(Pre-rendered model for the monster in The Host. Image taken from http://features.cgsociety.org)
THE LEVIATHAN:

Or the Matter, Form & Power of Bong Joon-ho's The Host
 
  It is being suggested by many reviewers of Bong Joon-ho's The Host that the film functions—
at least partially—as a self-aware political commentary. While these assertions are most often left unsubstantiated by reviewers, Bong Joon-ho has been far more precise when discussing the historical dramatization that serves as the opening scene of the film:
 
When I was reading the paper about this incident, I thought "Oh, that could be the starting point for my film!" It's also very genre-conventional, because it starts off in the morgue, and the officer is dumping chemicals into the river, so it can be a piece of political satire. (1)
  
While discussing the “factual” references for the film’s plot, Bong clearly states that he utilizes “political satire” as a set of “genre-conventions”—and he does so within a film that mixes the conventions and expectations of multiple popular cinematic genres in an original way. Despite this formal originality, it will be my assertion in this essay that the “political satire” that is consciously woven into The Host is employed ironically in the service of the politically repressive culture industry, with its dual mandates of mystification and entertainment—and, therefore, that the true political agenda of the film is a subconscious acquiescence to the power structures engrained in official economic and political models.
  Two aspects of the production are receiving the majority of the critical attention being paid to
the film—the “realism” and “high-quality” of the depiction of the monster-character on the one hand, and the comedic dysfunctionality of the depiction of the family-characters on the other. We must ask ourselves: are these truly the most noteworthy aspects of the film? If so, how are we to examine these aspects in terms of their political agenda(s)? Obviously, the technological spectacle of the ”monster” and the anti-conventional portrayal of the family are receiving the most mainstream media attention (that is to say, the reviews, promotional video, awards and interviews that play an integral role in the success of the economic venture of the film) because there is an established pseudo-linguistic relationship between mainstream filmmakers/production companies and media outlets—a code that serves to pre-categorize a film in marketing terms (that have been adopted as critical terms). A perfect example of this codification in a general sense is the American phenomenon of “best-picture” films that are produced explicitly to validate the positioning of marketing institutions (such as the Academy Awards, or major news outlet reviews) within the myth of cultural “expertise”. In the specific sense, the universalizing of film score types or the standardization of acting methods through cultural monopolization represent two of the handful of characteristics that are superficially and falsely debated in mainstream film criticism in order to artificially validate the existence of institutionalized critical “expertise”, and to ensure its symbiotic function in economic support of the cultural hegemony of major motion picture production and distribution. It is a slightly less visible extension of the standardization of occupational roles in major film production. The “bottom-line” reduction of all aspects of cinema culture is perhaps more overt right now in South Korea than in any other film market in the world:
 

In 1994, the Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology submitted a report to the president suggesting that the government promote media production as the national strategic industry by taking note of overall revenue (from theatre exhibition, television syndication, licensing, etc.) from the Hollywood blockbuster, Jurassic Park, which was worth the foreign sales of 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The comparison of a film to Hyundai cars – which at that time were considered the ‘pride of Korea’ – was apt enough to awaken the Korean public to the idea of culture as an industry. This revelation became a household topic for quite a long time, in accordance with the globalization-cum-information age discourse. Following the report, the Korean government established the Cultural Industry Bureau within the Ministry of Culture and Sports in 1994, and instituted the Motion Picture Promotion Law in 1995 in order to lure corporate and investment capital into the local film industry. In their efforts to create a cultural industry, Koreans emulated and appropriated the American media system with the mantra ‘Learning from Hollywood’. It was argued that Korea should promote large media companies as well as a more commercial media market. (2)

