So today I’m tackling another controversial remake which hasn’t gotten a fair shake, that is Spike Lee’s 2013 Oldboy written by Mark Protosevich and based on the 2003 classic Oldeuboi (올드보이) by South Korean director Park Chan-wook and writers Hwang Jo-yoon and Im Joon-hyeong, itself based on the Japanese manga. I enjoyed the original, it was fresh and moving and beautifully done. It could not have been done better for what it was. This remake however is more than just a remake for me. Lee didn’t just copy a film shot for shot, he reinvented a film by adding a whole new layer of subtext for an American audience on elitism and the American dream which offers some insight into the terrifying imaginary Real of the American psyche and with a brutal intensity.
(spoiler alert)
The original is referenced cleverly in a number of scenes though Lee consistently reimagines the action in a new way. The acting is excellent, soundtrack is tight (though I prefer the original) and the story plays out as concise as it can with a special spin on the twist built off the new layers added to the film. We start the film in 1993 with our ironic hero Joe Doucett (Josh Brolin), a dishonest, alcoholic salesmen. In a sense he’s a terrible person, selfish, rude, fraudulent and crude, filled with negativity, self-hate and corruption who instead of making his baby daughters birthday party has to scramble to make a sales deal. He argues she’s too young to realize he’s missing. Somehow this less than model citizen personality makes him more relatable as we’re all scrambling in this system; sometimes we get so lost in the scramble we forget what’s really important.
Joe Doucett is your “average American Jo” despite the BS advertisement spiel he gives his client early in the film, “We don’t make ads for Joe Doakes. No John Q. Public, John and Jane Doe, Mr. Everyman. No no no no no. We make ads for Daniel Newcombe. We make ads for Joe Doucett. We cater to the elite“. Ironically this speech starts while we’re watching Joe starring at his bloated body in the mirror, then spitting his mouthwash at the image in disgust, suggesting Joe never felt comfortable in his “elite” skin. Something just doesn’t fit.
Joe represents the failures of the American Dream, jaded, desperate and a little apathetic. After a horribly failed sales attempt he wanderers the streets of China Town drunk. He considers purchasing a little ducky for his daughter but the price isn’t right. Five dollars isn’t a lot but he wants to have it free, except the dream isn’t free, and for everyone up there’s another one down.
Joe wanderers to his pal Chucky’s (Michael Imperioli) bar. Chuck decides Joe had enough and won’t let him in. Just as Joe’s about to pass out on the stoop he sees a beautiful woman with a yellow umbrella. Next we see him wake up in what appears to be a hotel room, assuming he must have went home with that woman. He goes to the bathroom to urinate and the showers on. He assumes she’s in there but then he checks to see what’s behind the curtain only to make the startling discovery the shower was empty, the running hot water nothing more than a set piece. This is precisely a point of fracturing of this imaginary dimension where behind the curtain there is supposed to be a beautiful, “exotic” woman, instead you discover or rather rediscover the uncomfortable and disturbing existential dimension of lack.
Joe comes to find himself stuck in the shell of what’s left of the “American dream”. The room is an empty fragment of “real life” which offers little beyond the surface appearance to support the construction of symbolic order. There is no real human interaction and even the windows are fake, just images of the outside world changing with the time of day. All he has is a bible, a row of encyclopedias, and a television which shows him the programs “they” want him to see so he can grow brain dead on the “idiot box” (since he never reads). He’s fed the same cheap, low quality food for all his meals. They’ll keep him alive, but not exactly “well”.
From TV he learns his wife was killed, and that traces of his DNA at the site point to him as the culprit. His daughter is taken away for adoption and his name dragged through the mud, sort of the nail in his coffin. Days turn to weeks, weeks turn to months and months turn to years. Slowly, but surely, Joe begins to crumble mentally in his exile. He forms a bond with a little mouse, the only sentient being who acknowledges him though this quickly turns sideways when “they” kill his mouse and its family and serve it to him on a platter just for the torture. The cruel and inhuman treatment only speeds up Joe’s downward spiral eventually leading to attempted suicide. They won’t let him off that easy. They gas the room putting him to sleep. He wakes up clean shaven, realizing that he doesn’t even have control over his own life. He continues on, forced to watch documentaries on “his murder” and about what became of his daughter and how she feels about him, his crimes, and abandonment.
Within this absurd, and cruel circumstance, now reduced to the fractured real Real one cannot but become desperate to establish a new meaning, a replacement symbolic. Joe begins writing letters to his daughter, and rebuilding/purifying himself of all the garbage fed to him by “the system”. Having been broken down and hitting rock bottom he can finally create something new, strength where there had been weakness, dejection and apathy. He has a purpose now placing his daughters love before his own selfishness and planning for escape, and he nearly makes it out on his own, however after twenty years of imprisonment, Joe is freed by the will of those who held him captive to return back to the outside world where he goes on an epic quest to find out why he was captured, to find his daughter and take his revenge.
After tracking down and brutally attacking his capturers he confronts Chaney (Samuel L. Jackson), the ringleader of his hellish imprisonment. Joe tortures Chaney and discovers that a wealthy “stranger” was the cause behind his capture (Chaney’s “elite cliental“). The world beyond the room hasn’t changed, money is still king, and even Chaney’s revenge on Joe can be purchased by the stranger, even the “devil” has a price. The new Joe however can’t be bought. He’s over the artificial objects that construct this system of images. He has a mission to accomplish and he’ll stop at nothing in his quest for revenge.
