“We are away on a three-day vacation.”
3 - Iron opens with a shot of a Grecian marble visible through a mesh net. As the scene fades in, from off screen come golf balls, striking the net directly in front of the female statue. As the netting ripples with each ricocheting blow, one is reminded of movie theaters in which the curtains open only after the previews have begun to be projected. The initial images sway and distort until at last the screen itself is revealed. Kim has established a marvelous cinematic metaphor for the screen onto which the movies he so clearly loves are projected. Of course the beautiful, sacred object would be behind the film—great directors since the inception of the cinema have been great because of their ability to keep the holy object just off screen, just beyond the action the audience so astutely follows. Contemporary visual art can be said to be obsessed with deconstructing the pedestal—the very function that elevates art to its untouchable status. What better way for contemporary directors to address film than by assailing the screen with golf balls?
This is essentially what Kim’s 3 - Iron does, attacking the fundamental principles that make film work. One of the most purely cinematic films to be released this decade, it forces the audience to appreciate the degree to which perception and observation are central to the function of film at large: In the first seven and a half minutes there isn’t a single character who speaks on screen. Rather, the place of dialogue is taken by endless cycles of voyeurism that provide the movie’s focus. Not only does the audience get access to the hidden details of a suburban family’s home, they are also privilege to the private routine of the man who infiltrates that home. Only, the cycle isn’t complete yet, as a battered woman (Sun-hwa) will manage to secretly observe the break-in artist (Tae-suk) as he makes his way through her private belongings. The apex of this dizzying exchange of voyeurism occurs when Sun-hwa observes Tae-suk, naked, masturbating in her bathtub to a collection of nude photos of her. As a pair of voyeurs/paranoids, they maintain a relationship through the exchange of attempts at privacy and revealed secrets. Vacillating between symbolic director and audience, they mirror each other in their (in)ability to keep things from view. The tell-tale signs of her domestic abuse fade away just in time for him to receive identical bruises and cuts from the fists of a boxer who catches them in his home.
This cinematic exchange of view and object is what is at stake, even when murder and adultery are substituted as stand-ins within the film’s narrative structure. Like Chaplin and Keaton before them, the characters refuse to speak, and once placed under the strictest confinements of legal observation, Tae-suk perfects the art of not being seen—that is, essentially, to be wherever the audience is not looking. In so doing, he has performed the final and most impossible act: wandering behind the screen and into the realm of the fantasmatic object that awaits him there. A place where golf balls do not spin impotently around trees, fall gracelessly from their impact with the screen, or substitute for bullets in a movie where guns are mere child’s toys. What exists in the beyond of 3 - Iron is the sexual relation where the obstacle is never absent—the film that does not end.
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