🔥 Burning (2018) notes 🔥

Now that I’ve chosen Burning as my favorite movie of 2018, here are my scene-specific notes on the movie.

You can stream the movie on Netflix, Tubi (free with ads), Kanopy, or these sites.

SPOILER ALERT: These notes discuss the plot of Burning including the ending.

If you copy and paste anything from these original notes by me, please credit me AND link to this post (or the blog’s homepage). To emphasize what it says at the bottom of every post on this website: Copyright © 2021-2024 by John Althouse Cohen. All rights reserved.

J = Jong-su, the protagonist or anti-hero (Yoo Ah-in)

H = Hae-mi, the enigmatic woman (Jeon Jong-seo)

B = Ben, the rich man (Steven Yeun)

🔥  J + H first meet when H is doing a “raffle drawing,” pitching “high-end items you usually see in department stores.” Her pitch implies that people luck into luxury. The unspoken flipside: the poor are unlucky and resentful of the economic winners.

🔥  They go out for drinks, and H talks about her desire to go to Africa, seemingly based on what she’s heard about the Bushmen of the Kalihari: they have 2 kinds of “hunger”: “little hunger,” meaning ordinary hunger for food, and “great hunger,” which is hunger for the meaning of life.

🍊  H tells J: “I’m learning pantomime. … Look, I can eat tangerines whenever I want. … Don’t think: there’s a tangerine here. Just forget that there isn’t one.” This introduces the concept of absence, and the idea that you’re better off forgetting about what’s missing (not obsessing over it — advice J won’t follow). She adds: “The important thing is to think you really want one.” She says that to J, who seems to be going through life with minimal motivation and no passion.  

🔥  When they get to H’s bedroom, she says that light bounces off Seoul Tower into her room for just a brief moment once a day — if she’s “lucky.” So again we have the theme of good things coming by luck, as with the raffle drawing in the beginning. There’s a dark side to this focus on Seoul Tower: it’s a radio tower, and later J points out that you can hear a radio broadcast of North Korean propaganda when he’s at home (see below for more about that).

🔥  The director, Lee Chang-dong, said this poster shows all the symbols that matter to the movie:

The poster includes a cat, a cow, and a car. There are also birds in the sunset, and Seoul Tower. In this 25-minute video analysis of the movie, “Spikima” talks about the poster starting at 2:55. (The whole video is worth watching if you want to delve into the meaning of Burning — Spikima seems to have a good awareness of South Korean culture.)

🐈  When J is in H’s apartment where she supposedly wants him to feed her cat while she’s in Africa, J asks if H has an imaginary cat (poster symbol #1) — like the imaginary tangerine. H doesn’t say yes or no, just: “That’s funny.” What does the unseen cat represent?

🔥  H reminds J of how he insulted her when they were kids: “You said that I’m ugly … really ugly.” Earlier she said she got plastic surgery to become “pretty.” So H has been thinking about J for a long time, and she even changed her face in response to him. That might also suggest that J can’t recognize her as the girl he knew as a child — see the later part where he’s told he rescued her from a well but he can’t remember it.

🔥  The sex scene has none of the cinematic romanticism with which sexual intercourse is usually depicted as a spontaneous and carefree burst of passion. We see the kinds of mundane details typically left out of movies: H reaching around for a condom, J putting his hand on his penis, blank expressions on their faces. The scene is anti-romantic: J stares at the walls, and then the camera shows walls instead of focusing on the sex. We see the reflection of light on the wall — the one H says you can see only for a brief moment a day if you’re lucky. J got “lucky” by having sex with someone who had responded to his cruel insult of calling her ugly by making herself pretty for him. But he’s not that lucky: this isn’t presented as an unforgettable memory that should be compelling for either one of them in the future. Putting this scene early in the movie, soon after they meet, deflates the usual way movies build up “will they or won’t they?” tension; we know they will, and it isn’t that great. 

🐄  After the sex, we see J at home with a cow (poster symbol #2). J’s house is thoroughly cluttered — every counter, table-top, etc. is full of stuff, so he barely has a place to eat. This is in contrast with what we’ll see later of B’s home. H’s apartment is like a lived-in dorm (setting us up to notice later when it’s uncharacteristically clean).

