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Kingdom
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Experts say that springtime will kill the virus, but as far as we know
it may boost it. We know almost nothing about the virus, how can we know what
temperature it prefers?
– Bifo, “Diary of the Psycho-Deflation”, entry of 2 March 2020 (1)
The plague in Kingdom (two seasons so far, with a feature-length spin-off special Ashin of the North in 2021) is a
shape-shifting phenomenon; its characteristics seem to diversify and become
more complex as the series proceeds. It is established early on in the
narrative that the plague is harvested from a lovely looking flower located in
a “Frozen Valley” – but which valley is that, where is it? The flower’s
immediate use, as the credit sequence shows us, is to raise the dead – in this
case, a dead King circa the year 1600.
But how does this zombiefication process (according to
the English subtitles, at least, this popular word zombie never occurs in the series) lead to the condition of a
plague? We know all too well as global citizens of the 2020s that it is hard to
contain such phenomena. A key turning-point in the story comes when a large
group of hungry peasants cannibalistically feast on a cooked-up, infected
corpse – and that turns them into a horde of mindless flesh-eaters. I shall
shortly return to their pack-characteristics.
Later – in splendid sequences involving water, either
being immersed under surface-level in a bath or drowning in a river – we
discover it is all a matter of virus-carrying worms in the human body. Bodies,
not too seriously affected for too long, can expel these worms; but if these
little slithery creatures reach your brain, forget it. Then, all immunity is
shot, done for, over!
You can see, already, how Kingdom has managed, fortuitously or spookily, to resonate with our
present-day condition …
Expert medical/scientific observations of the ongoing
plague are made – especially by Seo-bi (Bae Doona), who carries the field diary
of her master. She notices irregularities, fluctuations, enigmas in the spread
and development – the evolution? – of the plague-virus. Why are some people
affected and others not? Do the flesh-eaters retreat during the hours of
daylight (as in vampire mythology), or is it, in fact, a question of
temperature (recall Bifo’s anguish about seasonal change quoted above)? What
about the poor, innocent baby who becomes such a central part – and stake –
in the conspiratorial power-games of this Royal Palace; how did he survive
being bitten by a huge pack of zombies?
Seo-bi keeps carrying around and returning to that
pretty flower with purple leaves: scrutinising its parts, its elements, its
spots, its transformable pieces. As we often hear in Kingdom, there is “still a secret” lurking behind this entire mess,
and the final shot of Season 2 tantalises us with a new and unknown trail to
follow in the future (or in the past) …
Once they have been fully transformed from human to
post-human – thus rendering them unambiguously available for slaughter, no
matter who they previously were, peasant or royalty – just how do the zombies
of Kingdom behave? With a nod to
popular cultural phenomena like The
Walking Dead (2010 onwards), they run very quickly towards any whiff or sight of human blood. No more slow shuffling
along like in the good old monster-movie days, or even in Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (2019)! Kingdom is truly keyed to the accelerationist tendencies of our time. These zombies work fast, leaving no time for Tilda
Swinton’s graceful warrior moves with a samurai sword in the Jarmusch film.
Keeping them at bay, when they are lunging for you, is hyper-stressful: another
aspect of being part of a labour force in the 21st century.
These zombies run in a rat-pack, but with absolutely
no sense of (as we say today) social
distance or (as we said yesterday) personal
space. They just surge forward until they lock on to flesh and begin eating.
There is no intelligence in them, only instinct; if they run over a hole, they
will fall into it; if they slide down a slanted roof, they are unable to catch
on to anything; if they slip in mud and start toppling over one another, they
will just pile up and flail around until they can land back on their bare feet.
They cannot be reasoned with and, on this brute level
of each individual zombie existence, they do not evolve – not for this mass is there the possibility of forming a
collective, networked revolutionary consciousness, as so thrillingly happens in
that most radical of zombie movies, George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), or for the worker-ants in Saul Bass’ fantastique classic Phase IV (1974), another prescient film for our time.
