Parallels Between Lee Chang-Dong’s Burning & Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Though the movie Burning and the book The Great Gatsby look like they have nothing in common at first, a deeper look and analysis reveals otherwise. I didn’t really realize this until my second watch of the movie, when I happened to be reading Gatsby at the same time.
First off, one of the main characters,Ben, is literally a Korean Gatsby but darker and more sinister. The protagonist, Jong-Su, even says so when he first meets him, when they found out their shared love for the classics. Both Gatsby and Ben are mysterious, charming men who enjoy the comforts of their money. Ben drives a Porsche everywhere, akin to Gatsby's yellow car, even to Jong-Su's farmhouse in the middle of the countryside, where it stands out. His Porsche contrasts heavily with Jong-Su's beat down truck in many different scenes, emphasizing the class difference between the pair. He is rich and does not face the problems that the two other main characters do, Jong-Su with his father in jail awaiting his trial and Hae-Mi with her crippling credit card debt. He doesn't even seem to work for his money either, living a comfortable well-off life. He mentions that he lived in either Europe or the States and also speaks with a slightly foreign accent. He goes against Korean values as well, smoking a blunt in Jong-Su's backyard. Even his name, Ben, is so different from the traditional Korean names seen throughout the film. Though he looks Korean, he is a foreigner through and through, clearly influenced by the west.
To Hae-Mi and especially Jong-Su, he is distinctly foreign while they are perfectly Korean. Jong-Su holds onto his conservative values as a farmer who grew up in the country. This is what causes him to call Hae-Mi unkind words when she was dancing, a spontaneous moment of passion while she was in a moment of vulnerability. Jong-Su parallels Gatsby in this moment, sticking to his idealized ideas of love and purity and failing to realize Daisy/Hae-Mi's independence. Hae-Mi on the other hand is more modern, she is open minded and a maniac pixie dream depressed girl. Jong-Su is so hesitant and wary around Ben because he is traditional Korean, distrustful about foreign influence. Even Hae-Mi, the one who befriended Ben in the first place, doesn't completely trust Ben. Ben says this himself that Jong-Su was "the only person in this world she trusts" and it made Ben "jealous for some reason", something he'd never felt before in his life.
The clear distinction between the trio creates a conflict that was seen before in many other forms of media: old vs new and in this case, east vs west. You know where else we saw east vs west? THE GREAT GATSBY. While the east vs west conflict in Gatsby was talking about the rich, it is different in this film. Jong-Su represents the poor eastern farmers, those who work to survive paycheck to paycheck, while Ben represents the western elites, those who drive Porsches everywhere, live a life of luxury, and can afford to throw parties spontaneously. Along with this, there are many other shared themes between Gatsby and Burning, like class disparity, inequality, and the charming face of the rich or in Burning's case evil. This is what makes Jong-Su's initial distrust of Ben so tragic, because he ended up being right. Though it is open to interpretation what happened to Hae-Mi, it is evident to the viewer that Ben had a hand in her disappearance. It is not until too late that Jong-Su realizes that "burning greenhouses" was a metaphor. Both pieces are left open-ended with the nightmare of Hae-Mi's death and the Gatsby's lethal dreams of love.
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