Introducing The Host: Shahim Sheikh
The third screening as part of ‘Screening Vulnerability’ was of Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 film, ‘The Host’, under the category of ‘Environment’. In it, an American military pathologist’s callous attitude towards the Han River in Seoul causes a monster to emerge from it as a result of an ungodly amount of formaldehyde being dumped into it. A working class family gets involved in the ensuing government cover-up, becoming a primary target of it while also searching for their youngest member who was taken away by the beast in question.
Most iconic monsters in film history have been a manifestation of the natural world’s resistance against civilisation’s disobedience towards the laws of nature. Following in that tradition, ‘The Host’ shows the indifference of neoliberal governments towards environmental conservation, amplifying the vulnerability of the natural world to human encroachment. As if such practices were not catastrophic to begin with, the sweeping, and often unscientific methods that States employ in dealing with calamities of their making further demonstrate the extent of the threat we humans are to the natural world. As a film made with a great sense of humour and a prescient approach to public vulnerability to misinformation and propaganda in states of emergency, ‘The Host’ was a natural choice for a film whose concerns begin at an environmental level and then spread across multiple layers of modern society. The virtuosic style of Bong, combined with the comical spirit of the film made it the most accessible of all films screened in the series, ‘Screening Vulnerability’, as well as being the one arguably the most loaded with ideas, stretching from environmental vulnerability to neocolonial anxieties.
Knowledge and Vulnerability in The Host
Sourav Jatua
The monster in Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host (2006) emerges as a result of an American scientist polluting the Han River. Consequently, the film depicts the creation of false information of a pandemic that is legitimised and supplied to South Korea by the American authorities for public dissemination. The South Korean bureaucracy follows this duly and turns onto the Park family who attempt to seek out the monster and rescue their daughter. Their struggle to search for their daughter is pitted against a government that is intent on suppressing information regarding the same to its own citizens. In the film, an American official’s advice to Park Gang-Doo to approach the police, media, or the army to report his plight becomes a cruel joke in this light. Park Gang-Doo is kept in isolation by bureaucratic machinery because he is identified as the only Korean to come in direct contact with the monster; by association, a bounty is placed on his family as well. The attitude of the Park family to the monster is sharply contrasted with that of the South Korean government. While it is true that the Parks’ have a personal stake in their hunt for the monster, the government at large simply waits for the American authorities to instruct them on how to eradicate it. The film thus critiques how the environmental vulnerability of a country is the result of a more powerful country’s wrongdoing. Furthermore, dictating false information and delaying swift action result in both natural and personal loss..
The Host: Of Questions on Genre and Vulnerability
Prateeti Chowdhury
Watching The Host piqued my interest in the monster movie genre, and the South Korean media’s fascination with it. Over the years, the outbreak of multiple epidemics, and recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, have been the inspiration to release several monster genre films/series such as The Flu (2013), Train to Busan (2016), Kingdom (2019-20), All Of Us Are Dead (2022), to name a few. Why is the representation of vulnerabilities, especially human vulnerability at the face of an unknown virus (often the cause behind zombie outbreaks), or an unknown monster so telling that there are multiple narratives of the same trope? One way in which the Korean monster or zombie genres work differently, can be the use of melodrama as a narrative strategy. Yin Yuan reads K-dramas to suggest that melodrama is not just a mode of storytelling, but also a means by which the economically precarious people make meaning of their everyday conditions of existence. However, The Host critiques this melodramatic narration by rendering comical the Park family’s excessive display of emotions during the mass funeral services.
The premise of an environmental anomaly is used to not just foreground the vulnerabilities of the protagonist and his family; it also consistently prods at the class distinctions in the Korean societal apparatuses that push the protagonists beyond their economically precarious status to being redundant subjects of the state. In conclusion, The Host shows vulnerabilities of precarious subjects to then ask questions – not just of the society, but also of the generic representations that define the visual culture/ethos of the nation.
Work Cited
Yuan, Yin. “The Melodramatic Mundane in South Korean Television.” Situations: Cultural Studies in the Asian Context, vol. 16, no. 1, 2023, pp.29-52.
The Ordinary Man’s Plight in Bong Joon-ho’s The Host
Salma Saheer
Bong Joon-ho’s The Host revolves around the Park family’s attempts to rescue their child, Hyun-seo, who has been captured by a monster that emerges from the Han River. Couched in humour and punctuated by moments of suspense, the movie effectively captures the plight that citizens face as inept government strategies fail to contain an environmental catastrophe. By withholding information and taking haphazard measures to deal with the situation, the structures that must support the ordinary man ends up amplifying their existing vulnerabilities. The Park family becomes a case in point. The process of mitigating vulnerability must begin with an acknowledgement of it. The Parks, who belong to the lower rungs of the society, are a dispensable entity in the government’s eyes. Therefore, Park Gang-Doo’s claim that his daughter is alive is brushed off as mere delusion. The irony that the lies about the non-existent virus spread by the government authorities and the US doctors are privileged over Park Gang-Doo’s truth, provokes one to think about whose voices have the power to be heard. The authorities also accentuate the vulnerability of the Park family by marking them off as potential carriers of the virus. The fear of the virus thereby transmutes into a fear of the individual and the family itself. This makes Park Gang-Doo’s body dispensable – his corporeal borders are breached in search of a virus that does not exist. Thus, in the face of a lack of structural support, an ordinary family like the Parks are driven to take matters into their own hands and Park Gang-Doo finally becomes the one to kill the monster.
The Anthropocentric Vulnerability Narrative in The Host
Amruta Gaiki
The Korean film The Host belongs to themonster film genre. In the film, environmental pollution (dumping of Formaldehyde in the Han River) causes a fish to mutate. This mutated creature then emerges and attacks humans. Stemming from an anxiety about the environment, it is a visual, tangible representation of what the environment could do to us if we are not careful. The creature first appears in its “final form” a few years after the dumping of the formaldehyde. Human impact on the environment builds up and thus, the monster is representative of the cumulative nature of our environmental vulnerability. Even though we might not witness the consequences , our future generations most definitely will. Since the danger the creature posits remains localized to the banks of the Han River, the viewers come to the realization that it could happen anywhere in the world.
The movie is also very clearly anthropocentric. At one point, a character says, “Old people have always said… that an animal which kills a human… should be torn limb from limb. That it’s a human’s duty to do so.” On the other hand, the creature does not have a voice. The movie does not reveal much about the creature. What does the creature see when it looks at the humans? Food? The movie mentions the concept of “seo-ri” (the right of the hungry). What about the rights of the hungry creature?
To conclude, we hardly see the creature’s narrative in the movie. It focuses primarily on human vulnerability, and we see our environmental vulnerability revealing different kinds of vulnerabilities.
Edited by: Sreelakshmy M