Bong Joon-ho's Mother (2009) and Okja (2017)

During this circuit breaker period, we can finally catch up on shows and awesome films! Last week, I watched Okja and this week I watched Mother. Both were so damn good! So I'm going to review them in the same post since they were made by the same director. One left me in tears and one left me feeling mentally exhausted. Even though they are pretty different films, both made me feel that society is rather screwed up.

Okja (2017)

My friend Michelle recommended this movie to me and my friends while we were chatting on Zoom. She warned that after watching this movie, you might not wanna eat pork anymore.

Basically, Okja is the name of a genetically modified super-pig that was created by a company called Mirando Corporation, headed by Lucy Mirando. We are introduced to her in the first scene and she looks like Willy Wonka all dressed in white. She appears in front of press to explain her plans for the super-pigs that are supposedly going to revolutionize the industry. It sounds too good to be true and it is: she's pretending that everything is done naturally but it is all a lie. The pigs are test subjects and they were created in a laboratory. When Okja was recaptured, they attempted to force her to mate (probably weren't successful), tortured her, and got a chunk of meat from her for taste tests. Ugh.

That already says a lot about big businesses, the food industry and capitalism in general. So on the other side, we have the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), which isn't a made up company like Mirando. IRL, they have been criticised for being violent terrorists who break the law in the name of helping animals. I'm not familiar with the work they do, but well, they weren't portrayed as the good guys either. (There's always a lot of grey area in Bong Joon-ho's films, which is why they are so popular)

Anyway, the protagonist of the film is Mija, a girl who lives with her grandfather on a farm, which is situated in the mountains. She's extremely close to Okja and the pig even saved her life instead of letting her fall from a cliff. Then in comes folks from the Mirando Corporation, including a crazy celebrity slash zoologist called Dr. Johnny Wilcox, played by none other than Jake Gyllenhaal. They inspect Okja and whisk her off to New York because she's the biggest pig and therefore the winner of the super-pig competition Lucy came up with ten years ago! When asked about his methods, grandpa said he just let her roam around freely. Free-range pork ftw!

Anyway, Mija leaves home and tries to get Okja back at all costs. As a character, she is portrayed to be an innocent girl who doesn't know what awaits her in the real world. It is easy to root for her because she just wants her pet pig back. It is her best friend and they grew up together! 

When the ALF swoop in to help her, they propose letting Okja get recaptured so that they can plant a camera on her and get videos of what really goes on in Mirando's facility. Jay, the leader, asks for her permission to go ahead with their mission - but she flatly declines and says that Okja should go home with her. This is no surprise. As mentioned earlier, Mija's goal is simple: get the pig and go home! But the Korean dude, K, mistranslates this on purpose and claims that she allows it.

On the other side, Lucy Mirando is pissed that the pig escaped in the first place. Their company would definitely suffer, so it is decided that they fly Mija to New York to see Okja in order to pretend that they actually care about her and her pig. They want to save the company from this PR disaster. Mija has not much of a choice but to go along with both the ALF and Mirando's plans. Even though none of this was surprising, it really irked me to see that all these adults were taking advantage of a young girl's wishes.

Mija and Okja are to meet on stage at a parade organised by Mirando - basically a huge marketing campaign. All hell breaks loose when the ALF reveals their presence by showing everyone a video of Oka being tortured. The members of the ALF try to help recapture Okja but most of them are arrested, except Jay and K. Thankfully, Jay insists on helping Mija and they drive to the slaughterhouse. It is a huge place and we immediately see a huge number of super-pigs kept in fences. Mija and the other two guys search for Okja desperately.

The scariest part of the movie is when Mija, in her search, realises that Okja is in the line of pigs headed up the ramp into the slaughterhouse. She goes in and sees meat hanging from above and blood dripping to the floor. Most of us don't wanna see how our food is being processed. We don't wanna know if it was genetically modified. Like what Nancy Mirando said when she took over from her twin sister Lucy: if it's cheap, they'll eat it. 

Thankfully, the person who is about to kill Okja stops when Mija shows up with a photograph of her and her pig. But Nancy appears too, all Cruella-De-Vil like, with her henchmen holding Jay and K back. She still intends to slaughter the pig because it is her property. Mija only convinces her to let Okja go when she buys Oka using the golden pig that her grandfather had given her as a present. Ugh. Typical.

The walk out of the slaughterhouse is basically the saddest part of the movie. Before this scene, there were plenty of jokes and funny moments in the movie. We met larger-than-life, comical characters like Lucy and Dr Johnny Wilcox (who both seem to have serious mental health issues by the way) and hilarious ALF members, including that one guy who doesn't eat much because he doesn't want to leave a carbon footprint on earth. It is clear that the director is making fun of vegans, animal rights activists, and greedy capitalists who take things to the extreme.

Mija walking Okja out of the slaughterhouse should be considered a victory. She finally got what she wanted. But it is not a victory at all and this was where I started crying. And no, I didn't just tear up. I cried until my nose was red. As she was escorted out, the other pigs were crying out in fear and in pain as they continued the killings. And unlike in other kid-friendly movies where the animals all get busted out of their cages and set free (see Rio 2011), this movie is way more realistic and that doesn't happen even if the evil villains seem one-dimensional and cartoon-ish. 

This scene is made sadder when two pigs, clearly a mother pig and a father pig, push their baby pig towards Okja to save it from its doom. Okja keeps the little one in her mouth and they somehow manage to smuggle the extra pig all the way back to South Korea. The ending may seem like a happy one since Okja is reunited with Mija and they are seen hanging out in the countryside again with the piglet. Yet it is anything but. Mija has been exposed to the cruel world out there but does not have the power to change things. Everything goes on as usual. 

I think having Mija as the young and innocent protagonist makes a lot of sense. Most of us can relate to the love she has for Okja, maybe because we are animal lovers and we have pets of our own. And most of us, at the back of our minds, know that animals are abused but we can't do much about it either. All we can do is to protect our own.

Mother (2009)

This movie is much, much darker than Okja. We are introduced to the main characters: a mother who lives with her intellectually-disabled son. It is never really specified what disability Do-joon has, but he is called a "retard" and an "idiot" throughout the movie, which gets him all riled up. He seems like an innocent boy who is simply slow and forgetful. He listens to his mom but is having a bit of a rebellious teenage phase. They are poor but they get by in their small neighbourhood. But then, a murder takes place and he's blamed for it, so his mother investigates and tries to clear his name.

For most of the film, we are led to believe that Do-joon is innocent. He was drunk when he followed the girl down that empty path and he did not mean to harm her in any way. With this notion of innocence firmly attached in our minds, we root for Do-joon's mother as she conducts her own investigation. At first the mother (and therefore the audience) thinks that the murder was committed by his friend, Jin-tae, who is a bad influence. When she's wrong, she gets a lawyer (an asshole whom she fires later), asks other women about the dead girl (Moon Ah-jung) when she gives them acupuncture, and bribes kids with coins for information as well.

We continue rooting for the mother when she and Jin-tae aggressively question some asshole punks about Ah-jung, who sounded like the village slut because she had sex with many guys and took compromising pictures of them, which she keeps in her precious phone. The boys were out looking for the phone but no one knows where it is. We root for her when she shows the pictures to Do-joon who's in jail, and he finally remembers an old guy whom he saw in the abandoned building who might be the murderer. Then, the movie reaches its climax when the mother enters the old dude's house, pretending to be someone from a charitable organisation who gives free acupuncture services.

This is when the plot twist happens. I did not see it coming at all, which is why I found it so brilliant: the old junk collector (or garung kuni) was hoping that acupuncture would allow him to forget a traumatising scene that he had witnessed. He unwittingly tells the mother what he had seen the night of the murder. The girl, creeped out by Do-joon, throws a rock in his direction and it lands at his feet. She calls him a retard. He throws the rock back and he hits her in the head. She bleeds. He carries her up to the roof and leaves her there to die.

