Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

206 Marshall DeutelbaumRecognizing the film’s departure from the focus of New Korean Cinema,critics interpreted the discontinuities Hong left in the film’s depiction ofthe characters’ mundane reality as evidence of the social malaise thatmany people thought was the hallmark of the post-political Korea. As MichaelRobinson explains this social shift:While the struggles of the 1980s led to the beginning of democratization andtrue civilian governance, cultural life thereafter seemed vacuous and purposelessto many who had devoted their life’s work to opposing authoritarianrule. Some artists who expressed their sense of detachment in the newera of apolitical cultural life were roundly criticized as somehow giving up.Yet, such expressions captured what many felt was the existential crisis thathad beset Korean culture in the 1990s. (Robinson 2005, pp. 24–5)From this perspective, critics interpreted The Day a Pig Fell Into a Wellsymptomatically, as a fragmented, postmodernist work that presented thecorrupting effect of modernization on Korea. As Eungjum Min, JinsookJoo, and Han Ju Kwak explain:The Day a Pig Fell into a Well does not address directly the issue of modernization.Nevertheless, insofar as the social reality of modern Korea is consideredthe outcome of modernization, the film consistently shows how ourlives in the postindustrial society have become fragile, dislocated, and confused.Viewed in the context of modernization, the film is a grim portraitof (post)modernity, filled with symptoms of disruption. (Min, Joo, and Kwak2003, p. 147)Consequently, they argue,The film attempts not to reproduce realist effects, but to urge the viewer toconfront the fragments of reality per se. It deconstructs “our” traditionalconcept of reality by showing trivial details, which ceaselessly collide, intersect,and intermingle with one another in a closed structure. What it constructs,therefore, is not a tapestry of unitary reality, but the absence of suchreality. (2003, p. 143)Furthermore, they contend that in place of traditional narrative unity, clearpsychological causality, and closure,The film uses various formal strategies to express disruption and disillusionment...