However, when it comes to killing these beasts, one precept
remains relatively classical: a stake driven through the heart is useless, but
gruesome decapitation is the single, sure method of dispatching them to Zombie
Hell. Kingdom milks many thrilling
and sometimes comical moments from these severed heads, either on the ground or
flying through mid-air – and one of them, at the start of Episode 3 of Season
2, even returns, in backwards motion, onto the body it was severed from, in
order to be part of an explanatory flashback. Not a bad digital-film-magic trick!
There is another kind of transition from classicism to
something more modern in the different stylistic treatments of Seasons 1 &
2. The entire series, so far, has been scripted by Kim Eun-hee (based on her
and Yang Kyung’s webcomic The Kingdom of
the Gods, which started in 2011); but while Season 1 is directed solely by Kim
Seong-hun, Season 2 is handled (except for Episode 1) by Park In-je. (Kim
returns for Ashin of the North.) Kim’s
approach is solid, professional, formal in a way that is reminiscent of the historical dramas made by Zhang Yimou (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991) or Chen Kaige (The Emperor and the Assassin, 1999), with a more distant
allusion to the work of Kenji Mizoguchi (The
47 Ronin, 1941).
So, in Season 1, there are many frontal framings that
place static characters, seated or bowing, within the imposing, strict lines of
palatial architecture. Atop that, there are glossy, spectacular shots recalling
contemporary American blockbusters: vistas captured by drone cameras, or
constant tracking shots that follow characters as they enter running up stairs,
through archways, along tight laneways … Kim leans a little too heavily (for my
taste) on elements of comic relief, as with the scenes involving the nervy,
cowardly Cho Beom-pal (Jeon Seok-ho) and his unrequited attraction to Seo-bi,
or the early banter between the Crown Prince Lee Chang (Ju Ji-hoon) and his
personal guard, Mu-Yeong (Kim Sang-ho).
Park, however, takes another approach. Relying less on
humour and sentimentality, Season 2 focuses more on the tough, enigmatic,
almost punk character of Yeong-Shin (Kim Sung-kyu) – and it gives a more
serious, complicated and indeed tragic arc to the destiny of Mu-yeong. In the
style of that backwards-rolling head already mentioned, Park loves to play
games of visual revelation borrowed from the horror films of Dario Argento: a severed
head hides a real head, until the person or the camera moves position. In
general, the action sequences are more inventively handled in Season 2, and
more varied in their techniques.
There is less Spielbergian grandeur in Season 2, and more
morbid lyricism in the manner of John Carpenter, who is another evident
influence on Park: witness the several sequences in which the action suddenly
switches to elegiac slow-motion, and goes from a realistic to an abstract
soundtrack, so that a character at the centre of the fray can look around and
take in the full extent of the ongoing, apocalyptic catastrophe …
Ah, but what do all these zombies mean, what do they symbolise? For hardcore fans of zombie film and
TV, there always needs to be a satisfyingly allegorical level: zombies (like vampires or body snatchers) must stand in for capitalists or communists, anarchists or bureaucrats, free-lovers
or no-lovers, consumerists or proletariats, liberation or repression. Take your
pick, depending which side of the ideological fence you are on! In Kingdom, however, I do not easily detect
any allegorical level. Perhaps that is because, as a viewer and analyst, I am
not Korean.
To me (long trained in interpretation!), these zombies
are just zombies, just as Sigmund Freud once reportedly said that sometimes a
cigar is just a cigar. I am reminded of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s amusing comment, when
asked at a European premiere of his The
Assassin (2015), whether the “political implications” of his narrative
caused him problems with Chinese censors and other state authorities. He simply
replied, with mock innocence: “My film is set during the Tang Dynasty of the 9th century! What present-day political implications could there possibly be in
that subject matter?”
So, I may well be missing an important layer of
meaning in Kingdom, and in the phenomenon
of its popularity on native soil. I am struck, for example, by Kim Eun-hee’s
comment that, while Western screen zombies “are mutants created by a virus, the
Korean zombies are a plague caused by hunger”. (2) But I leave this level for
other experts, better suited to the task than I, to decode. In passing,
however, let me enjoy the fact that I feel no burning desire, in this case, to
rush into proposing a national allegory. For that is the default option, so to
speak, of so many Western critics when faced with prime examples of Asian
cinema or TV, and perhaps especially now South Korean production. In the wake
of Bong Joon-ho’s massive crossover international success with Parasite (2019), everybody wants to feed
– like a plague-infected zombie! – on social-political allegory.
