MetaKnigel If the Rule is Broken–Break It.

The Kangaroo Panopticon

Why do I like Park Chan-wook’s Korean film, Oldboy, you ask? Why, the reason I like Oldboy is because I long to punish my enemies. Not only do I want to tit their tat, but also to utterly annihilate their entire existence while ruining everything they love. If they love nothing? Then I want to give them love only to violate it while blossoming. My enemies should not only suffer physically, but should also endure every possible psychological torture procurable. I want my adversaries to be at the peak of their hopes before kicking down their sandcastles. Before you indignantly judge me, you must remember that when I say “I”, you know that it means “we”: for beneath all of our politeness, beneath all of our reservations, linger spiteful, vindictive thoughts. Speak for myself? No, I will speak for all of us.

Elucidating this idea, Russell Roberts, the director of Vancouver, Canada’s Shakespearian Bard on the Beach play, Titus Andronicus, defends the choice of using gratuitous fake blood instead of “arty-farty” red ribbons:

“We’re very inhuman, we human beings. I mean, look what’s happening in Afghanistan, in Baghdad, in Somalia. It has happened since day one. This is no more violent or horrible than what’s going on around the globe right now. Titus has been catalogued as a problem play, but I think that the problem—if there’s a problem—is that we don’t like to have that mirror put up to us.”

The mirror of which Roberts speaks is the same mirror that Park puts up to us when he immerses viewers into the world of a man as an insect under glass. In Oldboy, Oh Dae-su unwittingly draws the attention of Lee Woo-jin who has enough wealth and motivation to become an omniscient, overbearing God in Dae-su’s life. Woo-jin’s explains his vengeance to Dae-su by saying: "Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink as the same," meaning that even the most frivolous of deeds may bring about the same wrath meant for more serious acts. Petty and insignificant causes lead to severe overreactions.

In one of his interviews, Park says: "Basically, I'm throwing out the question 'When is such violence justified?' To get that question to touch the audience physically and directly - that's what my goal is. In the experience of watching my film, I don't want the viewer to stop at the mental or the intellectual. I want them to feel my work physically.” When we watch the film, we feel Dae-su’s anxiety. When Dae-su feels most powerful, we see even his best attempts are futile. Woo-jin knows Dae-su completely and can not only predict Dae-su’s actions, but can also get deep inside of Dae-su’s mind to control his very thoughts. Woo-jin is the scholar studying Dae-su.

We can taste the omnipotence of God. Our voyeuristic tendencies, too, have grown well beyond fictional films and into peeping in on real lives. Our computer monitors are windows into the secret lives of others that we not only watch, but also play like interactive games.

Knowing of my own secret thoughts of revenge, knowing the little scenarios I play out in my head, I realise that our fear of becoming stereotypical paranoid freaks has left us too vulnerable. We simply aren’t as paranoid as we should be. And because we are scared of sharing our paranoia, a false sense of security has left us open to sudden and shocking intrusions into our lives. We tell ourselves that it would never happen to us, yet we never know when someone—some stranger—will notice us. Still, people are usually watching us. They have similar tendencies to us albeit sometimes with a little less hesitation for executing their fantasies. Even for ourselves, we find our urges overrule our better thoughts leaving our impulses to control our actions. When we know we should simply ignore some slight, we instead find ourselves with pyrrhic victories.

Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century social theorist and utilitarian advocate, proposed an institutional building that could allow an observer watch over all inmates without them knowing when and if they were being observed. This paranoid exhibitionist’s wet dream, known as a panopticon, was a way of keeping power not only over an inmate’s body, but also their mind. While Bentham conceived the panopticon as an application for hospitals, schools, poorhouses, and madhouses, he intended prisons to adopt such a system. The coeval government continuously strung along poor, bitter Bentham who had little success in building his prisons, but parts of his scheme have been realised. We see his idea in the guise of the ubiquity of not only CCTV cameras, but also the prevalence of public and private surveillance equipment such as camera phones, video recording equipment, tracking devices, and facial recognition software. With the increasing popularity of the Internet, we not only have to worry about an authoritarian “Big Brother” watching over us, but also about an anonymous ever watchful mob that has unknown, ever-changing intentions. Why would someone destroy our lives? Why not? It’s fun.

While we are hastily moving into a panopticonal society, we have not yet dealt with our need for vengeance. We do not simply want to correct injustices and prevent them from happening. Rather, we want to punish those responsible for perceived infractions. We want to go over and beyond mere justice. While Park’s vengeance trilogy criticises revenge, critics condemn Park for seemingly advocating revenge through glamorisation; however, Park refutes this claim: “living without hate for people is almost impossible. There is nothing wrong with fantasizing about revenge. You can have that feeling. You just shouldn't act on it”.  According to Park, not only is there nothing wrong with fantasizing about revenge, but also depicting revenge in films may help to diminish it. This may be true, yet our need for vengeance still lingers. No matter what clothes we wear, and no matter which niceties we hide behind, we are still animals. We are animals that can use keyboards and Internet connections.

