Chan-wook Park's films have always been prone to abrupt shifts in tone—in Thirst this tendency peaks. Following the completion of a somber and somewhat lyrical first act, Act Two morphs into a noir-ish soap opera as Song gets involved with the abused wife, Tae Ju, of a childhood friend, who has grown into a childish man under the thumb of a manipulative mother. Eventually Song abandons the priesthood and is drawn into an affair with Tae Ju and they rid themselves of the husband, dumping his body into a reservoir. But guilt drives a wedge between the couple and threatens to destroy them. In Act Three, Park returns to the stylish violence of Oldboy. Song turns Tae Ju into a vampire and, after a lifetime of weakness, of being abused, she delights in her new strength and powers—she becomes impulsive and incredibly violent. Song is still committed to maintaining as non-violent a path as his condition allows and eventually the lovers find themselves in direct opposition to one another.
This movie has already generated a wide range of opinions following its showing at Cannes. Criticisms include too long, too much gore, and too unfocused. Me, I didn't think it too long—Song's performance, which centers the movie, carried me through the slow bits. As to the gore, it's a vampire movie. Deal with it. Too unfocused? Well, I will admit there were moments when I thought the narrative rather murky (this is no masterpiece of clarity, though it may be a rough, unfocused masterpiece), but those moments were brief and I was borne along by the movie's tremendous energy and style. This is a picture that will likely tick off many vampire lovers, and it is especially not a film for the Twilight set (Is there a term for them yet? How about T-heads ... or even better, T-wits?), but even those folks can take heart from the news that, while Thirst is neither Twilight nor Titanic (a movie similar in appeal to the Stephenie Meyers creation), best of all, it's no Van Helsing.
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Short Story: THE PRESIDENT'S BOOK TOUR by M. Rickert
I grew up in a town so small that I can still remember the number on the census sign: Seven-hundred-and-ten. Downtown was composed of two churches, a gas station, hardware store, post office, and several bars. There was no library, of course, and I didn't see the inside of a bookstore until I was in high school. I left when I was eighteen, but it wasn't until I was thirty-one years old that I lived in a city large enough for a bookstore and a library. How I loved that library! I spent many hours there, “wandering the stacks,” grabbing whatever looked interesting to me until the day I discovered the collection of “The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror” then edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, which I took home and read as though they held the meaning of my life. Which they sort of did. Though I had been working on writing for years, I had chosen the bohemian writer path, rather than the academic one, which had made for some interesting adventures but had left me unmentored and rather clueless about publishing. All I knew was that I wrote strange little stories that no one wanted, and I was beginning to feel some despair over this. But these Datlow/Windling anthologies were filled with odd stories that reminded me of my own, and, quite consistently, the ones that seemed most like mine were published in something called The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fictio . The first issue I ever saw was in that same library. I sent a story that had been reaping rejections, “The Girl Who Ate Butterflies,” and when I received the check for that story, I bought a big old desk and a subscription to the magazine. I've been subscribing ever since.—M. Rickert
Our children roll across picnic blankets, their limbs stuck in strange postures, an arm permanently raised, legs at broken angles, lips split, eyes unfocused. When the sky shatters, our children gurgle with pleasure while we remember other explosions.
Before the war, our village was green, and we remember the variety of green, the green of apples, the green of long grass, short grass, sweet grass (each, you may remember, a different tone of blade), the green of root tree, and green of berry bush, the green of birds, the various greens of leaves. We remember how, in the summer, the whole world was green, and we walked about feeling (innocently) that we were green's flower. We did not think of it as a weapon.
"Oh Green, How We Love Your Branches!” That was written before the war, by one of our poets. Most of us don't know what it means, and yet, we do, somehow. This state of opposites is a part of us now, we are a people who love our children, and we are a people who wish our children had died, or better still, us. We should have died and saved everyone.
("Oh Green, How We Love Your Small Hands Like Leaves!")
The President makes several TV appearances to promote his new book. “We made a strategic choice to destroy the vegetation,” he says. “This was a compassionate decision, and history will reflect that."
It is rumored that the President's wives have had abortions rather than risk reproducing little monsters like ours. You may wonder why they would do such a thing. We point to our children, crawling on twisted limbs, breathing through deviated septums, drooling. Sometimes we see childless women on TV, jogging in the park, or sitting in the coffee shop, laughing bright red lips as they stare through glass, their blank eyes like those in a mask, but we do not judge these women, if we'd had any sense, we'd be drinking coffee like them, and not changing teenagers’ diapers.
Our children have no idea of lives lived without malformed bones, painful flesh. Most people cannot separate any idea of self from skin, and this is true of our children who stare at the exploding sky on this hot summer night, tongues coated with cotton candy, gnarled fingers sticky with dripped ice cream, mouths twisted with every exclamation for the thundered explosion of color. Our children know nothing other than what they are, no lives beyond the ones they live, no idea of what it means to be human that has not been created by war.
The President is coming to our village. Hoping to sell books, we think. A man can be quite clever and still be quite stupid as well. All opposites are joined in the state of being human. We are happy, here on the tiny shoots of sharp grass that have only recently begun to appear after all these years, and we are weeping. You cannot see it in our eyes, but you can see it in our children, who we think of as our tears. Can the President really come here and ignore them? Can he really think we will buy his stupid book?
