Lee Chang-Dong, “Burning” (2018)

“Burning” [버닝] is a film of contrasts—painful ones. There are the Great Hunger and the Little Hunger, light and darkness, soothing jazz music of Ben’s elegant, expensive cafes and the ominously drumming rhythm of Haemi’s dance, joined by the persistent then escalating pizzicato of an arbitrary note. They are painful, because they resist mixing, transformation from one to the other. Haemi’s innocent fascination with the dance of the Great and Little Hunger is rather a temporary object of amusement for Ben. Her demonstration of the dance at the dinner party may have been a thing of meaning and beauty to her; yet as the shot zooms out and we notice the amused faces of Ben’s friends, we cannot help but cringe at the ridiculous swayings of her arms. 

The Great Hunger and the Little Hunger

The very beginning of the film starts with a reunion between childhood friends, Haemi and Jong-Su. In a street bar, Haemi tells Jong-Su that there are two groups of people in the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert: the Great Hunger and the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger denotes those who hunger for food, desiring immediate satiation; the Great Hunger refers to those who yearn for a deeper sense of meaning beyond the instant gratifications. Haemi admires the Great Hunger. For her, pantomime is a way to achieve this: to convince herself that all the sensations felt from, for instance, eating a tangerine, are inside her mind, and that forgetting the non-existence of the tangerine, as opposed to convincing herself of its existence, lets her feel the satisfactions of eating the tangerine. In her dance of the Great Hunger and her story of having been trapped in the well, she had been looking upward, toward something she feels the lack of; to convince herself of the nonexistence of this something, hence the fullness of all, she performs the pantomime. Yet Haemi is not entirely able to become the Great Hunger. She wants the immediate satisfactions, whether that be through buying things she cannot afford (hence the credit card debt), having sex with Jong-su, or going on expensive dates with Ben. The scene of her Great Hunger dance juxtaposes painfully with her subsequent dancing at the nightclub.

And perhaps no one expects of her anything like the nobleness of the Great Hunger. Ben does not take seriously the spurts of confessions about her emptiness and loneliness nor her fascination with the Great Hunger. When she once again performs the ritualistic dance of the Great Hunger during the sunset at Jong-su’s childhood home, this time with her tops off, all Jong-su notices is her nakedness, the fact that she takes clothes off so easily in front of man. He does so when in fact the solemnity of the moment, the sublimity of that scene, the drumming beat undergirding the whole scene fail to convey to us any idea that her nakedness should be a cause for embarrassment. Jong-su's jealous comment, then, comes across starker than ever.

The Character of Ben and Jong-Su

Why did I automatically assume Ben as the Great Hunger and Jong-Su the Little Hunger? Perhaps because Haemi takes them to be? 

Ben comes off as mysterious, a figure akin to Gatsby. No one knows what he does; yet he seems like he got everything figured out. Money. Women. Friends. And perhaps some philosophy about life. In fact, his behaviors are so well couched in words of confidence and certainty that it seems easier to mistake Ben as the Great Hunger. The 21st-century, Korean-American kind. However, Ben is someone who lives only for the immediate pleasures, for those sensations that remind him that he is alive. Burning greenhouses (or “greenhouses”) every few months or so brings him such pleasures; it is his “hobby.” Just for those moments of pure sensation, he lives; and since the sensations are temporary, he repeats those moments over and over again. It does not matter the legal or moral consequences, as long as he feels alive. He is a character closer to the Little Hunger, who hungers for these immediacies.

Jong-Su, on the other hand, first seems like the Little Hunger. He perhaps hungers for Haemi, but not necessarily physically. He says to Ben that he loves Haemi (to which Ben just smirks). But ultimately he is the character closest to the Great Hunger in that he searches for more. More than the immediate sensations. More than the immediately apparent. He seeks to understand what is going on: Ben, Haemi, his father, and himself. He is the only one who takes Haemi’s words seriously. He believes in her story about how she fell into a well even when her family would not. And he seeks to understand it. He would be able to write when he can understand all this, but, as he tells Ben, he cannot understand so nor can he write anything. The Great Hunger may not have the answers; in fact, he is the one who hungers for meaning, not one who has found it. Jong-su hungers for understanding, for resolution, for meaning. Yet he only finds that the understanding and the resolution lead him toward violence. 

Watch “Burning”: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7282468/ 

Written 2 August 2024

HL from NC, U.S.A.