All Monsters Must Die (18 page)

“And how far along are we?” asks the documentarian. “Halfway?”

“Oh, I think more than halfway,” Alejandro responds. “If we compare with the rest of the world, we are already at 80 percent. And if we are talking about human feelings and heart, we are at least 95 percent there.”

The documentary shows seeds of doubt growing among the
KFA
members, who become ever more wary of the “wonder” that is North Korea, while Alejandro, unfazed, charges forth, leading group songs and shaking hands with everyone he meets.

In Panmunjom he tries to lead the group in protest against the United States, bellowing: “Yankees go home.” Toward the end of the trip he breaks into a room belonging to a journalist in the group, the American Andrew Morse, who was then with
ABC
News. He pries open a locked box, confiscates video footage and notes, and then hands them over to the authorities. Alejandro forces Morse to sign a confession of guilt, stating that he apologizes for all the criticisms he has voiced during a visit to a farming collective. Only then is he allowed to leave the country.

Since 2000, Alejandro has been responsible for North Korea's official website. The country has been so pleased with his contributions it has awarded him a series of honours, as well a position in the Committee for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

Alejandro looks very happy as he climbs aboard our bus. He wears a well-tailored outfit that he is said to have designed himself, based on the uniform of the Korean People's Army. Elias pushes to the front to get his photo taken with Alejandro, who straightens up and smiles. His military attire has virtually no wrinkles or creases.

When Alejandro has taken his leave and the bus rolls away from Panmunjom, Ari and Trond take out their North Korean flag and start singing “The Internationale,” a popular socialist anthem that has been sung since the late nineteenth century.

The videographer is ready with his camera again.

THE DMZ IS
a no man's land that stretches along the two countries' border. It is a wide area that contains green fields and a small village called Kijong-dong, which the South Koreans say is a façade — that the houses are merely cement shells patrolled by functionaries and the lights are turned on and off at regular intervals. Here in the village, the North Koreans have erected one of the world's tallest flagpoles — 160 metres — in order to break the record held by the South Koreans, who built a 98-metre flagpole in the
DMZ
village Daeseong-dong in the 1980s. They also started an audio war. Since the 1950s, the North Koreans have bombarded the South with revolutionary operas and propaganda speeches using enormous loudspeakers. In 2004, the South retaliated with a sonic wall of Korean pop. This time the two sides managed to end this unbearable situation at the negotiation table, where they agreed to a sonic ceasefire.

Soon after we leave the
DMZ
, we get a flat tire. Mr. Song, the bus driver, and the videographer are down to their undershirts, struggling to change the tire in the heat. The Bromma boys think it's incredibly funny; Bruno, who towers over everyone like a giant, calmly observes it all. He's about twice as tall as Mr. Song and could easily lift the tire without having to bend his knees. His enormous back and muscles are ready to spring into action. We look expectantly at him. But Mr. Song and the bus driver don't want his help; they are going to take care of this with true Juche spirit, or “
uri minjok-kkiri
” — “only our people together [can take care of this]” — as they say in both North and South Korea.

One of the Bromma boys spreads out a beach towel on the asphalt, strips to his underwear, and lies down. One of his friends takes a picture of him posing. He makes sure to get the tire-changing in the background. Tiny North Koreans struggling with giant tires.

“This is fun,” he says.

* * *

SHIN SANG-OK AND
Madame Choi weren't alone in their plight as prisoners in North Korea. But what differentiates their destiny from other abductees is that we have a public record of their activities: their movies. The films they made in the North can be seen as documents filled with messages and metaphors. One feature that wasn't made during their time in North Korea, but which has still been endowed with symbolic value, is the 1964 drama
Red Muffler
(
Ppalgan mahura
)
.
This film commemorates the South Korean air raids on the North during the Korean War. Shin had half of the film's 35mm negatives with him when he was kidnapped, as well as
The Red Gate
(
Yeolnyeomun
, 1962) and
Pyongyang Bombing Squad
(
Pyongyang pokgyokdae
, 1971). The reels were seized, but Shin managed to record what he had of
Red Muffler
with a video camera. After the couple's escape from North Korea, this was merged with the other half of the film in South Korea. The result is a remarkable document that explores both the division of the country and Shin's own story. We watched the spliced version at the Korean Film Archive in Seoul. The quality of Shin's video footage creates a filter, like a new layer of history in the story of the war.

