1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 90: Green fish

Tagging Green Fish (1997) as a “gangster” flick is like calling Badlands a “spree killer” flick: it ignores the poetry. Beautiful little scenes are interspersed with violent ones. The little scenes carry the movie.

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Ilsan, which lies within commuting distance of Seoul, was once farmland. Now, high-rises stand next to the fields. Mak-dong’s family still lives in a hut. The patriarch has died. Mak-dong’s oldest brother is mentally disabled; another brother, a policeman, is a drunkard; another barely gets by, delivering eggs; their mother cleans houses; their sister does sex work.

Mak-dong has just completed his military service. Riding the train home, he confronts ruffians who are molesting a stylish young woman. The ruffians beat him. He loses his belongings; the woman retrieves them and tries to contact him. He tracks her to Seoul, where he lands himself in another fight, this time with the gangsters whose boss the young woman, Mi-ae, is mistress to. The boss, “Older Brother,” brings Mak-dong into the gang.

Mak-dong’s talent is for taking beatings. His first assignment is to bait a councilman into beating him up after karaoke. The councilman thus acquires a debt to “Older Brother.” Such is the labor to which Mak-dong is put.

I’ll support the family, Mak-dong tells his brothers. He works for their sake – and for Mi-ae’s.

And, paradoxically, he is motivated by genuine loyalty to his exploiter, “Older Brother.” Not just by need or fear.

You might believe such loyalty to arise from a misguided, idiosyncratic compulsion. But “Older Brother” is just as loyal to the older head of a rival gang. Although these men are adversaries, they uphold the same seniority code.

Mak-dong’s fellow junior gangsters are ineffectual louts. The parallel with Mak-dong’s biological family is unmissable: the gangsters also are called “brothers.” Mak-dong outperforms his fellows, as “Older Brother” recognizes. Yet he remains at the bottom of the pecking order. The gang is hardly a meritocracy. Only the boss’s intercession saves Mak-dong from suffering more abuse than he does.

And Mi-ae? Behave how she will – whether she obeys or throws tantrums – she’ll always be the “kept” woman. That’s her fixed place.

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As a genre specimen, Green Fish exhibits the common tropes: police corruption; assassinations; the “kept” woman’s daliance with a subordinate member of the gang.

But these are just pegs from which to suspend the individual scenes. And these, often, are glorious.

(1) Mak-dong’s early encounter with the ruffians has a surprising, satisfying logic of reversal and counter-reversal.

(2) Mi-ae lets go of a scarf. It flutters from her train window and lands on Mak-dong’s adoring face.

(3) Restaurant patrons discuss whether to order the dog soup or the chicken soup. They agree on the chicken and then join the cooks in chasing the condemned bird around the yard.

(4) The egg vendor is pulled over, bribes the police, is cheated, and chases the police in turn.

(A persistent theme is contempt for official authority. All of the police are corrupt or weak. Mak-dong’s policeman brother prefers to describe himself as a public servant; thrown out of a restaurant, he makes no appeal to his badge. Mak-dong, as a soldier, receives no respect from civilians. Is this because every man must take his turn in the armed forces? Or must every man take a turn because soldiering is disdained?)

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I was hooked from the opening credits, which are set against lovely old photographs of Mak-dong and his family in the countryside.

An early scene (below): Mak-dong the ex-soldier comes home. See how indifferently he walks past another fight. (Fights seem very common.) You can get a sense of the movie’s soapish/​noirish music. The mood is of a defeat.

Which, for many rural citizens, was what Korea’s new industrial prosperity was.

A dinner party

Yesterday was my first day in the new IUSB tutoring office. The office is on the fourth floor of the library. I sit right up against the stacks, in the “philosophy of social science” section (this isn’t as titillating as it sounds).

The chairs are padded better than in the old office, but they don’t recline as nicely.

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I & Karin and Martin & Mary went to a dinner party given by H., a Korean – or, rather, it was given by his gringa mother-in-law, who is my boss in the high school English Dept. The food was cooked by H.’s wife, K. (my boss’s daughter). It was the Babette’s Feast of Korean food.

I was able to reminisce with H., K., and K.’s mother about Korea.

Didn’t you just love the train?, said K.’s mother (my boss).

It was a very good train, I said, but I didn’t love riding it to and from Seoul three hours every day. (H. and K. agreed about this.)

I told them that I mostly rode the Bundang Line. Ah, the Bundang Line, H. nodded vigorously. I hated the Bundang Line, put in K.

I also mentioned the protests against the American beef, and I said that my favorite thing about Korea was its DVD rooms.

You remember so much about Korea, they said.

Then, at M&M’s and Karin’s and my request, they brought out their dog, a Japanese Spitz, a little breed that is nonetheless a giant compared to most dogs in Korea. The dog’s name was “White Bear.” He yapped incessantly. A short while later, H. and K. put him away.

We ate two flavors of Korean ice-cream: Green Tea and Honeydew Melon. The dinner party was a great success.