Pain Is a Garment: Pornography and Sexuality in Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden (Patreon)

Pornography—notoriously difficult to define, its moral weight and cultural impact bitterly contested not just by prudes and lewds but by opposing factions within movements like feminism—has always been a dicey subject for discussion. Is it art or exploitation? Does it objectify women or empower us? In Park Chan-Wook’s 2016 twisty lesbian thriller The Handmaiden, the complex nature of porn takes center stage, explored with real insight in a story concerned not just with the abuses and ugliness of pornography, but with the beauty and connection it can foster between lovers.

When enterprising Korean pickpocket Sook-hee (Kim Tae-ri) takes a job as handmaiden to the apparently oblivious Lady Hideko (Kim Min-hee) as part of a con cooked up by a fellow thief posing as fallen Japanese noble turned art forger “Count Fujiwara” (Ha Jung-woo), she knows nothing about her mistress save that she’s heir to an enormous fortune and set to marry her controlling uncle Kouzuki (Cho Jin-woong), who forces her to perform onerous live readings for his circle of wealthy book collectors.

As Sook-hee and Hideko grow closer, though, and the film’s numerous reversals complicate its story, we learn that Hideko’s “readings” are of antique pornography. These function as previews both for the forged works of erotica her uncle sells and for her own availability as a living doll on which his friends can act out their fantasies—for a price. It’s a vision of pornography as a kind of butterfly pin, a way for men to keep the objects of their lust immobilized and to interact not with women but with their trussed and static wet dreams of what women should be. One of the readings Hideko performs is literally titled “Pain Is a Garment”, a direct statement that there is a viewer outside the fantasy, admiring it without encumbrance, and the viewed, forced to bear its weight and feel the coarse weave of its fabric against her skin.

GROOMING AND COERCION

The scenes unfold largely in shot-reverse shot format, Hideko—and, in a flashback, her aunt (Moon So-ri)—kneeling in elaborate traditional garments on a bare stage, Kouzuki and his guests fidgeting and licking their lips on tiered steps rising up from it. She is painted, posed, and lit for their pleasure, an alluring bauble trained to talk the room off with decorous ease. She’s no more real to the men she services than the wooden mannequin she mounts for their entertainment.

That training, overseen by her uncle and his butler Madame Sasaki (Kim Hae-sook)—later revealed to be the Korean wife he put aside in his eagerness to naturalize as a Japanese citizen—is a gauntlet of sexualized violence for the young Hideko. Its purpose is the explicit removal of her voice and self, a hollowing out of her mind to suit her uncle’s purposes. Even her innocent laughter at being taught the words in Japanese for “penis” and “vulva” is an intolerable offense, prompting him to seize her face and grind his palm wordlessly into it, infuriated by her making light of the most basic components of his obsession with erotica.

Jealously hoarded and feasted on without regard for how it joins one’s desires to other people, porn can be as isolating and conducive to cruelty as the terrible basement under Kouzuki’s library. In that dank pit, lined with shelves groaning under the weight of pickled human sex organs, one wall given over to a tank where a gigantic octopus coils and thrashes in salt water, suggesting an unconscionable acting-out of Katsushika Hokusai's The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, the lines between pornography and reality smear and drip. In that room, the same bookmaking tools used to assemble priceless works of erotica are repurposed to unjoint and butcher human bodies.

Surrounded by his grisly trophies, Kouzuki presses the captive “Count Fujiwara” for details of his wedding night to Hideko. No sooner has he asked his questions, though, than he starts fantasizing about the answers. His own banal fantasies of cock-teasing and sexual abandon separate him from reality with an almost palpable force. He doesn’t want to know what happened, but rather how events might fit his preconceived wet daydreams. It’s no coincidence he’s at his most boyish during this sequence, hair disheveled, manner slipshod and eager.

In Kouzuki’s conception of pornography there is no room for a woman’s voice, which would serve as a reminder of her selfhood. When the young Hideko talks back to him at the opening of the film’s second act, he forces her to hold a heavy golden vaginal bead in her mouth while he beats her hand with a string of three others. “Next time you feel like talking back,” he says afterward, tying the string to the sash of her robe, “remember the taste of this metal bead.”

PORN AND LOVE

The sex toy—the uses of which an adult Hideko will someday describe in vivid detail to a rapt and sweating audience—is repurposed as a simple gag, a denial not just of Hideko’s sexual personhood but of her every spoken word and feeling. Later, at the film’s—ahem—climax, she and Sook-hee wet these same beads in each other’s mouths and press them gently past the lips of their vulvas as they sail to safety aboard a passenger liner. As the camera shifts its perspective to the moonlit sea outside, we hear the chiming of the beads ring out over the water.

It’s a reclamation of pornography by a person who has spent her life as a sex slave. It’s also two women finding love and connection in the language of erotica. Indeed, Hideko’s extensive knowledge of erotic practices generates much of the excitement in the early days of their sex affair. The pair bonds quickly as Hideko leads Sook-hee through a flurry of positions, from scissoring with hands clasped and arms straining to sixty-nining amid tangled sheets, bodies shining with sweat. The long, miserable work of her life is put to use not in service to anyone else, but by her own choice.

THE LIMITS OF SYMBOLIC INTIMACY

This, unfortunately, is also where Chan-Wook’s insight into the inner workings of lesbian relationships starts to run into trouble. In his artfully symmetrical sex scenes he reaches for but largely fails to grasp a sense of nuanced erotic connection. The two women are distinct and well-realized characters, but neither has much in the way of a sexual persona. This is not to say that every lesbian movie needs strictly defined bottom and top roles, but sex is seldom if ever as smooth, natural, and mutually mobile as Chan-Wook makes it out to be.

There’s a sense in these scenes that what we’re seeing is less a naturalistic depiction of sex than it is a man’s projection of what sex between two women might mean. Hideko and Sook-hee are cooperative, mutually giving, and unashamed in bed, an interesting take on lesbian love as more generally symmetrical than heterosexual relationships, but one that reduces their lovemaking from human connection to oddly sterile metaphor. There are no moments of hesitation, no slip-ups, no figuring out of their dynamic. Individual shots—Sook-hee’s rolling back muscles as she performs cunnilingus on Hideko, for example—succeed, but taken as a whole these scenes are weakened by a lack of organic feeling.

The film’s deepest insights into sexuality and desire occur not during sex, but in moments of domestic physical intimacy. Sook-hee sanding Hideko’s sharp tooth with a thimble while Hideko bathes in scented oils, a lollipop dangling from one hand, would be shopworn as pornography. The boyish maid inverts her life’s defining power dynamic, infantilizing her mistress and using the implements of her servitude to finger the orifice with which Hideko orders her around. As a largely silent sequence of burgeoning lust, it burns hotter than anything else in the movie.

It’s this genuine human bond between the two women which enables them to bring pornography into their sexual relationship in a healing, adventurous context. “Why does the candy taste different?” Hideko wonders as she and Sook-hee share their first kiss, Sook-hee’s lips glistening with sugar. “The bitter turned sour, the sour turned sweet, the sweet turned savory…” It’s a deft way to explore how love, affection, shared lust, and other emotions can complicate even the simplest pleasures. While Chan-Wook’s grasp of the subject matter isn’t perfect, the end result remains a moving, thoughtful, and intermittently sensual work.