Apparently, yes.
* * * *
The fifth of July dawns a beautiful day, a blue sky meringued with puffs of white clouds, a lovely sun warmly shining down on us. The streets are littered with spent fireworks, crushed red and white popcorn cartons, deflated balloons. The sweepers move down the streets and sidewalks like computer cursors. We put on our best clothes, dress our children over diapers we've learned to fashion from old sheets, holes cut out for extra limbs, widened for odd shapes. We look out the kitchen windows as we prepare breakfast. With all the trees gone, we easily see the black dot in the distance when he approaches, the President, and his caravan of cars. “Here, drink,” we say to our children and hand them their sippy cups.
* * * *
We assemble in the park, where just last night, we celebrated. We look at the crowd of tired faces, the beasty children groveling in the grass, ruining their best clothes, but what can be done? We do not know how to discipline them, or raise them with any sense of wrong or right, even how to begin the discourse. They are too damaged to learn moral implications; we are pleased if they can learn to use a fork. Which is not to say that they have no inner spark, no fire trapped by the dark embers of their flesh, no longing, no desire, no dreams where they are like us, standing upright, bearing vaguely symmetrical faces. What must it be like, we wonder, to desire all that the body desires but not have the body to pursue it?
The President's limousine, followed by several black cars, glides like a slow dark torpedo from the back of the park, flags flapping in the breeze. The vehicles stop near the stage, the doors open. Men and women in suits step out, begin moving through the crowd, looking for weapons. When they walk near the children, the gnarled hands try to grab the weapon-seeking wands; one succeeds, bringing it toward what might be a m
outh, but the woman pulls it away, striking the child in the process. The audience murmurs its disapproval. The woman is immediately joined by two other suits who walk beside her, scanning the crowd as though we are to be feared, though they hold the largest weapon of all, what was already done to us, what we have already lost, and what remains.
There is an invocation, a song, and introductions. The Admiral is introduced by a General who is introduced by a decorated Soldier who was introduced by a Pilot who was introduced by a Navy Seal. It's all rather much for our children, and, frankly, for us. By the time the President speaks, the sun floods the entire field; only the dignitaries standing on the stage are in the shade. It is hot and we are weary with the small speeches our children droned and moaned through, but when, at last, the President speaks, we wonder how he does it. How does he look over the entire crowd and yet make each of us feel spoken to? How does he smile and make us feel happy? How does he make us forget how he failed?
"I know these are hard times,” he says, his voice booming into our hearts (like little bombs), “but I see in your faces the strength of heroes. I know these are hard times, but I see in your children's faces the promise of the future."
We look at our future's face, the strange monstered contortions we have given birth to, and we look at our President in confusion. There is some murmuring, the suits adjust earphones and stand at attention, but even they can't help but whisper out the sides of their mouths. The President has made a mistake. He has forgotten where he is. He is speaking as though our children are normal.
The President, his eyes twinkling, raises his hand, palm toward the crowd. “I know there are some who believe your children cannot be the face of the future,” he says, and suddenly it seems even the children are listening, the roars and groans, the babbles and slaps, the rolling and slithering have all stopped. What is the old expression, you could hear a drop of blood fall? The President smiles. “When I look at these faces, I don't see a future that is ugly and misshapen, I see a future that remembers war and is committed to peace. I see a beautiful future, not our dream, but our destiny!"
The crowd roars. Even the children slap the ground with limbs and flippers. We forgive the President everything. Afterward, we wait in line for hours to buy his book. We are disappointed to discover that he does not sign them himself but has hired a writer to do so in his place. “The President must keep his hand strong, for signing important papers,” we are told.
We do not expect him to stay in our town that night, but he does. He spends the night at an undisclosed location (the old Maulkey Mansion on the hill) and in the morning the newspaper blares the headline, PRESIDENT MAKES NEW HOME HERE, and that is how we come to learn that the President is staying.
The next few days are very exciting. Truckloads of trees are driven through town to the Maulkey Mansion. These are not the twiggy sticks that have begun popping up between our scraggly grass, but full-grown giants, uprooted (from who knows where) and replanted in craters dug on the hill. We had almost forgotten what trees look like, or so we told ourselves, but now that we see them again, we realize the memory of trees has always resided within us. We remember shade, and leaves, branches wide enough to sit on, we remember our parents scolding us not to go so high, we remember the colors of Autumn, the snows of Winter, we remember the seasons, and the scent of green. We try to tell our children about this, our children whose ugly visages have brought us this new peace, but they don't respond as we had hoped, they scream and writhe furiously as if tossed by an angry sea or burned by napalm. We begin to suspect that they know a lot more about what has occurred than we realized. “Hush, hush, don't worry,” we say. “The President lives here now. No one will harm us. He brings peace.” (And trees, we think, but don't mention, fearing it will confuse the point.)
