Hurry up and hide your humiliation: The Handmaiden on a
Nation’s Counterproductive Healing in the Afterquake
Hurry up and hide your humiliation: The Handmaiden on a
Nation’s Counterproductive Healing in the Afterquake
KIM TAERI (SOOK-HEE) AND KIM MINHEE (HIDEKO) BEHIND THE SCENES OF THE HANDMAIDEN.
LISTEN AS YOU READ
I.I.I.I.
POSTER OF THE HANDMAIDEN
Adapted from Sarah Waters’ 2002 historical crime novel The Fingersmith, The Handmaiden (Korean: 아가씨) is a story through which we’re meant to learn how to heal. Following Sook-hee and Hideko, a fiery pickpocket and a wealthy but reclusive Japanese woman respectively, the film meshes queerness with colonial Korea, a shift from the original’s setting of Victorian era Britain.
Just as The Fingersmith is split into three sections, The Handmaiden is also told in three parts. /// Part One is told from the perspective of Sook-hee, a maid hired to help a con man, “Count Fujiwara,” wrest a Japanese heiress’s (Hideko) inheritance. The plan goes as follows: Sook-hee, under the guise of Hideko’s maid, will subtly encourage Hideko to marry the count. Upon the count's successful seduction, he and Hideko will marry; then, with the help of Sook-hee, the count will register Hideko to an asylum in order to take her money. Then Sook-hee ends up falling in love...with Hideko. From there on, the film is filled with twists and turns, with the two subsequent parts uncovering more secrets as time progresses and the perspective shifts.
I ARGUE THAT THIS FILM, WITH ALL OF ITS SECRECY, IS A RECIPE FOR RECOVERY.
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APPROPRIATE
Take that* which has shot you and wring it by its neck. Stamp out the coals until your feet have gone hard and cracked. Slip the garb off your persecutor and let it settle on your body, on your form, on your person; let it become yours. This is not a brand but a recovery. A reclamation of power. Don’t let your fear of it soften you, but brandish it like a sword which has turned on its original master.
QUEER
Don’t ask questions about lines. There is no line to be drawn. Ignore your desire for clarity and obsoletion, because it will only lead you astray. This isn’t classification, but division, and this is what they** want. Take the salve of ambiguity and slather it all over until your form underneath is unrecognizable but closer to the truth.
BRIDGE
The gap: it lies in your hands. Mold it like clay, if clay was negative space. Erase the pencil marks; the severances that made your head ache with overwhelm. Let them join hands, marry. Flirt. Allow Romeo and Juliet a spring wedding.***
*What has made you ill in the first place. Japanese colonization, maybe.
**(Or maybe it’s simply inhumanity) We're all the same alike the same after all.
***Amateur and professional work is not always lauded the same. But they're no oil and water.
STILL OF SOOK-HEE AND HIDEKO.
As an internationally acclaimed film, The Handmaiden, in all its uniqueness, has attracted considerable academic and cinephilic attention. Scholars and critics—amateur and professional alike—from all around the globe have pitched in their two cents on the film’s content: whether it succeeded as an adaptation or exists on the brink of something less forward; how its depiction of colonial Korea perhaps differs from those of various other Korean cinematographers and auteurs; the weight of its contribution to the more lacking database of queer films. But while the social and academic conversation is certainly plentiful, it tends to fall on either side of a singular line.
II.
COLONIALISM ::::
More often than not, it is the academics and scholars who are drawn to notions of colonialism and Korean history when analyzing The Handmaiden. How is meaning created by isolating specific techniques? they tend to ask.