Certainly, I am not blind to a central,
socio-political element in the Kingdom series: the conflict of classes, the devaluing of the poor (let them die!), the
malign oppressors among the royal, ruling class. For Kim, the “show’s core
story line” is “about what happens when the hunger of people and the greed of
those in power combine”. (3) Many important story shifts – defections from one side of the class
barrier to another, decisive changes in moral-ethical attitude and behaviour of
particular characters – rest upon this structure of comparative meaning.
But that is an almost universal theme or point of social reference – an idea that travels
easily, and well, across cultures and nations. This is why Bong’s entertaining
brand of Marxism has been so enjoyed and so embraced all over the world:
everyone can relate to it and even, at some level of their psyche, agree with
it.
But let me now displace myself away from these
socio-political co-ordinates of allegorically reading an audiovisual narrative
for its national (or even global) significance.
What I personally find most intriguing about Kingdom – and this is surely not only
because I’m a Western critic-analyst – is that it has a relatively rich, quite
well-developed level of symbolic meaning, but this meaning has almost nothing
to do with the elaborate zombie aspect of the plot. Of course, this thematic or
semantic level intersects with the zombie plot at many points (how could it
not?), but the zombies are not, in fact, integral to it. The figure of the
zombie, ultimately, functions as a basic reference-point for everything unnatural that enters the world of the
fiction: monstrous in the true sense
of being a hybrid creature forced together from diverse elements that should
never naturally be combined.
Horror cinema has played on the fear and suspicion of
unnatural combination from its inception: from Frankenstein to Reanimator, from
The Thing to the Human Centipede. But there is another kind of eruption of the
unnatural: in a disturbance to the order
of things – not necessarily the social order, but the human order, the most
basic, universal relations of growing up, falling in love, giving birth,
nurturing a child, ageing and dying … in approximately that order of sequence!
Kingdom, taken from a psycho-sexual angle (one that is generalisable across many
societies in history), finds its most central focus in the iconic relation of
Mother and Child.
We approach this figural icon of Mother and Child only
through its progressive displacements and perversions – there is no
ontologically normal, biological instance of it presented at the outset of the
epic story, and in fact we will never yet see such a thing in two whole seasons
of Kingdom. Episode 3 of Season 1
contains an intriguing tableau involving an incidental, anonymous character,
but this event signals the core theme of the entire drama: as a mother tries to
scale a wall to evade zombies, who should be saved by the helping hands
reaching down from above – her or the baby she is holding? In this instance,
it’s the child who survives – but we register the difficulty, the unnaturalness and arbitrariness of the
choice (reminiscent, indeed, of Sophie’s
Choice!).
Eventually, by stages, this theme moves into the
foreground. The spectacle of a mass of pregnant women eating voraciously –
because they are being, for once in their lives, generously fed – is strangely
disquieting. For what sinister purpose is this peculiar farming operation being
pursued? The locus of unnatural horror comes to reside in Queen Consort Cho
(Kim Hye-jun): the first time we see her, we instantly realise that she is far
too young to be the biological mother of our dashing hero, the Crown Prince.
And even her reproductive capacity, as wife to the King, is in question.
Politics (including the patriarchal politics of
gender) enter this picture: for the Queen’s grand power-takeover plan to
succeed, the baby must be male … And on it goes, right through to the mystery
of a new-born baby, and the way it survives a zombie attack. Is the child natural
or unnatural? What kind of symbolic, non-biological mother-figure can Seo-bi
become to him? Can anything like a natural family unit ever be restored?
These are some of the questions that will impel me to
watch Season 3 of Kingdom.
1. Bifo (Franco Berardi), “Diary of the Psycho-Deflation (Part 1)”, Verso Blog, 18 March 2020. back
2. Cho Yeon-gyeong, “Writer Finds a Home for Her Zombie Fantasy: Kim Eun-hee says Netflix was the Right Place for Kingdom”, Korea JoongAng Daily, 8 February 2019. back
3. Ibid.
© Adrian Martin April 2020 |
, Seasons 1 & 2, Netflix, South Korea, 2019-2020)