🇺🇸  In this movie with themes of class divides, J’s home in South Korea has a TV in the foreground showing the President of the United States, Donald Trump, who asserts: “The well-being of the American citizen and worker will be placed second to none.” The news talks about immigration enforcement and repealing Obamacare — issues that could leave the less well-off feeling that they’ve been shut out.

🔪  Then, while J is still at home, he stares at a collection of knives on the wall. The juxtaposition of Trump’s appearance on TV with J focusing on his big knives hints that J is feeling pent-up (burning!) rage and could react violently against privileged, dominant people like B.

🐈  In the first scene with J alone in H’s apartment, he jokes about seeing the cat’s poop without seeing the cat: “You decided to introduce your poop to me first?” So that makes it seem like the cat is real, but we’re still not sure.

🔥  J glances at a photo of H on her wall, then stares out her window while masturbating. (Is he forgetting that she isn’t there, as she advised when miming the tangerine?)

🏛  The movie is unusually focused on mundane realism; for instance, we see J going through security in the courthouse, when most movies would skip over that standard procedure and instantly put us in a dramatic courtroom scene. And what happens in court is an impersonal let-down: J’s dad is being arraigned for assaulting a government official, but J leaves as soon as his dad looks at him.

📖  J keeps telling people he’s writing a book — he says that to H, then to his dad’s lawyer. There’s a lot of that vague talk, but he never gets specific about his work, and we rarely see him writing. The lawyer tells him to write about his dad’s legal situation, and to persuade his dad to write a “letter of apology” to the victim. But as usual, J seems disengaged from the person he’s with, and he never talks to his dad in the movie. He comes up with another way to support his dad, without needing to face him.

🌅  In the first conversation between the 3 main characters after they’ve left the airport, H tells a story about when she went on a tour in Nairobi, Kenya. She was the only person on the tour who was alone, and she wondered why she was even there. Then she saw the sunset and thought: “I must be at the end of the world! … I want to vanish just like that sunset! … I wished I could disappear — as if I had never existed!” (Foreshadowing!) B insensitively interjects that he finds it “fascinating to see people cry,” since he’s “never shed a tear.” Spikima’s video (see above) says a better translation would be it’s fascinating to see “humans” cry, as if he’s an alien observing earthlings.

🔥  When J asks B what he does, B cryptically and condescendingly says: “This and that. … You wouldn’t understand if I told you. To put it simply, I play. Nowadays, there is no distinction between playing and working.”

🔥  The tense, minimalistic theme music, with a steadily pulsating bass, is first played while J is going home after hanging out with B for the first time. (B later tells J to “feel the bass.”)

🎾  J is throwing a tennis ball back and forth on his wall and hits a framed photo of himself as a kid on his dad’s shoulders, right before he types up the petition on his dad’s behalf.

🔥  When we see J persuading an older man to sign the petition for his dad, they seem to be in front of greenhouses, where workers are diligently working. (Foreshadowing!)

✋🏻  J jealously looks on as B touches H’s hands to read her palms in a cafe. B tells H she has a “stone” in her “heart” that’s making her suffer, preventing her from enjoying things. “That’s why you can’t appreciate tasty food, or tell a guy that you like him.” (The part about appreciating food calls to mind the scene where she mimes enjoying a tangerine and says you have to really want it.) When H giggles at the fact that B put a stone from a nearby garden in her hand as a flourish to his palm reading, B glances at J while saying in a slightly devious manner: “I’ll do anything for fun.” B is obsessed with the idea of “fun” — he later tells J to be less serious and more fun. (Does B look down on those who seek the “great hunger,” like H and maybe J?)

🔥  When we first see B’s immaculate apartment, B says he likes cooking “because I can make what I want, any way I want. What’s better is that I get to eat it, just like a human making an offering to the gods.” H doesn’t get what he means by “an offering,” so B says it’s “a metaphor,” but H doesn’t know what that is either! B says to ask J since he’s a writer. So the movie is priming us to look for metaphors, and especially to interpret B as if he’s speaking in metaphors.

