This review is x-posted from a previous blog, and expanded! ♥
Both the Dionysian and the Apollonian are, in their own ways, model constructions of the feminine self. One woman cooks elaborate meals, and she cleans, she puts out, fucks hard, she creates, she gives, she takes. A perfect body, a model wife. The other calls herself a writer, but stares at blank pages, creates nothing anyone will buy, practices asceticism in sex and food, purging anything that comes in, maintaining her smallness, never taking up space she doesn't have to, never being too greedy, having a cold, masc professionalism. Both are typed just shy of parodical, the constant retching abjection of Yun-hee matched to the violent, emotional abjection of the hysteric Song-hee, but in that elevation 301/302 plays out the soaps of these two archetypes, with its television ratio and chambered dramaturgy intruded upon only by ever recursive structure, to ends both sincere and comical.
Song-hee's character is the more volatile of the two, but her story, elsewhere maybe played for laughs, is taken seriously. The camera lingers on her ass, her breasts, only for seconds, but she is sculpted, at times thin with proportions that feel just unattainable. It lingers more on her hands, though, her knives, how she makes intricate, loved meals wasted in the mouth of a man who doesn't love her, and the trash can of the woman who can't receive her. Her coping is consumption; passive, pathetic resistance from her husband. At first, the sex excites him so, as does the food, but he resents having to compliment her, he resents routine, he resents her needs. So when she seeks to define herself in proximity to her new neighbor, she takes on a more aggressive, dominant role. She is, at times, a perfect woman by standards both grotesque and universally understood. Too woman for woman. She even shrieks like a lady. She is not enough for anyone here, though, not enough to be loved, not enough to fix.
The concept of culture-bound syndromes is fraught, typically as it centralizes and typicalizes Western medical thought and experience while exceptionalizing any cultures outside of that. Still, there is some use to the idea, how different cultures beget different medical and psychological considerations. More over, there is one disease we consider a culture-bound syndrome that is specific to the West, and still transported and understood elsewhere; anorexia nervosa. The FDA has no singular approved pharmaceutical treatments for anorexia nervosa. There are pharmaceutical treatments for symptoms of anorexia and for possible causes for anorexia (typically antidepressants), and there are non-pharmaceutical approaches used to treat anorexia, but unlike in the US, Korea does have more routine and specific anorexia treatments, including corticosteroids and anabolic steroids, including testosterone. We don't know what Yun-hee takes, some brown pills in an orange bottle, but this small gesture gives way to how Yun-hee's celibacy, her restraint, is almost more along a Paglia-model of the Apollonian in some of the ways it pushes masculinity onto her; it's telling too that her stripping before death is the only forwardness she's ever shown, and it is towards another woman. Here is woman as man. She is, just like Song-hee, not enough. She is molested, degraded, and her sterile peace is always intruded upon. She says her body rejects everything.
There is another relevant culture-bound syndrome to discuss here, though, called hwabyeong. There have been attempts at exporting this very specific cultural phenomenon outside of Korea under names like post-traumatic embitterment, but they have yet to really stick. Still, the name tells you what you need to know, it is a sickness of fire. It’s not outrageous temperament but rather lingering, swallowed suffering. The body can't quite flush it. Both women here feel of this. The fire sat in their guts, pulled out like the fish song-hee guts in her first meal for the neighbor. The connection is forced, at first, and nonconsensual, but it means something, eventually, that in their dichotomy they share that abjection, share their proximity to the ripeness of death. Just, one will set the table, and the other will be the meal.
301/302 sort of astounds me. It’s so confident and precise and abject but feels like it should never work as well as it does. Few things have made food so essentially and immutably gorgeous and revolting in equal measure, within moments of each other. None of the subject matter is ever exactly uncharted territory, but director Park Chul-soo never really falters in keeping things under control. The indulgence and the abstinence find themselves formally reflected in all decisions here, from aspect ratio, to choice of set, to the rhythm of images, the presence of horror and sex. And for as distinctly and necessarily sexual and leering as it is, it feels always pointed, focused.
301/302 has perhaps a somewhat strange reputation on user-sites for being not explicit enough in its same-sex desire, but that feels really misguided to me. The thrust of it is explicitly about their psychosexual dynamic; what could be more “gay” than retching up a health smoothie and then asking a woman if you look "tasteless” before dropping your robe, asking her if she wants a taste? It’s the exact same double entendre dynamic that Bryan Fuller would cop for NBC’s Hannibal so many years later, played similarly as soapy horror, albeit perhaps less winkingly. I think broadly there has been misreadings of Park’s vision though, how it sees the codependent and comorbid ways desire and need are navigated, largely comigng down to a misreading of the characters (neither remains passive or purely sympathetic figures, where I have seen some retrospectives read Yun-hee as such, and likewise the aforementioned misunderstanding of how sexual desire figures in here). Which is a shame, because in some ways this feels like it has a rather muted, if generally positive, reputation over here.
Still, there has been some definitely good writing on 301/302, though. Colin Marshall’s LARB retrospective on the film makes some similar observations as mine, but provides valuable context in other places, especially regarding the function and positioning of food here (whereas my interest was definitely more along the lines of the sexual here lol). Really appreciated how grounded and fleshed out this read was. Ultimately, though, yeah. I watched this a few months back, did a little letterboxd log for it, and then found myself continuously thinking about it. There’s something so rapturous here, so pointed and astute. I absolutely want those with the stomach for something like this to take time and watch it at some point.