Spa Night Film Heteronormative Sexuality Film Analysis Watch the film mentioned in the file and read the instruction and the pdf. Selected a question in th

Spa Night Film Heteronormative Sexuality Film Analysis Watch the film mentioned in the file and read the instruction and the pdf. Selected a question in the instruction to answer. (250-300 words) # Nonhegemonic Masculinity
1. Queer Masculinities -As we have discussed last two weeks, the unmarked ideal
norm of masculinity is likely to be defined by traits such as “straight, white, and
middle class” while all otherness has been judged inferior deviations.
-As modern society keeps reproducing gender hierarchy and demanding traditional
patriarchal masculine images, men are trying to live up to the masculine ideal.
-Modern male subjects experience pressures to assert their masculinity during this
gender role socialization.
-Especially, a queer male subject experiences double pressure both being as a queer
and a man.
-Regardless of sexual orientation, masculine men are required to display overt
sexuality or heteronormative masculinity.
2. Asian-American Queer Masculinities
-It becomes more difficult for Asian-American gay subjects since stereotypes of Asian
American men are usually characterized as lacking masculinity.
-Here, we have to be careful as being a gay doesn’t mean being effeminate. However,
based on the hegemonic western ideology, Asian-American gay figure are doubly
stereotyped and mischaracterized.
-Those subjects struggle to meet both expectations from Asian family and from
American masculine society.
3. Burden as Asian-American men
-For Asian immigrants, because of their difficulty of assimilation, economically, they
are more likely to be excluded from spheres of power and influences.
-Therefore, first generation of Asian immigrants tended to sacrifice themselves to
enable their children to gain a formal education, enter high paying professions, and
eventually ascend to the middle class.
-Thus, the second generation of Asian immigrants might have pressure to move
upward on social and occupational ladders to meet their parents’ expectation.
-David, the protagonist in Spa Night, also feels pressure to enter into prestigious
university although he doesn’t have any interest in attending universities. However,
David attends SAT class since he fears disappointing his parents by not returning their
investment and expectation.
-Moreover, some of Asian immigrants coming from countries, influenced by the
Confucian culture, the first son in the family are required to be an heir of the family
and carry on a family line. In other words, the first son of a family has pressure to
have a baby boy.
-This cultural atmosphere gives pressure or even guilt to Asian-American queer
subjects as they cannot fulfill their family’s expectation.
For today, you need to watch Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night. You can find the film at:
Youtube: https://youtu.be/935rAXgJ6gM
# Here are some points that I want you to think about:
1. Exhibiting Heteronormative Sexuality
-David and Eddie are somehow obsessed to exhibit “masculine”, “tough” body
images. Especially, David keeps taking photo of his torso. How do you understand
David’s taking photo of his body, and his devotion of “building a masculine body?”
-David is expected to embody heteronormative masculinity from his parents and from
Korean-American society. Can you tell what gender roles are expected to be
performed by David?
-David seems to be stuck in discursively tangled gender and racial structures. How do
you understand the ending of the film where David is running down the streets of LA,
surrounded by multicultural signboards?
-David barely shows any emotions. Especially, in the final scenes, David has no facial
expression when he is in the middle of the Korean church or in the middle of LA
streets. Why? How do you understand these scenes?
2. Korean Society: Church
-Although first generation of Korean immigrants has lived in the United States for
decades, some of them still follow Korean culture and demand their community to
follow the traditional ideology.
-The Korean church community works as a symbolical setting in this film. How does
this Korean society construct the images of normative masculinity? What values does
the society require to second generation of Korean immigrants, especially to
Korean-American male subjects?
-Why do you think the owner of spa pretended not to witness David’s sexual
intercourse with another Korean-American?
-Why do you think David chose another Korean-American as his partner while he
refused Caucasian man who approached to him?
3. Masculinities and Femininities in the film – How do you understand David’s
father’s masculinity? Why did he refuse working at Mrs. Baek’s restaurant with his
wife?
-How about Eddie’s masculinity? He seems to have a strong bond with his mother
considering he couldn’t refuse his mother’s sudden demand to take care of David.
-Can you find common features among female figures- David’s mother, Mrs. Baek,
female employee of the Korean Spa, and the boss of moving company-? Especially, in
terms of the female boss of moving company and the employee of Korean Spa remind
the boss of pizza restaurant in Parasite. Why do you think these indifferent,
cold-hearted female characters keep appearing in the films where masculine
characters struggle for economic hardship? Do you think female characters are
symbolically depicted as economic competitors of male subjects?