🚗  Out on B’s balcony, J marvels to H about how someone so young can live like B — having a Porsche (poster symbol #3) and “cooking pasta while listening to music.” The Porsche question is understandable, but the part about cooking and music makes less sense: cooking pasta at home is more associated with being frugal than being rich. J sums up B: “He’s the Great Gatsby. … Mysterious people who are young and rich, but you don’t know what they really do.” That seems to be a jab at how movies often show characters’ luxurious lifestyles without plausibly explaining how they got so rich.

🔥  When she’s out with friends, H shows them her “little hunger” and “great hunger” dance. Little hunger = swaying her hands in front of herself. Great hunger = lifting her hands up to the sky, which foreshadows her dance in front of the sunset. (B conspicuously yawns at what H is saying, and later he’ll yawn at his next girlfriend’s similar monologue to friends at a restaurant — a sign he doesn’t respect them.) Then they go to a dance club and H does a variation of the great hunger dance. Sudden cut to J in the morning, with cows (poster symbol #2), using a shovel to dig up dirt while pretending to be a rock singer and using the shovel as a microphone. (He sings: “Oh, my butt is burning up!”) Maybe H’s dance inspired J to come up with his own performance.

🔥  J’s singing is interrupted by B + H showing up to see his home. J points out you can hear North Korean propaganda broadcast in the background — they’re right near the border of North and South Korea. The border symbolizes the class divide in South Korea, and remember that earlier we heard Trump on TV talking about immigration enforcement — multiple references to borders dividing a relatively affluent country from a poor country.

🔥  In front of J’s house, H says she grew up near there. She tells a story that when she was about 7, she fell in a well near her house, and J saved her. “I was terrified that I’d die if nobody found me, but then his face showed up … and I was rescued … but he doesn’t even remember.” Then she goes into J’s house and says: “I feel like I’m in my home.” The suggestion is that she belongs with J.

🌅  The 3 smoke pot outside. J can’t handle it, coughs uncontrollably. But after H does it, she has the one pure, transcendent moment of the movie when she takes off her shirt and uses her hands to create a flying-bird silhouette against the sunset — with a South Korean flag 🇰🇷 waving in the background, reminding us that they’re near the border with North Korea. She starts flapping her arms as if she’s a bird, and she cries — probably remembering when she was in Kenya and wanted to vanish into the sunset. Then the camera seems to slowly float away, pointing at the sunset. Why does she cry? Is she  suicidal?

🔥  While H is sleeping, J confides to B that he hates his father, who has an “anger disorder” — “rage bottled up,” which led to J’s mom leaving him and his sister. “The day my mom left, I burned all her clothes. My dad lit a fire … and made me burn them with my own hands. I have dreams about that night.” (Referencing the movie title and the last scene!) This leads to B claiming he has a “hobby” of burning “abandoned greenhouses” — about once every 2 months, and he’s due for the next one. He admits that “it’s a clear crime,” but rationalizes it by saying it’s like how they both committed a “crime” by smoking pot. B talks about greenhouses with the same language H used about the sunset: “You can make it disappear, as if it never existed.” Another rationalization: he calls them “useless, filthy … greenhouses.” J, who’s usually dull, has a rare moment of insight when he points out that this means “you judge whether they’re useless.” (This could be analogous to the rich judging the poor, men judging women, etc.) B rejects that framing; he likens his arson to rain washing things away: “There’s no right or wrong there — it’s the morals of nature.” So B refuses to take responsibility and sees his bad behavior as simply natural, which connects to the theme of class divides. B has already picked out a “great one to burn down,” near J’s house, which is a show of disrespect toward J.

🔥  J has an uncharacteristic moment of openness when he admits to B, H’s boyfriend, “I’m in love with H.” But when H then comes back out, J seems hateful, not loving; he scolds her for “undress[ing] so easily in front of men” — “only whores do that.” His crude comment shows his inability to relate to her (or anyone): even if he was bothered by her display, you’d think he’d play it cool if he ever wants to have a chance with her. Without responding to J, H calmly gets in B’s car … and we’ll never see her again!

🔥  After H disappears, J shows up at her building and asks the old woman about the cat — but she says cats aren’t allowed in the building. The woman says: “She seems to have gone on a trip. She cleaned up her room.”

