The Violent Vulnerability of Youth
by Wan Khalisah
I had nothing to expect from Bleak Night (Yoon Sung-hyun, 2010). As the film opened with an out-of-focus shot of boys in high school uniforms, walking with the overconfident swagger of young men who only recently discovered their physical strength and accompanying feelings of invincibility, I cringed. How many times have I had to sit through a testosterone-fueled film, full of men without much sense or maturity to deal with their emotions; who find catharsis in beating people up and making that violence seem edgy and cool? I was tired and bored. Yet what intrigued me was the strange, erratic camerawork that forced me to look closely at the gritty tones of its world. Sometimes uncomfortably close and disorienting in its tracking of the characters, it urged me to pay attention, as if to warn of the confusion and desperation to come.
Bleak Night takes a hard, unflinching look at how emotional repression insidiously tears apart the lives of three high school boys. Following the suicide of one of the boys—Ki-tae, our tragic protagonist in this film—a grieving father tries to piece together the events leading up to his son’s death. Characterized by a carefully constructed non-linear narrative that tracks Ki-tae’s fragile psychology and subsequent downward spiral, the film is a subtle but powerful critique of the pressures of performing a toxic idea of masculinity, which suffocates and represses young men. These young high school boys, at an age where their identities are in flux, are shown to affect masculinity of the worst kind, where the only acceptable emotional outburst is one of anger and violence. Vulnerability is perceived as a weakness, only displayed in moments of grief or regret. This is observed very plainly in Ki-tae’s character: he is violent, quick to anger, and constantly asserting his dominance by intimidating his classmates. Many times in the film Ki-tae proves his capacity to be cruel and taunting to people he considers his best friends.
Ki-tae and his posse of sycophants reminded me so much of the boys from my childhood: arrogant, impudent, violent, and self-centered, without a care for whoever they hurt in their outbursts. When I was eleven, I got into an argument with the boy who sat in front of me in class, and in response, he shoved the table against my chest. It left a bruise for days. I was moved to another seat and a new girl took my place, one who was less likely to argue or react. Boys like these were familiar. Later in life I would meet more classmates just like that, who disrupted class, were unbearably disrespectful, and cracked overtly sexual jokes that made female classmates uncomfortable. Ki-tae represented everything I despised in an adolescent boy.
As the film unfolds, however, Ki-tae’s infuriating personality peels away, revealing the fragile psychology hidden behind that untouchable persona. His parents’ physical and emotional absence left an indelible impact. At his core, Ki-tae is deeply lonely, and struggling with low self-esteem issues which he buries under a front of brashness. Whether from resistance or simple inability, he cannot express his emotions to his friends, and his efforts to keep his pride as a means of self-preservation end up pushing them away. This is obviously in conflict with his childish need for attention and validation, so it is unsurprising that his friendships are fraught with tension and misunderstanding. He cruelly pokes at Dong-yoon’s pressure points until his closest friend chooses to leave him as well—and this becomes the breaking point for an already brittle psyche. Dong-yoon, as the only person who truly knows him, cuts him deepest when he says, “Nothing would’ve gone wrong, if you weren’t here from the start.”
I was speechless. Here I was, shaking my fists at the boy I recognized as the tyrant of my childhood, and coming to the uncomfortable realization that we are more alike than different. I recognized the wavering between extremes, the all-consuming emotions that in the moment declare themselves to be the most important and urgent thing in the world, with a mindless disregard for anyone else, even—or perhaps, especially—those who really care for us. These moments are often forgotten in our adult years or brushed off as immaturity. But at our most vulnerable it is incredibly difficult to believe that anything could assuage our angst and indignation, except to fight it with fire. For Ki-tae, his resort to violence and torment as a substitute for productive emotional release provides little in the way of catharsis, and reveals instead more repression, hardened and calcified into something that can’t be excavated. Hate, sadness, and anger have fused to the bone.
In his desperation, Ki-tae wanted—needed Dong-yoon to understand. He needed Dong-yoon to know, somehow, and without words, all the confusion, rage, fear, loneliness, depression—everything he could not make sense of on his own. It is a deeply human desire: to want the people we love to understand us even when we cannot express our convoluted thoughts. In difficult periods of my life, I snatched at anything that I thought could fix or alleviate my despair. I held on to my friendships so tightly to the point of possessiveness, while at the same time the self-awareness of my overdependence made me resentful of them and myself. Like Ki-tae, my relationships were tested, and many eventually snapped. It felt inevitable. Trying to locate the beginning of the problem feels like an attempt to locate the starting point of a circle; in playing the blame game, we discover only circumstances twisting around each other, a never-ending cycle of what-ifs and if-onlys. A painful lesson Ki-tae and I learned was that the friends we believed to be true, the people we thought would be in our lives forever, may not be. Their decision to love us is contingent upon the person they believe we are. When they recognize who we’ve become they can always choose to take their love back. That is a frightening prospect: to think that when the world pries us open and turns us into twisted, ugly versions of ourselves, the people we love might not want to be there for us.
The haunting of memory that comes from a lifetime’s worth of regret is manifested in Bleak Night’s non-linear narrative: the boundaries between memory and reality are blurred, and at times erased. Often a flashback bleeds into the present and vice versa, with startling effect. In what appears to be the present, Dong-yoon gets out of bed, seemingly having gone to sleep crying. He then walks into a kitchen where Ki-tae is waiting. In this seamless slip into memory, Ki-tae says one of the most poignant lines in the film: “Even if I lose everything, I’d still have you. You truly understand me. Even if others don’t give a shit, as long as I have you, I will be OK.” The non-linear narrative achieves climactic significance in the closing scene at the railroad, where the three friends used to play baseball: the boundary is erased completely, and Dong-yoon and his memory of Ki-tae have two separate conversations, where every line of dialogue adds new layers of meaning. Everything returns full circle, and the story of the tragedy of a friendship broken beyond repair, with no possibility of resolution, is fully laid out. “Who is the best?” Ki-tae asks, in a memory. “You are. Friend.” Dong-yoon replies, only too late.
At the film’s close, I felt the air knocked out of my chest. I found myself nestled in the hearts of the characters, who are often tightly framed in shot, pulling the audience into their perspective, to see on their faces what they cannot bear to say. The repeated metaphor of lonely, impersonal spaces—the faceless apartment blocks, long corridors, the abandoned railroad—suggests a claustrophobic world that is at the same time incredibly vast and solitary, where the story of Ki-tae, Dong-yoon, and Hee-joon (the third friend of the group), the breakdown of their friendship, and the crumbling psyche of a lonely young man, all come to pass. It is a world that is familiar to me. In Ki-tae, I saw my desire to be seen, to be loved and understood, even through the rage and unreasonableness. For someone to love me despite everything, and believe that there is good in me, to still want me around. I wished Ki-tae could’ve had that.
Wan Khalisah is a Communications graduate from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her interest lies in analyzing the interplay between literature and visual media.