Joe befriends a kind hearted nurse named Marie Sebastian (Elizabeth Olsen) who helps him track down the mysterious stranger. It seems no coincidence that Marie is a nurse. She is one who takes care of the sick and those in need as we see in her introduction when Joe meets her at a drug addiction clinic where she is servicing the homeless. Unlike Joe she is apparently a good hearted human being. It is unclear if Joe ever had such character, in fact there’s evidence to the contrary. A former teacher from Evergreen Academy where Joe attended classes refers to him as “cruel” and “a bit of a lost soul”. Further investigation of the “stranger” reveals that he was another Evergreen alumnus named Adrian Doyle (Sharlto Copley). Joe recalls tormenting Adrian’s sister Amanda for her promiscuity after witnessing her having sex with a man on campus one night. That man turned out to be her father Arthur and the rumor ended up destroying their family. It turns out Arthur was having sex with everyone in the family, including Adrian. After moving away Arthur decides to murder them all and then commit suicide, however Adrian survived the shotgun blast only to take his revenge on Doucett.
Joe goes to Adrian’s penthouse, defeats Adrian’s assistant Haeng-Bok (Pom Klementieff) and confronts Adrian. Adrian congratulates him for figuring out his identity and why he did what he did to Joe as agreed, giving him his diamond prize. Adrian asks Joe if he ever thought about why he had let Joe go in the first place before he shows Joe that the interview with Mia was all a set-up, and “Mia” was a paid actress. Adrian reveals the devastating truth that Marie is really his daughter and that he had engineered events to make Joe fall in love with Marie and have sex with her to make Joe feel what he had felt losing everything. This shocking Oedipal-like (or rather “inverted Elektral”) twist models the original though goes a step further in making Adrian’s whole family incestuous as a metaphor for those in power rather than just sister and brother as in the original. Like Oedipus, both protagonists relentlessly pursue the truth, only to be destroyed once they learn it. In Oedipus Rex Oedipus is in search of who killed his father Laius, unaware that the killer he is looking for is none other than himself. At the end of the play when the truth comes out his mother Jocasta hangs herself while Oedipus, horrified at his own incest and patricide gouges out his own eyes.
In the original Oldboy Dae-su (Joe) apologizes for driving Woo-jin’s (Adrian) sister to suicide and begs him not to tell Mi-do (Marie), hoping she does not follow the same fate as Jocasta and Woo-jin’s sister. Woo-jin is unimpressed with Dae-su’s begging and so Dae-su cuts out his own tongue as a symbol of penance. Woo-jin accepts Dae-su’s plea, then boarding the elevator Woo-jin recalls the events of his sister’s suicide before shooting himself in the head with a pistol. Adrian voluntarily kills himself in the remake as fulfillment of the promise he made to Joe earlier in the film. Rather than go on with the knowledge of this disturbing revelation Dae-su decides ignorance is bliss, and goes to the hypnotist from the prison to erase his memory of Mi-do being his daughter restoring the symbolic order and allowing them to go on together happily ever after, though suggesting the possibility the hypnotism fails at the end of the film. Hypnotism is a major plot device in the original film though it is completely removed in the remake. Joe deals with the revelation in a completely different way, writing a letter to Marie saying they can never see each other again, and leaving her most of the diamonds, using the rest to pay Chaney to return him to the captivity of the hotel room in an ironic twist of fate having escaped the room only to return to serve the time for his crimes, meanwhile preserving his innocence symbolically through his sweet-hearted offspring Marie. She’ll never know the truth of their relationship, thus allowing her to go on happily within the mediation of her symbolic order.
The room here is the symbol of that which is abstracted from the external world, but reveals the world of American society as something innately missing something. That lack is what we are driven to fill with our American dreams, however, the dream isn’t real, and there’s no way to truly fill the void. Joe’s containment ends off serving as a kind of Lacanian jouissance which prevents itself, transforming the ironic jouissance he experiences in his quest for revenge into the subtle joy he experiences in “repairing the tear” in “his reality” (aka “his symbolic order”). Now that he is forced to see himself as the true arbiter of the crime, he has taken revenge on himself. As Zizek puts it “When a subject is confronted with an extremely intense event (brutal, torture, absolute disgust, over-intense jouissance), it cannot accept it as part of its ordinary reality, so it experiences a loss of reality.” In letting go of Marie, that which can never fit, Joe is allowed freedom from the symptomatic pain of the revelation, restoring order over the imaginary Reality of trauma. It was a reality carefully protected by Adrian’s incestual family, a reality that Joe was conditioned to accept. Rather than “gouge out his eyes”, and unable to un-see, or return to ignorance, Joe goes on ultimately to let go, or more precisely accept the lack as a first step toward recoordinating his phantasmatic order. Having protected his daughter from the dissonance of the horrific imaginary Real Joe is able to establish symbolic order over the horrors of the dangerous imaginary reality of Adrian. This isn’t a totally happy ending as Adrian’s reality is not completely defeated, and possibly even accepted in its twisted innocence. Joe gains a kind of moral victory as he grants Marie a continued freedom from his “brutal elitism” rather than maintaining the incest.
