Memories of Murder · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Bong Joon Ho's second feature announces its operative mode in an early lateral camera pan: a slow, unhurried reveal of the first victim's body in an irrigation ditch, the landscape absorbing the discovery without yielding shock. Kim Hyung-goo's wide shots throughout grant the Hwaseong agricultural fields the same visual weight as the detectives moving through them—refusing the procedural grammar of truth-revealing close-ups in favor of what Deleuze called opsigns & sonsigns, pure optical situations that watch without resolving into action. The images accumulate evidence but produce only looking, a mode Bong inherits directly from Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), where photographic proof of a possible murder remains permanently equivocal and sustained observation never yields interpretive authority. That visual posture is the ground for the film's deeper argument: the crisis of the action-image. Memories of Murder adopts the serial-killer procedural's structural contract—body, detective, revelation, arrest—and dismantles it from the inside. The evidence is contaminated, the witnesses unreliable, the institutional apparatus of policing so structurally compromised by torture that it cannot produce reliable knowledge; action curdles into desperate improvisation. What the film builds toward is not a solution but a transformation: the final image of Park Du-man staring out of the frame tips the procedural entirely into the time-image. He is no longer an agent within the investigation but a seer confronting an unresolved past, and the film ceases to be genre entertainment and becomes instead an open wound in national memory.