Ben Weber's Post

One thing that struck me while reading Appadurai’s theories of the different -scapes, was the way in which they overlap, influence and at times also contradict one another although we are rarely aware of them. In many ways, the scapes seem to be imagined fantasies and combined with Benedict Anderson we can come to a point where it makes sense to think of current identity as constructed by imagining ourselves in these scapes in a particular reality. This is alluded to by Appadurai himself on p. 7. This may seem a rather obvious observation and a simple way to think about the scapes, but it makes it possible to read Old Boy in a new way.

If we watch “Oldboy” with this idea in the back of our minds, we could argue that during his imprisonment, Oh Dae-su is taken out of certain scapes and loses his connections to them. His family would probably be located in his ethnoscape, although not exclusively there, since they would also be in his ideoscape, and when he loses them, he loses the key component of it. What happens if we lose such an integral part of our identity and our ethnoscape? For Appadurai the scapes are probably not hierarchical, so another horizontally linked component or even another scape would probably stabilize the ethnoscape. However, in the movie, this cannot naturally happen, due to the constraints Oh Dae-so’s prison put on him. What does happen is that through very controlled access to media he is artificially forced to replace this lost component with something else. Since his family is dead and thus forever lost, he cannot even imagine them as he sits in his prison, which robs him of one escape he would have. The mediascape, controlled by his captor, then works on influencing and replacing his ethnoscape with a new ethnoscape and a new ideoscape. Whereas at the beginning of the movie he is shown as a father and citizen, he is now transformed into a made–for-tv hero looking for justice, making his actions predictable. His goal becomes revenge and revenge as he can see it on television. So we can see how one scape is destroyed, which makes his identity instable and how carefully selected new images make him restructure his identity in a predictable way. TV is his new reality and revenge is his new ideology, which works perfectly in the one room prison as it is created by exactly this space.
When he is later released into the “real” world, this all collapses. He has lost key parts of himself and acts not in accordance to rules of the real world, but rather in ways that only make sense to him and in the prison. He is no longer part of the imagined community of reality, having placed himself into a new network of reworked “-scapes,” which make his actions stand out and appear strange to others, while they are the only actions that makes sense to him. When he is forced to see reality again at the end of the movie, he becomes aware of this disconnect, which destroys him and makes him see no other option but to return to the one place his new imagined world makes sense, his prison.

In a way, this is the only way we can actually see the scapes; in their failure. The same way we have discussed Snow Crash playing with time and thus helping us experience the now, Old Boy plays with spaces and scapes and makes these visible. However, there are some problems with this. Could Oh Dae-su have imagined something else except revenge to avoid his fate or is he helpless before human nature? Also, there seems to be a hierarchy of scapes, with the visual and thus the mediascape dominating the other scapes more than it is dominated by them. Lqastly, it is interesting to think of the new space of the prison as created because it makes us think about how the scapes are constructed and created in the real world and shows us that they are somehow seen as a priori in Appadurai's text.