Seyong Jo's "Let's Dance"

"Let's Dance," by Seyong Jo,* is essentially a stylized documentary about abortion in Korea.  The movie includes fictionalized scenes, as in the beginning of the preview below, but the heart of the movie is a series of interviews with women who have undergone abortions in Korea.



The interviews are powerful.  Their strength comes from the startling openness and honesty of the women, who tell their stories in a a plain, straightforward way that nevertheless manages to be tremendously moving.  Although we don't hear the questions, the interviewer (Jo, I assume) clearly handled the interviews with considerable skill, reminiscent of Errol Morris.

The movie is refreshingly free of Michael Moore-style propaganda.  It depicts a demonstration against abortion, and also shows oral argument before the Supreme Court of Korea in a landmark case in which the court declined to overrule the country's anti-abortion statute.  But the movie never engages in polemics, instead letting the women speak for themselves.  The result is nuanced and complex, and leaves room for doubt and contradiction.  One woman holds a memorial service for her terminated child.

After the movie there was a brief Q&A session with Jo.  She said (through a translator) that there are cultural differences between Korea and the United States.  For instance, at one point in the movie, Korean women tend to start crying, but in America that wasn't the case.  I decided not to speak up, but in truth I cried too.  Some things are universal.

* "Seyong Jo" is how her name is spelled on the website of the Chelsea Film Festival.  I have also seen it spelled "Se-young Jo" and "Se-yong Jo."  My understanding is that "Jo" is her family name and "Seyong" is her given name, which is why I refer to her as "Jo" in this review.

Dave's Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

Dave's latest effort, Worse Than A Crime (which we recently reviewed), is perhaps the clearest example of "wishful fiction," the genre that Dave and Sarang developed in a hash-fueled overnight session when the two crashed the 2012 Pulitzers (recall that in 2012, the prize board, deadlocked, didn't award the Pulitzer for fiction to either Dave or Sarang).  But in all truth, Crime is a relatively straightforward, almost obvious application of the approach.  More interesting, I think, is Dave's 2013 novella Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?.  The book imagines a not-so-far-fetched near-future in which Congressional politics have become so dysfunctional that it is impossible to pass traditional legislation.  Instead, Congress votes on general statements of policy, which are then translated into law by an advanced computer algorithm.  The change is of course highly disruptive, but as legislation starts moving again, after a long freeze, an uneasy equilibrium emerges.

But all hell breaks loose when a hurricane inflicts severe damage on Houston and incapacitates a large amount of the nation's oil infrastructure.  Congress, swept up in the national outrage over the resulting economic slowdown, passes a resolution declaring that the U.S. should spend "whatever it takes to secure the most crucial natural resource in the greatest country on the face of the earth."  The measure passes unanimously and is hugely popular . . .  until it comes time to translate the policy into statutory law.  The legislative computer carefully assesses the Congressional resolution and allocates $175 billion to fund maple syrup infrastructure in Canada.

Leaders of both parties are in a bind.  On one hand, the measure is hugely unpopular, since most Americans had assumed the funds would be used to strengthen the petroleum industry in the U.S.  On the other hand, no one wants to acknowledge any flaw in the drafting of the Congressional resolution (which literally every member of Congress voted for), and no one can afford to be seen as anti-science by suggesting that the computer misconstrued the legislation.  (When the Republican governor of Texas suggests that the computer program should be tweaked and re-run, Neil deGrasse Tyson slams him for injecting politics into the scientific method.  "If you change algorithms every time you don't like the results, then you're doing politics, not science," the astronomer points out.  The governor quickly backs down.)

The problem is not just political and technological, though.  A debate breaks out as to what it means for "the greatest country on the face of the earth" to refer to one nation or another.  How does a phrase "reach out" into the world and "attach" to a particular entity?  Can reference be fixed by some sort of objective rule?  Is a causal chain necessary?  Could, for instance, an accidental blotch of paint refer to a tree that it happens to resemble?  Does it matter in what causal relation the viewer stands with the tree?  And what is causation, anyway?

Disturb the Universe thus becomes much more philosophical than Crime, and because of the way the plot unfolds it does not fit comfortably within "wishful fiction."  But for exactly that reason, it is a bolder and more profound exploration of the genre's outer bounds than any of Dave's other books, and it is also a cri de coeur, the opening salvo in Dave's passionate argument for the ongoing relevance of philosophy.  The future of the country may not be at stake—yet.  But the future of philosophy and the public intellectual is very much in play, and Disturb the Universe is right in the middle of it.

Dave's Worse Than a Crime

Dave's latest effort, Worse Than A Crime, can perhaps best be described as utopian political satire.  The novel opens bluntly, describing a press conference given by Secretary of State John Kerry while on a visit to Japan.  A college student asks Secretary Kerry how the U.S. can justify its huge military budget while billions of people lack access to clean drinking water.  Kerry briefly hems and haws before settling on a clever response:  the U.S. would happily cut its defense budget by 10% if China and Russia were willing to match the cuts.  "And we could spend the money on clean water, living wages, free ponies for everyone—whatever you'd like!" Kerry smirks, before moving on to the next question.