Answer one of the questions from above and write your reflection (250-300
words)
FOCUS ON ASIA AND
THE MIDDLE EAST
COMING IN
Culture, Class and Repression
in Andrew Ahn’s Spa Night
THE INTERSECTION OF TRADITION AND SEXUALITY CAN BE A MESSY ONE,
EVEN MORE SO WHEN IT INTERACTS WITH DIASPORIC IDENTITY IN A LIBERAL
WESTERN CONTEXT. IN HIS DEBUT FEATURE, DIRECTOR ANDREW AHN CAPTURES THIS VERY COLLISION THROUGH THE EXPERIENCES OF THE EIGHTEENYEAR-OLD SON OF KOREAN-AMERICAN MIGRANTS. THE RESULTING FILM,
ACCORDING TO LAURENCE BARBER, IS A QUIETLY MOVING CHRONICLE OF
CONFRONTING QUEER IDENTITY – NOT SO MUCH A STORY OF COMING OUT
AS ONE ABOUT COMING TO TERMS WITH SELF AND SOCIETY.
72 • Metro Magazine 191 | © ATOM
In 1903, nearly seventy years before the Stonewall riots
changed the course of queer history, New York City
police raided the Ariston Baths. Twenty-six men were
arrested; of these, twelve were charged with sodomy
and seven were eventually imprisoned for up to twenty
years.1 Four centuries prior, authorities in Florence made
a mass push against homosexual activity, with records
showing that forty-four men engaging in such acts at
baths were convicted from 1492 to 1494.2 These are just
a couple of recorded historical instances in which bathhouses were something of a link between the gay community, hidden as it was, and mainstream society, purely
in the sense that the latter acknowledged – through
subjugation – that such a community even existed.
Bathhouses have long straddled the line between the
traditional need for covert gay spaces and the necessarily public existence of those spaces.
This, however, is a very Western conception of the
bathhouse – or bath, or spa, or sauna. In Andrew Ahn’s
2016 debut feature, Spa Night, which premiered in the
US Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival,
the spa the title refers to isn’t one that exists for the
purpose of clandestine sexual encounters. Rather, it’s a
traditional Korean spa that has become an underground
This spread: Young
Korean-American
David Cho (Joe Seo)
www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 191 • 73
David’s concern for his parents
is key here; for some queer
people, the guilty feeling of not
wanting to burden parents with
a coming-out during a time of
stress will feel sickeningly familiar.
This spread: David with his
father, Jin (Youn Ho Cho), and
mother, Soyoung (Haerry Kim)
74 • Metro Magazine 191 | © ATOM
hook-up spot for gay men in Los Angeles. For David Cho
(Joe Seo), the eighteen-year-old son of Korean immigrants
Jin (Youn Ho Cho) and Soyoung (Haerry Kim), the discovery of this fact quietly upturns his somewhat-meandering
existence. The place that is, perhaps, the most traditionally
Korean thing in his life in the US also forces him to question
his identity and, therefore, his relationship with his parents,
the most significant people in his life.
As much as Spa Night is about David’s sudden selfreflection, it’s inextricably concerned with Jin and Soyoung.
Southern California is home to the largest Korean-American
population in the US3 and, throughout the twentieth century,
it became increasingly common for Asian immigrants who
were excluded from what could be considered the mainstream workforce – due to prejudice, language or both – to
open restaurants. Chinese immigrants, for example, turned
anti-Chinese laws into a way to establish businesses that
functioned as ‘complex sites of chain migration and familial
obligation’.4 In Los Angeles’ Koreatown, many restaurants
are small, family-owned enterprises.5 Since finishing high
school, David has been helping out in his parents’ restaurant. But, as business has been slow for Jin and Soyoung,
they can no longer afford to keep the restaurant open. This
throws what was already a rather-haphazard family situation
into disarray.
The director’s interest in not just the cultural but also
economic experience of immigrants forms a major undercurrent in David’s story. Ahn and cinematographer Ki Jin
Kim frame David, Jin and Soyoung starkly as they stand
outside the shuttered restaurant, dazedly staring inwards
at their failed enterprise. David’s concern for his parents is
key here; for some queer people, the guilty feeling of not
wanting to burden parents with a coming-out during a time
of stress will feel sickeningly familiar. Meanwhile, he is also
mulling over the prospect of tertiary education, something
the restaurant was no doubt intended to fund. Because of
his unimpressive SAT scores, his parents – despite great
financial stress – pay for him to attend SAT classes to better
position him for entry into university. David is something
of an enigma, however, and it’s never quite clear what he
would even want to study if he did attend.