Park Heebon, Julie Sanders, and Chung Moonyoung:
The Handmaiden “actively decenters Western concerns” by “making new Korean meanings” due to both its environmental and perspective shift from Victorian era Britain /// The Handmaiden is a film that produces its intentions through its identity as a more ambiguous adaptation, arguing that its ambivalence makes it even more successful in creating meaning /// Further pulls aesthetic movement (neo-Victorianism) into an Asian context, using it to analyze contextual shift that occurs from book to film
The Handmaiden’s foregrounding of the hybrid culture of colonialism inherently subverts social systems (specifically the patriarchy and hierarchies) in colonial Korea, especially through its rejection of common assumptions regarding the colonial period /// Speaks to the ambivalence of both Korean and Japanese identities and their abilities to become “a matter of performance.” /// Colonial hybridity is a central means from which to derive meaning from the film /// Points out South Korea’s hesitancy towards cultural hybridity due to it often being viewed as equivalent to forced assimilation into Japanese culture /// Goes into the nature of the film as an adaptation and how perhaps it exists as a critique on pre-existing debates regarding the origins of Korea’s current modern culture
: Seungyeon Lee
:::: QUEERNESS
Queerness, however, is primarily a focal point of conversation amongst Western online spaces. Video essays (ex. The Lesbian Gaze by verilybitchie on YouTube) have been published regarding the lesbianism in the film, either lauding its success and happy ending or critiquing the presence of the male gaze. Think pieces can be found scattered across the web on people’s blogs or Letterboxd accounts, seemingly ignorant towards the colonial aspects of The Handmaiden. Seldom is queerness included as a central argument in scholarly debate, and it is even rarer to find it married to discussions surrounding colonialism.
BINARY
This binary within scholarly conversation is ironic, as I argue that The Handmaiden seeks to blur the boundaries that exist and are made to seem inherent to our lives. Who is good and who is bad, for example; who we can and shouldn’t love. How to deal with trauma. It’s never as clear cut as it seems, and bridging these two sides of academic discourse will help in providing a more robust picture of what the journey of healing might look like. Just as more social, casual conversation must merge with the academic, queerness and colonialism must be brought together in order for the looking glass to become clear again.
OR BI*? NARY!
*meaning "two parts," or in this case, only two parts. Not to be confused with the shortened word for "bisexual"
STILL OF SOOK-HEE AND HIDEKO.
III.
lenses through which I look
STILL FROM MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA (DIR. DZIGA VERTOV), IN WHICH THE CAMERA PERFORMS AS BOTH THE SPECTATOR AND PARTICIPANT. THIS IS A DEFIANT FILM WITH NO CHARACTERS, STORY, DIALOGUE, NOR SET.
film*
* ( film analysis )
SOCIO-HISTORICAL
What does South Korean cinema look like today? What has it looked like? Why has it looked like this? What is with its obsession with modernity? Its consistent portrayal of the evil Japanese and heroic Koreans? How does The Handmaiden contribute to this space, make it look a little different?
in other words
I'm looking into not only how colonialism has forever stained Korean history, but how its memory lingers today.
AESTHETIC
What is with all the symmetry in The Handmaiden? Why is Hideko's skin whiter in post-production? Why is all of the architecture Japanese and/or English? Why does Hideko wear gloves? How does the film demonstrate the narrator's shifting perspective through the camera's gaze? Who is holding the gaze? Who shares it? How are sentiments of secrecy--concealment--conveyed through aesthetic choices?
in other words
I want to explore how specific aesthetic choices create meaning about pivotal characters and their relationships with not only each other but the spaces in which they exist; explore how their character is informed by the mise-en-scene.
MORE IMPORTANTLY
QUEERING
While much of my research is based in film and historical analysis, I want to highlight the queering lens I hope to successfully apply to The Handmaiden. Though this may seem redundant given it is an explicitly sapphic film, I’ve found that, as mentioned above, queerness seems to have trouble proliferating the firm barriers academic debates have put up in order to make space for conversation regarding colonialism in Korea. As a result, viewers are prevented from reaching more nuanced understandings of Japan and Korea’s relationship. Through this queering lens, I wish to show that conversations on colonialism and queerness in relation to this film should not be mutually exclusive (or even approach mutual exclusivity) and in fact function better when these barriers are shut down.
Queering this film does not mean focusing on the queer rep but rather is a divergence into understanding things as existing outside the binary.
