ABSTRACT
E,J-yong’s Asako in Ruby Shoes (Sunaebo, 2000) pioneers inter-Asia regional collaboration in visual culture, specifically Korean and Japanese production and distribution. The story revolves around a Korean office worker U-in so plagued by alienation and ennui that he is addicted to cyberporn. The Korean name U-in puns with the English word “urine,” connoting the abject state he is in, not only his depravity but the fact that his condition is only knowable vis-à-vis a Western tongue. The full range of meaning for his existence depends on a source outside himself and his language. Whereas the film’s working title is, appropriately, Uri-Nation,1 the Korean title Sunaebo (Pure Love Story) turns into the dialectic doppelganger repressing unseemly body functions and biological needs. The jarring transformation from a work-inprogress nicknamed by “birth parents” to the final product for the public echoes the gap between Chinese milk name (ruming) used by, figuratively, the cooing, breastfeeding mother and close family members, on the one hand, and school name (xueming, formal name) in schools and in public, on the other. The former is diminutive, funny, and endearing, the latter respectable, even grandiose. One is left, however, wondering which nation comprises Marcel Duchamp’s ready-made urinal, school named Fountain (1917)— Korea or Japan or both or all nations, for urine, like lucre, flows across borders, touching all viewers, including U-in. Such odious thoughts aside, U-in’s obsession centers on the pay-to-play live show “Asako in Ruby Shoes,” its Japanese porn starlet wearing a pair of red sequined, Chinese-style, roundtoed, flat-heeled, casual “ruby shoes.” She plays to get paid; he pays to play with her image. Put it bluntly, he pays to get laid, or, more precisely, he “lays” himself with some visual aid. In general, the male body’s sense of power and mastery arises oftentimes
from absent-minded, “out-of-body” reverie, such as masturbatory sexual fantasy with some partner(s), which effects a discharge of internal tension or, pardon the expression, jerking off into thin air. Letting fly one’s fancy consolidates the feeling of in-control. This mind game gives a metaphorical spin to masturbation. By definition, masturbation requires coordination of body parts, eyes and ears processing stimulations, mind editing still and moving mirages, and, last but not least, fingers and hands. The alignment of body
parts and imaginary partners seeks wish-fulfillment by vacating that wish, lording over an infinite domain that is but the self. Indeed, both protagonists are bent upon wish-fulfillment, which strangely “undoes” the very existence of the wisher: U-in escapes from his angst and desire into virtual sex, the culmination of which requires masturbating himself; Asako intends to commit suicide, severing all umbilical ties to space and time, afloat weightlessly and timelessly, with her favorite shoes on. Hye Seung Chung and David Scott Diffrient in “Interethnic Romance and
Political Reconciliation in Asako in Ruby Shoes” insightfully read the fetish of shoes along the line of Dorothy’s magic footwear in The Wizard of Oz (1939), yet they ignore the connections to Japanese-Korean chinoiserie and Japanese pop culture. The alienated, repressed teenager Aya/Asako performs to save enough money to realize a romanticized exit from her stifling family and social life: holding breath to choke herself to death just as the airplane crosses the International Date Line. As the captain announces the crossing of the Date Line in an Australian accent, Asako changes into the ruby shoes. A fleeting shot of the soles before her toes snuggle in reveals the capitalized brand name UNBILICAL, along with illegible small letters, presumably on product details. In addition to suicide at high altitude, the shoes have long been Asako’s passion, similar to U-in’s cyberporn. Earlier, Asako successfully negotiates an installment plan with the owner of a Tokyo Bopper branch store, hence stepping out into the street in those very shoes so overjoyed and “wing-footed” that she takes off with outstretched arms as if spreading her wings, captured from the back in a freeze-frame shot. On the one hand, the Chinese-flavored shoes accentuate exoticism over chinoiserie, already recurring in the film’s Chinatown banquet and a Chinese Korean woman too aggressive for an impotent U-in. On the other, the brand Unbilical from the chain store Tokyo Bopper anchors the film in Japanese Occidentalist fascination with American jazz and bebop music, evidenced in the subculture surrounding the anime series Cowboy Bebop first broadcast on TV Tokyo in the late 1990s. The brand Unbilical suggests the consumer’s conscious or subconscious
severing of the bond or umbilical cord to the earthy womb, the axes of space and time that define existence. A move toward liberation and individualism, unbilical, nonetheless, cannot erase “umbilical” firmly embedded in the spelling. Asako, for instance, wishes to extricate herself, by means of insulating footwear, from the soil and Japanese identity. In turn, the shoes relocate her to the neverland of Oz, chinoiserie, and Japanese consumerism. Contrary to her desire, unbilical shoes become a new umbilical cord to other meaningmaking, selfhood-engendering, thus maternal matrices. Furthermore, she fails in her suicide attempt, bursting out for a breath of air after a fade-out and a prolonged shot of total darkness for the duration of what is supposed to be her last breath. Even if she succeeds, her method of exit, self-suffocation, merely duplicates her stifling life. To deny oxygen to her lungs and bloodstream contradicts the fact that she is in flight, floating in mid-air. Buoying her
