by Paul Fischer
Once selected, the guards were erased from the files the Party kept on every citizen. “The security personnel do not show up on any record, have no identification number or card,” wrote former member Lee Young-Kuk. “It is as if they do not exist.”
These were the men who, from 1985 on, guarded the couple on their every trip to Europe. They stood outside bathroom doors when Shin or Choi went to relieve themselves and took turns sitting at a desk in their hotel suite when they slept at night. They were highly trained and blindly devoted.
Still, the couple felt increasingly certain that filmmaking would be their way out. They worked so hard that they barely paid attention to their failing health. Between 1983 and 1986 Choi was in and out of hospital with gallstones, infections, and an influenza she could not shake off. Shin was also often exhausted and found himself dropping cameras during takes, unable to support their weight. They were both entering their sixties now and had been through far too much. They had not seen their children, families, or friends since 1978. They lived in opulent captivity, in a large villa compound with staff and chauffeur-driven cars, all the while shamefully aware of the poverty and suffering of the ordinary people around them. And they were worn down by absurd rules and regulations. In 1984, for instance, there had been, in quick succession, a “necktie instruction” and a “hat instruction” from Kim Il-Sung, mandating that all Party officials now had to wear ties and hats at all times; Mr. Kang turned up to work one day suddenly sporting a ridiculous bow tie and a porkpie hat.
Unable to forget his two failed escape attempts, Shin was adamant that he would only try again when he felt certain of their chances. But would that moment ever arrive? More to the point, would it happen while Choi and he were together, with enough strength to follow through?
The six movies he had made so far had been great successes. But he needed something more—he needed a film Jong-Il would deem good enough to pitch to Western Europeans, the Japanese, even Americans. He needed something sensational.
29
The Rubber Monster
That something sensational was Pulgasari.
By far the most famous film that Shin Sang-Ok made in North Korea, Pulgasari: The Iron-Eater was so representative of the absurdities and contradictions of North Korean cinema, of Shin himself, and of Kim Jong-Il, that it has become one of those so-bad-it’s-good cult movies, alongside Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space, Nicholas Webster’s Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room. The most ambitious blockbuster a national film industry had ever attempted, it’s the sort of terrible classic that is given midnight retrospectives in underground and art-house cinemas around the world.
Until Pulgasari, Shin had been a good, sometimes great, filmmaker. He had made his share of drivel in South Korea, but those had been exploitation pictures shot in a couple of weeks with very little effort and released off-the-cuff to make a quick buck. Pulgasari marked a turn in Shin’s career: the first time he had put all his energy into a picture and created a stinker. It was a sudden, inexplicable transformation, after which Shin never recovered his magic touch.
A glorious failure was never how Kim Jong-Il and Shin Sang-Ok saw it. Pulgasari was, upon first release, their greatest success. Shin never said exactly whose idea the film was, but it isn’t hard to guess. Shin’s cinematic heroes were Chaplin, Renoir, and Rossellini. His producer’s touchstones were Bond, Rambo, and Jason Voorhees. And it was Kim Jong-Il who had made a habit not of leading, but of following: of copying foreign successes he had just seen and enjoyed. Nation and Destiny was an answer to a long-running film series in Japan, Unknown Heroes a rip-off of German and Czech spy thrillers, The Flower Girl an extension of classic Chinese melodrama. Now he was ready to copy another one of his favorite franchises, this one also from Japan.
Godzilla had first appeared in the 1954 monster film of the same name and had quickly become an international phenomenon, in Japan because it touched a nerve about the nation’s World War II defeat and the destructive heritage of the atom bomb, and in the rest of the world as one of the great cheesy bad movies. Between 1954 and 1975 the franchise spawned fifteen installments, in which Godzilla went from radioactive monster to playful, family-friendly hero; his popularity declined as the films grew more light-hearted. After a nine-year absence from screens, the monster came back in 1984’s The Return of Godzilla, an appalling picture that failed at the box office and drew guffaws from critics (Roger Ebert wrote of the film, “My favorite moment occurs when the hero and heroine are clutching each other on a top floor of a skyscraper being torn apart by Godzilla and [a] professor leaps into the shot, says ‘What has happened here?’ and leaps out again without waiting for an answer”). But The Return of Godzilla was the first Godzilla film to be dubbed in Korean, so Jong-Il certainly saw it; and its release was accompanied by a hugely popular Godzilla festival which drew thousands of devoted followers to Tokyo to discover the film and buy truckloads of merchandise. This Jong-Il had also watched with great interest. The monster film, he decided, would be North Korean cinema’s entry into the international marketplace.
