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I saw the weirdest movie this weekend that in its strange way said something about fanfic. It's impossible to really talk about it without completely spoiling it, so be warned. It's called A Tale of Two Sisters in English. Its Korean title is Janghwa, Hongryeon, apparently based on a well-known Korean folktale. If you're planning to see it and don't want to be completely spoiled, don't read, though being spoiled might help you know what's going on as you watch it.
The story runs basically thus: Two sisters arrive home after a long absence in what is presumably a mental hospital, to live with their father, Moo-Hyun, and his second wife, Eun-joo. Su-mi, the older sister, is openly hostile to her stepmother, while her younger sister Su-yeon is scared of her. Eun-joo is a nightmare, a girlish happy homemaker who's a little too happy—bordering on hysterical. So happy her husband keeps giving her pills to calm her down. Her behavior makes for an awkward dinner party between Moo-Hyun, Eun-joo, Eun-joo's brother and his wife, Mi-hee. Eun-joo gets crazy and Mi-hee pitches a fit. On the way home Mi-hee mentions that back at the house, there's a girl under the sink.
Su-mi and Eun-joo clash over her father, and over Su-yeon, whom the stepmother abuses. After she discovers somebody has cut or scribbled her out of old family photos (in which Real Mom, too, appears) and broken the neck of her parakeet, Eun-joo lets loose on Su-yeon, locking her in a closet. When Su-mi finally tells her father about the abuse Dad says he's had enough of her nonsense: Nobody's locking Su-yeon in the closet. Su-yeon has been dead for some time. Oops.
Neither Su-mi nor Su-yeon takes well to this news. So the following day Dad goes to get whomever it is he's been speaking with on the phone, giving updates about how things are going. This leaves Su-mi and her stepmother alone with a large bloody bag someone's dragging around the house and stuffing into that darned closet. Standing over her stepdaughter with a heavy statue (of a child covering its eyes), Eun-joo tells Su-mi, "Do you know what's really scary? You want to forget something. Totally wipe it off your mind. But you never can. It can't go away, you see. And... and it follows you around like a ghost," before knocking her out. Dad comes home and picks Su-mi off the now blood-free floor, then goes to confront his crazy wife.
Only there is no crazy wife. Once again, there's only Su-mi, who has not only been playing the part of her sister but her stepmother as well. The real Eun-joo has just been brought home, looking very sleek and not girlish at all. Maybe Su-mi needs to go back to that hospital. When she gets there we finally learn "the truth" behind all this. At some point before the death of the girls' mother, Dad appears to have taken up with Eun-joo. She came to the house with her brother and his wife. Perhaps Dad asked his wife for a divorce, perhaps this is where the affair was revealed. Perhaps Mom was dying anyway, since Eun-joo might be a nurse. Whatever happened, Mom was upset and so were the girls. Mom comforted Su-yeon in her room, then hung herself in Su-yeon's standing closet and took an overdose of pills for good measure. When Su-yeon went to get dressed the following morning, there's Mom. In trying to pull her mother out of the closet Su-yeon brought the whole thing down on herself. The adults downstairs heard the crash and Eun-joo investigated but did nothing to help Su-yeon, who was suffocating under the weight of the closet and her mother's corpse. Running into her father's girlfriend in the hallway, Su-mi snarked at Eun-joo which her future stepmother warned she "would regret," then stomped out of the house in anger, thus missing her sister's final, "Help me, Su-mi."
There are still a few things to tie up (not all the ghosts here are a delusion—heh heh heh) but that's the part that made me think about fanfic (once I figured out what was going on to my satisfaction). See, there are wonderful hints throughout the movie that these females are all the same character (not the least of which is that they all get their periods on the same day—Moo-Hyun really married himself into constant PMS hell here), and have a way of disappearing from the scenes in ways that would be bad filmmaking if they weren't clearly deliberate. For instance, at the dinner party one would think that even if the two sisters chose not to eat with the adults we would see where they were—are they up in Su-mi's room? Su-yeon's? Are they eavesdropping? There are 6 people in the house but suddenly the director sees no reason to place two of them anywhere. That's because there's really only one, and she's currently freaking out everyone at the table by being her stepmother reuniting with her brother.
