Train to Busan: Post-apocalyptic Gothic that works

A few weeks ago, I contrasted "Gothic" stories with a more rigorously defined science fiction. To summarize quickly, the Gothic is more concerned with the interior, psychological landscape of its characters, while science fiction is concerned with how humanity interacts with the environment, especially as technology both shapes humanity and is shaped by it.

In a science fiction post-apocalyptic or dystopian tale, for example, much time will be spent on how humanity got into the mess it's in, the social and technological steps it is taking to survive, and the specific details of day-to-day existence. The science doesn't necessarily need to be so rigorous it would pass muster in a peer-reviewed journal, but it must exist, and it must be central to the story. Interstellar comes to mind as an example.

In a Gothic post-apocalyptic or dystopian story, on the other hand, the focus is more on how the change in society wrought by environmental distress affects humanity psychologically. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a perfect example. McCarthy never even explains how the world inhabited by his characters came to be cold, gray, infertile, and lawless. We see the characters struggle to survive in great detail, but there's not much science that goes into it: scrounge, sneak, steal, get lucky. That's the formula. Mankind doesn't overcome the trouble by applying rational thought to solving problems, but by keeping hope alive.

The first Korean zombie blockbuster

I decided recently that my Korean skills have atrophied to an unacceptable level, so I started watching nearly everything Netflix had to offer in Korean. (I haven't yet committed enough to get Drama Fever or one of the Korean-only apps.) Netflix now has Train to Busan, the 2016 zombie blockbuster. I loved it. It reminded me a lot of the 2008 hit The Good, The Bad, and The Weird, which was Korea's first hit "Western" (set in the Gobi Desert). That movie took a quintessentially American genre that Americans have used to understand themselves for over 50 years and turned it on its head. While the American Western was about settling the frontier, The Good, The Bad, and The Weird was about what happens when where you live is someone else's frontier to be settled. I saw it as a working out of the old Korean proverb about how geopolitics apply to a small country: "When two whales fight, the shrimp breaks its back." This movie was about how the shrimp can learn to survive.

Train to Busan also took a common Western genre--one that's becoming more and more common by the day, it seems-- and gave it a uniquely Korean twist, one that managed to have moments in it of meditation on the rapid changes in Korean society.

Train to Busan (부산행) was as good as any Western movie about zombies, and better than most.

The story focuses on Seok Woo, a fund manager who will happily screw whoever he needs to in order to come out on top. He reluctantly agrees to take his daughter, whom he temporarily has custody of while he and his wife work out the details of their divorce, from Seoul to Busan to see her mother. He agrees because he feels sorry when he buys her the same birthday present he got her for Children's Day because he works too much to notice what she likes. He also missed her recital, when she wanted to sing the song she'd been practicing for him. So he gets on the train with her on her birthday.

Along the way, the great zombie outbreak happens. It's very sudden. We get very little explanation of what caused it. We learn that the company responsible for the virus was a company Seok Woo's fund was working with, so he bears some responsibility. But we don't know what the company was trying to accomplish or where they went wrong. That's not what the movie's about.

Before the train gets going, we get little peeks into the lives of some of the other passengers Seok Woo will interact with. There is a high school baseball player and the girl who likes him but he is too shy to like back yet. There are two elder ladies (ajuma), one of whom is much more caring than the other. And then there is Yoon Sang Hwa and his pregnant wife. All the passengers will work to change how Seok Woo sees the world, but Yoon will be the strongest impetus to Seok Woo's catharsis.

Seok Woo's daugher, Soo Ahn, is different from him. As the crisis unfolds, he tries to convince his daughter to take care of herself and let others worry about themselves, but she insists on helping others. She naturally takes to Yoon and his wife, who also exhibit concern for other passengers. Seok Woo's personal change takes place when Yoon unselfishly helps him and when he sees how upset his own daughter is with how much he only cares for himself.

It's not a complicated twist for a character to make, but why should it be? One thing about Zombie fiction is the way it breaks human behavior down to its rawest elements. When a crisis hits, you either throw others ahead of you to save yourself or you try to help others.

We don't get a whole ton of exposition about what abilities the zombies have. They're strong, but not the most powerful zombies we've seen in film. Tougher passengers can fight them off. We know they get confused by the dark and that they immediately calm down when they do not see live humans. One difference between them and other zombies I've seen is that the disease passes to new hosts very quickly. You get bit, and within seconds, you're turned. (The movie does cheat at the end in order to give us a tender moment, but it was worth it.)

The quickness with which the zombie virus passes is mirrored by how quickly selfishness spreads among many of the human survivors on the train. When faced with fear, they turn on each other with lightning speed.

The part where I make it about something more than just the movie

"In order for the culture to have a future, we have to go back to the past." -Korean rappers Epik High

The movie reflects an angst in Korean society that's been growing for some time. Korean society modernized with unbelievable rapidity, going from a medieval society to hyper-modern in a little over a generation. It hasn't slowed down its pace of change. Standards of living for most Koreans have skyrocketed, but along the way, old relationships that kept society together have collapsed. Korean parents used to put all their money into their children rather than retirement plans, because their children were their retirement plan. But a strapped young generation cannot pay for their elders, leading to an impoverished older generation being stuck into sub-standard poor houses.

It's not unlike when feudal relationship broke down in the West. On the one hand, they needed to go. Nobody wants to be born into relationships and kiss ass to everyone born above him. On the other hand, even though it sucked to have to serve a lord, that lord did have responsibilities to take care of you. Similarly, in Korean society, you had to show a shocking (to me as an American) amount of deference to your elders, but they in turn owed you care and concern.

In the West, The enlightenment was a result of the breakdown of feudalism, as was democracy. But so were the nightmare capitalist and industrial societies Dickens wrote about. Korea went through that, but on a highly compressed timeline.

We often see zombies as a warning of how mindlessly people now live their lives. It's a commentary on how we consume media and, nowadays, social media. Train to Busan turns zombies into something more basic. The cause of the zombie outbreak is selfishness, and the zombies are nothing more than an external monster representing what people are becoming internally.

Zombies have power on our imagination because they are humans stripped down to the reptilian brain, devoid of empathy and sympathy. This movie doesn't overthink what to do with that thematically. What is opposed to non-human humanity is human humanity. Caring for one another isn't just hippy-dippie crap. There's a strong biological basis for it, and the better we are at it, the better able we are to survive stresses in our environment, whether they are slowly creeping socio-economic changes brought about by globalization and technology or monsters hurling themselves as us as we speed through life on a train.