Pulgasari was to be North Korea’s Godzilla. Only instead of Godzilla’s nuclear fallout paranoia, a topic close to home for the Japanese in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pulgasari’s subtext concerned class warfare, communism, and the collective good.
Pulgasari is set in a Korean province in medieval times. The farmers, oppressed by a despotic governor and his soldiers, are starving. An old blacksmith who refuses to obey the governor’s orders is arrested and imprisoned in a wooden hut. Out of boredom, he carves out of mashed-up rice a small dragonlike figure with horns. Following his death in captivity, his daughter inherits the figurine. In a surreal twist, the daughter pricks her finger while sewing and a drop of blood falls onto the small dragon. The dragon, Pulgasari, is magically brought to life by the little girl’s blood. Feeding on metal, as befits the creation of a blacksmith, he eats all the iron he can find, and quickly grows from a cute pet who sleeps in the little girl’s bed with her to a gigantic, fearsome, invincible monster with devil’s horns, a muscular chest and stomach, and big, sharp fangs—a monster, yes, but one with a social conscience. Instead of leveling everything in his path like Godzilla, Pulgasari sides with the farmers against the governor and attacks his palace. The governor’s soldiers do everything they can to stop him (including firing rockets at him—thirteenth-century rockets, no less) and eventually manage to set off a rock avalanche that buries the beast. But they fail to account for the blacksmith’s daughter, who cuts her arm and spills her blood all over the pile of rocks, miraculously (and inexplicably, since none of the blood actually touches Pulgasari) bringing the monster back to life. Pulgasari kills the remaining soldiers, splatters the governor underfoot, and smashes the palace to pieces. The farmers are free and virtue prevails.
But it’s not over. Pulgasari’s appetite is endless. He has consumed the soldiers’ swords, armor, and weapons. Next he goes for the farmers’ tools, their domestic pots and pans—everything made out of metal. The peasants’ economy cannot sustain the creature’s life. It is implied that, if the village cannot find a way to sustain him, the monster’s appetite will devastate the entire world. Finally the little girl who created him hides inside a big bell and lures the monster to eat it. Pulgasari swallows the bell, with the little girl inside, but he cannot digest her and explodes into pieces, leaving behind only a tiny Pulgasari of the original size. Before this small dragon can wreak any havoc of its own, a beam of divine light shines down and destroys it. The film ends with a shot of the little girl among the rubble, a single tear trickling down her face.
* * *
The film is long, leaden, and dreadful. Pulgasari stumbles forward clumsily, like a toddler learning to walk, his face frozen in papier-mâché anger, his size changing arbitrarily based on the action portrayed at any given moment. He rips apart buildings that are clearly hollow behind their cardboard façades.
The film was
shot in just under a year in 1985, the last film Shin Sang-Ok made in North Korea. Knowing, like all good film executives, that the best way to re-create a film’s success is to hire the people behind it, Kim Jong-Il put aside his anti-Japanese sentiment and flew in the best Japanese technicians to work under Shin, including the special-effects crew behind the Godzilla films and Kenpachiro Satsuma, the man who had worn the Godzilla suit in The Return of Godzilla. According to Satsuma, he was originally told he was being hired for a big-budget Hollywood film being shot in China; but after a few days’ filming on a soundstage in Beijing he and the rest of the Japanese crew, numbering seven in all, were flown to North Korea and told that was where the majority of the film would be shot. As soon as they landed in Pyongyang, Satsuma said, their passports were taken away, allegedly “for our own safety.”
