Bong Joon Ho: Philosopher and Filmmaker

With the release of Parasite (2019), winner of the Palme d’Or and an Academy Award for Best Picture, the South Korean director Bong Joon Ho secured his place as one of his generation’s leading filmmakers. While scholars and critics have long appreciated his penetrating critique of Korean society and global capitalism, this book presents the first cohesive philosophical analysis of his first seven feature-length films. It argues that Bong’s cinema not only engages with philosophy, but is radically philosophical.
Writing as an intimate outsider to Korea, a ＂resident alien＂ married into a Korean family, and teaching at Bong’s own alma mater, Anthony Curtis Adler explores Bong’s visionary and re-visionary treatment of spatiality, temporality, myth, memory, genre, and the semiotics of monstrosity.

Adler argues that for Bong Joon Ho, cinema doubles the ambiguity of philosophy, presenting the aesthetic means to represent anarchic motions and movements. While it can capture and contain them, subordinating them to an overarching order, it can also free them to appear in their anarchy. From the humble apartment building of Barking Dogs Never Bite to the train in Snowpiercer and Parasite’s mansion, Bong’s films stage interior spaces as representations of a cinematic apparatus that is, ambiguously, site of both imprisonment and liberation.

Even while confronting globalism head-on, Bong’s films never cease to engage with the specific challenges faced by modern Korea, and, above all, the struggle of the Korean people for political representation and economic justice.

Anthony Curtis Adler is a professor of German and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, South Korea. His most recent books include Celebricities: Media Culture and the Phenomenology of Gadget Commodity Life (2016), and Politics and Truth in Hölderlin: ’Hyperion’ and the Choreographic Project of Modernity (2021).