Hurry up and hide your humiliation: The Handmaiden on a Nation’s Healing in the Afterquake
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Introduction
The Handmaiden (Korean: 아가씨. Dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016) is a story of romance and trauma. The film tells of a fiery orphaned pickpocket named Sook-hee who is hired by a Korean con man to help swindle a Japanese woman out of her inheritance. Based on Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith, which is set in Victorian era Britain, The Handmaiden instead plays out during Japan’s occupation of Korea while maintaining the explicitly queer tropes present in the original. It is an unusual film due to its domestic and global success as a South Korean erotic lesbian psychological thriller, and as such, has attracted a flurry of academic discourse from both Korean and Western scholars. The nature of its existence to the West as a queer masterpiece versus its appearance to a more culturally Korean audience as a commentary on colonization is a site of tension not often acknowledged – a gap unlikely bridged. It is in preventing this split – this binary – that one will more fully understand The Handmaiden.
Working thesis
The Handmaiden is a disruptive (piece that awakens others) piece that calls for a reexamination of Korea’s national trauma. Through displaying acts of arguably gratuitous pleasure and appropriation, the film itself becomes a work of sensualism and mimicry (reword) through its visual execution (and nature as an adaptation). A masterful piece of worldbuilding, the film ultimately offers a suggestion as to what a utopian, healed Korea might look like in the aftermath of its laceration (trauma).
How is appropriation demonstrated as a method of rehabilitation throughout the film? How does this relate to South Korea’s relationship with their national trauma?
Q
How does applying a queer reading of the film affect one’s understanding of Korea’s relationship with modernization? How does viewing key concepts from the film as belonging to a spectrum create meaning?
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As my argument lies heavily in examining the schema of a nation in the aftermath of trauma through a film, I am planning on primarily incorporating film/visual, historical, and cultural analysis. My use of film analysis is relatively self-explanatory – The Handmaiden is a film, so naturally I will be studying how its contents and composition creates meaning; and historical analysis will help expand my articulation of Korea’s trauma in relation to the film while cultural analysis will provide context for how she continues to deal with her past.
Though there is plentiful scholarly discussion surrounding this film, I’ve found that most of it splits into two categories: a) a focus purely on The Handmaiden as an erotic queer film, and b) a focus on the colonial setting of The Handmaiden with gestures to its queerness but hesitancy towards including it as part of a focal argument – the furthest it goes is typically a feminist gaze. In my analysis, I hope to help bridge the gap between these two groups as, in favoring one over the other, meaning is not fully captured and is lost.
&Methods
interpretation...
After coaxing out The Handmaiden’s message, one might find a vision of a utopian Korea. This is because this film is a recipe for recovery. There are two parts to this convalescence: 1) appropriation, and 2) resisting the binary.
Appropriation is a way to heal from national trauma. In taking something that has hurt you and making it your own, you have gained autonomy. I argue that The Handmaiden compares this concept with Korea’s relationship with modernism, as South Korean cinema has an obsession with it yet ignores the guts of its past. There is friction around attributing it to Japanese occupation. There is concealment, like foundation on a bruise. In The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook is saying here, look at this. Look at how appropriation can be done in different ways. While being a film that is itself intimate with modernism, he also manifests this idea into other forms in order to emphasize this concept: through eroticism (sexual pleasure), visual pleasure, and queerness, all forms of pleasure/love/intimacy.
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In the film’s queerness, Park encourages the audience to apply a queer reading to the film. In doing so, one will see that not everything is so black-and-white, but that it all exists on a spectrum. Oftentimes, Korean cinema will cling onto polarizing images of Korea vs. Japan – The Handmaiden shies away from this notion and introduces the salve of ambiguity. In the same way, modernism isn’t so black-and-white; it wasn’t fully Japan that modernized Korea.
(( Scholarly conversation surrounding The Handmaiden itself often appears as a binary wherein arguments fall in one sphere or the other. Bridging this gap, too, is how one will reach the remedy that this film is offering. ))
Through appropriation and leaning away from binaries, Park encourages – challenges – not only his contemporaries in Korean cinema, but the nation as a whole to rethink its history, worldbuilding through The Handmaiden his own vision of what a healed Korea might look like.
Sources
Sources
Seo-kyung, Chung,, et al. The Handmaiden Widescreen ed., Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2017.
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