Satsuma was housed in a vacation villa in the same compound as Shin and Choi’s; his room had a vast bathroom and ornate dangling chandeliers. When the Japanese were allowed into Pyongyang, Satsuma was shocked by its cleanliness and quiet. It felt like Tokyo Disneyland to him. Three interpreters followed them wherever they went and often stopped them from taking pictures, especially of any soldiers or military vehicles, even though the military were everywhere in the city. The film seemed to be behind schedule and everyone acted frantic and rushed. The North Koreans didn’t have adequate special-effects equipment, and anytime Satsuma or Teruyoshi Nakano, the special-effects director, requested a new piece of equipment or gear, the shoot had to stop while the Party read over the request and then gave its approval. This had to be done often, because at the end of almost every day the North Korean technicians walked away with the tools, down to the nails, they had been given to work with, and returned at the start of the next day claiming they hadn’t stolen them and asking for new ones. Then there were the delays caused by the endless power cuts. Satsuma remembered Kim Jong-Il visiting the set on several occasions but only speaking to the Korean crew. With the Japanese he kept an absolute distance. The Japanese crew worked mostly in isolation anyway, rarely interacting with the Koreans themselves, which may partly explain the film’s lack of coherence.
As a result, in spite of playing the film’s eponymous monster, Satsuma only met his director, Shin Sang-Ok, once, and only because he bumped into him at the production office. Shin was overworked: he was working on Hong Kil-Dong at the same time as Pulgasari, his health was declining, and the stress of life in Pyongyang was weighing heavily on him. They had a short conversation in Japanese, Shin bringing up projects he hoped to make in Japan one day. Satsuma was intrigued. He had heard that Shin had been kidnapped, in which case Kim Il-Sung would surely never let him go to Japan. But he’d also heard rumors that Shin had defected to the North willingly, and he’d seen footage of him saying so in a press conference. Which was true?
“Are you planning on going back to South Korea?” Satsuma asked the Korean.
There was a pause. “It would be too complicated, politically, to go back,” Shin answered, and left it at that.
* * *
Filming on Pulgasari wrapped on December 28, 1985, and when the film was released several months later it became Shin’s greatest hit in North Korea. Crowds stampeded to the cinemas in such numbers that two separate defectors, one who had lived in Pyongyang and the other in the provinces, vividly recalled people being crushed to death in the fray. Theaters were so full that many North Koreans never managed to see the film despite several attempts.
Jong-Il, too, was thrilled with the film, which he saw as expressing the people’s struggle against greed, private wealth, and oppression. The monster symbolized the Party, their collective representative, or, better still, Kim Il-Sung himself, the man who had freed a nation from oppression. But was it the correct reading? When the film, many years later, was finally shown outside North Korea, there were many who argued that Shin’s intended interpretation was that the honest people were starving themselves for the benefit of Pulgasari, until finally the innocent spirit of the masses itself, in the person of the little girl, who had created the monster out of her own blood, sacrifices herself to restore freedom. To them Pulgasari still represented Kim Il-Sung: once the people’s hero, now a selfish beast of destructive and unquenchable appetites, who could only be gotten rid of by spilling blood.
So was Pulgasari the most outrageous, obvious Workers’ Party propaganda, as Jong-Il saw it? Or was it Shin’s allegorical mutiny, cleverly disguised? Shin himself never gave a satisfactory answer. “It’s a pure monster film,” he said when asked. “I didn’t put any ideology in it.” Some observers pointed to the long history of Korean protest films, first made under the Japanese occupation, which disguised anti-Japanese propaganda behind an obvious plot. These people—scholars and academics among them—were convinced Shin’s film was a sophisticated masterpiece, its imagery and subtext a serious critique of Kim Il-Sung’s regime.
Whatever Shin’s true intentions, Pulgasari defined his career and changed his life. It was the worst film he had ever made, and became without doubt the most widely famous—even better known than his 1960s South Korean masterpieces.
And, once Kim Jong-Il saw it, Pulgasari saved Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee’s lives.
