the scene through an abrupt pan over by hand — adding to the unexpected element of him being able to listen and understand. The construction of Gang-du as subhuman is necessary within US hegemony in order to continue to construct the US as a saving and helping superior force: his dehumanization is necessary to subjugate him and to perform experiments on him. Nevertheless, Gang-du’s continued persistence and his interruption of such conversations offers interesting and entertaining interruptions to the silence constructed by these league of doctors dedicated to the upholding of US hegemony.
The Korean News Apparatus: “We have tragic news” and the Differentiation of Grievability
The film’s utilization of news segments are central to the plot and the mapping of hegemony in the ROK through the news and other ideological apparatuses. While the news is being disseminated through the Korean network, with the recognizable editing and construction of the Korean newsroom, the actual root of knowledge and news dissemination is deferred to the American counterpart, whether it is another doctor at the US Army hospital or the American Center for Disease Control and Prevent, or CDC (over the more convenient Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency). I think US hegemony is best exemplified in the news segment scene after the Park patriarch Park Hee Bong is killed by the creature. In the fade to black as Gang-du grieves the loss of his father and gets put under a black mask, the Park patriarch’s death is marked as not worthy of grieving on the apparatus as the male newscaster cuts through the grieving non diegetic soundtrack, saying “We have tragic news,” regarding the death of Sergeant Donald White.
His life is lauded as brave for “revealing the virus” and the news apparatus is flooded with condolences: the news apparatus pauses for the death of this occupying American soldier while none of the Park siblings are able to wait nor grieve for their father. The realistic construction of the newsroom maps the way that US hegemony and US narrative is disseminated in ways not unlike this, and further, the newscasters become voice pieces for US hegemony, chastising the Korean government and announcing their uninvited intervention: “Meanwhile the US and WHO, citing the failure of the Korean government to secure the remaining two infected family members or to capture the creature in question, have announced a policy of direct intervention.” The introduction of “Agent Yellow,” edited to the tee of military sections on Korean news broadcasts, is presented as a privilege “chosen for use here in Korea,” but it does not cite prior testing or concern for Korean environmental livelihood: this echoes the initial dumping of chemicals, but now, in this moment, it is not only dangerous of biological life within a few meters of it, but it is also sanctioned. The incongruent transition of the shaky treatment of the Park patriarch to the crisp and uniform news apparatus in the film interrupts and unsettles the silences constructed by US hegemony in news dissemination, and the fictitious representation and iteration of the horrific Agent Yellow demonstrates and solidifies the robust relationship between US hegemony and militarism.
Concluding Thoughts and the Ambiguous Reproduction of Popular Korean Resistance
I will ultimately conclude my analysis by pivoting to the film’s interesting choice of the re-appropriation of the intellectual activist through the “unemployed university graduate” character Nam-il, who may not be as legible for the common non-Korean audience. Responding to his siblings poking fun at him being an unemployed graduate, Nam-il angrily laments “I sacrificed my youth for the democratization of our country and those fuckers won’t give me a job.” Without the prior context of the Minjung Movement and what this struggle visually looked like, Nam-il’s work with the soju molotov cocktails may just look like the most accessible weaponry, but Nam-il’s entire character is an echo and re-appropriation of the student intellectual activist of the Minjung Movement.
I find this choice of this film to be an extremely interesting one that echoes the early reproduction of the dumping of toxic chemicals, but of course, with a very different effect. The reproduction of the makings of soju molotov cocktails in the back of the tight taxi with a fairly new companion seems to revive a sort of nostalgia, remembrance, and historicization of this time of mass political participation and success. As Nam-il stalks and successfully follows the creature in the heroic and almost triumphant ending, his last one is a complete dud: his ultimate failure is one I didn’t quite understand. Maybe it was one last slapstick or just the setup for Nam-joo to redeem herself, but to think of the Nam-il’s character in the mapping of hegemony, his character feels like a self-aware caricature of this liberation struggle, a living representation of both the failure of the movement for a true people’s government and the futility of liberal ideology as the response to American (+ ROK collaborationist) hegemony. This dual-ended character, emboldened through the protest against the use of Agent Yellow, helps better construct The Host as an interruption to the silences constructed by US hegemony and also as a medium to raise the consciousness of the populace. Pessimistically, I believe that the material conditions of society and superstructural level of civil society necessitates a repetition that is not sustained enough at the moment for the emergence of a new mass culture. However, as subjects amidst and within the persistence of dominant and leading US hegemony, The Host offers a meaningful interruption of the silence of Korean historicization and US imperialist naturalization and further, an invitation to reflect and take up the call to raise our consciousness despite the material conditions.
Work Cited
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 1971.
“Medical Management Guidelines for Formaldehyde.” CDC/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. October 21, 2014.https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/ MMG/MMGDetails.aspxmmgid=216&toxid=39#:~:text=Ingestion%20of%20as%20little%20as,pain%2C%20bleeding%2C%20and%20perforation.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
“US Forces Discharge Toxic Chemicals.” 동아일보, Donga Ilbo, 13 July 2000, www.donga.com/en/article/all/20000713/191564/1.
Weaver , Teri, and Hae-rym Hwang. “Morgue Official in Korea Convicted of Dumping Chemicals Avoids Jail.” Stars and Stripes, 20 Jan. 2005, www.stripes.com/news/morgue-official-in-korea-convicted-of-dumping-chemicals-avoids-jail-1.28241.
