On Cho & Park

As much as I don't feel it's my place to ruminate on the tragedy in Virginia, I guess all this hoopla - stirred up by oft-hoopla-instigator Nikki Finke - surrounding Cho Seung-Hui's possibly having been influenced by the work of one of my favorite directors, Park Chan-wook, deserves comment.

I can't tell by Finke's original article if she's actually bothered to watch the film Oldboy which she connects to Cho's rampage on the basis of the hammer photo, but if she has seen the film she's obviously not bothered to think about the film and what it says about violence and the human dueling-desires to both see it and to reject it, and the ultimate emptiness of the pursuit of revenge. This article at Slate sums up my opinion pretty thoroughly, especially by quoting Park himself here:

"My films are the stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves."

Slate's Grady Hendrix, who wrote this article, goes on to say that's "one of the smartest things that anyone's said so far about the motives of Cho Seung-Hui", but I'd say you could transpose that quote onto most of the people who turn out after a tragedy like this to lay the blame at popular art's feet. It's awfully easy to lay the blame on a movie, or a Guns N Roses album, for this sort of horror, and forget about the millions of other people who've watched or listened to these things and not gone on a rampage, and it's a little more difficult to opine on the basic fact that there is horror inside us all, and that it is the duty of responsible, intelligent artists - of which Park is most certainly one - to mirror and dissect these inescapable human conditions.

Anyway, there's more on this over at the NY Times.
.