The Handmaiden: First-impression review and meta
The extended version of The Handmaiden was amazing. It wasn’t always easy to watch, particularly when the story moved to Hideko’s viewpoint, but it was a beautifully crafted story with a happy ending and I loved it. Here are thoughts that I had on first viewing about what heteronormative patriarchy does to female sexuality, and what the character of Count Fujiwara said to me about marginalization and misogyny.
Both sections have heavy spoilers for The Handmaiden with warnings for content including trauma, suicide, and sexual violence. Most of it is about Fujiwara; discussing Sook-Hee and Hideko's intertwined story required much more thought and work, and will be in a separate post.
Brief thoughts on the reclaiming of female sexuality in Hideko's story
Sook-Hee and Hideko’s first night together was both heartrendingly moving and hilariously funny-funny, in large part, because they had to rely on the paper figure (in so many ways) of Count Fujiwara to initiate sex at all. Of course, the humor works only because of a darker underlying truth; that women are so socialized to see themselves as objects of pleasure and not agents in their own pleasure, that these women had to invoke the male gaze and male pleasure in order to fulfill their own desire for each other.
Having her sexuality subsumed by the male gaze was especially and brutally true for Hideko, of course, who was groomed and abused from childhood to perform the fantasy of men against her will. As Fujiwara points out jocularly to Kouzuki, but with deadly seriousness, she was so well trained she had no desire of her own left. Isn’t her treatment just a grotesquely amplified version of how women are “trained” under patriarchy, though?
This is one reason Hideko’s masturbating before Fujiwara on their “first night” shows how she has changed by claiming her own feelings and desire with Sook-Hee. Rather than perform Fujiwara’s fantasy for him as she had before, she invites him to be a spectator of her own sexual pleasure instead. Hideko’s flashing the knife at Fujiwara before she gets into bed has several layers of meaning. Korean audiences would recognize the symbolism immediately, because highborn Korean women traditionally carried silver-decorated knives to kill themselves with in the event of threatened rape. Much like the act of refusing sex with him, the knife was symbolic of her fidelity to Sook-Hee-though that symbolism would have been lost on Fujiwara and likely on Hideko herself, who was not a Korean woman. She and Fujiwara would have intended and received it as a threat to him if he tried anything. And, of course, it was a continuation of the ruse on Fujiwara, that Sook-Hee was still their unknowing mark.
There’s another level of the masturbation scene that really gets to me: In addition to being a power move on Hideko’s part, it was also an act of intimacy toward him. It was revealing in a way the sex shows she was forced to perform for him and the other guests never could be, because as abusive as those performances were she also revealed nothing of herself in them. As Fujiwara himself commented, she was trained to the point of being dead inside. By refusing to do his desire but instead showing him her own, she had revealed herself more fully to him than she ever had before-as a person with her own will and her own pleasure that had nothing to do with him. If he had realized what it meant and taken the gesture as offered, if he had accepted her as an equal human being and not an object for possession, then his story could have ended very differently.
On that note, I’ll discuss the tragedy of “Count Fujiwara” in the next section.
The Tragedy of Count Fujiwara
The tragedy of “Count Fujiwara,” of course, begins with the fact that both words are lies. His original Korean name was Goh Pandol, which was on his passport that Hideko was using. Goh is a common surname on Jeju Island, and Pandol means a wide, flat rock. It’s not a very dignified name at all, and suits his low birth. Director Park Chan-Wook has said (Korean link) that the name was specifically meant to be comical and not very thought-out, and that Pandol was not a very cherished son to his parents--no wonder he became a con man, Park joked.
The name is only the start of the indignity of Pandol/Fujiwara's background. I don’t know if I can even convey to non-Koreans the crushing lowliness of it. His father was a servant, which meant pretty much functionally a slave or at best a destitute manual laborer. His mother was a shaman, which carried some spiritual power but also meant she was despised as spiritually unclean and sexually loose living outside the bounds of patriarchy.
And his parents weren’t just lowlives, they were lowlives from Jeju Island. To the extent people outside of Korea know about the place they think of it as a tourist destination, but traditionally it meant poor farmland, hopeless poverty, and a distinctive culture that was systematically marginalized and destroyed. Jeju Islanders were crushed underfoot by the mainlanders, and the Japanese happily carried on the exploitation; due to the geographical proximity, Jeju Islanders were taken away en masse to be forced laborers in Japan and elsewhere during the Pacific War. The brutality didn’t end with liberation from Japanese occupation, either. It was the Korean military and right-wing militias sanctioned by them who slaughtered and tortured civilian islanders from 1947 (two years after liberation) to 1954 (after the Korean War) while the U.S. military government looked the other way.