The film's title plays on the red muffler scarfs the South Korean fighter pilots wore with pride, but which at the same time carried with them the values of the Red Guard and the associations of North Korean schoolchildren. The mufflers synthesize values and worlds, not least establishing a link between North and South, as David Scott Diffrient shows in the essay “Han'guk Heroism: Cinematic Spectacle and the Postwar Cultural Politics of
Red Muffler.
” The muffler is a symbol of the enemy's scalp, and an object that saves lives, and something that is passed on from hand to hand in the same way that the character Chi-son, played by Madame Choi, goes from owner to owner, from wife to prostitute to wife again.

General Park gave Shin generous resources for this project:
Red Muffler
was to become a military recruitment film as well as a celebration of the South Korean dictator himself. In the scenes in which North Korean villages are bombed, no maimed people or crying children are shown; instead we are given the pilot's perspective as he looks over the controls and levers, like in a video game.

The scarf in the film is connected to the “fear of the colour red” (or “red complex”) — a historical trauma in South Korea. Ever since the Korean War, the colour had been contaminated with the constant threat of the Communists in the North. People who wore red shirts risked being told off; a red carpet in a hotel room might upset people.

The first step taken toward recontexualizing the colour happened at the 2002 World Cup, when it was appropriated by the Red Devils — the South Korean team's devoted fans — who took over the streets with their red shirts and their drumming and their jubilant cheers.

OUR BUS IS
back on Pyongyang's streets and we see members of the Youth Corps everywhere. They march in neat rows, wearing bright red scarves that stand out against their white shirts. From the age of three, children are schooled in ideology. From eight to fourteen, they wear the red scarf. When they turn fourteen, they trade it in for a pin featuring Kim Il-sung's portrait. The scarf is proof of their direct connection to the Kim Il-sung Socialist Youth League.

* * *

MOST PEOPLE IN
both North and South Korea know the folk tale that the movie
Pulgasari
is based on. But Kim Jong-il wanted to rewrite the story. To understand the meaning behind
Pulgasari
, you have to revisit the original —
Godzilla. Gojira
, as it is called in Japanese, is a character born of the nuclear age. The original 1954 movie is neither kitschy nor ironic, even if the special effects wouldn't exactly impress an audience in the digital age.
Godzilla
is often automatically classified as a B-movie, but in fact it was one of the most expensive films ever produced in Japan, with the equivalent of a budget of sixty-five million dollars today.
Godzilla
is a dark, melancholic elegy with deliberate symbology and sophisticated sound design; it is an allegorical film with political content.

The movie opens with a scene of a fishing boat that is annihilated by a beam of light, a reference to an event that happened in March of that year: the Americans testing a 1.5-megaton hydrogen bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese tuna boat
Lucky Dragon 5
was nearby and was covered in radioactive debris. The crew fell ill with radiation poisoning and the incident, which was called the “tuna scare,” set off an international crisis. A fear of radiation poisoning spread throughout Japan once more.

In the film, Godzilla originated in the Jurassic age and has been living at the bottom of the ocean. But when his habitat is destabilized by the Americans' test explosions, the homeless monster absorbs the radiation and begins to wander. The navy deploys depth charges and the military erects a high-voltage wire along the coast. But nothing can touch Godzilla. The monster's carapace glows and a radioactive heat ray shoots from his mouth, melting buildings and houses.

Japanese audiences recognized the references to the recent past in the film's images: for them the smoking ruins of Tokyo the day after Godzilla's rampage were a reminder of the devastating bombing of the city at the end of the war. The images of burned people at the hospital and children being examined with Geiger counters brought up fresh, painful memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Finally, a naval ship is sent out to sea for the last stand against the monster. The military is using a new super-weapon created by a scientist named Dr. Serizawa, who chooses to die with the monster. The final scenes are devoid of triumph. One doubts that Godzilla is the last of its kind. If the nuclear tests continue, a new Godzilla will rise from the sea.

