The Image of Class Immobility in Chang-dong Lee’s Film Burning and William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”

Abstract

Chang-dong Lee is a well-known Korean director whose films reflect the repressive social and political reality of South Korea. The film Burning (2018) is one of his recent movies which well reveals a current depressing atmosphere of the young people in contemporary Korea. The narrative and the construction of the movie follows the plot of William Faulkner’s short story “Barn Burning” (1938). The director adroitly adopted and transformed the plot-line to fit into the current atmosphere and times of the Korean society. Therefore, this thesis aims to discuss how the film elaborates the culture of the early southern US, which contemporary Korea bears no resemblance to, and modify it into the tragedy – extreme class inequality and immobility – which Korean society faces nowadays. This paper places the movie in a dialogue with the original text and, based on it, examines the social ramifications of the movie text. In doing so, it focuses on how both works are alike in the aspect of the devastating and fearful reality of each society.