Roland Barthes once wrote of the disturbing effect of the point-of-view shot from the eyes of a dead man in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr: “The camera moves from house to cemetery recording what the dead man sees: such is the extreme limit at which representation is outplayed; the spectator can no longer take up any position, for he cannot identify his eye with the closed eyes of the dead man; the tableau has no point of departure, no support, it gapes open.” This remark came back to me while watching Park Chan-Wook’s Decision To Leave, a film whose most audacious shot is presented from the point-of-view of a dead eye, that of a man who has fallen to his death from a cliff, which this eye is now ‘looking’ up at from the ground below while ants crawl over it.
The dead man is Ki Do Soo, who appears to have died by accident on a rock climbing trip. Soon, however, the detective investigating his death, Jang Hae-Jun (Park Hae-il), begins to suspect the possible involvement of the man’s much younger wife, Seo-Rae (Tang Wei). The relationship of obsession, fascination, desire, and love that develops between Hae-Jun and Seo-Rae will come to form the center of Park’s film, with her possible murder of her husband—a former immigration officer, whose assistance in helping Seo-Rae migrate to Korea from China turns out to have been less than altruistic—only the beginning of the story. What emerges as the plot unfolds is a film that is itself obsessed with history and its weight upon the present, and with the question of whether love remains possible in a modern world that appears to be drained of historical possibility. This is where that dead eye comes in.
The motif of the dead eye, begun in the early scene showing Ki Do Soo’s body, recurs at numerous points in the film, notably at a late moment when Hae-Jun and his wife are buying fish at a market, their dead eyes staring up at us from a bed of ice. Hae-Jun is also constantly squirting himself with eyedrops, his blurred vision and sleeplessness signaling his proximity to the shadow-world. But the most disturbing dead eyes are the most banal and everyday ones, which abound in this film: the dead eyes of CCTV cameras recording every movement, of phone apps tracking GPS coordinates. What other film so powerfully and horrifyingly presents the ubiquity of the dead eyes of surveillance, of a vampiric, undead, unending calculation? In this ‘world viewed’ (to cite Stanley Cavell) by the unliving, what life is available to the ‘viewed’ subjects themselves? The spontaneous one is that of a miserable biopolitics of health, adhering to the algorithm’s caring advice on diet, exercise, and the elimination of vices, represented in the film by the character of Hae-Jun’s wife. This is a life which shores up identity, and identifiability, soliciting the self-satisfaction of measurable accomplishment in the assurance that one is perpetuating a life administered by the dead eyes of a benevolent overseeing power.
Opposed to this is all that cannot be administered, cannot be made useful, cannot be safely protected as a quality pertaining to an identity: it is what “shatters” the self, in the words of the film (I am relying on the English subtitles). In other words, the great theme of passion, obsession, and amour fou—this is the heart of a film which unabashedly sets itself the task of being a Vertigo for the age of Siri. The essential question of Decision To Leave is whether these values and these experiences are possible in such an administered world. And just as Hitchcock’s film, in the figure of Carlotta Valdes, looked back to an earlier time onto which these values could be obsessively projected and rendered tantalizingly inaccessible, here the vision of a less-administered world—a world which, being less clearly seen, could still allow for heroism, passion, and tragedy—is projected onto preceding generations that are just receding from living memory, in the form of ‘dignified’ behavior, such as that of the war heroes who resisted Japanese imperialism. A time when national legends were universally binding in sorting out truth from lies, unlike the present world in which spin can convince us to give our money away to financial speculators, or to believe that nuclear energy is perfectly safe. Such is the projected past in which the lovers, the detective and the woman who “shatters” him—the woman he loves, the suspect he is chasing—would have to live if they were ever to be together. A world in which two people could meet without each knowing themselves or the other too well, without seeing them too clearly (a dead eye is the only eye that doesn’t blink), because all would remain shrouded in the ‘mist’ of a world not penetrated by a reifying and calculating vision, a world to which they would remain attached, their commitment to dignity and their passion expressing their belonging to this world.
Mist is another recurring motif, as an infamous weather condition in the small-town the married couple move to in the later part of the film. But while others bemoan this climate, when Hae-Jun and his wife run into Seo-Rae, the object of the detective’s obsession, at the fish market, she tells them she moved to the town because she likes the mist. When Hae-Jun meets Seo-Rae atop a mountain, not knowing if she might be planning to kill him, his lack of badge and gun aren’t merely a danger to his physical safety: he goes to her unadorned by an administered identity that would keep him safe in the assurance of self-knowledge, accompanying him as surely as his iPhone tracks the number of steps he’s climbed. Only thus, in renouncing all possession, all protection of himself by a positive, known self-identity, can he encounter another person, another existence. As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Second Sex: “Man attains an authentically moral attitude when he renounces being in order to assume his existence; through this conversion he renounces all possession, because possession is a way of searching for being.” Hae-Jun goes so far as to tell Seo-Rae that meeting her “shattered” him, and she (rightly) interprets this statement (which she first has to put through an online translator, given her limited knowledge of Korean) as a declaration of love.
Georges Bataille writes in The Accursed Share:
“Overcast weather, when the sun is filtered by the clouds and the play of light goes dim, appears to ‘reduce things to what they are.’ The error is obvious: What is before me is never anything less than the universe; the universe is not a thing and I am not at all mistaken when I see its brilliance in the sun. But if the sun is hidden I more clearly see the barn, the field, the hedgerow. I no longer see the splendor of the light that played over the barn; rather I see this barn or this hedgerow like a screen between the universe and me.”
In the same way, slavery brings into the world the absence of light that is the separate positing of each thing, reduced to the use that it has. Light, or brilliance, manifests the intimacy of life, that which life deeply is, which is perceived by the subject as being true to itself and as the transparency of the universe.
Here the logic is on one level the opposite: mist is affirmed as a figure of opacity, as opposed to Bataille’s veneration of light. But mist and light are both atmospheres in which the things of the world are bathed, and what Bataille describes is the violence that is carried out by denuding things of this setting in order to picture them more precisely, making them available to knowledge and to ‘improvement’ through work (hence the significance of his mention of slavery). This reduction of things—and people—to what they are, by separating them from their sustaining environment in order to put them to work for the perpetuation of a deadened life, is what the two lovers reject in their pursuit of a passion worth dying for, amid the fantasy of a heroic past. This romantic attitude evinced by the film could see it accused of nostalgia or conservatism, and certainly sets it at odds with the recent influx of ‘eat the rich’ class allegories in world cinema, from Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite to Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness. But as certain critics have argued, this purported left-wing turn in contemporary cinema offers little in the way of a genuine critique of capitalism, its moral lessons providing nothing but the satisfaction of laughing at the rich without any investigation of the deeper structures of capitalism or the possibility of other forms of life. Decision To Leave’s commitment to a cinema worthy of the present means far more than such allegories concerned with nothing other than the administrative logic of reducing things to what they are.
Conall Cash
Conall Cash completed his PhD in French at Cornell University in 2022, and is now a Lecturer in French Studies at The University of Melbourne. He has published in the areas of literary and cinematic modernism, phenomenology, and political theory. His most recent film-related publication was a chapter in the 2022 volume, Better Call Saul and Philosophy.