That’s the kind of place Jeju Island occupied in Korean history. That’s the context-endless poverty, marginalization, exploitation, and violence. Fujiwara reinvented himself from the ground up, wiping away that boy who was dirt or turd, the lowest of the low.
(It’s worth noting that the gold mine Kouzuki got in exchange for selling out his country was in Hamkyung Province, which is on the opposite end as Jeju Island-in the far north to the Island’s far south. Hamkyung is another poor and heavily exploited area, and has suffered badly under North Korean rule as well. The cruelty of Japanese occupation reached across the whole of Korea, in other words, and continues in the hands of the Korean elite both North and South.)
I hope this background places Kouzuki’s torture of Fujiwara in perspective as well. Here was a Korean collaborator of Japanese rule who had made his fortune off the explotation of his countrymen, mutilating and torturing a man from one of the worst-affected areas. Much like Kouzuki’s favored transport of riding on a traditional Korean A-frame carried on a Korean servant’s back, the torture scene was a microcosm of that oppression.
The genius of The Handmaiden, of course, and what makes Park an incisive commentator instead of a dull macho nationalist, is that Fujiwara is a villain. The movie resists the extremely easy exit of making Fujiwara the noble sufferer and Kouzuki his diabolic tormentor. Nope, actually, they are ideological twins. Fujiwara is a misogynist and rapist who approached Hideko with the promise of freedom only to try and lock her in another cage, who used Sook-Hee’s trust to not only deprive her of her freedom but kill her in captivity. His attempted violations might not be as outlandish as Kouzuki’s, but are just as horrific.
Fujiwara, then, is the marginalized man who, in the face of exploitation and brutalization, chooses to exploit and brutalize women in turn for his own gain. You see him in just about any community that is targeted by discrimination.
Fujiwara’s real tragedy is that he was actually halfway there to true liberation. When he told Hideko he was no Japanese nobleman but the son of a Jeju Island servant, that was a mirror image of Hideko masturbating in front of him on their marriage night. They both revealed their most vulnerable selves, their deepest secrets to each other and that could have been the basis of a powerful alliance. They could have set Sook-Hee free and plotted Kouzuki’s downfall together. He could have had Hideko’s friendship and respect, something he would have valued if he had seen her as a person in her own right.
Instead Fujiwara chose to become Kouzuki. Rather than challenge the oppressive structures of racism and sexism he wanted to climb it to the top. He didn’t hate the fact that Koreans were discriminated against; he hated the fact that he was Korean, one despised even by other Koreans. He didn’t hate the fact that Hideko was Kouzuki’s prisoner; he wanted to make her his own prisoner.
Still, he was tantalizingly close to being an actual liberator. He was the one who gave Hideko the opium as the ultimate out should Kouzuki get his hands on her. The fact that she ended up using it against Fujiwara instead, of course, showed how he had taken Kouzuki’s place as her would-be abuser.
It’s telling that Fujiwara had prepared the same exit for himself as he had for Hideko, and it’s also telling how limited his imagination was, as was hers: For both of them the plan of last resort was self-destruction. The structures of brutality were so ironbound, so absolute, that it was easier to destroy themselves than the system. Sook-Hee was the only one who had the imagination to smash the structure itself in destroying the books that were the instruments of Hideko’s abuse, Sook-Hee who was the life her mother had stolen from the iron grip of death, who was the victory that great thief had smiled over.
It’s fitting that Fujiwara killed Kouzuki, then, and doubly fitting that he killed himself in the process. A victim of the occupation destroyed his oppressor, but death struck them both because symbolically they were the same by this point, both of them racist, misogynistic abusers.
It is in this context that Fujiwara’s last line is both comical and deeply sad. “At least I got to keep my dick.” He had nothing else at this point, no future, no freedom, and only a few more moments to live, but at least he was still a man in his own eyes. As long as he had that he had something to hold onto.
The tragedy of Fujiwara is that he chose to hold onto the domination his idea of manhood symbolized to him rather than taking Hideko’s and Sook-Hee’s hands in friendship. But then again I suspect that, to him, standing in solidarity with women really would have felt like losing his dick.
