Cult (3)
38.
When I said I wanted to get my hands on the Saekdong script, my father was silent for a long moment before saying, “You really do ask for the strangest things. All right. I’ll do it.”
He hadn’t said he couldn’t do it, so I took that as a yes.
I was remarkably optimistic like that. “It should be possible, right? The Korean Publishing and Visual Culture Center keeps just about every book on film-related subjects. Even if Saekdong was never published, I’d think a copy would still survive there as archival material.”
“But leaking that material is another matter. …You don’t suppose they’d refuse, do you?”
That would throw my whole plan off course. “Come by the house tomorrow evening. We’ll have dinner. Click.” And just like that, he hung up.
“…?” So he was going to do it, right?
Or was he? Was that his way of saying no?
Was he asking me to come eat because he’d help me,
or because he wouldn’t help me? Either way, communicating with my father was the hardest thing in the world. Still, the next evening I went straight to my parents’ house without a single complaint. But the atmosphere there was noticeably different.
When I’d come to pick up the passbook, the place had felt austere and barren. Now the living room was packed with bonsai trees, and the air was thick with the smell of something sweet and rich. A kind-faced older woman in an apron greeted me at the door.
She was the housekeeper.
“You must be Professor Mok’s son~ Come right in.”
“Hello. Is my father here?”
“Of course he is. Oh my, just as Professor Mok said, you’re a fine-looking young man.”
…Awkward.
Not because the woman was making such a fuss, but because my father had apparently been talking about me somewhere.
I changed the subject. “Were you cooking? It smells amazing.”
“Why, yes. Professor Mok called suddenly yesterday and insisted I prepare a proper dinner table for tonight. I spent five hours cooking today, I tell you.”
…My father had called her about my meal?
What corner of the multiverse was I on, exactly?
“Ah, please take this. I bought it on the way here.” I held out the fruit basket to her.
I’d bought it because it felt wrong to arrive empty-handed.
Just then, my father came out of the inner room.
“….” He looked at the fruit basket over the rims of his glasses, clearly displeased. “What kind of fool brings a fruit basket to someone else’s house?”
He was grumbling because I’d gone to the trouble of being polite for no reason. …And yet this was the same man who’d sent a wreath, wasn’t it?
It was even fresh flowers, which were now rotting in plain view in the living room.
Still, I was used to his clumsy way of speaking by now. “Yes, I’ve been well too. Shall we eat?”
“Ahem. We shall.”
A little later, I found myself seated before a dining table so laden with food it looked ready to collapse.
There was all manner of meat from land, sea, and air, along with mushrooms that looked expensive at a glance and namul that must have taken a tremendous amount of effort. There had to be enough here for four more people.
“Eat.”
“Yes. Thank you for the meal. Do you eat like this every day?”
“The housekeeper said she’d make something nice because you were coming.”
That wasn’t quite what I’d heard earlier, but… well, let it go. In any case, the meal was superb.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten this much in one sitting.
When I finished my second bowl of rice, my father looked secretly pleased. Then, once we were sitting with tea in the living room, we gradually got to the point. “So, why do you want the Saekdong script? Are you shooting that noodle-video thing again?”
“Novel N Film? No, it’s not that. It’s for something I’m planning to run in Gyeongseong Geul.”
“Then it must be for the criticism section. Hmm. That’s rather important, isn’t it? But why would Gyeongseong Geul be dealing with film?”
That was a long explanation.
But since I’d come this far, I told my father everything that had happened: how I’d started Forest after being captivated by fiction in an independent magazine; how the literary world had reacted to the trend that began there; how I’d shifted Gyeongseong Geul’s theme to “cult” in order to secure Forest’s territory. Most of all, I told him that no one knew Forest was me.
After hearing it all, my father suddenly laughed. “Ho ho. So you’ve been doing all this behind Editor-in-Chief Im’s back?”
“Something like that. You probably guessed as much.”
“At any rate, not bad. Hmm. An independent magazine, is it? Independent magazines have their own lineage. Their own history, which means they’ve been around for a long time. They were certainly around when I was young. I’m sure there were some excellent novels among them.” My father narrowed his eyes, as if trying to call back a hazy past that no longer came clearly into view.
“Works that are hard to find now?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Things like that don’t even remain in museums. Unless some very peculiar collector has them, that is. In any case, that’s the limit of an independent magazine.”
The limits of a medium also determine the lifespan of a work.
That was how important the role of a medium was.
No matter how sophisticated an independent magazine might seem, there was a reason writers gathered in literary circles.
“In that sense, what you’re leaving behind through Forest would be a tremendous windfall from their perspective.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve heard independent magazine circulation has actually gone up a lot.”
“And you?”
“Pardon?”
“So? You must have some end goal in mind. What exactly do you stand to gain from all this?”
I laughed to myself.
That was so like my father.
He was the kind of person who could openly ask after another man’s glory and profit without making it awkward.
That was something only parents could do.
In fact, I’d even hidden this from Editor-in-Chief Im, yet for some reason it all came spilling out in front of my father. “There’s no guarantee my wish will come true, but….” I told him what I could call my plan.
My father listened to the very end, then said simply, “That’s impressive.”
It was like a single line said after savoring an especially delicious meal for a long time.
“There’s no guarantee the whole plan will come to fruition, though.”
“Hmm. Come with me.” My father led me to his study at the far end of the first floor.
It was the study in my father’s old mansion, with wooden wall panels and bookshelves lined on all four sides, crammed full of books and academic papers. At the very back stood a solid wood desk with only manuscript paper and pencils on it.
A yellow lamp was lit above it.
He must have been writing right up until I arrived. As always.
Rattle.
My father took something out of a drawer.
