The Hauntology of Decision to Leave
When Transcendental Desire is halted by the Social/Cultural
Decision to Leave is one of the top films of 2022, but this here writing is not here to tell why nor how. This is not a film review, nor an experiential reflection on the many things that this film does so well. This is a meditation on Decision to Leave’s exploration of a unique form of hauntology: when love is halted by seemingly impermeable social and cultural boundaries.
*SPOILER WARNING*: There are spoilers ahead for Decision to Leave. If you are interested in this premise, and the film by proxy, I strongly encourage you to close this article and watch the film for yourself before returning to read. If you are unbothered by this warning, or your sole interest is in the premise, by all means continue. I welcome all thoughts and comments on the film and/or the premise.
Before beginning the musings, I must highlight the definitive haunting moment of the film. Without exploring this moment, the following musings would ring empty.
At the 43 minute mark, ‘Decision to Leave’ features our two central character’s crossing a definitive social boundary: Hae-joon’s (the talented detective in an unhappy marriage) hosts Seo-rae (his only current suspect for Seo-rae’s husband’s murder) for dinner. During this dinner, Seo-rae surveys Hae-joon’ wall of unresolved cases and asks about the killings of San-O, a murderer that has evaded arrest for some time. Seo-rae’s playfulness and curiosity during this scene is highlighted by her frequent attentive questions about the cases, a disposition further emphasized by the “happy” and “bumpy” violins that play in the film’s soundtrack during this scene.
Seo-rae asks about San-O’s relationship with one particular woman. Hae-joon answers, explaining that the criminal killed another man after suspecting that the man was messing around with the criminal’s girlfriend at the time. Seo-rae remarks, “So, he loves the woman more than death…”, then points to a picture of the aforementioned girlfriend of the criminal. Hae-joon confidently dismisses her wondering, responding “Oh, [her]?”. Immediately, the film cuts away to a few days forward in the story, when Hae-joon and his partner move forward to arrest this very criminal he is discussing with Seo-rae. Those “happy” and “bumpy” violins that I previously mentioned, those which highlighted the playful curiosity of Seo-rae? They startlingly morph and deepen into roaring cellos, the only time the instrument appears in the film’s score. The viewer has just been severed from the ‘Buddy Cop’ and ‘Budding Romance/Fling’ of Act 1, and has now been introduced to a much different Act 2. The tone is now darker, far more serious, signifying that this film is not here to be fun or flirtatious. “We are here to sit with something deeply unsettling, something ineffable,” I could hear the film almost whispering to me.
As the cellos continue to roar, we watch as Hae-joon’s partner is attacked by the criminal as the duo of police officers are moving in for the arrest. The criminal flees, and Hae-joon gives chase. The film cuts back to Hae-joon and Seo-rae during their dinner. Hae-joon explaining that the girlfriend of the criminal that Seo-rae is asking about lives “far away” and that she had since gotten married to someone else, essentially dismissing Seo-rae’s suggestion that to find the criminal you only need find his love. Seo-rae sighs, shoots a look of disappointment at the naive Hae-joon, then giggles as she looks at her hands.
The cellos fade. The score quiets to a few subtle chimes.
It is here where the film reveals its soul, the very conflict it suggests the viewer to sit with, all within one sentence of dialogue from Seo-rae. She looks back up at Hae-joon, and, with impregnable poise, poses a question:
“In Korea, if a person you love gets married, does the love cease?”
As the film explains to us in myriad of different ways, the answer to Seo-rae’s question is “no”, love does not cease when a person you love gets married. The film’s meditation on both this question and answer becomes its own exploration of the phenomenological structure for love, and one that brought me right back to Lévinas’ reflections on the emotion:
“Love remains a relation with the Other that turns into need, transcendent exteriority of the other, of the beloved. But love goes beyond the beloved… The possibility of the Other appearing as an object of a need while retaining his alterity, or again, the possibility of enjoying the Other… this simultaneity of need and desire, or concupiscence and transcendence,… constitutes the originality of the erotic which, in this sense, is the equivocal par excellence.”
― Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority
To quickly summarize, Lévinas describes love as having multidirectional movement: a desire and need that moves towards the other, but also beyond in a transcendent motion. Love is a movement towards the other in terms of “needing” to be with, to share physical and/or mental space. At the same time, there is a transcendental movement, where the self is moved from itself and pulled out of itself in its desire to join with the other, an other whom is infinite, ever-expanding, and always unknowable. The intricacies and specificities of these philosophical notions are not of this writing’s concern. Rather, the concern is the transcendental movement of love itself, how Seo-rae and Han-joon make these movements, and what happens when this transcendental movement is forbidden or prohibited from coming to fruition.
Seo-rae and Han-joon use their situatedness in their social/cultural roles as “suspect” and “detective” to continually move toward each other in desire. For Hae-joon, this is the care he places in observing Seo-rae, or how he eventually lets her into his home after his partner *trashes her apartment. For Seo-rae, she returns to Hae-joon’s home to help him sleep and burn photos. The glaring caveat that the film presents as a ‘given’ from the beginning is the obvious: the romantic relationship between the two cannot ever happen. It is almost socially forbidden. Hae-joon is investigating Seo-rae and Hae-joon is also married. To seek a life with Seo-rae would mean for Hae-joon to ruin his career and his marriage. Although the two individuals are equals, their social and cultural positions have created a boundary. This is a boundary that a transcendental movement could leap over and love to see itself manifest, but not without involving consequences in the relational and professional spheres for each of the individuals involved.
In effect, ‘Decision to Leave’ invites the viewer to sit with this unique ‘hauntology’: what happens — what does one do — when transcendental love (between two equals or peers) is stomped out by social, cultural, and logistical boundaries?
Decision to Leave is wonderful and flawless work of fictional cinema, naturally entailing that its story is taken to the highest degree of risk in the name of entertainment. All the while, the haunt of this phenomenological dilemma is recognizable in everyday life: when love painfully persists even after one is married to someone else, when the relationship is separated by physical distance, when the two’s social positions are organized in such a way that it is made clear that the relationship cannot manifest without harming another social or culture agreement — common example coming to my mind being dating in the workplace, or when one peer is in a professional position of power over another peer.
This is haunting that I sat with throughout the film, and the haunting that I continue to sit with when I think about this story. To be sure, the film’s tragic ending only amplifies the intensity of this experience, this particular mourning of interpersonal connection that is incapable of seeing itself through. Chan-wook is a mastermind in his ability to convey this romantic tragedy using the sea and the mountain metaphor. As the omnipresent imagery throughout the film suggests, the sea and mountains can never explore or be with each other. For one to exist naturally entails that the other must be pushed away, the two eternally separated by the physical properties that allow them each to exist on their own.
Unless, what if there were to be a mountain submerged under the sea? Have we then solved this phenomenological dilemma? Or, perhaps there is a separate geographical term that names this feature of the Earth, and I am merely resistant to accepting that there is no possible universe where Hae-joon and Seo-rae can continue to share time together.
