My Sassy Girl

I usually have some reservations about adapting movies across cultures. Yes, one of the most successful Hollywood movies of all time was an adaptation of a Japanese film. There was a movie about a bunch of rebels attacking a samurai fortress, called “Hidden Fortress”. It later on got remade into “Star Wars”, although George Lucas did add some stuff of his own.

There have been some remakes of “The Ring”. Now The Ring may be a big hit, and the ending (which I can’t reveal) may have been inspired by the internet which is a western invention, but there are a lot of aspects of “The Ring” which are very Asian. Long haired ghosts, the notion of the supernatural being unhappy people with some axes to grind with the living - these are Asian types of ghosts.

The one adaptation which was never going to work is “My Sassy Girl”. Some things about human nature are just not universal. The original premise of “My Sassy Girl” is not going to work in the western context, because all these people are behaving like Asians, not westerners. Yes, emotional masochism is universal. But the Jeon Ji Hyun character using her violent behaviour on her boyfriend as a mask for her grief over the previous boyfriend is something rather particular to Asian culture.

I can imagine an angmoh doing that, but I can’t imagine an angmoh being so selfless as to hide these problems away. When angmohs have psychological problems, they do not make Korean soap opera out of it. Instead they beat somebody up, shoot up on drugs, go to therapy, blog about it, whatever. But they will tell somebody about it. They will discuss it. Angmohs don’t suffer in silence because they are not Asians.

The guy is also clearly not an angmoh. Angmoh guys are macho people. It is more Asian to be the sensitive new age guy. In fact many of them are. So this SNAG is not a real issue. Asians also tend to be more sentimental than angmohs, who see this as a sign of weakness. But angmohs are not more stoic than Asians, rather they are more stoic about different things. If you make an angmoh stay back longer in the office than he has to, he will either quit his job or badmouth his boss to the rest of the world. The asian will be better at tahaning this. We all know this to be true: angmohs are better at fighting for their rights, and Asians are better at eating shit.

Ang moh women do not bully guys and then fall in love with them afterwards. They do not get touched by his unwavering devotion. What his actions communicate to her is that he has a small dick.

Conversely the whole spectacle of the woman loving the self sacrificing guy, and yet being constrained by both her own reservations and by society’s norms to express it, is something intensely moving to Asians. Angmohs are much more likely to say “what a fucking idiot, she has issues, she should go and seek professional help”.

The issue is that while these 2 people are fairly unusual even in Korea, the rest of their psychological makeup is fairly common. She’s the one who masks her suffering. He’s the one who is a mother’s boy. But these two people will be considered freaks in angmoh society. They would be wimps and losers.

Yes, Shakespeare wrote “Taming of a Shrew”, another romance involving a sassy girl. But in that play, the guy manipulates her and eventually dominates her, instead of winning her over by putting up with her shit. When I found out that the remake was directed by Yann Samuell, who also directed “Love Me if you Dare”, a light turned on in my head. That was a good movie, and there are some similarities, like the fire of being extremely attracted to the other is starkly contrasted with the ice of playing a game where you have to act cool. But that was love as competition, and is in some respects quite macho.

Anyway I read somewhere that the director of the Korean version was brought in as a consultant for the Hollywood version, and when he saw the mess, he threw up his hands and quit. I can imagine why.