🔥  J meets up with B and confronts him about the fact that J didn’t find any burned greenhouses in his area. J says he couldn’t have missed it, but B insists he did miss it, adding that sometimes you don’t see what’s closest to you. Is H the one closest to J? Is “greenhouse” a metaphor for H? (See above on metaphors.) Did B burn H instead of a greenhouse? It’s hard to believe that B would feel motivated to sit around condemning greenhouses in such personal terms: “useless” and “filthy” — it makes more sense if he’s secretly insulting a woman. 

🔥  When J asks B about H, B says he hasn’t seen her either — it’s as if she “vanished into thin air” (again calling back to H’s sunset monologue about wanting to “vanish”). J suggests maybe she went on a trip, but B says: “I doubt she went on a trip. She can’t afford it. … She doesn’t contact her family or have any friends. H is lonelier than she seems.” It’s as if B is verbally erasing H, describing her as someone who’s all alone, can’t leave town, etc. B seems disingenuous in how he describes H: he says she wouldn’t have gone on a trip, but she recently went to Kenya on a whim (which is how she met B).

🔥  J starts asking people in the neighborhood about the time H fell in a well, but they say that didn’t happen. J’s mom doesn’t remember the incident but says there was a well near their house.

🐈  B catches J spying on him and invites him up to his home, where J sees a cat (poster symbol #1). J points out that the cat wasn’t there last time he was there; B explains that he found a “stray” and hasn’t named the cat yet. For B not to have named the cat implies not caring much about the cat — does the cat represent H? J was supposed to take care of H’s cat but didn’t. Then B turns out to be the one with the cat, but B lets the cat get away.

🔥  J confesses he hasn’t made much progress in his writing. In a rare show of vulnerability, he admits: “I don’t know what to write. To me, the world is a mystery.” That implies that when we later see him writing intently, he has figured out something about the world.

🔥  J sees the pink watch he gave H (which he won in the raffle at the beginning) in a drawer in B’s bathroom along with other feminine items. When J looked in that drawer before, it looked similar except without the watch. Does each object in the drawer represent a different woman B has been with … or killed?

🐈  B and his female friend are looking for the cat in the parking garage. J calls to the cat, which doesn’t work at first, but the cat comes to J when he says “Boil!” That’s the name of H’s cat, but we don’t know it’s H’s cat; the cat could have been coming at random.

🐄  In one of the movie’s more enigmatic scenes, J’s female calf (poster symbol #2) gets taken away by people who’ve apparently bought it from him. J seems surprisingly sad as he gazes at the cow. We see a close-up of the cow staring back at J, while one of the men buying the cow says: “It’s saying something.” My read on this is: the cow (who’s on J’s farm) represents the side of H that wanted to be with J and felt at home in his home, while the cat represents the mysterious and unavailable side of H.

🔥  When I said we’d never see H again, you might think I was wrong: we see her in bed with J in one of the last scenes of the movie. But then we see him in the same position in bed with no one else there. So it wasn’t really H. (Even J’s sexual fantasies are lackluster, not impassioned.)

💄  In B’s second-to-last scene, he’s applying makeup to his new girlfriend, who seems uncomfortable with it. This scene calls to mind Vertigo (my favorite movie of 1958), where a man (Jimmy Stewart) dominates his girlfriend (Kim Novak) by making her up into the woman he seems to have lost. Burning’s director, Lee, said this about B:

You can say that the mysteries of Ben as a character are very much connected to the mysteries of the modern world. … To me, Ben as a character symbolizes the quality of life that everyone seems to pursue nowadays. Everyone wants a more sophisticated, more convenient life. … At the same time, I wanted to point out that underneath all that there may be a horrible consequence — another side to that life that we all pursue, even if we don’t really realize it. So whether Ben is a serial killer or just a cultured, rich friend, the distinction is actually not that important. … I just wanted to suggest that this life that we pursue and want so much may not be the most appropriate one in its entirety — it may also be monstrous.

