Trapped, Terrorized, Traumatized: The Transnational Meanings of Oldboy’s Detention Narrative Hye Seung Chung, Ph.D. (Colorado State University)

Trapped, Terrorized, Traumatized: The Transnational Meanings of Oldboy’s Detention

Narrative

Hye Seung Chung, Ph.D. (Colorado State University)

Extraordinary Rendition

• The CIA’s program of abduction and extrajudicial transportation of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism to detention and interrogation facilities in Afghanistan, Egypt, Guantánamo, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Syria, and elsewhere where torture is permitted.

A 9/11 Image in the Split Screen Time Montage Sequence

parallels

• Korean military dictatorships – Park Chung Hee’s yushin regime

(1972-79)– Chun Do Hwan’s regime (1980-87)– Violations of civil rights

• post-9/11 new world order– “Extraordinary rendition”

“For filmmakers concerned about any aspect of 9/11 or its aftermath, the attacks and their legacy offer a tremendously rich and challenging body of material. The resulting films range from those that seek simply to exploit 9/11 for entertainment purposes to those that seek to understand, explain, and interpret this recent history.”

Stephan Prince, Firestorm: American Film in the Age of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 4

“[El-Masri] was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonian custody for twenty-three days, after which he was handcuffed, blindfolded, and driven to Skopje airport, where he was handed over to the CIA and severely beaten. The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled, and sodomized El-Masri with a suppository — in CIA parlance, subjected him to “capture shock” — as Macedonian officials stood by.”

Amrit Singh, “European Court of Human Rights Finds against CIA Abuse of Khaled El-Masri,” The Guardian, December 13, 2012.

“The CIA drugged him and flew him to Kabul to be locked up in a secret prison known as the ‘Salt Pit,’ where he was slammed into walls, kicked, beaten, and subjected to other forms of abuse. Held at the Salt Pit for four months, El-Masri was never charged, brought before a judge, or given access to his family or German government representatives. The CIA ultimately realized that it had mistaken El-Masri for an Al-Qaida suspect with a similar name. But it held on to him for weeks after that. It was not until 24 May 2004, that he was flown, blindfolded, earmuffed, and chained to his seat, to Albania, where he was dumped on the side of the road without explanation.”

Amrit Singh, “European Court of Human Rights Finds against CIA Abuse of Khaled El-Masri,” The Guardian, December 13, 2012.

Lee Woo-jin in Oldboy (2003)

Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men (2007)

“As a figure of terrorism, Chigurh is everywhere and nowhere at once….He operates freely with no rules or limits. He is the nightmarish symptom of a renegade capitalism without limits, boundaries, or borders….The man sent by corporate headquarters to rein him in…describes him concisely, ‘He’s a peculiar man. You might even say he has principles, principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that.’ This comment resonates with the constant iteration of US ideology as the pursuit not of economic gain (or oil) but of “democracy” as well as the imperious power of US policies to drive the state directives of other nations.”

Camilla Fojas, “Hollywood Border Cinema: Westerns with a Vengeance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television Vol. 39, Iss. 2 (2011): 94, 100.

“As the CIA expanded covert operations inside Somalia under Obama, its renditions of terror suspects from neighboring East African nations continued just as they had under Bush. In July 2009, for example, Kenyan police snatched an Al-Qaeda suspect, Ahmed Abdullahi Hassan, from a Nairobi slum and delivered him to that city’s airport for a CIA flight to Mogadishu. There he joined dozens of prisoners grabbed off the streets of Kenya inside ‘The Hole’ — a filthy underground prison buried in the windowless basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency….Obama also allowed the continuation of a policy adopted after the Abu Ghraib scandal: outsourcing incarceration to local allies in Afghanistan and Iraq while ignoring human rights abuses there. Although the U.S. military received 1,365 reports about the torture of detainees by Iraqi forces between May 2004 and December 2009, a period that included Obama’s first full year in office, American officers refused to take action, even though the abuses reported were often extreme.”

Alfred W. McCoy, “Impunity at Home, Rendition Abroad,” HuffingtonPost, August 14, 2012.