This is the first essay in a new Reverse Shot column that focuses on the dynamic or below-the-surface nature of queer representation in international cinema.
Word Made Flesh:
Resurrection of the Little Match Girl
By Jawni Han
In 2002, Jang Sun-woo seemed an untouchable figure of Korean cinema. But it only took 14 days for his legacy to come completely undone. Made on a $10 million budget, which was well above the then-industry average of $3 million, Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002) flopped at the Korean box office at an unprecedented scale, making back a measly $300,000. Its commercial disaster accounted for roughly 20 percent of the Korean film industry’s deficit that year and unsurprisingly, ended Jang’s career. In this regard, Resurrection of the Little Match Girl bears some parallels to what Heaven’s Gate (1980) did to Michael Cimino and the American film industry. Heaven’s Gate has since enjoyed significant critical reappraisal, but Jang’s final film still exists primarily as a meme and a cautionary tale about the Faustian bargain that the Korean film industry struck with the Y2K venture capital bubble. The derision is largely justified, except for one major overlooked aspect of the film: how its accidental queerness in retrospect unlocks new possibilities for Korean cinema and the Korean language. More often than not, revolutionary gestures in cinema have to be excavated from the rubble of film history, and an earnest engagement with this deeply flawed film unveils a reservoir of untapped revelations that can be harnessed in our contemporary queer imagination.
The film’s title refers to a virtual reality game in which players compete with one another to ensure that the Little Match Girl of the game freezes to death as she does in Hans Christian Andersen’s original story. Whoever the girl thinks of while dying wins the game and claims an unidentified prize. Ju, a delivery boy at a Korean-Chinese restaurant, enters the game with the hope of dating the Little Match Girl. It does not take long before he realizes he is not ready to compete with other gamers armed with baseball bats and guns. He is saved by a lesbian woman named Lala, who like Lara Croft, wields two pistols and rides a chunky motorcycle. As the film goes on, it is revealed that System, the mastermind behind the virtual reality, suspects Ju is a lethal computer virus, and conspires with other contestants to eliminate him. With some help from the architect of System who now wants to topple the operating software he built, Ju infiltrates the liminal space within the virtual reality to confront System and bring the Girl to the real world with him. The film concludes with three possible endings, the last of which shows Ju and the Girl living on a serene tropical island.
It would be dishonest to reclaim Resurrection as a queer film solely based on the presence of Lala. A more generative queer reading becomes possible when the focus is shifted to the actress playing the role. Jin Xing (金星; 김성 in Korean), a renowned dancer from Shenyang, is a chaoxianzu (ethnic Koreans in China) transgender woman. Resurrection is not the first Korean film to star a trans woman, but it remains, to this day, one of the few Korean films to not pathologize or ridicule trans femininity. In films like Man Is Not Popular (1963) and Woman Is Better (1965), desperate men live as women either to become licensed sex workers for American soldiers or to execute personal revenge. In Resurrection, on the other hand, no one even questions Lala’s womanhood. Ju refers to her as noona (누나), a term that men use to address older sisters and older women they are acquainted with in Korean. The Korean language is mostly genderless with a few notable exceptions, such as familiar titles, and it would not have been out of place for Ju to address Lala by her name or a gender-neutral term of address. Thus, Ju’s use of the word noona feels deliberate and significant.
The queerness of Resurrection becomes even more apparent in Jin’s first language. Lala is an obvious pun on Lara Croft. At the same time, lala ((拉拉)—adapted from Lazi (拉子), the saphic narrator of the Taiwanese novel Notes of a Crocodile—is a slang word for lesbians in Mainland China. In Korea, Jin would most commonly be referred to as “트랜스젠더” (transgender), the Korean loanword from English. But in Shanghai, where she currently resides, some might call her kuaxingbiezhe (跨性别者), the Chinese equivalent of “transgender people,” but with a slight but crucial difference. The first character kua (跨), which corresponds to the Latin prefix “trans”—itself meaning “across” and “on the other side of”—can mean both “to step across” and “to straddle.” The latter meaning is integral to Jin’s own self-expression. In an English-language interview broadcast on HDNet World Report, she says: “I don’t stand in the male point of view to make my work. I don’t stand in the female point of view to explain myself. No, I stand in between.”