up like amniotic fluid, air still gains entry, dictated by her own biological reflex. The survival instinct of the body overrides the mind’s will to die. The timing also defeats the purpose of unraveling umbilical bondage. Since the International Date Line belongs to neither yesterday nor today, hence outside of time and timeless, Asako flees time altogether. At the last minute, alas, she remains a prisoner to her body. Given the futile attempts of both Asako with her toy shoes and U-in with his virtual toy, given the failures of toying with their bodies by ejecting semen or oxygen, unbilical imaginary constitutes yet another rather than breaking the umbilical cord, stringing together, without their knowing it, the flying kite and the kite flyer, or the vaporizing dream self in ascent and the aging body lowered into the ground. The former is embodied by suffering angels in Wim Wenders’ elegiac long takes in Wings of Desire (1988). The latter is graphically dramatized by Samuel Beckett in Happy Days (1961), where the protagonist is incrementally buried in two acts. Both are familiars to King Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings: the ethereal Lagolas, whose arrows fly, and the dwarf Gimli, whose tribe burrows underground. Within the context of a single human body, physically and socially constructed self versus dream self are coupled like the pants’ zipped-up fly and the bird rearing to go, the trapping of civilization and the naked id. Collectively as one body politic, inter-Asia unbilical love appears to favor new transnational unions over old nationalist homeland, but umbilical attachment stays intact, just below the surface of millennial interethnic romance and eros in the wake of Asako in Ruby Shoes. The irony of the fly grounding the bird informs the genre of inter-Asia romance, self-contradictory and repressive of sexuality, where the visual pleasure it offers haunts with masturbatory, urinary traces. Once upon a time, the four mini-dragons soared from the Pacific Rim,
followed by the awakening of the dinosaur in hibernation-China. Despite the economic crisis in the late 1990s and the global recession in the new millennium, Asian countries along the Pacific Rim have come to constitute a cultural sphere of sorts around the turn of the century. Hari (Japan-idolizing), the Korean Wave, and collaborations across the “Greater China” of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong suggest an inter-Asia circulation of cast, crew, capital, production, and consumption, one that can be conceptualized erotically as the adjoining of disparate entities driven by certain internal impulses, or even masturbatorily for the illusory, self-serving, pleasure-seeking nature of this mating ritual. Discursively, inter-Asia visual culture appears to coalesce into a body politic/body imaginary, where one region excites and satiates the thirst of another region, an erotic play of, by, and for Asia. One particular drive for inter-Asia regionalism springs from technological revolution, which crosses national boundaries. High-tech advances prompt self-worth and independence that would resist globalization-cum-Westernization. In reaction to Hollywood’s global reach, intercourse within the Asian body politic offers what seems to be an alternative. Should Orientalism be the West’s exotic fallacy, inter-Asia eros defami-
liarizes Asian identity by wedding two Asian yet alien bodies from two
different races speaking two languages across two systems and narrative genres. Despite the linguistic, social, and political differences, a climactic moment of touch elevates individual love over all obstacles. One particular obstacle is narrative genres. Inter-Asia unbilical love renders these tales essentially romance, yet these films may also belong to gangster movies and action thrillers. Furthermore, the recurring motif of airplane flight signals systemic, even seismic shift, often accompanied by filmic shuttling between black and white and color, between reality and virtual reality, between life and death. Hence, across generic and other divides, that moment of touch comes at crucial turning points, even at finales, emphasized through freezeframes, close-ups, theme music, or actual physical contact. But unlike the Hollywood formula of a kiss dissolving to the bedroom, or the ecstasy of lovemaking, inter-Asia eros is content with a linguistic and narrative/generic entwining where barriers turn into bridges. These unbilical moments formulate new bonding seemingly in denial of, yet actually in conjunction with, old umbilical linkages. This ambivalence reflects the desire for glocalization keenly felt by Asian regional and diasporic spectatorship. Unconsciously in Asako’s footsteps, Asian-language visual culture features,
diegetically, the plot of interracial romance, leading to fans’ subsequent craze across national boundaries. The frenzy over the Korean drama Winter Sonata beyond the peninsula proper, particularly in Japan, illustrates the performers’ pan-Asian charisma. Inter-Asia unbilical love dramatizes cross-cultural attachment, for example, in romance between “Boy Meets Girl”: the Korean TV drama Friends (Korean boy falling in love with Japanese girl in Hong Kong), Hanoi Bride and Golden Bride (Korean boy with Vietnamese-Korean girl), and the Taiwanese blockbuster Cape No. 7 (Taiwanese boy with Japanese girl). The old umbilical regression is alive and well in “Boy Meets Girl,” despite the scripted forging of new transnational relationships. For instance, the consumers of unbilical love blithely go along with the racial illusion: the Vietnamese-Korean girls are all played by Koreans speaking fluent Korean. This ploy is an inter-Asia version of Hollywood exotica featuring either a Caucasian or a mixed race actress as Oriental, except Korean productions locate the exotic in Hong Kong, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Such Korea-centric productions in the name of inter-Asia romance further regress into umbilical reunification of the two Koreas in “North Meets South.” Over the divided Korean peninsula yet often involving more than the Korean race are Double Agent, Shiri (with the girl’s makeover via Japanese cosmetic surgery), Joint Security Area (with its Swiss-Korean girl, who is, needless to say, Korean),MyWedding Campaign (Korean in search of Uzbek koryo wife), and more. Pointing to love as much as to raw urge, unbilical love also swings to the other corporeal extreme of sham marriage, human trafficking, prostitution, and obsessive perversity, illustrated in the final section of “Lotus Meets Mud,” including Failan (Korean gangster and Chinese picture bride) and, of course, Asako in Ruby Shoes. The umbilical in unbilical love shows in the repression of “Mud” for “Lotus,” or the abominable for the aesthetic.
