MR. VENGEANCE
At risk of annoying Junichi by doing a popular culture read on the Virginia Tech massacre, I was stunned to see the above image, part of a set of pictures mailed to NBC News by Seung Cho on Monday morning. What is striking about this image is that it's a reference (one can only assume) to the South Korean cult film, Oldboy (the most celebrated scene being one where the protagonist takes on 40 thugs armed with only a hammer).
As anyone who has seen Oldboy can tell you - the entire movie is about vengeance and not just any kind of revenge fantasy, but long, intricate, pre-meditated, plotted-out vengeance. I don't think you need me to spell out why such a film would loom largely in the imagination of someone like Cho who - it is now relatively clear - was methodical about planning the massacre.
At the risk of being solipsistic - as an Asian American man opining on the actions of someone who happens also to be a Korean American man[1] - it seems worth noting that Cho would have turned to Korean pop culture - partially - to help build the kind of personal/social script of violence that he felt was necessary to resolve whatever issues existed in that dark mind. Undoubtedly, there will be some misguided (if not outright idiotic) media analysis that's going to "blame" Chan-wook Park's film the same way Marilyn Manson was cited for Columbine and certainly, that's not my point here.
Though I've been resistant to overplaying race/ethnicity in trying to analyze Cho's state of mind, I may have been protesting too much since if you're talking about alienation, marginalization, feelings of invisibility, etc. (all of which Cho rages against in his video), it's rather impossible to deny that these are all feelings that people of color - and Asian Americans in particular - are well familiar with. The difference is that 99.99999% of us have more constructive coping mechanisms to deal with those feelings (like, er, playing violent video games and listening to hip-hop?) than plotting the indiscriminate murder of others. That said, a racial analysis seems to have its place here even if I'm still hesitant with constructing an entire pathology out of it.
Likewise, I'm not at all suggesting Asian pop culture such as Oldboy or all of John Woo's gun-fu films planted ideas in Cho's head. It's far more likely that he simply found resonance in the characters and narratives of those films with his own fantasies of mastering violence and inflicting vengeance upon others.
[1] In reference to the previous post about Cho as "alien" vs. "American", the manifesto video he put out should, without a shred of doubt, confirm that Cho was thoroughly American on some very deep-seated levels. Sorry folks - we'll have to claim and his psychosis as partially ours. Can't pin this one on South Korea (even if they did apologize for him...something only an Asian society would do, you know?).
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