Successful cult films like The Host and Snowpiercer proved to be harbingers for Bong Joon Ho’s enormous breakthrough success with Parasite. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon provides a consideration of the director’s entire career and the themes, ambitions, techniques, and preoccupations that infuse his works. As Jeon shows, Bong’s sense of spatial and temporal dislocations creates a hall of mirrors that challenges us to answer the parallel questions Where are we? and When are we?. Jeon also traces Bong’s oeuvre from its early focus on Korea’s US-fueled modernization to examining the entanglements of globalization in Mother and his subsequent films. A complete filmography and in-depth interview with the director round out the book.

Insightful and engaging, Bong Joon Ho offers an up-to-date analysis of the genre-bending international director.

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is a professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Vicious Circuits: Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century.

Acknowledgments

A Note on Romanization

Global Entanglements

Increments of Modernity: Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) and Memories of Murder (2003)

Parenting Fails: The Host (2006) and Mother (2009)

Fantasies of Escape (Outside): Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017)

Fantasies of Escape (Inside): Parasite (2019)

Coda: Mise en mondial

An Interview with Bong Joon Ho

Filmography

Bibliography

Index