The mother is shocked to learn that her son is actually a murderer. She says that Do-joon might be released, so the old man picks up the phone in order to tell the police what he had witnessed. But it's too late: he gets clobbered to death with a large metal tool and his house gets burned down. The mother has become a murderer. Her goal and intention is still to save her son and get him out of jail, but there is a huge difference between getting an innocent man off death row, and letting a murderer get out of jail scot-free.

As a result of this scene, the audience has to re-evaluate the way they perceive this mother. Looking back, I realise that I was completely wrong about her. We actually don't know much about the mother. Sure, we know what she does for a living and that she sleeps next to her son at night, but apart from that, we don't know who she really is. We don't even know her name!

It can be inferred that the mother is actually someone who is or used to be mentally ill and once had suicidal thoughts. This is evident when it is revealed that she once tried to poison Do-joon and herself with insecticide when he was five. When Do-joon confronts her about it, she goes completely off the rails and screams. She asks if she's allowed to perform acupuncture on him to make him forget about the incident, but obviously she can't. This makes me think that she was responsible for Do-joon's intellectual disability. It is unclear whether or not he was born with a disability, but consuming insecticide might have made it worse. And mum's acupuncture method might have made him the forgetful person he is as well.

Another major theme in the movie is the idea that society and the systems in place have failed us. At first, you'd think that the system has failed because the police had Do-joon, someone with an intellectual disability, sign a confession for a crime he didn't commit because he later told his mother that he didn't do it. However, at the end, the system did fail because Do-joon, the murderer is released and the police captured someone called Crazy JP, who was mentioned by some kids the mother questioned earlier and said to be Ah-jung's boyfriend who escaped from a sanatorium. They arrested him as they found her blood on his shirt or something. Crazy JP said she had a nose bleed, and we know that this is probably true because in a flashback, they showed Ah-jung and her friend entering a printing shop for some photos and when she had a nose bleed, her friend was like, "Not again!"

Apart from the police failing to catch the right criminal, lawyers are seen as jerks who have no time to sit down for a chat but have all the time in the world to drink and have fun with hostesses at a seedy karaoke place. The old junk collector was an asshole too: he told the mother about the murder that he had witnessed but he did not rush to Ah-jung's aid when Do-joon, the creepy drunk dude, was following her. He left out the actual reason why he was in the abandoned house in the first place: to meet Ah-jung and have sex with her like they had planned, which was why his picture was in her phone and why he had brought rice for her as payment. He could have prevented a murder or called an ambulance in time! 

Lastly, society has failed to look out for those who live on the margins. The mother visits Crazy JP and cries out of guilt when she realises that he has no family to look out for him. The system simply swapped someone out with an intellectual disability for another, since it's easy to pin the blame on them. The police concluded that Crazy JP tried to rape Ah-jung because didn't believe that Ah-jung would have consensual sex with him either. It is also clear that the mother is poor but resourceful enough to get enough money for the lawyer, and to pay Jin-tae to help with her investigation. Ah-jung's family lived on the margins too. Ah-jung had to take care of her grandmother, who was described as a "crazy old lady who walked around with rice wine". This also explains why she was known as the "rice cake girl" because she sold her body for rice and brought it home for her grandmother. Instead of helping her family out, society (or in this case men) sexually abused her, which is probably why she kept pictures of them for her own protection. 

Both families lack a father figure as well, which puts them at a disadvantage since we live in a patriarchal society. Do-joon's masculinity is also questioned by Ah-jung, and Do-joon seems rather hung up on the fact that he has not had sex with a girl before.

A scene that was rather strange was when Do-joon went back home to sleep next to his mother, but he placed a hand on her boob and she didn't mind. It was a scene pretty early on and I didn't think much about it but I found it weird. After the movie, I realise that this symbolises their unhealthy relationship. When the mother went off the rails, she screamed, "I was going to kill both of us! You and me are one!" 