EIJI TSUBURAYA, THE
famous special effects master at Toho Studios in Tokyo, was responsible for the look of the Godzilla monster. All of Tsuburaya's characters, including Rodan (the terrifying flying lizard), Mothra (a giant moth), Booska (the predecessors to the Teletubbies), and Ultraman (the humanoid alien in stylish red-and-silver costume), are beloved by the Japanese and have been popularized through film, video games, comic books,
TV
series, model kits, and toys. Even Tsuburaya himself has been cast as a collectible figure dressed in his signature style: sunglasses, pork pie hat, white shirt buttoned up to his neck, and a pen in his breast pocket. The only thing missing is the eternally burning cigarette.

But none of Tsubaraya's other imaginative figures can ever measure up to Godzilla, “Japan's most famous international film star,” memorialized as a national monument that stands in Ginza.
Godzilla
is the most enduring series in film history — twenty-nine films have been made over a period of fifty years.

WHEN TSUBARAYA CREATED
the monster, he'd already had a long career as a cinematographer and a director. Toho Studios was created in 1936 by Ichizo Kobayashi — a railroad magnate, politician, and bigwig in the entertainment world — and Tsuburaya was hired one year later. During the war, Tsuburaya was summoned to the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service. His assignment was to make instructional films for fighter pilots, and he himself became a skilled aerobatic pilot. The attack on Pearl Harbor had unleashed a euphoric wave of nationalism, and it was thought that a big film about the honourable blitz would convince the Japanese people that total victory was nigh.

Five months after the attack, Tsuburaya began working on an incredibly advanced reconstruction of the events for the film. Using photographs supplied by the navy as reference, he built a detailed, grand-scale model of Pearl Harbor in the backlot of Toho Studios, recreating the destruction: the American battleships set alight by bombs and the spread of black smoke over the harbour.

After this, Toho became drawn farther into the military's propaganda machine, to the point where their operations merged. The worse the war went for Japan, the greater Toho's mission. Near the end, they were even given access to fighter planes fresh from the factory. In desperation, the studio created pompous, heroic films that deviated ever more from reality.

After the war ended, the Americans found the film stock featuring Tsuburaya's sophisticated set design. They thought they were looking at actual footage of the attack. Some scenes were even incorporated into their own documentaries about Pearl Harbor. Tsuburaya's special effects were so advanced that the Americans made sure he was fired from Toho Studios. Considering his detailed knowledge about the geography of Pearl Harbor, they concluded he must have been a spy during the war.

After a few years Tsuburaya returned to Toho Studios, but initially he was forced to operate incognito. After the American occupation officially ended in 1952, his name could once again be listed in the film credits. When work started on
Godzilla
he was resurrected as a special effects specialist.

Tsuburaya put an extraordinary amount of energy into making sure everything in the film was perfect. The Tokyo that he created for the movie was to 1/25 scale, and the buildings had complete interiors so that they would collapse realistically. Tsuburaya wasn't happy with his first model, so after “Tokyo” was destroyed by the monster, everything had to be rebuilt from scratch.

The pioneering actor who was given the illustrious job of bringing the monster to life was Haruo Nakajima. He lost twenty-two pounds during the shoot of the first film — after every take they poured his sweat out of the costume. Nakajima pulled on that rubber suit for eighteen years, from 1954 until 1972. He fainted numerous times from the poisonous fumes of burning kerosene-soaked rags. Once he was nearly electrocuted, and another time an avalanche of crushed ice fell on him, to name just a few of his hardships. Like Tsuburaya, Nakajima embodied the Japanese culture of duty. When a person is given a task, he takes that task seriously, burrowing deeper and deeper into his obligations. The years pass by and he faithfully goes to the office until the day he retires. The monotony seems to have polished him until he sparkles, and it is this sparkle that he leaves behind.