Misinformation and its Host: A Review of Bong Joon-Ho’s Monstrous Political Satire
Aidan Trembath
Having plenty of time to indulge in movie-watching over the winter break, I decided upon a relatively recent monster film called The Host, a Korean gem directed by the esteemed cinematic wizard of Parasite¸ Bong Joon-Ho. The film had sat on my shelf for most of the fall semester and far exceeded my long-heightened anticipation to watch it. As with Bong Joon-Ho’s other films, The Host delivers sharp, poignant, and darkly comedic satire of South Korea’s political obstacles. The film and its themes of misinformation and bureaucratic ineptitude felt especially pertinent given the uneven responses of governments around the world to COVID-19.
The film begins with American scientists dumping hazardous materials down drains that connect to the Han River, a major waterway that runs through Seoul. The villainy of unregulated dumping, portrayed rather cartoonishly with a nigh-diabolically unsympathetic American scientist, is followed by the introduction of the central family living in a mobile home and food truck along the Han River. After presenting the lead character and single father to a daughter, Park Gang-du, as bumbling and unaspiring, a fish-like monster makes landfall, gorging itself on the beachside onlookers and abducting Park’s daughter to consume later. What follows is a mixture of family drama, kaiju horror, and rescue plot, interwoven with the South Korean and American governments’ respective attempts to control the spread of information by quarantining victims on false premises of a disease spread by the creature. The film ends with an overt criticism of the United States’ dumping of formaldehyde near South Korea in the early 2000s, followed by the South Korean government’s use of an extremely toxic gas, dubbed “Agent Yellow” (a thinly disguised reference to the American “Agent Orange” gas used in chemical warfare), to destroy the creature. Park Gang-du and his family manage to kill the creature at the end but at the expense of his daughter’s life.
The film feels particularly relevant in a time of COVID-19 and deliberate restrictions of public information by state governments. The pride and recklessness of irresponsible governments around the world have had direct repercussions on the lives of civilians, both in democracies and non-democracies. In China, Zhang Zhan, a citizen journalist, was recently arrested for her coverage of the early days of the pandemic; in the United States, President Trump knew about the severity of the virus in time to prepare for its arrival but chose to downplay its virulence; in Brazil, President Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied the virus’s gravity, resulting in Brazil becoming a hotspot for the virus. In The Host and in our present reality, the information that governmental bodies choose to share with, or withhold from, the public is amongst the foremost factors that mitigate or exacerbate the deadliness of an emergency.
For anyone looking for a monster film with a multilayered bite, The Host offers an exceptional insight into South Korean and American relations and the societal repercussions of undisclosed environmental dangers.