Jin, a woman who “stands in between” the masculine and the feminine, also straddles the line between being Korean and being Chinese. In the film, this biographical detail is more foregrounded than her transness, as Jin delivers her Korean lines with a chaoxianzu accent. Officially recognized as an ethnic minority group by the Chinese government, chaoxianzu people often experience discrimination in their ancestral motherland due to Sinophobia and anti-communism prevalent in South Korean society. Although Jin’s ethnic identity does not figure into the film’s narrative, her distinct accent further underscores Lala’s untethered existence, not fully belonging to either the material world or the virtual game space. Early on in Resurrection, Ju is warned of the possibility of severe neural damage caused by exceeding the limitations of his bodily capability inside the game. The boundaries of what is physically possible in virtual reality are never clearly established, but aside from System and its underlings, Lala is the only one who can suspend gravity and perceive the trajectory of a bullet in slow motion. What makes her immune from brain damage even though she defies the laws of physics in the game? What is her identity in the material world? Such scrutiny proves futile in the end because Lala is there to simply assist Ju in saving the Little Match Girl and to execute The Matrix–inspired action stunts. She is symptomatic of the film’s incoherent narrative logic and Jang’s lazy writing, which frequently resorts to deus ex machina.
*****
Among the most celebrated auteurs of South Korean cinema, Jang has long stood out for his lack of discernible directorial signature and sustained engagement with particular themes or subject matters. It is challenging to draw a clear throughline that can neatly define an eclectic filmography that includes The Age of Success (1989), a black comedy satirizing the collusion between Neo-Nazism and the Korean conglomerate class; Road to Racetrack (1991), one of the most successful examples of the transplantation of European modernism in Korean cinema and a precursor to Hong Sang-soo; A Petal (1996), the first Korean studio film to tackle the 1980 Gwangju massacre; and Timeless Bottomless Bad Movie (1997), a formally uncategorizable movie that was built on collective authorship between Jang and a group of runaway teenagers. Perhaps one can make the case that what unites all these films is his commitment to relentless reinvention and interrogation of cinema’s possibilities. When sexually explicit Lies (1999), a spiritual sister film to In the Realm of the Senses (1976), got him embroiled in obscenity law trials, Jang and the Korean film industry essentially renegotiated the bounds of free speech in post-democratization South Korea. Reflecting on the impacts of Road to Racetrack in an essay for Cine21, critic Jung Sung-il writes that it “pushed the [aesthetic] boundaries of Korean cinema so far that no Korean film has since crossed them.”
It should come as no surprise that Jang’s attempt at making a “straight” blockbuster was doomed to fail. Being the most expensive production to date at the time, the only boundary Resurrection pushed was the parameters of Korean cinema’s industrial capacity. Formally, it never rises above its sci-fi blockbuster mold and its execution leaves so much to be desired. The film fails to even adequately imitate its references—the Wachowskis, John Woo, Blade, and cyberpunk anime—let alone put a local spin on them. This fatal flaw becomes all the more disappointing in the context of the rest of his filmography. In Lies, he infuses the trappings of Nikkatsu Studio’s Roman Porno with vérité-like camerawork to dissolve the barrier between fiction and documentary, as well as to interrogate how heteronormativity socially reproduces itself in Korea. Bad Movie, a dizzying spectacle of 35mm, 16mm, MiniDV, and Hi8 cinematography and arcade game-inspired 2D digital animation, straddles ethnographic study, no wave city symphony, vérité documentary, and stylized reenactments in an effort to understand its subjects and co-authors: the teenage delinquents of Seoul in the 1990s.
