In an interview conducted in 2002, the year after ADDRESS UNKNOWN and BAD GUY premiered in South Korean theaters, Kim Ki-duk was asked to describe the source of his “han” (恨). This concept, sometimes characterized as uniquely Korean, encompasses a number of subjective meanings, including “resentment,” “unresolved suffering,” and the “feeling of inferiority.” Explaining these feelings, Kim remarks with his typical provocativeness:

In the previous chapter, I tried to show how the violent imagery in Kim's films produces the experience of alterity, an experience that reflects the inability of dominant ideology to account for subject positions that have historically been excluded from it. ADDRESS UNKNOWN and BAD GUY make visible the lives and histories of the ostracized, forcing viewers to experience these histories as radically different. They depict individuals who may be characterized through their han, for their lives do not conform to the narrative precepts of popular melodrama and its moral occult, and like the filmmaker himself, survive in the blind spots of commercial cinema. Kim remarks that he “overcame” his feelings of inferiority when he left Korea and temporarily lived in France as a sidewalk artist.

Cinema played a role in this process of overcoming through his attempts to understand those who have been misunderstood. In the following discussion, I would like to show how three films by Park Chan-wook perform a similar critique. The spectacles of violence in both Kim's and Park's films function analogously: they interrogate the moralizing gaze of the film spectator and raise fundamental questions revolving around the ethics of the other. However, as we shall see, Park is concerned with a specific aspect of this ethics, namely the logic of revenge and its relationship to cinematic narrativity.

We can begin by thinking about the relationship of han to violence.