Some of us animals perform dastardly deeds such as torturing and killing other cuter, fluffier animals. One such animal under the alias Huang siu siu, earned 100 yuan a pop for each bunny she crushed. Her sponsors were a group who paid cute girls to fill the desires of “Crushfetishists”. Sickened and repulsed, we want retribution. Yet, what can we other animals do about such cruelty?

Well, this is the age of Internet vigilantism and the Chinese Internet phenomenon known as the “human flesh search engine.” We now have the means to catch bunny-crushers as well as other deviants. Mary Bale, the woman who “thought it would be funny” to dump a cat in a trash bin, was one of these animals caught on a CCTV and then hunted by a fleshmob of concerned citizens. Justice was served and the kitty was saved.

While it has, in the past, usually been those in charge that have been the eye in the sky, commoners now have the opportunity to watch the watchers. Police officers such as Patrick Pogan, who body-slammed an innocent cyclist then charged the cyclist with assault, can now be brought to justice for abusing power. Our new technological toys are invaluable for catching anti-social activities.

Yet, while we can use our technological tools to reveal otherwise hidden corruption, violence, and other transgressions, there are those who abuse these tools. As with other mobs, these vigilante collectives run kangaroo courts that may go beyond the justice that any court would normally dish out or even indict the wrong people. Fleshmobs can completely ruin people’s lives for petty offenses: misdemeanours become capital offenses.

Even with the smallest amounts of personal data the massive human collaboration can dig up schools, workplaces, contact information, financial records, and even residences. They make the anonymous onymous and once this happens a faceless army sends out hatemail, cyber-attacks, death threats, to name but a few. We can never face our accusers. They can attack the individual, or even those in their social network from employers to loved ones. The public shaming is often endless and without boundaries. This is witch-hunting and the Spanish Inquisition in modern form. Think about it: it takes one individual to read some misinformation about a supposed crime, become irrationally infuriated, and then harass from afar. What are you going to do? Call the cops?

How can we deal with such overwhelming paranoia and fear from not only the unpredictable nature of others, but also ourselves? There are laws, but laws mainly restrict behaviour. How do we dig into the hidden depths of our consciousness to reveal the creatures that hate to be looked at? Perhaps art is one safe vehicle of exploration. In another interview, Park says:

“With the development of civilization and the rise in education levels, people have had to hide their rage, hate and grudges deep within them. But this does not mean that these emotions go away. As relationships become more and more intricate, the rage only grows more and more. While modern society is burdening the individual with a growing sense of rage, the outlets through which people can release their rage are becoming narrower. This is an unhealthy situation, and it's probably why art exists. In reality, however, the vengeances represented in my movies are not actual vengeances. They are merely the transferring of a guilty conscience. My films are stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves. Therefore, rather than movies purporting to be of revenge, it would be more accurate to see my films as ones stressing morality, with guilty consciences as the core subject matter. The constantly recurring theme is the guilty conscience. Because they are always conscious of and obsessed with their wrongdoings, which are committed because they are inherently unavoidable in life, my characters are fundamentally good people. The fact that people have to resort to another type of violence in order to subjugate their initial guilty consciences is the most basic quality of tragedy characteristic in my movies thus far.”

As Park says, our relationships are becoming ever more intricate, and as they do so, we need to find ways to vent our rage. Within the panopticon, we are further distanced from others and our empathy is less likely to be triggered. On the battlefield soldiers need special conditioning to make them actually shoot other humans; however, when the same empathetic soldier is separated through technology, be it a plane or computer monitor, the adversary ceases to be human and is instead some blip, some object. The same goes for us behind our computer screens. People’s lives aren’t lives at all. Rather they are text and moving images. We are usually good people, but by othering others they become non-human, so we can be inhumane. We are negotiating contemporary norms, but we still have guilty consciences: we all have mental shitlists of those who have wronged us. Although we might not have acted out our scripts, we have roleplayed them enough in our minds that they have become a part of our personality. We rehearse what we will do next time since we could not do it last time. Never again we say, then we look for opportunities that resemble that situation. Without some sort of release, such as through art, our guilt leads us to vengeful acts. We might want to smash the mirror when it is held up to us, but sometimes we need to look straight into the eyes of the doppelgänger that looks back at us and have an actual discussion before they have enough power to take control.