Barking Dogs Never Bite: You're Not Your Worst

The Person vs. Persona split is a blurred line between the possibility of self and the application of self. Who we want to be and who we are aren’t as separated as we may think. It’s the call to action that lets us be that person that we so desperately want to be. Shredding the skin of our flaws and the genuinely bad things that we’ve done in, if only for a moment, catharsis and redemption for our sins. Even if not entirely devoid of self interest, we deserve grace, to not be made a monster lest we turn into one through exaggerated public perception, and start believing in it ourselves. 

Barking Dogs Never Bite, directed by Bong Joon-ho in his directorial debut no less; is a wry, darkly humorous, and light-hearted piece that I believe wants us to look in the mirror, both physically and metaphorically and heartily laugh with ourselves and all of the bits and bobs that make us this strange, complicated, inconsistent, and somehow top of the food chain species. Let it all out. You’re not a horrible person. You’re just made to think you are by the mechanisms in place designed to shame you for things that are ambiguously unacceptable, unfairly irredeemable, or both.

An out of work college professor who is particularly annoyed with the sounds of barking dogs in his apartment complex decides to take drastic measures to ensure his peace and quiet. Park Hyun-nam, a young woman who is a bookkeeper at the complex who decides to investigate reports of missing dogs in and around the area. Their stories begin to intersect in unexpected ways. The catalyst of character and narrative occurring in simultaneity when the college professor Ko Yun-jo locks a dog in a closet that was bothering him personally. Realizing that the dog he locked up was not the one causing the barking as it had throat surgery and couldn’t bark, Ko returns to undo his lapse of judgment/cruelty only to find unexpectedly that the building’s janitor has killed a dog and is planning to use it in stew.

The character work between its two leads is what ultimately has the most influence on the quality of the work and is the starting point for the film artistic successes. Ko Yun-jo being jaded with where his life is and how those are treating him in it, makes him sympathetic enough, but his believability comes through when his darkest urges win over to take him to a place he needs to redeem himself, both on a personal and spiritual level. The motivation to change comes from his own choices. It’s a powerful feeling of responsibility imbued in the unwilling hero who causes his own problems. And in Park Hyun-nam, a young woman idealizing fame and fortune, chasing drama and intrigue to find the ugly and inconvenient truths of the stories glamorized in the nightly news reports. The ignorance of her fantasies lined with false solutions to her financial predicaments and grander ambitions clouds her sense of not only reality but acceptable morality within society. They are the anchor points of the narrative theming and do a tremendous job feeling like real people in a real world situation, stumbling through the best they can.

The cinematography and shot framing of this film is so subtly parallel at times if you blink you might miss it. Drawing between both of the remarkably well fleshed out main characters and their struggles as well as their character traits and flaws. It is in as much of the unspoken that we discover who these people are and what their financial struggles mean to each of them and how it impacts them as people as we do when they are communicating directly with each other. Slow, methodical, and direct in its pacing and camera movements, it mimics the pace of the film, punctuated by moments of kinetic energy that serve as narrative catalysts. 

It is undoubtedly rough around the edges and may be a bit lethargic in it's opening third but in the green, sordid, almost sickly looking apartment complex, grimy and lived in equal measure, in which most of the film takes place, the ethical and moral apathy that occurs isn't so far from that which we are familiar with in each of our own real lives. Though it's light-hearted tone interspersed with varying genres of upbeat music doesn't create the kind of weight that another filmmaker might have unwittingly trifled with. The soul, worldview, and expressions of this film are as idiosyncratic and individual as it is eccentric and painfully real and it is in that way that it is undoubtedly the origin story of its auteurist creator.

Bong creates an extremely nuanced and subtle symmetry between the main participants in the narrative sense as well. On the surface these people seem like they have nothing in common, we are given the opportunity to dig deep enough to see that, while their exterior motivations may seem different, ultimately their methodology isn’t as different as maybe we’d like to think. Are any of them really “bad” and “irredeemable” after all even if some of their behavior is borderline psychotic? Why are the kinder actions rewarded with far less than those that are not? It’s an unfortunate symptom of the world we live in. In some cases we really aren’t so different from the animals beneath us on the food chain.

And these ideas feed into my own interpretations of this work and what it truly represents at its core. That it is an examination of human morality with an emphasis on highlighting the hypocrisies of our own individual moral codes and creeds. No one in this world is some flawless moral arbiter. While we all believe our own belief systems to be righteous and for the best of intentions, in some cases the basis for a handful of these beliefs don’t have the most altruistic origins. That doesn’t even come close to making us cold and calculated egomaniacs. In fact if anything it makes us remarkably human. What sets us apart as good people is when our mistakes, our flaws, our misdeeds, turn into self-reflection, and at the very least and effort, both spiritually and tangibly change us for the better. Even if they don’t undo what wrongs we have committed, that we have tried to be good is what should be remembered along with our indiscretions.