That's where fanfic came in. Su-mi's delusions made a disturbing amount of sense to me. Here's a girl capable of creating people who don't exist and thinking she's someone she isn't. Presumably she could create any delusion she wanted. But rather than choose something stable, for instance a life where Su-yeon is still alive and they live with their father, she instead creates her evil stepmother as well and continually puts her sister in danger. See where I'm going with this? Su-mi's entire delusion is one long RPF hurt/comfort fic! It's not just that Su-mi wants to save the sister she didn't save in life, because she's also "writing" abuse from which to save her. She's the Eun-joo doing the abusing, the Su-yeon being abused—and she herself always "arrives" when the abuse has been done, unable to save, but only to comfort with much snuggling and promises never to let anyone hurt Su-yeon—if only Su-yeon tells her when she needs help. Unfortunately, Su-yeon has a habit of not telling about the abuse going on, even when confronted directly by a sister demanding "Who did this to you?" (One of the most oft-heard phrases in hurt/comfort fanfic, where the person interrogated usually, like Su-yeon, responds with mute distress.) It's the never-ending adventure of Mary Su-mi and Mary Su-yeon!
After all, none of this abuse ever seems to have happened in "canon." Eun-joo did let Su-yeon die, but she never locked her in any closet. Su-yeon pulled the closet down on herself and was trapped by her mother's body. Indirectly Eun-joo caused this to happen by probably driving the mother to suicide, but the idea of her locking Su-yeon up for punishment appears to be a fairy tale-fantasy of Su-mi's, the kind that appears in a lot of fic. Su-mi has a fanficcers instinct. She doesn't create a safe delusion to block the truth from her mind, she compulsively acts out scenarios that never end. There's always more torture, more threats and more comfort. There's no resolution, because the pleasure comes from the action of playing out the hurt/comfort, almost like a ritual.
To create that fanfic situation, of course, Su-mi needs fanon characters. When Eun-joo finally appears towards the end of the movie in her tailored grey suit, with her sleek hair and cool, professional manner you immediately do a double take—what happened to the caricature? The Eun-joo we've known up till now has been a teenaged girl playing at being a grown woman, not to mention projecting her own issues onto Eun-joo. "Now you're even trying to act like a mother," Su-mi contemptuously tells Eun-joo when they meet in the hallway on the day of the suicide. So in fanon Eun-joo fusses over dinners, pretends to care about her "daughter's" well-being and wants to be friends. The real Eun-joo's mother act is far more believable—but it is still an act. There is a real relationship between the two Eun-joos. Su-mi's version makes the subtext text.
I assume Canon Su-yeon, had we known her, might also be different from the one we know. True, the one time we do see her she is crying and helpless, but given her mother had just turned herself into a jack-corpse-in-the-closet-box we probably should consider that moment a-typical. The real Su-mi may have always been dominant, but that's all the more reason for her to make her sister weaker in fanon: unable even to whistle, much less ask for help (in "fanon" Su-yeon chooses to hide her abuse while in reality she called for help and Su-mi wasn't listening) or deal with her own period. In real life I suspect she was a bit more effective. She certainly is in death. Note to the wise: Never ever kill a young woman in an Asian horror movie.
It's also very fanfic the way different characters get lost when Su-mi concentrates on something else. The two sisters may start out sitting on the porch together, but when Dad comes out and Su-mi tells him off the camera leaves Su-yeon completely, like she's not even there. When Su-mi wants to have a dinner party as Eun-joo she doesn't bother to explain where she and her sister are at that time. That's probably why the most discordant note is Moo-hyun, the only other "real" person in the house. Su-mi calls him "clueless" and he certainly is. He's like a canon character wandering around in a fanfic. While the females are fighting over whose house this is, Dad's handing out pills, apologizing or ruining everything by bringing up canon.
It makes me wonder about that line of Su-mi/Eun-joo's: "Do you know what's really scary? You want to forget something. Totally wipe it off your mind. But you never can. It can't go away, you see. And... and it follows you around like a ghost." We always talk about fanfic as "exploring possibilities" and things like that, but I think sometimes it's also about trying to forget something that bothers us in canon—we call it "fixing" usually. Like Su-mi, after all, we tend to torture and save characters that are the most starkly unrescue-able in canon while we rush to save them with their underdog rescuers—always being sure to get there a moment to late so that we can then administer comfort. The director of A Tale of Two Sisters, Ji-woon Kim, has stated there is no incest in the movie—and there isn't—but I don't think questions about it arise simply from the fact that the two sisters are shown curled up in bed together. (Su-mi snuggling into bed to wait for her "husband" Moo-hyun is a different story that's making a different point.) I think there is just something…I don't know if it's sexual, but it's related…about Su-mi's repetitive fantasy. Something fandom's known about for years. There's wank going on here, but it's wank of the fandom kind.
I'm using words like fanon and canon here, but of course fanfic really just takes an impulse from life and concentrates it. We all have fantasies about telling people off or whatever, in which people become what we need them to be. Perhaps what made this jump out at me as fic was the fact that Su-mi really does have a single story she's dealing with—the story of the day her mother killed herself. That's the day she's recreating, using the elements of it in her fantasies: the closet, the brother-in-law, and his wife. Su-mi, like many fanfic writers, has no use for OCs.