🔥  Last scene: J + B have arranged to meet outside, in front of many greenhouses. J persuaded B to meet by saying he’d be bringing H, so B seems confused that H isn’t there. (Doesn’t that undermine the theory that B killed H? If he killed her, B should know J is lying that H is going to be there.) J stabs B to death! Then J takes off his own clothes and throws them and B’s body into B’s Porsche (poster symbol #3). J’s clothes are a callback to the story he told B about his dad making him burn his mom’s clothes. It’s snowing and J is cold, shivering and naked. He walks back to his own car and drives away, with the burning Porsche visible in his car windows. That scene is mostly one long take; the only cut is to the camera in front of J’s car, as he’s driving away.

🔥  The movie leaves much unanswered or unclear. Why does J murder B? Because J thinks B killed H? But we never find out what happened to H! Maybe she didn’t die — maybe she just went on a trip. (B could be wrong that she couldn’t afford it, or maybe she went with a friend or lover who could afford it. J did see H’s suitcase still in her apartment, but she could have used another bag.) Even if J somehow knows that H died, how does J know B killed her, rather than H committing suicide? (See my question above: “Is H suicidal?”) The pink watch in B’s home doesn’t prove it — that was given away in a raffle, and there could be many identical watches in the area. J didn’t see any distinctive markings on the watch, and J saw one of H’s coworkers wearing a similar pink watch. Even if it is H’s watch, she could have simply left it at her boyfriend’s place, then decided not to bother getting the watch back after they broke up. B’s cat coming to the name of “Boil” isn’t clear proof either (see above).

🔥  The more interesting evidence is B’s admittedly criminal ways (he says he regularly commits arson with no specific motive, just for fun) and his seemingly unconcerned attitude about H’s disappearance. Soon after the last time we saw H, her phone called J but he heard no speaking, only unclear noises, implying that H was being kidnapped and desperately trying to call a friend, but afraid to speak because she was being threatened. Even if J can’t know that B did anything to H, this isn’t a criminal trial — J doesn’t need proof beyond a reasonable doubt in order to be motivated to kill B. J could have enough motivation based on the suspicious circumstances, combined with J’s jealousy of B for being rich and more successful with women.

🔥  Spikima’s video (see above) points out that J is featured in every scene … until near the end, when we see B putting in his contact lenses and applying makeup to his girlfriend’s face. Then the last scene begins with B smoking alone before J shows up. So the movie spends more than 2 hours establishing this rule about always showing J, only to break that rule in seemingly minor scenes near the end. What is the movie trying to tell us there? Well, this happens right after we see J typing on his computer in H’s apartment, which is silently shown for an oddly long 53 seconds. (The camera zooms out so we see the sky to his right while he’s typing — similar to when H finishes her dance in the sunset and the camera drifts toward the sky to her right.) Spikima’s theory is that once J starts typing, the rest of the movie is a fictional story he’s writing. So J kills B only in his fantasy. Director Lee has confirmed that this ambiguity was intentional: “This last scene could have happened in reality, but at the same time it could have also been a part of this novel that Jong-su is newly writing, so I hope that this one scene sort of combines and contains all of the various layers that the film presents.” Lee added:

the last scene can be read as a warning about how rage can explode, but it can also ask for the meaning behind what happens when rage explodes in this way. I think that this last scene really shows the relationship — the various layers behind Jong-su and Ben’s relationship — because when you see Jong-su kill Ben, you see that Ben doesn’t really resist, he sort of lets Jong-su stab him as if he’s waited for this all along, and Jong-su sort of shows something like sympathy as Ben dies. It’s quite different from what you normally see in a murder scene when someone explodes toward their object of rage — and I think this element could have really flustered the audience, but it could have also have given them a new perspective on the relationship. Also, you see Jong-su take off all his clothes. Of course, superficially, this is done to get rid of evidence of the murder, but at the same time it presents this very cinematic image, where Jong-su almost appears as a newborn baby but simultaneously this enraged monster. This image carries that sense of extreme duality within it. When he leaves and drives away in his truck with the burning Porsche in the background, I wanted the audience to sort of ask themselves, where is this character going? And what is he going to do next?

🔥  J goes through almost the whole movie in a daze. He seems stunned and stunted. He rarely makes any personally revealing comments. (The rare exceptions are when he admits that the world is a mystery to him, and when he tells B — but not H — about his love for H.) H makes up for J’s blank affect and B’s unnerving, alien quality with her more human expressiveness … and great hunger.

Click here for my shorter post about Burning, and click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.