  
The “monster” that is brought to life in The Host is at once the central narrative fabrication of
the film as well as the most explicit representation of the artificiality of the filmmaking process. The manner in which this device is representative of a political agenda is highly complicated because of the complexity of the conscious and subconscious political tensions this device references, and ultimately because of the contradictory representational strategies employed in the film.
  The technique of creating terrifying or supernatural characters that symbolize political and
psychological anxieties is by no means a novel one—its use in fairy tales, allegory, painting, cartooning, and innumerable other forms is common knowledge. What locates the monster of The Host within a much more specialized tradition is its explicit artificiality—an artificiality which attempts to be an equal to the “natural” processes of traditional photography in its ability to represent life. This method of symbol making reflects an ill-advised resuscitation of enlightenment hubris—a belief in the possibility of a fundamental mechanization of life in the name of universal coherence and environmental mastery. The monster of The Host, which, in the narrative “genre-convention”, is a byproduct of Western arrogance and violence, is in the totality of the cinematic experience the direct semiological descendent of Hobbes’ Leviathan, in that it denotes an artificial biology as the structural model for the life of a singular social subject:
 
(3)
  
Like Hobbes’ Leviathan, the failure of The Host, and the monster that is the main spectacle in the film, as political illustration stems from three, cyclical causes: a technological hubris resulting in the reduction of the natural and human to mere mechanics; a technical production apparatus that is incapable of and uninterested in a multiplicity of subjects; a logocentric reduction of multiplicity in social subjectivity in favor of a generalized and mystified symbolism.

If we seek to understand the monster as a true Hobbesian “automaton” that monolithically
represents the political and psychological state of Korean audiences then we can effectively identify the political agenda of The Host with that of the masochistic mass culture described and predicted by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer:
 
Just as the occupants of city centers are uniformly summoned there for purposes of work and leisure, as producers and consumers, so the living cells crystallize into homogenous, well-organized complexes. The conspicuous unity of macrocosm and microcosm confronts human beings with a model of their culture: the false identity of universal and particular. All mass culture under monopoly is identical, and the contours of its skeleton, the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly, are beginning to stand out. Those in charge no longer take much trouble to conceal the structure, the power of which increases the more bluntly its existence is admitted. (4)
  
No matter how intensely a viewer is enraptured in the narrative drama, there is no adult, politically responsible audience member who is unaware of the artificiality of the monster, or of the expense of bringing this fabrication to the screen—it is literally animated in the computer rendered “contours of its skeleton”, and I can think of no more accurate a description of the form the monster takes than “the conceptual armature fabricated by monopoly”. This illusion of technological control over the appearance or image of the organic (multiple) subject is also descriptive of the relationship of the spectacle-film to the psychologically repressive fascist mass spectacles first analyzed by theorists such as Wilhelm Reich, Georg Lukåcs, Siegfried Kracauer, and later by Paul Virilio and Jeffrey T. Schnapp (to name only a few). It is obvious—yet contrary to the codification of institutionalized film commentary—that the monster exists at every moment within and beyond the frame as an explicit manifestation of the technological power of the filmmaker, production companies, and by synecdoche, the terrifying ability of the culture industry to manipulate the meaning of cinematic (quasi-mythical) images via economic monopoly. It is my belief that this type of analysis is appropriate for understanding the explicit intent behind many technical aspects of The Host, and possibly for the analysis of its fundamental political agenda as well.
  We can now begin to understand how, as the above Adorno and Horkheimer quote describes,
The Host blends many of the common conventions of various cinematic genres for ultimately political reasons, although these reasons—according to the contradictory logic of repression—are simultaneously subconscious and explicit. The repressive techniques relating to the realization of the monster require the construction of a framework of “genre-conventions”, or filmic structural and grammatical devices in order to achieve the culture industry’s dual mandate of entertainment and mystification.
  The microcosmic unit of the family is conflated symbolically with the psychological state of
the South Korean audience—and by virtue of their powerlessness and comic ineptitude, they become representative of self-doubt and self-limitations in the image of all audiences that the screen projects. Again, Bong Joon-ho is more direct than any critic in stating his intentions:
 
I hope many people watch it! Even though it will have subtitles, it's a movie about a family, the weak "losers" or "lower-class" characters, so I hope audiences can sympathize with and relate to these characters. And I hope that they enjoy it! (5)
  
