Will You Feed Us to the Zombies?

Train to Busan and How to Tell a Story About Class

Korean movies about class have been having a moment in the US of A.

Consider Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, an international hit from 2018. It was based on a Haruki Murakami story that is itself inspired by William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning,” one of the great American short stories about inter-class violence. Or take Parasite, which is probably the most widely resonant class parable of the last several years. I’ve written about that movie elsewhere, but suffice it to say it would be difficult for a conscious adult to watch it and not see that it’s ruthlessly, knifingly about socioeconomic hierarchy and how class society works.

It’s that “how it works” that makes Parasite such a banger. Once Bong Joon-ho’s movie won Best Picture and generally got enshrined in the 2010s cultural canon, it became popular to say its “message” wasn’t really that radical. Oh, rich people can be mean? Capitalism creates hierarchy? You don’t say!

Except Parasite does more than just assert that rich people can be unpleasant. It implicates the viewer, emotionally embodying our own complicity in the class system, regardless of where we fall within it. Therein lies the rub—in the feelings, not the “message.” Parasite seduces us with the ascent of a wily family of working-poor aspirants, makes us root for them to keep getting what they want on the terms they’ve set for themselves, and then drags us into their irony-laden undoing. Parasite thus cunningly gives the lie to its own treacly promises. That’s what makes the movie radical: It begins by promising a feel-good story about what pulling yourself up by your bootstraps can do, and then puts the viewer through the thresher of the violence that actually upholds class society.

I recently watched Train to Busan (2016, dir. Yeon Sang-ho), which is unmistakably about class, even as it’s just as unmistakably about zombies. Zombie stories always carry a tinge of reactionary fervor—are the zombies a hoard of immigrants, or a domestic rabble, or otherwise a seething mass of uncivilized Others? Sometimes the zombies are exactly that, if the story sucks. But Train to Busan takes a smart angle, depicting the initial government response as labelling the zombies “rioters” and trying to turn an apocalyptic crisis into a lecture about law and order.

On board the train to Busan, the passengers of which are steadily overwhelmed by zombies as the rest of the country falls apart around them, we have two Shitbag Corporate Guys. The first is the closest thing to a protagonist in Train to Busan—Seok-woo (Gong Yoo), a finance guy who also happens to be a single father struggling to connect with his young daughter. He gets a redemption arc after initial tension with blue-collar hero and all-around badass Sang-hwa, played by action legend Ma Dong-seok. The second Shitbag Corporate Guy (Kim Eui-sung) is the COO of a bus company who is constantly trying to seal off parts of the train where there are still survivors, or otherwise shitbaggily trying to save himself at the expense of others.

This second Shitbag Corporate Guy, older and far less sympathetic than Seok-woo, manages to bully the conductors into obeying his tenuous authority. He knows how to take command, and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to maintain that aura. I won’t go into too much detail—if you haven’t seen it, the movie is on Netflix; go watch it.

The point is that Train to Busan doesn’t just tell us about the existence of class hierarchy and how that manifests as tangible power in an extreme situation. It also shows characters making choices about how and whether to maintain that hierarchy. Some choose to do so, while some rise above it. This is one way you can dramatize your thematic interests—you ask a question about the thing you care about, and have your characters answer it in a way that reveals who they are.

Any story can gesture at Important Issues. You can crowbar Important Issues into a movie that is at its heart an advertisement for the United States Air Force. We are in a supremely gestural cultural moment, in which the most cynical art genuflects to the most urgent problems. It can be hard to know how to respond to all this smarmy scraping and bowing. For an artist who actually wants to say something useful, it can be disheartening. If the soulless corporation is already saying their version of the thing, is it worth saying?

Train to Busan is an excellent example of how imaginative storytelling can get past gesture and into visceral dramatization. Once characters understand that acting the way they always have and upholding familiar systems will mean throwing people to a horde of ravenous zombies, there’s space for a whole series of high-stakes questions to be gorily answered. It’s brutal, and that’s the key. To gesture is to dress up a cynical story in dutiful clothes. To dramatize is to have a pack of zombies tear those clothes off with their teeth.

American audiences appear to be more comfortable with this kind of narrative brutality when it comes from overseas. That a class-focused strain of Korean movie, in particular, has done well here in the past few years says less about Korean filmmaking as a whole than it does about what Americans crave but won’t do ourselves. We want someone else to tell us how brutal our class system is. We also apparently want overhead shots of glittering transit infrastructure, something our own film industry couldn’t provide even if we asked.

The sequel to Train to Busan, called Peninsula, came out in Korea within the past few weeks. I very much look forward to checking it out and doing another #take about it in this space.

A request

At some point in the not-too-distant future, I’m going to offer a paid subscription plan for this newsletter. Such a plan will give you, beloved potential customer, access to exclusive content! There will continue to be free content as well, don’t worry, but those who want more can get more.

What I want to do now is consider what that exclusive content might be. I will almost certainly sprinkle in more #takes and essaylets like what you’re used to seeing here, but I might also try serializing a novel, as well as answering subscriber questions. Or other things! It’ll inevitably be an experiment, which is what this newsletter has been since the beginning.

If you think you might be interested exclusive content from this very newsletter, and you have ideas about what you’d like to see, please don’t hesitate to hit the comments or to email me. It’s about the journey, not the destination, since no zombies are chasing us—yet.

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

We rejoin our heroes in the wilderness:

Take it from a decently experienced traveller who once fancied himself a more intrepid outdoorsman than he’s turned out to be: Shit being heavy is a problem. Things are always heavier than you think, once you get away from running water and air-conditioning. Having the misery of lugging useless doo-dads around in the heat seared into my soul is probably one reason I own very few possessions on the eve of my 30th birthday.

A bold adventure turns into “taking a break.” This is the reality of a lot of travel, even the rugged outdoor kind—what you really want is a break, not an adventure. Adventures are always somehow both wetter and thirstier, both colder and hotter, more fatiguing and more enervating than you thought. Some people really do want that, but most don’t, most of the time. We want to go sit serenely in the woods and eat a sandwich.

Also, Calvin, don’t kill any walruses. Come on, man.

Other fun things

I’ve been moving this week, so I’m a little light on content, but here’s a fun, insightful article a valued reader linked in the comments last week. It adds further context to the “language belonging to characters” thing I brought up.

Also, I’ll continue to plug Discontents, a collective of which this space is now a member. Well worth checking out and signing up for!

A poem

Nathaniel Mackey watches the scarecrow