posttechnodystopia

[posttechnodystopia]

Oldboy was a Warning of Today's Big Data Dystopian Future

I thought I would finish today by showing stills from one of my favorite arthouse movies of the 21st century. A disclaimer, Oldboy is not my favorite arthouse movie. Nor is it my favorite Chanwook Park movie. One of these days I'll send him up in a subsequent post.

2003

For those of you who do not know, Oldboy is the story of a scoundrel named Oh Dae Su who is kidnapped without warning and without knowledge of who his captor is.

Struggling to cope with his captivity for fifteen years, he is suddenly released with nothing but the obsessions that kept him alive--Revenge against the person who held him captive, and Curiosity as to why he was kidnapped.

But freedom becomes complicated for Oh Dae Su when he realizes events are being manipulated around him. The phone he is given mysteriously belongs to his captor. The clothes are not his. And he begins to suspect the young woman who decides to take him in.

There is a ton going on in this complex plot. Oh Dae Su does not know what he did to cause his captivity, something all private citizens should fear about the complex legal and digital world that makes decisions for us.

Multiple spends most of his time in captivity practicing to fight his captors, and preparing his escape. We only find out halfway through the film that every action he took was under constant surveillance. His efforts would have been for nothing. He was as powerless in the confines of his cell as he was in the real world.

Oh Dae Su even fails in captivity to take his own life. He admits, while trying to dig through a wall, that even if he falls to his death he will be free. Each time he is rescued from his attempt at self harm.

All of this is to say, a theme of totalitarian control and surveillance runs throughout Oldboy. Even the clothes he wears have been given to him by his abductor, and they are loaded with bugs so that they can know everything he says and does.

Even Oh's decisions are in doubt as he comes to question whether he has been either drugged or hypnotized.

The environment in Oldboy resembles today's consumer reality. Our phones that we use every minute collect and store personal data that is used to market products to us. Worse, that data is subsequently used to direct product marketing so that the things we want are conditioned into us. Even the clothes we wear and the food we eat are someone else's choice.

So was Chanwook Park trying to warn us about the nightmare of today from 22 years ago?

Not exactly. A lot has been explained about Park's motivations while making Oldboy, more than I have even read.

Chanwook Park has said that Oldboy was only partly an adaptation of the source graphic novel by Garon Tsuchiya. On a deeper level, Park has acknowledged that he meant to retell the play Oedipus Rex using the hypnosis motif that Tsuchiya employed in the manga.

But Park also acknowledged his influences were modern and postmodern novels, including the works of Franz Kafka.

Franz Kafka's writings are surreal dark comedies, but they are presented with bleak cynicism for the social bureaucracy of law which was his first vocation.

It follows that Chanwook Park did not write the script for Oldboy thinking of the risks modern technology would pose to us. Instead, he was writing about character motivations that were centuries old.

We learn by the end of Oldboy that his captor had his own plan for revenge against Oh Dae Su for some past wrong. But the unfolding of his revenge plot could be seen as the movie's only flaw, in that is seems nihilistic and purposeless. By the end, the villain gets nothing out of it and still suffers due to his previous, tragic loss.

The villain's revenge is entirely nihilistic.

This was Chanwook Park's stated intent for the revenge theme in Oldboy. But it is also a comment on the emptiness of totalitarianism, whether state sponsored or corporate. While it is all dangerous, in the end the impulse to dominate others is stale and hollow for the perpetrator of these violations.

There is much more to be said about Chanwook Park's filmography in all its richness. But for the topic of this blog post, the similarity between the movie and reality comes essentially from the fact that people have had the same dark motives since before the conception of Big Data.

There is something more to be said about how Oldboy, and the filmography of Nora Ephron, undermine some of the essential theories of postmodernism by Jean Baudrillard. But that is for another day.