The story runs basically thus: Two sisters arrive home after a long absence in what is presumably a mental hospital, to live with their father, Moo-Hyun, and his second wife, Eun-joo. Su-mi, the older sister, is openly hostile to her stepmother, while her younger sister Su-yeon is scared of her. Eun-joo is a nightmare, a girlish happy homemaker who's a little too happy—bordering on hysterical. So happy her husband keeps giving her pills to calm her down. Her behavior makes for an awkward dinner party between Moo-Hyun, Eun-joo, Eun-joo's brother and his wife, Mi-hee. Eun-joo gets crazy and Mi-hee pitches a fit. On the way home Mi-hee mentions that back at the house, there's a girl under the sink.
Su-mi and Eun-joo clash over her father, and over Su-yeon, whom the stepmother abuses. After she discovers somebody has cut or scribbled her out of old family photos (in which Real Mom, too, appears) and broken the neck of her parakeet, Eun-joo lets loose on Su-yeon, locking her in a closet. When Su-mi finally tells her father about the abuse Dad says he's had enough of her nonsense: Nobody's locking Su-yeon in the closet. Su-yeon has been dead for some time. Oops.
Neither Su-mi nor Su-yeon takes well to this news. So the following day Dad goes to get whomever it is he's been speaking with on the phone, giving updates about how things are going. This leaves Su-mi and her stepmother alone with a large bloody bag someone's dragging around the house and stuffing into that darned closet. Standing over her stepdaughter with a heavy statue (of a child covering its eyes), Eun-joo tells Su-mi, "Do you know what's really scary? You want to forget something. Totally wipe it off your mind. But you never can. It can't go away, you see. And... and it follows you around like a ghost," before knocking her out. Dad comes home and picks Su-mi off the now blood-free floor, then goes to confront his crazy wife.
Only there is no crazy wife. Once again, there's only Su-mi, who has not only been playing the part of her sister but her stepmother as well. The real Eun-joo has just been brought home, looking very sleek and not girlish at all. Maybe Su-mi needs to go back to that hospital. When she gets there we finally learn "the truth" behind all this. At some point before the death of the girls' mother, Dad appears to have taken up with Eun-joo. She came to the house with her brother and his wife. Perhaps Dad asked his wife for a divorce, perhaps this is where the affair was revealed. Perhaps Mom was dying anyway, since Eun-joo might be a nurse. Whatever happened, Mom was upset and so were the girls. Mom comforted Su-yeon in her room, then hung herself in Su-yeon's standing closet and took an overdose of pills for good measure. When Su-yeon went to get dressed the following morning, there's Mom. In trying to pull her mother out of the closet Su-yeon brought the whole thing down on herself. The adults downstairs heard the crash and Eun-joo investigated but did nothing to help Su-yeon, who was suffocating under the weight of the closet and her mother's corpse. Running into her father's girlfriend in the hallway, Su-mi snarked at Eun-joo which her future stepmother warned she "would regret," then stomped out of the house in anger, thus missing her sister's final, "Help me, Su-mi."
There are still a few things to tie up (not all the ghosts here are a delusion—heh heh heh) but that's the part that made me think about fanfic (once I figured out what was going on to my satisfaction). See, there are wonderful hints throughout the movie that these females are all the same character (not the least of which is that they all get their periods on the same day—Moo-Hyun really married himself into constant PMS hell here), and have a way of disappearing from the scenes in ways that would be bad filmmaking if they weren't clearly deliberate. For instance, at the dinner party one would think that even if the two sisters chose not to eat with the adults we would see where they were—are they up in Su-mi's room? Su-yeon's? Are they eavesdropping? There are 6 people in the house but suddenly the director sees no reason to place two of them anywhere. That's because there's really only one, and she's currently freaking out everyone at the table by being her stepmother reuniting with her brother.
That's where fanfic came in. Su-mi's delusions made a disturbing amount of sense to me. Here's a girl capable of creating people who don't exist and thinking she's someone she isn't. Presumably she could create any delusion she wanted. But rather than choose something stable, for instance a life where Su-yeon is still alive and they live with their father, she instead creates her evil stepmother as well and continually puts her sister in danger. See where I'm going with this? Su-mi's entire delusion is one long RPF hurt/comfort fic! It's not just that Su-mi wants to save the sister she didn't save in life, because she's also "writing" abuse from which to save her. She's the Eun-joo doing the abusing, the Su-yeon being abused—and she herself always "arrives" when the abuse has been done, unable to save, but only to comfort with much snuggling and promises never to let anyone hurt Su-yeon—if only Su-yeon tells her when she needs help. Unfortunately, Su-yeon has a habit of not telling about the abuse going on, even when confronted directly by a sister demanding "Who did this to you?" (One of the most oft-heard phrases in hurt/comfort fanfic, where the person interrogated usually, like Su-yeon, responds with mute distress.) It's the never-ending adventure of Mary Su-mi and Mary Su-yeon!