If there’s one thing David is assuredly concerned with,
though, it’s body image. We watch him as he goes running,
the LA cityscape whizzing by in the background, and as
he positions his torso on his phone’s screen and takes a
photo, presumably for use on Grindr or some other sex or
dating app. Discovering one’s sexuality often coincides with
an increased fascination with the body, and David’s interest
in fitness – and the respite it gives him from his perpetual
proximity to family – aligns with an overinvestment in body
image common among gay men. Throughout Spa Night,
David stares at mirrors, looking over himself, as though
trying to find answers by seeing through his skin rather
than through inward examination.
Ahn is clearly uninterested in standard ‘queer actualisation’ narratives. David never comes out to anyone in this
film, nor is there a coming-out in Ahn’s award-winning 2011
short film, Dol (First Birthday), which seemingly envisions a
version of David’s life some years down the track. In Dol’s
opening scene, protagonist Nick (Joshua Kwak) shuffles
away from partner Brian (Martin Lee) as someone walks
past in the street, to avoid detection. He doesn’t invite Brian
to a family celebration, the first birthday of a nephew; there,
his sister-in-law asks why Brian didn’t come. Clearly, the
family is aware of Nick’s sexuality even if they don’t fully
acknowledge it. His nephew struggles to pick something
during his doljabi, a ritual in which the now-one-year-old
celebrant chooses an object from an array placed in front of
them, said to foretell their future – money means wealth, a
brush indicates intelligence, thread symbolises long life. The
ritual also makes an appearance in Spa Night when David
and his parents attend one, but it’s hard to imagine what
David might have chosen at his own doljabi and whether
it aligns with the place in life in which he finds himself.
In Dol, Nick’s mother (Chris Yejin) prays over a large
amount of food before the family arranges for a portrait to
be taken. Nick sits next to his father and plaintively begins,
‘Dad …’ only to be ignored. There is no scene caused, no
angry blow-up so common in Western queer narratives; his
father knows what the conversation will be and evidently
would rather not have it. Nick returns home to Brian and
their dog, Chloe. In the gorgeous final shot, Brian joins Nick
in the shower, but the camera observes them through frosted glass. They kiss and embrace in vague shapes, moving
and shifting like an illustrated mosaic, out of sight enough to
be vague but clear enough to be a clever parallel to Nick’s
family’s awareness of his living situation. Ahn’s aim is to
examine the spaces between what we might call the ‘definitive moments’ in a young queer person’s self-­actualisation,
rather than putting the events themselves on display.
David has crafted a life that functions similarly, all
spaces between without the big moments. While Soyoung
begrudgingly accepts a waitressing job at a family friend’s
still-successful restaurant, Jin – unwilling to cede breadwinner status – and David try to make some extra money by
doing manual labour. Jin intermittently tries to find work in
between drowning his sorrows in alcohol, his masculinity
under threat. Throughout Spa Night, rigid cultural expectations – both self-imposed and external – bear down on its
characters. In South Korea, barely a fifth of the population is
supportive of homosexuality;6 much like in China and Japan,
a certain kind of family-based social conservatism reigns in
cultures where more traditional gender roles remain relatively
www.metromagazine.com.au | © ATOM | Metro Magazine 191 • 75
dominant. The subversion carried out by gay men using Korean
spas for hook-ups squares off with the traditionalism inherent
in them. Spa Night’s opening scene shows David and his family
engaged in the ritual of the spa; later in the film, we see David
washing himself again, albeit with a raw, extreme intensity.
Mrs Baek (Linda Han), who runs the restaurant Soyoung now
works at, brags about her son Eddie (Tae Song), who attends the
prestigious University of Southern California, and the two mothers
arrange a play date of sorts. David and Eddie end up going out
with a group of teenagers, landing at a karaoke bar, then drunkenly deciding to go to the spa. David finds his eye wandering, noticing Eddie’s friends in the steam room; they call him out but don’t
press the point. On the way out, he notices a ‘help wanted’ sign
and scores himself a part-time job in the establishment, then soon
picks up on the discreet activities that go on within the building.