Thud.
He set a thick document envelope on the desk.
“Open it.”
With a feeling that was equal parts hope and disbelief, I opened the envelope.
Inside it was—
[Saekdong Script · Screenplay · Direction by Kim Giwoon]
The full screenplay of Saekdong. “No way—you went to the Korean Publishing and Visual Culture Center?”
There was no way this script had existed as an electronic file.
It must have been preserved somewhere in archival storage, still in booklet form. Getting access to archival materials was a complicated and finicky business.
Access could have been denied at that stage alone.
Even if my father had obtained the script directly through the authority of a senior committee member, it still meant he’d had to copy every single page by hand.
“Ahem.” My father cleared his throat, embarrassed. “The staff there had quite enough trouble. If only I’d known how to use the copier myself, honestly.”
So he had tried to make the copies himself.
Probably while floundering so badly it made the staff members wince.
Honestly, all of it was deeply moving to me.
“Thank you so much, Father.”
“…Ahem. Just take it and go.”
My father hurried out of the study. Rustle.
I clutched the envelope tight.
It was precious. Truly precious, in every sense.
And somehow, I was a little dazed by it all. He hadn’t waved his influence around in plain sight, but the power of an elder in this field was… more potent than I’d expected.
─┼
Now that I had all the material, there was no reason to put things off.
The moment I got home, I started setting everything up.
I opened the laptop on my desk and pulled up the Saekdong file Eun-sun senior had converted for me. Beside the laptop, I laid out the Saekdong script as well.
All right. Let’s begin.
Chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-!
As always, the woman in yangban attire dancing with a knife appeared.
I started reading the script.
S#1. A gisaeng house
Hwayeon, dressed in stage costume, performs a sword dance with a piercing gaze.
Her costume billows violently in time with the dance.
Whoosh— the blade slices through the air as if about to be hurled somewhere (C.U.).
With a sound effect like huuk-, the camera closed in on the knife. The screenplay moved forward in a plain, honest line.
The older the film, the less room there was for an actor’s interpretation or a director’s whim.
They filmed exactly as the script said, and only as much as the script said.
There were two reasons for that: first, film was expensive.
Second, they trusted the “writing” contained in the script more than the “feel” of the set.
In that sense, you could call Saekdong script-centered.
Meanwhile, the slaughter of the gisaeng Hwayeon begins.
That part, too, was described faithfully in the script.
The film flowed on and on until it reached the scene where Hwayeon committed her first murder.
S#31. The room where Yunman is staying.
After they sleep together, Hwayeon rises quietly.
She slips her stage costume over her white shroud.
Yunman, drunk, snores in his sleep.
(Camera shows the wall)
Hwayeon’s shadow on the white wall.
Her shadow stabs Yunman again and again.
Yunman: (As the shadow moves in a desperate struggle) Agh! Ah! After the murder ends.
The brightly colored hem of Hwayeon’s costume, dripping with blood.
“…Huh?”
I rewound the film and watched it again from the beginning.
Hwayeon’s shadow with the knife kills Yunman’s shadow.
With the awkward, violently popping sound effects peculiar to old films.
And then immediately after that, the blood dripping from the stage costume.
The first time I saw that scene, I’d said this to Eun-sun senior:
It’s charming. Even without color, it feels like color is emerging anyway.
And this line in the script: “the brightly colored hem of Hwayeon’s costume.”
In that instant, the black-and-white world in my head turned full color.
The language that had piled up as I read the script layer by layer.
Those words found their colors and began to buzz and swarm.
And in the middle of them, the single word shining most brilliantly of all:
Brightly colored.
Yes.
It was the most fantastical word one could possibly use in a black-and-white film script.
This was no good. I couldn’t hold back any longer.
As if drawn by something, I scrawled this into my notebook:
Saekdong makes the invisible visible.
And so I began to watch Saekdong, read Saekdong, and write about Saekdong.
[In the 1950s, when the war had only just ended and Korean society lay in ruins, even black-and-white film must have been hailed as a technological miracle. If art is always bound tightly to social phenomena, then the way people looked at film could not have been the same as it is now. We may wish for film technology to advance day by day, but in the 1950s that was, quite literally, asking for the moon. After the war, wasn’t it enough that the country was alive, culture was alive, and people were alive?]
I began with the general relationship between society and art.
This was important.
Because that was precisely where the value of cult was born.
[(…) Saekdong, one of the small first stirrings of Korean cult. What Director Kim Giwoon sought to realize through Saekdong was a kind of fantasy. Citizens who naturally felt grateful for black-and-white film. And yet they knew all too well that the world was not black and white, but color. In that sense, wasn’t color film itself a kind of unconscious fantasy? A vague dream that the “real” world could be captured on film exactly as it was.
Look at the word “brightly colored.” The fact that the director used this word was, in itself, a declaration that he meant to contain the fantasy of color within this film. He left on the page a fantasy that technology could not fully capture, then attempted to realize it “sensuously” on the screen(…)]
Chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-chang-chang!!!
Hwayeon danced again.
And I kept writing.
[(…) And if color film was the hidden fantasy of the citizens of the time, then Saekdong was already cult at the screenplay stage.]
…Good.
To be honest, I could have gone even deeper here.
I could have matched the color of cult cinema and made it more blatant, more viscous, more shamelessly soaked in its own fervor.
But if I did that, the editorial meeting would cut it to ribbons, so reluctantly I kept the line where it needed to be, like a tightrope walker holding my balance at a careful height.
Still, that was fine.
Keeping that line was interesting in its own way, too.
Scratch, scratch, scratch….
My language was being born on the page.
The words emerging from my notebook danced as wildly and brilliantly as Hwayeon’s sword dance.
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