MODERNITY AND FEAR IN BURNING (2018):A FOCUS ON WALTER BENJAMIN’S URBAN EXPERIENCE

Abstract

This article examines Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) through Walter Benjamin’s reflections on modernity, focusing on the film’s characters and the ways in which they are narratively and spatially constructed. Rather than offering a clear distinction between truth and falsehood, Burning adopts the form of mystery to suspend causal explanation and destabilise judgement. In doing so, the film addresses the anger of the younger generation in contemporary Korea without reducing it to individual psychology or explicit social critique.

Drawing on Benjamin’s concepts of allegory, montage, and the dialectics at a standstill, this study argues that Burning presents Korean modernity as a simultaneity of non-synchronicity, in which multiple historical temporalities coexist within a single present. Through the contrasting environments surrounding the characters, from rural Paju to urban Seoul, the film foregrounds the contradictions of a modernity shaped by industrialisation, militarisation, and middle-class fantasy. The characters of Jong-su, Hae-mi, and Ben are analysed not as autonomous individuals, but as differentiated manifestations of a fragmented subjectivity produced under capitalism. Ultimately, the article suggests that Burning does not seek to resolve the question of“whatisreal”, butinstead rendersthe familiarlandscape of Koreanmodernitystrange. By doing so, the film reconfigures realism as a critical mode that reveals how anxiety and anger emerge from unresolved historical and structural conditions in the present.