This is an incredibly unhealthy way of thinking. You are your own person. Some parents think that what their child does reflects who they are. Sure, sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. But you can't always be responsible for them and protect them forever. In this case, perhaps the mother did teach her son to be violent. She has violent tendencies of her own and her son exhibits those tendencies too. Whenever someone calls him a "retard", he lunges at them and lashes out. He even killed Ah-jung for saying that. When he gets beaten up in jail, she tells him off and he retorts that she was the one who told him to hit people if they bullied him. However, two wrongs don't make a right. He should've realised that name-calling shouldn't warrant attention, but his overprotective mother might have prevented him from learning this lesson earlier in life.

The mother's actions could also be interpreted as self-serving. Perhaps when Do-joon was diagnosed with a disability, people in their small town said that it might be heredity and thus she might have also been labelled as a "retard". She doesn't want an additional stigma: to be seen as the mother of a retard AND a murderer. She doesn't want to others to think that she had not taught him well. She tells everyone that her son wouldn't hurt a fly, because that is also how she wants society to see her: as an innocent old lady who wouldn't harm others. But when the idealistic image that she has of her son is shattered, she couldn't handle the truth and in that moment, decided to stoop to his level and also become a murderer - because they are one. It is an extremely unhealthy symbiotic relationship, and others have pointed out that this is similar to Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho.

Later, Do-joon gets out of jail and his friends pick him up. They stop by the junk collector's blackened and burnt house to see if they'll find anything interesting. Do-joon finds his mother's acupuncture kit and returns it to her. Understandably, she is shocked to see her charred metal box because it is evidence that she was there. Do-joon tells her to "be careful" and I think he doesn't realise that the phrase could mean two things. It could be an innocent reminder to be careful and not leave your stuff lying around, or could be an insidious way of saying that he suspects she killed the old man and she should be careful not to leave evidence behind. Ultimately, it sounds like the former, but the mother still freaks out.

The importance of one's memory features in the film heavily. The characters in the film want to forget about the bad things that have happened as mentioned earlier through the use of acupuncture. But Do-joon's mother has to press her son to remember what he had done the night of the murder. This is a problem right from the start, when his friend kicked down a car's side mirror but claims that Do-joon did it. Do-joon didn't deny it and so his mother had to compensate for the damage caused to the car. In the film, we also see Do-joon walking around drunk but the scene cuts back to how he got home and fell asleep, implying that he had forgotten what had happened in between.

When Do-joon got out of jail and returned home to eat with his mother, he said that perhaps the killer left the body on the roof so that everyone in town would be able to see her and get help. He says this so innocently and doesn't realise that he's justifying his own actions. This was what the police were baffled about as well. But Do-joon doesn't remember committing the crime just like how it took him years for him to remember about his mother poisoning him. These traumatic episodes are blocked out by his brain.

At the end, when the mother boards a bus that is meant take parents out on a trip and relax, she decided to use acupuncture to forget the bad stuff and joins the middle-aged ladies who are dancing in the bus. The film starts with the mother dancing in the field and ends with her dancing in the bus. It is supposed to be a happy dance or maybe even a victory dance. A dance of freedom. But since the audience knows the truth, watching her dance is unsettling.

The film is meant to be dark and disturbing. It can be argued that everything the mother does (poisoning her son, killing a man etc) is all for the sake of her child. She will go to great lengths just to ensure that her son is safely out of jail, whether he committed the crime or not. Do you agree with her methods? Would you do the same if you were in her shoes? Would you clean up after your child's mess like the mother did when she tried to cover up the Do-joon's pee on the floor?

Personally, I wouldn't. I think that the right thing to do would be to bring her own child to justice. You have to let go. You can't protect your child forever. Let him bear the responsibility of his actions, whatever they may be. But then again, I'm no mother, so what do I know?