But Kerry's ordeal is far from over.  China and Russia almost immediately accept Kerry's "offer," putting Kerry in the difficult (but by now familiar) position of having made policy while trying to make a reductio ad absurdum.  To make matters worse, China and Russia don't equivocate:  each of them immediately slashes its military budget by more than 10% and launches an ambitious program of financial aid and technical support.  The countries jointly declare that the true measure of a country's economic, technical, and administrative capacity (as well as diplomatic clout) is its ability to eliminate waterborne diseases wherever it chooses to do so.  Providing clean drinking water thus becomes not just a humanitarian project but an arms race of epic proportions, with the U.S.'s status as the sole superpower hanging in the balance.

Dave is careful not to portray the resulting flood of money into clean-water infrastructure as an entirely positive development.  The U.S. is forced to twist elbows, and worse, in its diplomatic effort to get the job done.  When Bangladesh refuses to allow outside contractors to bid for key infrastructure jobs, the U.S. threatens to take away the Bangladeshi military's lucrative peacekeeping contract with the United Nations, nearly instigating a coup.  Meanwhile China uses southeast Asia's lingering resentment against Japan to stir up nationalist fervor, hoping to channel it into political support for massive water projects.  The results are, unsurprisingly, not exactly what China intended, and soon Japan abandons its longstanding neutrality and plows headlong into the global clean-water arms race.  Great Britain can't long resist joining the fight, especially when France announces that all of its former colonies will have clean drinking water long before Britain's.  Germany, while not directly participating in the struggle, deploys a vast fleet of u-boats that help install undersea pipes and cables for coastal cities such as Lagos and Manila.

Before long, old resentments resurface, and countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are forced to pick sides in an increasingly acrimonious "cold peace."  Developing countries shrewdly play the great powers against each other, demanding not just physical infrastructure but large-scale social and economic changes that will make it possible to deliver clean, affordable drinking water in a sustainable manner without further assistance.  The results are devastating to the world's water-borne pathogens, which are the true victims of the superpowers' insatiable zeal.

Worse Than A Crime subtly suggests that, even as vast resources are devoted to clean water and other public health initiatives in a mad game of geopolitical one-upmanship, the real madness is that this didn't happen sooner.  If the world depicted by the novel is not an entirely realistic one, the moral question that Dave presents is no less urgent:  just what, exactly, will it take for technology developed in the 19th century to become available to all humans who live on this earth?  Just when, exactly, will the last person die of cholera, an eminently preventable disease?  And why should we tolerate any delay whatsoever?

Dave's Tara Incognita

Dave's latest effort, Tara Incognita, applies his technique of "narrative parallax" to the Civil War novel The Wind Done Gone, the debut novel of country-music songwriter Alice Randall.  To appreciate the nuances of Dave's technique, you would probably have to read his manifesto, "Math and Literature:  Two Great Tastes that Taste Great Together."  In short, narrative parallax is not merely the re-telling of a story from another perspective.  Instead, it involves recasting events in such a way that the story sheds light on "the fabric of reality itself."  In other words, while the "reference story" may have a conventional focus on plot, character, etc. ("the thing itself"), the "perspectivally shifted recapitulation" directs the reader's attention to the subtle differences and contradictions that emerge when the story is retold ("what comes between").  "The simplest way to put it," Dave writes, "is that it is the difference between using trigonometry to calculate the height of a tree, and using trigonometry to calculate your own location.  We've seen the tree, we've thought about the tree, frankly we are bored by the tree; but what can the tree, together with our quantitative methods, teach us about ourselves?  And about our place in the universe?"

But you don't need to be steeped in Dave's somewhat convoluted literary theory to appreciate Tara Incognita.  The Wind Done Gone, which serves as Dave's "reference story," is narrated by a recently-freed slave in the deep South named Cynara.  Dave re-tells the story from the perspective of Scarlett, Cynara's white half-sister.  The book itself is masterful, almost disturbingly so.  Scarlett is rendered vividly and arrestingly, and her triumphs, setbacks, and constant maneuvering are endlessly fascinating.  And yet the story, however delicious, is hard to swallow.  As Scarlett enters the foreground, her family's slaves are simplified, depersonalized, and pushed to the margins.  The book is a self-conscious exercise in privilege and racism.  So what does it say about me that I loved Tara Incognita and couldn't put it down?  What does it say about our society that Tara Incognita is a bestseller and has become far better-known than The Wind Done Gone?  And that the book is about to be made into an epic movie (with Dave taking his first-ever screenwriting credit) that is expected to be one of the highest-grossing films of all time (in inflation-adjusted terms, at least)?

Whatever the broader social and literary implications of the book, Randall apparently does not appreciate Dave's implicit commentary on her work.  She has sued Dave and his publisher (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), though most legal experts think that Dave has a solid First Amendment argument that his book is a parody.  I hope the matter can be settled amicably, because I think the writers have a lot to say to each other and to the rest of us about the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which our legacy of racism distorts our perspective.  The sooner they can resolve their differences, the sooner the dialogue can start.