Visually, Spa Night is at its best during these sequences, catching
the eyes and bodies of men and watching them as they silently
gesture and encourage one another. The film is shot in a manner
that is reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s Shame (2011), both in the
tracking shots of a running David down the street as well as in the
coolly eroticised observations of its subjects.
But, whereas McQueen’s film positions a gay sex-on-premises
club as a kind of rock bottom for its protagonist, Spa Night is
open and curious about the activity on display. It tracks men as
they move between rooms, catches the sight of towels draped
over lamps, and pushes in on David as he takes pains to cover
for some customers despite the owner’s desire to clamp down
on use of the spa for purposes other than its intended one. The
moment conjured by the film’s title comes late in the piece;
granted unlimited access to the spa as the sole perk of his job,
David eventually finds himself having a sexual encounter with a
patron. It’s short and jagged – and, for David, an intermingling of
cathartic pleasure and dawning shame. In aesthetic terms, Spa
Night’s approach to nudity and sex is somewhere between the
TV series Looking and Alain Guiraudie’s film Stranger by the Lake
(2013): there’s honesty to it, but darkness as well.
Yet Spa Night proves a rarity, not just because it centres on
a queer person of colour, but also because it foregrounds an
Asian-American family; at present, Asian-American representation on screen is a hot topic.7 Ahn’s film is not alone, however.
The past year has also seen Korean-American actor John Cho
play a Sulu acknowledged as gay in Star Trek Beyond (Justin Lin,
2016), and Spa Night has an antecedent in 2014’s Lilting (Hong
Khaou), which, as I discussed in an earlier issue of Metro,8 also
examines the unique intersection of cultural pressures, same-sex
relationships and family. Meanwhile, in South Korea, TV dramas
are starting to slowly include representations of gay individuals and partnerships.9 But progress happens gradually. And,
as the microcosm of Spa Night shows, though David confronts
his sexuality physically, by the end of the film he is still at sea.
Fortunately for him, it’s never less than clear that his parents love
him dearly: ‘I thought I could do better for you,’ Jin tells David.
‘I thought I could do more.’ Ahn’s authentic portrayal of this family dynamic – which he admits is partly autobiographical10 – gives
the indication that the awkwardness of David’s eventual comingout will be just that and not something worse.
But when we leave David, he is still running. Lacking a score,
Spa Night’s gentle sound design pushes the viewer through quieter moments – the dripping of water, the slap of David’s sneakers as they move across the pavement. When in the spa, David
is frequently shot at odds with his surroundings; around him,
midsections of male bodies are seen separated from heads, and
the dim lighting of the building casts shadows across hands and
76 • Metro Magazine 191 | © ATOM
arms and legs in teasing ways. As a gay man, David becomes a
stranger in the heteronormative society he lives in; as a gay man,
he becomes a stranger to the Korean culture he is surrounded by.
Ahn’s delicate balancing act fuses these themes together
elegantly, if occasionally with an excess of restraint. But the film
moves with the confidence of a story that needn’t stress its own
significance, aided by stellar performances from its central three
actors. In particular, Seo’s embodiment of David’s reticence is
punishingly real; the fact of being closeted and knowing that’s
how you’ll have to live for the foreseeable future is a draining experience. For David, and for many queer people, self-expression
feels like a major risk when publicly expressing one’s sexuality
still feels dangerous. In some ways, it’s David’s doljabi all over
again: a sea of options artificially laid out for him; paralysed by
choice, suffocated by steam. At some point, he will have to stop
running and make a decision, because running can only take you
so far until you collapse, out of breath.
http://andrewahnfilms.com/coming-soon/spa-night/
Laurence Barber is an award-winning freelance film and television
critic and writer. He is a film and television studies graduate from
The University of Queensland and lives in Sydney. You can follow
him on Twitter @bortlb.
m
Endnotes
1
Meredith GF Worthen, Sexual Deviance and Society: A Sociological
Examination, Routledge, London & New York, 2016, p. 243.
2
Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male
Culture in Renaissance Florence, Oxford University Press, Oxford
& New York, 1996, p. 203.
3
See Jie Zong & Jeanne Batalova, ‘Korean Immigrants in the United
States’, Migration Policy Institute website, 3 December 2014,
, accessed 27 October 2016.
4
Heather R Lee, ‘The Untold Story of Chinese Restaurants in America’,
Journalist’s Resource, 10 June 2015, , accessed 27 October 2016.
5
Matt Rodbard, ‘2…
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