We will ostensibly “enjoy” our identification of ourselves as “weak” and “lower-class” masochistically as we laugh at the anti-heroic slapstick of the family in The Host. Despite the superficial reversal of narrative conventions, we can still feel ourselves being guided by the codes of score and fetishized facial reactions into a sympathy with the phallic unity of microcosm and macrocosm. We take refuge from the vaginal horror of the monster in the narrative reversal of character expectations, as a scene of mass mourning becomes a three-stooges routine, as the American military hero dies, as the son’s incompetence leads to his own father’s sacrifice, as the drunk brother finally proves his dexterity only to slip in the end, as the hesitant sister satisfyingly releases her flaming arrow, as the invalid father shakes off a lobotomy to stab a metal rod deep into the monster’s all devouring orifice, as the little girl is replaced in the familial structure by a little boy—a confused and ecstatic shuffling of surface elements gives way to an overwhelming sense of the inevitability of violence—and specifically—the inescapability of a centralized, masculinized violence perpetrated against the feminized chaos of the organic, the democratic, and the resistant. This stimulating and meaningless shifting of mythological readings in the characters and symbols in the overlapping climaxes of the film represents the final failure of the conscious political agenda of the film, in much the same way that Carl Schmitt characterized the meaning of the Leviathan as a political symbol:
  No illustration of or quotation about a theory of state has engendered so provocative an image as the leviathan; it has become more like a mythical symbol fraught with inscrutable meaning. (6)  
When true horror becomes reduced to “thrill” or sadistic comedy, the potentially radical expressions of discontent and criticism of power structures is exchanged for the masochistic pleasure of the cinematic audience enjoying and accepting its own powerlessness. What is most disappointing is that while The Host superficially addresses the psychological ramifications of genuinely interesting and problematic subjects—namely environmental devastation, the social aftermath of Korean democratization, and American military imperialism—the film ultimately exploits the social tension surrounding these issues to reinforce a repressive positions of social spectatorship and incomprehensibility. The Host—with its structural, technical and symbolic methods generating a nihilistic, stereotypical, misogynist, and repressive model of social subjectivity—is the ironic spectacle of pretending to corporealize the terror of political powerlessness and social fragmentation. Even if it were genuine, this is a fundamentally backwards approach in terms of conveying an actual political agenda, for as Michel Foucault has stated:
  Rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high, we should be trying to discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts, and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects, or as the subject. To grasp the material agency of subjugation insofar as it constitutes subjects would, if you like, be to do the precisely the opposite of what Hobbes was trying to do in Leviathan. (7)  
Despite the excitement manufactured in the institutionalized circuits of film marketing and reviews around “genre-bending” and “self-reflexive” genre films, it is an unavoidable fact that repressive political agendas in film cannot be avoided or countered in narrative reformulations alone—reassessments in technical, symbolic and structural methodologies are essential. When stripped of its masochistic pleasures, The Host reveals yet another Artificial Man projected onto the cinema audience as the terrific, chaotic body. I am reminded of Susan Buck-Morss’ juxtaposition of two images from 1933 in her book Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West which she qualifies as "symbols of the masses displayed as spectacles for the masses", representing “two complementary economies of desire": Boris Iofan's design for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow (a classicized skyscraper topped by a giant statue of Lenin) and a poster for the movie King Kong showing the giant ape perched on top of the Empire State Building. (8)
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NOTES:
 
(1) Weinberg, Scott, "TIFF Interview: The Host Director Bong Joon-ho.” Cinematical. Sep 13th, 2006. <http://www.cinematical.com/2006/09/13/tiff-interview-the-host-director-bong-joon-ho>
 
   
(2) Shim, Doobo. “Hybridity and the rise of Korean popular culture in Asia.” Media Culture Society. 2006. National University of Singapore. <http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/28/1/25>.
 
   
(3) Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a COMMON-WEALTH ecclesiasticall and civill. London: University Press, 1651. P. xviii.
 
   
(4) Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. P. 94-95.
 
   
(5) Weinberg, Scott, "TIFF Interview: The Host Director Bong Joon-ho.”
   
(6) Schmitt, Carl. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Carl Schmitt, George Schwab, Erna Hilfstein. p. 5.
 
   
(7) Foucault, Michel. “14 January 1976.” Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador. 2003. P. 28.
 
   
(8) Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. P. 176.