After all, none of this abuse ever seems to have happened in "canon." Eun-joo did let Su-yeon die, but she never locked her in any closet. Su-yeon pulled the closet down on herself and was trapped by her mother's body. Indirectly Eun-joo caused this to happen by probably driving the mother to suicide, but the idea of her locking Su-yeon up for punishment appears to be a fairy tale-fantasy of Su-mi's, the kind that appears in a lot of fic. Su-mi has a fanficcers instinct. She doesn't create a safe delusion to block the truth from her mind, she compulsively acts out scenarios that never end. There's always more torture, more threats and more comfort. There's no resolution, because the pleasure comes from the action of playing out the hurt/comfort, almost like a ritual.
To create that fanfic situation, of course, Su-mi needs fanon characters. When Eun-joo finally appears towards the end of the movie in her tailored grey suit, with her sleek hair and cool, professional manner you immediately do a double take—what happened to the caricature? The Eun-joo we've known up till now has been a teenaged girl playing at being a grown woman, not to mention projecting her own issues onto Eun-joo. "Now you're even trying to act like a mother," Su-mi contemptuously tells Eun-joo when they meet in the hallway on the day of the suicide. So in fanon Eun-joo fusses over dinners, pretends to care about her "daughter's" well-being and wants to be friends. The real Eun-joo's mother act is far more believable—but it is still an act. There is a real relationship between the two Eun-joos. Su-mi's version makes the subtext text.
I assume Canon Su-yeon, had we known her, might also be different from the one we know. True, the one time we do see her she is crying and helpless, but given her mother had just turned herself into a jack-corpse-in-the-closet-box we probably should consider that moment a-typical. The real Su-mi may have always been dominant, but that's all the more reason for her to make her sister weaker in fanon: unable even to whistle, much less ask for help (in "fanon" Su-yeon chooses to hide her abuse while in reality she called for help and Su-mi wasn't listening) or deal with her own period. In real life I suspect she was a bit more effective. She certainly is in death. Note to the wise: Never ever kill a young woman in an Asian horror movie.
It's also very fanfic the way different characters get lost when Su-mi concentrates on something else. The two sisters may start out sitting on the porch together, but when Dad comes out and Su-mi tells him off the camera leaves Su-yeon completely, like she's not even there. When Su-mi wants to have a dinner party as Eun-joo she doesn't bother to explain where she and her sister are at that time. That's probably why the most discordant note is Moo-hyun, the only other "real" person in the house. Su-mi calls him "clueless" and he certainly is. He's like a canon character wandering around in a fanfic. While the females are fighting over whose house this is, Dad's handing out pills, apologizing or ruining everything by bringing up canon.
It makes me wonder about that line of Su-mi/Eun-joo's: "Do you know what's really scary? You want to forget something. Totally wipe it off your mind. But you never can. It can't go away, you see. And... and it follows you around like a ghost." We always talk about fanfic as "exploring possibilities" and things like that, but I think sometimes it's also about trying to forget something that bothers us in canon—we call it "fixing" usually. Like Su-mi, after all, we tend to torture and save characters that are the most starkly unrescue-able in canon while we rush to save them with their underdog rescuers—always being sure to get there a moment to late so that we can then administer comfort. The director of A Tale of Two Sisters, Ji-woon Kim, has stated there is no incest in the movie—and there isn't—but I don't think questions about it arise simply from the fact that the two sisters are shown curled up in bed together. (Su-mi snuggling into bed to wait for her "husband" Moo-hyun is a different story that's making a different point.) I think there is just something…I don't know if it's sexual, but it's related…about Su-mi's repetitive fantasy. Something fandom's known about for years. There's wank going on here, but it's wank of the fandom kind.
I'm using words like fanon and canon here, but of course fanfic really just takes an impulse from life and concentrates it. We all have fantasies about telling people off or whatever, in which people become what we need them to be. Perhaps what made this jump out at me as fic was the fact that Su-mi really does have a single story she's dealing with—the story of the day her mother killed herself. That's the day she's recreating, using the elements of it in her fantasies: the closet, the brother-in-law, and his wife. Su-mi, like many fanfic writers, has no use for OCs.
