| Rowan Smith |
Oldboy plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, July 21st, through Tuesday, July 23rd. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
When I first started getting more seriously interested in movies, around age thirteen, it was when video stores were on the precipice of catastrophe, though we didn’t know it yet. The business had already largely homogenized, people mostly rented from large chains like Blockbuster (or, in my case, Video Update, later Movie Gallery). When, as a thirteen-year-old, I wanted to learn about “great cinema,” I didn’t have that many resources. I had the AFI top 100 list, the IMdB top 250, and my mom’s 1999 edition of the Videohound Golden Retriever’s Movie Guide. The only places I really had to look were thrift stores, Walmart, and Video Update. The summer before my Freshman year I went to VU every Tuesday when they had a BOGO on all the gallery tapes (meaning not new releases on the outer perimeter walls) and you could get two tapes for $2. I would use my allowance every week to rent ten movies and watch them. I was burning through classics at a blistering pace. All About Eve, Citizen Kane, Easy Rider, and even a few foreign films like Seven Samurai and The Seventh Seal. The ones that the video store had. I liked most of these movies okay at the time, but I began to notice that most of these older and subtitled movies didn’t enthrall me, especially not compared to more contemporary films from the Gen X filmmakers that had come to prominence in the 90s—Tarantino, Linklater, PTA, Wes Anderson. All these black-and-white movies felt stuffy and slow compared to them, and while there were a number of subtitled movies on these lists I just could not find copies of, I figured that they would probably be droll like the ones I had managed to see.
I think this is a pretty common sentiment, the resistance to subtitles. Even when something manages to have a crossover appeal like Squid Game I heard so many people say that they watched it dubbed so they wouldn’t have to constantly be staring at the screen. Multitasking is definitely a modern hurdle for subtitles to overcome, but even before smartphones the idea of “foreign films” has always been synonymous with pretentiousness to most people. I feel like most people are exposed to the same sort of subtitled films that I was at that age. Four-hour epics like Seven Samurai test our patience and the more artsy stuff like Seventh Seal are endlessly mocked for their more surreal aspects. Even subtitled films that break these molds and do cross over like Das Boot or Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon are viewed as more exceptions to the rule than examples of a narrow view.
In the spring of 2004, I was about to enter high school and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme at Cannes. However, I found out that Quentin Tarantino, who was Cannes’s jury president that year, had strongly argued that the Palme should be given to a Korean film called Oldboy. Instead, Moore won gold while Oldboy went home with the Grand Prix. I immediately got my notebook with all the movies I wanted to see and wrote down Oldboy and underlined it. I mean, even if it had subtitles, Tarantino said it was amazing.
It was a year later that my family got Netflix. This was DVDs-in-the-mail era Netflix, but honest to god it changed my life. I immediately got on and constructed a queue of all the movies that I had been looking for for years. The first movie I ever got from them was Todd Solondz’s Happiness. But the week after that, I got Oldboy and realized that basically everything I had ever thought about foreign films, and perhaps by extension everything I thought about film, had been completely wrong.
At fifteen I realized I had been treating “great” movies like they were homework. I was watching all the movies I was “supposed” to watch but I wasn’t enjoying them. I hadn’t had enough time or guidance to learn the history and context of the films, and I was a kid, and of course, Doctor Zhivago is boring compared to Kill Bill. But I hadn’t realized until in the midst of Oldboy that I had drawn some sort of distinction between “fun” movies and “important” movies, and that I had put movies with subtitles into the latter category. No one would ever mistake Oldboy for a stuffy or boring experience. It is a kinetic and taut thriller that feels gripping and immediate and contemporary. I remember thinking that anybody would like this movie, that it should have the mass appeal of other modern thrillers like Seven did. I tried to impress this upon my friends at the time. “Guys, he literally fights like 40 guys with a hammer. It’s fucking crazy.” I told them. “Yeah,” they’d reply, “But it has subtitles.”
I had to get better friends.
This experience is one of the earliest examples I can think of where a preconceived notion I had fell away and exposed a doorway behind it. I feel like many people are too afraid to admit they are wrong when they have this sort of experience. I am very grateful to myself that I was not. When I walked through that door, I found incredible riches on the other side. It didn’t take long for me to gorge myself on the treasures that most people are unwilling to experience because of that subtitle barrier. Ichi the Killer, Ong-Bak, Irreversible, countless contemporary movies not in English that I could now see easily with Netflix, and I could burn copies of them (sorry!) and bring them to my friends’ houses and show them. At fifteen I began to gain a reputation that I still get teased for to this day: Rowan, he’s the guy who watches all those weird foreign films. Mostly teased with love. But I can’t deny it. When I look at my shelves and take stock of many of the films that mean the most to me, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Santa Sangre, Kinji Fukasaki’s Battle Royale, these were all movies that I saw because of Oldboy, and because of those movies I was willing to go back further and find Persona, Woman in the Dunes, Stalker, Yojimbo, and so many more.
I feel like most film lovers have a few movies they can point to as watersheds for themselves, the movies that opened the world up for them the way that Oldboy did for me. I hold Oldboy as close as I do because it may have opened the hardest and most important door of all. Most people are unwilling to put in the effort to watch films with subtitles. When I was younger this made me very angry. Now, I am simply grateful that I have all these wonderful movies in my life. When I was fifteen Oldboy changed my life, and because of that it will always hold a special place in my heart.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon