ABSTRACT
Known to South Koreans and international audiences as a licentious filmmaker whose narratives pivot around sadistic, perverse, and slickly choreographed visceral violence, Park Chan-wook’s sensational impulses and aesthetic flair cleverly obfuscate his other concern in South Korean society: motifs of material and immaterial labor. Iconographic elements of the working class and “salarymen” litter Park’s mise-en-scène, from the proletariat figure, rugged and broken by extreme social circumstances, to the white-collar worker, laid off and similarly down on his luck. Their work environments, as crafted on screen, vary visually from cramped and bustling factory floors to corporate tower blocks, cosmopolitan high-rises, and lifeless office cubicles.