(The original version of this post appeared on my Tumblr on April 8, 2018. This version, among other changes, incorporates an addition I made on August 6, 2018 about Fujiwara's name.)
Dreamwidth entry URL: https://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/74317.html
Both sections have heavy spoilers for The Handmaiden with warnings for content including trauma, suicide, and sexual violence. Most of it is about Fujiwara; discussing Sook-Hee and Hideko's intertwined story required much more thought and work, and will be in a separate post.
Brief thoughts on the reclaiming of female sexuality in Hideko's story
Sook-Hee and Hideko’s first night together was both heartrendingly moving and hilariously funny-funny, in large part, because they had to rely on the paper figure (in so many ways) of Count Fujiwara to initiate sex at all. Of course, the humor works only because of a darker underlying truth; that women are so socialized to see themselves as objects of pleasure and not agents in their own pleasure, that these women had to invoke the male gaze and male pleasure in order to fulfill their own desire for each other.
Having her sexuality subsumed by the male gaze was especially and brutally true for Hideko, of course, who was groomed and abused from childhood to perform the fantasy of men against her will. As Fujiwara points out jocularly to Kouzuki, but with deadly seriousness, she was so well trained she had no desire of her own left. Isn’t her treatment just a grotesquely amplified version of how women are “trained” under patriarchy, though?
This is one reason Hideko’s masturbating before Fujiwara on their “first night” shows how she has changed by claiming her own feelings and desire with Sook-Hee. Rather than perform Fujiwara’s fantasy for him as she had before, she invites him to be a spectator of her own sexual pleasure instead. Hideko’s flashing the knife at Fujiwara before she gets into bed has several layers of meaning. Korean audiences would recognize the symbolism immediately, because highborn Korean women traditionally carried silver-decorated knives to kill themselves with in the event of threatened rape. Much like the act of refusing sex with him, the knife was symbolic of her fidelity to Sook-Hee-though that symbolism would have been lost on Fujiwara and likely on Hideko herself, who was not a Korean woman. She and Fujiwara would have intended and received it as a threat to him if he tried anything. And, of course, it was a continuation of the ruse on Fujiwara, that Sook-Hee was still their unknowing mark.
There’s another level of the masturbation scene that really gets to me: In addition to being a power move on Hideko’s part, it was also an act of intimacy toward him. It was revealing in a way the sex shows she was forced to perform for him and the other guests never could be, because as abusive as those performances were she also revealed nothing of herself in them. As Fujiwara himself commented, she was trained to the point of being dead inside. By refusing to do his desire but instead showing him her own, she had revealed herself more fully to him than she ever had before-as a person with her own will and her own pleasure that had nothing to do with him. If he had realized what it meant and taken the gesture as offered, if he had accepted her as an equal human being and not an object for possession, then his story could have ended very differently.
On that note, I’ll discuss the tragedy of “Count Fujiwara” in the next section.
The Tragedy of Count Fujiwara
The tragedy of “Count Fujiwara,” of course, begins with the fact that both words are lies. His original Korean name was Goh Pandol, which was on his passport that Hideko was using. Goh is a common surname on Jeju Island, and Pandol means a wide, flat rock. It’s not a very dignified name at all, and suits his low birth. Director Park Chan-Wook has said (Korean link) that the name was specifically meant to be comical and not very thought-out, and that Pandol was not a very cherished son to his parents--no wonder he became a con man, Park joked.
The name is only the start of the indignity of Pandol/Fujiwara's background. I don’t know if I can even convey to non-Koreans the crushing lowliness of it. His father was a servant, which meant pretty much functionally a slave or at best a destitute manual laborer. His mother was a shaman, which carried some spiritual power but also meant she was despised as spiritually unclean and sexually loose living outside the bounds of patriarchy.
And his parents weren’t just lowlives, they were lowlives from Jeju Island. To the extent people outside of Korea know about the place they think of it as a tourist destination, but traditionally it meant poor farmland, hopeless poverty, and a distinctive culture that was systematically marginalized and destroyed. Jeju Islanders were crushed underfoot by the mainlanders, and the Japanese happily carried on the exploitation; due to the geographical proximity, Jeju Islanders were taken away en masse to be forced laborers in Japan and elsewhere during the Pacific War. The brutality didn’t end with liberation from Japanese occupation, either. It was the Korean military and right-wing militias sanctioned by them who slaughtered and tortured civilian islanders from 1947 (two years after liberation) to 1954 (after the Korean War) while the U.S. military government looked the other way.