* * *
After Shin finished Pulgasari, he sent Kim Jong-Il an advance copy, along with the newly finished Hong Kil-Dong. Less than a week later, on New Year’s Eve 1985, Choe Ik-Gyu burst into the Shin Film office. The Comrade Dear Leader, he announced with excitement, had watched the latest films and was so delighted with Shin and his staff that he wanted to reward them for their efforts. Shin followed Director Choe through the building’s auditorium, outside of which three trucks loaded to the brim were pulling up. The seven hundred employees of Shin Film were summoned. Loudly, Director Choe announced, “The Comrade Dear Leader is delighted with Pulgasari and Hong Kil-Dong. He has sent these gifts in recognition of your efforts, which is a great honor.” Then, as the trucks started unloading, he read off a list of the contents.
“Gift list: fifty deer, four hundred pheasants, two hundred wild geese, two hundred boxes of oranges…” Out of the trucks came fifty deer, freshly killed; four hundred pheasants, yet to be plucked; two hundred smoked geese; crates and crates of oranges fresh from Japan. Many of the workers cried as Choe Ik-Gyu read out his message. “The Dear Leader was very pleased that all the workers under President Shin and Vice President Choi of Shin Film have worked so hard to create such excellent movies,” he said. “He instructs you to work even harder in the new year to make even more good films…” In true North Korean custom, the letter went on and on.
When Choe was done reading, the heads of each Shin Film division stepped forward, each in turn, to swear their loyalty to Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il, and then the whole staff sang “The Song of General Kim Il-Sung” (“So dear to all our hearts is our General’s glorious name / Our own beloved Kim Il-Sung of undying fame…”) and “The Song of General Kim Jong-Il” (“He’s the artist of great joy / Glorifying the garden of juche / Long live, long live General Kim Jong-Il!”). Shin Film’s administrator spent the entire night dividing the gifts among the staff, with top cadres taking home whole deer and boxes of oranges and those below contenting themselves with a few oranges and a bit of pheasant. The next day, January 1, Shin and Choi threw their own party for their executive staff, about forty people in all. Everyone was still reeling with happiness from the unexpected gifts. Jong-Il frequently gave gifts to his inner circle, but rarely did regular staff receive presents, since official Workers’ Party rules forbade gift giving between members, claiming that it went against socialist principles. The night was filled with eating, drinking, singing, and dancing; even Shin and Choi joined in with traditional Korean songs.
The couple had reason to be happy, but they also felt a powerful melancholy. The songs they sang—“A Song of Hope,” “Arirang”—were farewell songs, and this, they hoped, would be their good-bye party.
* * *
Pulgasari
had convinced Kim Jong-Il that Shin Film and North Korean cinema were ready to be formally presented to polite society. It had always been his artistic dream to make internationally recognized movies, but now there was an added financial urgency: North Korea was bankrupt. It could not draw any more loans from foreign countries, including its longtime allies China and the Soviet Union. Kim’s counterfeiters were struggling to keep up with his appetites. And despite the glowing reports Jong-Il sent up to his father, productivity in the country’s mines, fields, and factories was tumbling. Kang Myong-Do, a member of the ruling elite who later defected, said, “The government had no bank reserves and was nearly broke. So from the mid-1980s most foreign trade had to be done on credit. Anyone who could borrow $1 million from another country was considered a North Korean hero.”
The top-grossing film of 1985, Back to the Future, had made $210 million in cinemas in the United States alone. Clearly the Dear Leader didn’t expect Shin Sang-Ok and Choi Eun-Hee to rival Robert Zemeckis and Michael J. Fox, but Pulgasari had cost only a couple of million dollars to make—the return was almost guaranteed. And Kim, who was an intuitive capitalist himself, looked to Godzilla: there was money to be made from the merchandise, the toys, the sequels …
So it was that in the weeks before New Year’s Eve 1985, after talking about it and dithering for over eighteen months, Kim Jong-Il finally formally greenlit Shin’s plan to establish a full-time office in Vienna, which would produce North Korean films and export them around the world. The first stage of Shin’s mission, Kim told him, was to find an Austrian coproducer interested in a 50 percent stake in the company, as well as funding for Shin Film Vienna’s first motion picture: Genghis Khan.