Trucks rumble down Main Street bearing roses. Roses! The scent so sweet we think we might faint, or do something crazy. Our children try to follow the glorious cargo; we have to pull them back, promising them that we will someday take them to see the President's garden, not knowing that we are telling the truth. Trucks, rumbling over the bumps and cracks of our dusty streets, spill silky petals and stemless flowers. We can relate to the children's desire to stuff them into their mouths, to try to keep them forever.
What was done to those petals! Crushed, loved, and destroyed. Roses, truckloads of them, night-blooming jasmine, forsythia, flowering parsley, and mint, the scent floating down the hill, causing us to remember everything we'd forgotten. Lovers found each other in the rich scented dark and did not think about the dangerous results of malformed children, and our “children,” not so young anymore, wandered from their rooms into night streets sweet with perfume, colored vaguely blue by the moon, and even with all the confusion of extra limbs and orifices, found pleasure, wantonly, selfishly, giving no border to the consequences we had never thought it necessary to mention. In the morning we found them, tiny blades of new grass stuck to their skin, streaks of dirt down their backs, hair tangled, faces pink with pleasure, drooling, cooing in their secret language.
We steer them home. They are large and lumbering, groaning, laughing strangely at things we don't understand. We find them naked and in embrace, tangled limbs like Gordian knots. When we scold them, they only spit, or sigh, or pay no attention at all to us. We grow tired of this night dance, their sexuality like open flowers giving off a strange odor. We, the parents, suffering exhaustion, too many nights awake and on guard, fail, and wake to find them in fields and alleys, beds, and storefronts, the faces of peace smoothed by expressions of ecstasy.
These couplings, with one exception, were without any sense of loyalty or affection. It was the rutting of animals, any sum of various parts would do. We found sisters and brothers, cousins, girls and girls, boys and boys, groups of four, six, and, on one occasion, when the moon hung like an ice cream scoop in the sky, we found an orgy of dozens. They fought us like a small army, fiercely biting and kicking as we tore them apart, though later they gave no indication that they recognized each other in any significant way. There was only one couple, Syoon and Chila, torn apart, and returned to each other night after night.
Syoon is one of the children whose deformities, before the war, would have been considered terrifying, but now is thought fortunate. She is able to walk, for instance, her limbs easily accounted for and fitting into a pre-war ratio, though it is true her spine is bent at odd angles, and her “walk,” really more of a lope. Yet, compared to most of the others, she is almost graceful. Her face (and this would account for her seeing the butterfly before anyone else) tilts upward, destined since birth to look at the sky and not the humans who made such a mess of everything. Her mouth falls into a philosophical frown, giving the impression that this damaged child ponders her fate. Syoon's eyes, though far apart from the plane of bridgeless nose, nonetheless reside in what, before the war, was the expected position, giving her an unwieldy fishy look, a creature always rising to the surface, but they are large and bright blue, laced with lashes so long they flutter against her cheeks beneath amazingly, perfectly aligned eyebrows, all of which only seems to further the impression that this one, this daughter of war, has somehow come into the destroyed world bearing a new version of beauty.
Chila's face is not so fortunate, his eyes all varied in shape, large, small, protruding; and in composition, lashless, heavy lidded, brown, blue, one with a pale cloudy yellow pupil, like curdled butter. His mouth is wide and loose-lipped, his tongue often hangs out, dripping with saliva. No, what Syoon found so compelling in Chila did not reside in his face but in his body, a throwback by some genetic fluke to a time before the war when young men had sun-colored skin, when their flesh exuded a beguiling scent, the combination of meadow green and sex. The girls found their way to him, discovering pleasure in what, they could not know, was the perfect body of our past.
Yet, Chila only roved for one, and, with his great muscles and massive size, kept all away from her as well. Syoon, always Syoon until
we could not ignore it any longer, they had become lovers, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, drawn to each other to the exclusion of all others, exhibiting symptoms of that most dangerous of emotions until at last, desperate, we tied them up at night.
* * * *
It became necessary for an abortionist to come to our village and set up shop at the old meat market, designing an odd storefront window of small statues carved out of coal set in a sea of white pebbles. It wasn't long before a steady parade of girl children (do we still call them children? Well, they aren't adults) are escorted there by “parents.” Some days there is even a line of customers waiting outside on the sidewalk, not as unpleasant as it might have been, before the President's arrival. We wait, breathing in the scent of green. We are standing there when a butterfly flits down Main Street followed by Syoon, who appears to be chasing it, laughing out of the frown of her mouth.
We were enchanted to see Syoon, the prettiest of all our ugly children, loping down Main Street, her moon-fish face, perpetually turned upward, now turned upward at the violet butterfly, which flitted just out of reach of the small fingers she lifted overhead, not understanding that the allure of the butterfly is lost once captured. How could she understand? Syoon, like all the children, had never seen a butterfly.
We watched this glorious thing, transfixed by the memory of a time when this was almost a rite of passage, admittedly for three-year-olds, rather than children Syoon's age, who, we later determined, was about fifteen. By the time she was on the hill, it was too late. Even from a distance we could see the small black dots that were the guards descend on her, and though we shouted, she was taken into the mansion by a swarm of them, swallowed by an open door which then was shut.
FSF, October-November 2009 Page 30
