A cyborg is saved from starving by his friend, Il-goon

Date

2006

Description

Creator of the image: Park Chan-wook
Date of the image creation: 2006
Medium: Film
Person depicted: Il-goon, played by Jung Ji-hoon ‘Rain’

This still-shot is taken from the 2006 independent South Korean film ‘I’m a Cyborg but that’s Okay’ by director Park Chan-wook. The simultaneously cute and dark film weaves its way through genres, including romantic comedy, psychological horror, slapstick and surrealism. The film’s opening scene depicts a young woman, played by Im Soo-jung, working on a radio factory assembly-line. The character Young-goon is convinced that she is a cyborg and, following the hallucinated orders, a cyborg-radio. She decides to recharge her battery. Whilst still on the assembly-line, she proceeds to slit her wrist, stuff it full of wires, and connect it to a power socket.

After this delusional act, interpreted as a suicide attempt by authorities, Young-goon is incarcerated in a mental institution, where most of the film is set. She lives in the asylum with a diverse and eccentric array of other patients. Among them in Il-goon, a handsome young man hospitalized for his kleptomania and anti-social behaviour. He is played by Jung Ji-hoon, better known by his stage name Rain. He is one of South Korea’s most popular singers and highest-paid celebrities with a huge following in East Asia.

Young-goon becomes convinced that, being a cyborg, she does not need food to survive, preferring to lick batteries. Hospital staff begin force-feeding her, and her condition deteriorates. Il-goon conceives of a scheme to help Young-goon by pretending to implant a make-shift clock-work device into her core. He claims that his machine, which he calls a ‘rice-megatron’, can transform food calories into electrical energy, thus enabling Young-goon to eat human food. After talking her through the steps of eating — from spoon, to mouth, to chew, to swallow — Young-goon succeeds in ingesting a mouthful of rice. She stands up and her body becomes semi-transparent. A whirling mass of gears, light-bulbs and other mechanical contraptions are revealed spinning inside her. In the scene depicted here Il-goon gazes through her transparent body and sees the implanted rice-megatron enabling her cyborg body to extract electricity from the rice. At the moment the screenshot was captured. Il-goon hugs her and the sanatorium dinning hall erupts in cheers at the end of Young-goon’s hunger strike.

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