Scholars like JUDITH BUTLER will help shape my queer reading of The Handmaiden. A post-structuralist gender theorist and philosopher, Butler seeks to expose how gendered life is “foreclosed by certain habitual and violent presumptions” and emphasizes the idea of “opening up possibilities” instead of maintaining strict models of gender expression, even if such models might serve as arguably “positive” or “correct” examples for society. She asserts that idealizing images of gender inherently end up producing new forms of hierarchy and exclusion (Butler, viii). I plan to use her understanding of queerness as a dissolvent in order to rid the notion (dissolve the salt, if you will) that structure and definition* are necessary for people to comprehend the past, when in reality, healing comes faster when everything is made softer.
*Strictly Japan modernized Korea.
*Japan did not at all modernize Korea.
*Korea is modernized.
*There is a universal definition of what it means to be modernized.
*Women should be with men.
*Women should be submissive.
*There is only evil and good.
*Et al.
STILL OF SOOK-HEE, PEERING THROUGH THE WINDOW TO SPY ON THE COUNT'S ATTEMPTS AT SEDUCING HIDEKO.
THESIS
" The Handmaiden is a disruptive piece that calls for a reexamination of Korea’s aching past. While displaying acts of arguably gratuitous pleasure and appropriation, the film itself becomes a work of sensualism and mimicry through its visual execution and nature as an adaptation. A masterful piece of worldbuilding, this film ultimately suggests what a utopian, healed Korea might look like in the aftermath of its trauma. "
MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE MORE
This essay seeks to answer not only how appropriation is demonstrated as a method of rehabilitation throughout the film—how it relates to South Korea’s relationship with their national trauma—but also how applying a queer reading of the film affects one’s understanding of Korea’s relationship with modernization.
SUBCLAIMS .......
" The Handmaiden suggests that appropriation is a method—perhaps the method—of rehabilitation through its transformative power to liberate individuals from ownership. "
" While appropriation by means of
intimacy with modernism initially
appears purely as a suggestive remedy
to the Korean public, it additionally
becomes an active critique of other South
Korean creators when it is continuously
shoved in the face of the viewers. "
" Through queering The Handmaiden, notions of ambiguity and spectrums become embedded into the film, hence positing the origins of Korea’s modernity as blurry, neither black nor white. "
" The Handmaiden’s existence as an explicitly
queer film that isn’t exclusively about
queerness further posits homosexuality as
something inherent to any society—as
something not abnormal—reinforcing
impressions of spectrums and ambiguity. "
STILL OF SOOK-HEE & HIDEKO. THE COUNT'S VISAGE IS BLURRED. WHO CARES.
world(re)building
The Handmaiden is a proposal, waiting. Asking for the viewer to accept. This recipe it has offered suggests that should it be followed, Korea might look a little different. Might look a little more healed. It helps envision a world in which the more appropriate measures were taken in the aftermath of Korea's national trauma (Japanese occupation) and emphasizes that it isn't yet too late. Though perhaps this film speaks more explicitly towards Korea and its past, the same steps, it is implied, could just as well be applied to anyone who has experienced something so tragic. It is never the end but something that will pass—and if it isn't, it is something that you will walk by, run by, step over. Either way, The Handmaiden speaks to those who think they've hit a brick wall (who've been threatened by the basement*) while their eyes are closed because that is what the world is telling them. The world is telling them structures so they can navigate when all they have to do is open their eyes.
*“You’ll have a week of freedom, but always remember the basement.” Uncle Kouzuki to Hideko. He has threatened her by reiterating how he murdered her aunt with torture devices in his basement. Her aunt hung herself on a tree. These were, at large, empty words.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999.
“Film Camera.” PurePNG, purepng.com/photo/4766/objects-film-camera. Accessed 2 June 2024.
“Karen O & Danger Mouse - Nox Lumina.” YouTube, YouTube, 15 Mar. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6KW2OGB86I.
“Man with a Movie Camera (Motion Picture) Ukraine, U.S.S.R., Vufku, 1929.” Distributed by Macmillan Films, 1929.
Park, Heebon, et al. “Secondary Pleasures, Spatial Occupations and Postcolonial Departures: Park Chan-Wook’s Agassi/The Handmaiden and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith.” Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 11, no. Special Issue: Neo-Victorian Asia, 2019, pp. 177–205. 2, doi:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2628665.
Seo-kyung, Chung,, et al. The Handmaiden Widescreen ed., Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017.