No matter where Jang borrowed his ideas from—European modernist cinema, postmodern literature, Japanese exploitation films, Capcom’s arcade game titles, or Peter Handke’s avant-garde theater—he almost always found a way to turn this hybridity into an exhilarating formal experiment and a portrait of postcolonial South Korea in flux. In the 1970s, Jang was a student activist and theater-maker who believed in the liberatory possibility of madanggeuk, a hybrid medium that fuses Korea’s traditional masked dance known as talchum with Brechtian epic theater. After participating in the Gwangju Uprising and his subsequent imprisonment, Jang became disillusioned with theater and turned to film criticism, and eventually filmmaking. But he still retained the core tenet of madanggeuk, which chooses an open yard where the distinction between spectators and participants is blurred in opposition to a stage that is separated from the audience. As a critic, Jang advocated for a cinema that expands on the formal and ideological openness of madanggeuk and moves the needle toward a more just world. There is no doubt that Jang put his theory into filmmaking practice throughout the ’90s. No other Korean films from this decade were more open and attuned to what was happening in the country than Jang’s. If we can call Resurrection a “sell-out” film, it is because he betrayed his own theoretical commitment, not because of the film’s enormous budget.
It's possible that Jang felt he could harness the vastness of an open-world VR game and integrate it into his open cinema. He learned the hard way that he could not, but a different kind of openness emerged, as though a computer virus infiltrated his vision. The inclusion of Lala-Jin Xing and her identity markers points to another kind of hybridity that has been forgotten in Korea due to the unending Cold War: the Korean language’s inextricable relationship with Chinese characters and the existence of the Mandarin-speaking Korean diaspora. According to 2002 research on the most frequently used modern Korean vocabulary by the National Institute of Korean Language, roughly 35% of the Korean vocabulary consists of Sino-Korean words. Queer terminology is no exception. For instance, iban (이반), the Korean word for “queer,” is a pun on the word ilban (일반; 一般), which means sameness, ordinary, and universality. Depending on who you ask, iban corresponds to either 二般 or 異般, which mean “the second kind” and “a different kind,” respectively. The word’s expansiveness, which goes beyond the categories of sexuality and gender and embraces anyone living in the margins, is made possible by the Chinese characters.
However, English reigns supreme in contemporary Korean queer lingo. The annual pride parade in Seoul goes by “queer parade,” instead of “iban parade.” Of course, the meaning of the word “queer” has come to be expansive like “iban,” but its political reclamation may not be as immediate to Koreans as iban would be. This is not to suggest that Korean queers must abandon English loanwords. Korean is a hybrid language by its nature and its history under Japanese and American occupations. The future of queer Korean language lies in leaning further into its hybridity by adapting loanwords from foreign languages other than English and revitalizing Sino-Korean words that are long forgotten. There is no reason to designate the English word “lesbian” (레즈비언) as the singular term for Korean women who desire other women. In the 18th century, Koreans referred to lesbians in the royal court as daeshik (대식; 對食), literally meaning “eating face to face.” It is a question of whether one feels an affinity to Lesbos, the home of Sappho, or to the secretive “dining” rituals among certain maids of honors from the Joseon Dynasty.
In a public lecture from 2019, Kim Hong-jun, director of the Korean Film Archive, points out that the 1960s, often dubbed as Korean cinema’s golden decade, was also the decade in which many Koreans started to phase out the use of Japanese and made more conscious effort to express their thoughts in their mother tongue. Kim believes that filmmakers’ increased mastery of the Korean language paved the way for Korean films with locally specific aesthetic trademarks such as The Housemaid (1960) and Aimless Bullet (1960). If this is true, absorbing Sino queer vocabulary would not only expand the horizon of the Korean language but also the horizon of Korean cinema—but more specifically, what is possible in queer Korean cinema. The conception of a trans woman as a woman who refuses to adhere to a single category does not find a corresponding formal expression in Resurrection. Its failure, however, can be a cause for celebration rather than despair. As Jack Halberstam puts it in The Queer Art of Failure (2011), in a world where success is quantified by profitability and heteronormative values, failure is where we can begin to critique capitalism and heteronormativity. “Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life [...] but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise,” writes Halberstam. In this sense, both the financial and artistic failures of Resurrection present an opportunity for us to reimagine Korean cinema. Through Lala-Jin Xing, Korean cinema should inherit Jang’s fearless open cinema and move toward more open cinema; queer Korean cinema to iban Korean cinema that celebrates social illegibility, plurality, and queer art of failure.