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Memories of Murder
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López Imitation Serial killer movies have always been obsessed with the patterns formed by the act of imitation. The mysterious killers imitate their own previous murders (or those of their idols), and the way of staging the “scene of the crime” forms a “signature”. (Metaphors from the arts flood in already!) Those copycats who eagerly join in and perpetuate the imitation game make the case exponentially harder for investigators to sort out and solve. In Bong Joon-ho’s second feature, Memories of Murder, imitation, or mimicry, extends in every possible direction. A child imitates the words and gestures of a cop; a mentally disabled man mimics the gestures of the crime; a guy out for a vicarious sexual thrill wears the coloured underwear found on the victims. Contamination Early in Bong’s film, we see a crime scene overrun by police, photographers, onlookers; in investigative parlance, the site has been well and truly “contaminated”. Later, evidence will be deliberately contaminated – meddled with, and even wholly fabricated. Yet another kind of semantic contamination structures the plot and its central characters: at the start, Park (Song Kang-ho) and Seo (Kim Sang-kyung) stand for two entirely different modes of investigation. But, in the course of the story, they influence each other to the extent of trading places. Dissolution Memories of Murder is, above all, about the corrosive effects of passing time – and how time renders an already ambiguous, uncertain serial murder case even less fathomable and detectable (as also in David Fincher’s best film, Zodiac [2006]). Like in the work of one of his masters, Billy Wilder, Bong unfolds the true themes of each of his films slowly – returning us, at the end of Memories of Murder (as in Mother, 2009), to the exact same spot – but with our understanding of what is at stake, and what has vanished, now considerably deepened. This brief text on Memories of Murder was written to accompany our more elaborate audiovisual essay, Imitation/Contamination/Dissolution (2016), which can be purchased as part of our Audiovisual Essay Collection Vol. 2: Close Analysis here. MORE Bong Joon-ho: The Host, Barking Dogs Never Bite © Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin July 2016 |
/ Sarinui Chueok, Bong Joon-ho, South Korea, 2003)