That’s the kind of place Jeju Island occupied in Korean history. That’s the context-endless poverty, marginalization, exploitation, and violence. Fujiwara reinvented himself from the ground up, wiping away that boy who was dirt or turd, the lowest of the low.
(It’s worth noting that the gold mine Kouzuki got in exchange for selling out his country was in Hamkyung Province, which is on the opposite end as Jeju Island-in the far north to the Island’s far south. Hamkyung is another poor and heavily exploited area, and has suffered badly under North Korean rule as well. The cruelty of Japanese occupation reached across the whole of Korea, in other words, and continues in the hands of the Korean elite both North and South.)
I hope this background places Kouzuki’s torture of Fujiwara in perspective as well. Here was a Korean collaborator of Japanese rule who had made his fortune off the explotation of his countrymen, mutilating and torturing a man from one of the worst-affected areas. Much like Kouzuki’s favored transport of riding on a traditional Korean A-frame carried on a Korean servant’s back, the torture scene was a microcosm of that oppression.
The genius of The Handmaiden, of course, and what makes Park an incisive commentator instead of a dull macho nationalist, is that Fujiwara is a villain. The movie resists the extremely easy exit of making Fujiwara the noble sufferer and Kouzuki his diabolic tormentor. Nope, actually, they are ideological twins. Fujiwara is a misogynist and rapist who approached Hideko with the promise of freedom only to try and lock her in another cage, who used Sook-Hee’s trust to not only deprive her of her freedom but kill her in captivity. His attempted violations might not be as outlandish as Kouzuki’s, but are just as horrific.
Fujiwara, then, is the marginalized man who, in the face of exploitation and brutalization, chooses to exploit and brutalize women in turn for his own gain. You see him in just about any community that is targeted by discrimination.
Fujiwara’s real tragedy is that he was actually halfway there to true liberation. When he told Hideko he was no Japanese nobleman but the son of a Jeju Island servant, that was a mirror image of Hideko masturbating in front of him on their marriage night. They both revealed their most vulnerable selves, their deepest secrets to each other and that could have been the basis of a powerful alliance. They could have set Sook-Hee free and plotted Kouzuki’s downfall together. He could have had Hideko’s friendship and respect, something he would have valued if he had seen her as a person in her own right.
Instead Fujiwara chose to become Kouzuki. Rather than challenge the oppressive structures of racism and sexism he wanted to climb it to the top. He didn’t hate the fact that Koreans were discriminated against; he hated the fact that he was Korean, one despised even by other Koreans. He didn’t hate the fact that Hideko was Kouzuki’s prisoner; he wanted to make her his own prisoner.
Still, he was tantalizingly close to being an actual liberator. He was the one who gave Hideko the opium as the ultimate out should Kouzuki get his hands on her. The fact that she ended up using it against Fujiwara instead, of course, showed how he had taken Kouzuki’s place as her would-be abuser.
It’s telling that Fujiwara had prepared the same exit for himself as he had for Hideko, and it’s also telling how limited his imagination was, as was hers: For both of them the plan of last resort was self-destruction. The structures of brutality were so ironbound, so absolute, that it was easier to destroy themselves than the system. Sook-Hee was the only one who had the imagination to smash the structure itself in destroying the books that were the instruments of Hideko’s abuse, Sook-Hee who was the life her mother had stolen from the iron grip of death, who was the victory that great thief had smiled over.
It’s fitting that Fujiwara killed Kouzuki, then, and doubly fitting that he killed himself in the process. A victim of the occupation destroyed his oppressor, but death struck them both because symbolically they were the same by this point, both of them racist, misogynistic abusers.
It is in this context that Fujiwara’s last line is both comical and deeply sad. “At least I got to keep my dick.” He had nothing else at this point, no future, no freedom, and only a few more moments to live, but at least he was still a man in his own eyes. As long as he had that he had something to hold onto.
The tragedy of Fujiwara is that he chose to hold onto the domination his idea of manhood symbolized to him rather than taking Hideko’s and Sook-Hee’s hands in friendship. But then again I suspect that, to him, standing in solidarity with women really would have felt like losing his dick.
(The original version of this post appeared on my Tumblr on April 8, 2018. This version, among other changes, incorporates an addition I made on August 6, 2018 about Fujiwara's name.)
Dreamwidth entry URL: https://ljlee.dreamwidth.org/74317.html