Response for The Right To Forget, The Duty to Remember (Joonhee Park, Wheaton College)
Sonja Bertucci, University of Richmond
July 31, 2024
A Call for Agency in a Time of Crisis
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According to Bruno Latour, as he writes in Habiter la terre (2022), the ecological crisis has been pervasive for the past 50 years, yet none of the warnings have compelled us to radically transform our relation to the world. On the contrary, humans remain calm, almost stoic, as Latour observes, and continue to ignore the profound mutation in our relation to the world. It is as if the opportunity to rectify the damages has passed, leaving us with a strange future perfect tense: The time is past for hoping to ‘get through it.’ Confronting this missed opportunity, Latour urges us to search for new conditions of habitability of the world, a search that he calls “landing” (like returning to land after being adrift). This landing corresponds to an awakening of the capacity of action at the ground level: to believe in an individual’s agency to effect positive changes in the world. Such seems to me the virtue and urgent call in Joohnee Park’s The Right To Forget, The Duty to Remember. Instead of pointing the finger at its audience, instead of being weighed down by moralizing discourses, this film offers a positive response to Latour's demand. It discloses forms of agency that stave off despair, anger and blame while providing concrete modes of action or intervention in a series of carefully constructed case studies.
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Following a prologue that immerses viewers in idyllic images, accompanied by a voiceover narration highlighting the enduring harmony of nature, the film transitions abruptly (visually and aurally) to images of waste – trash in water and sprawling landfill sites. These jarring images of anthropogenic degradation produce a chastening effect in the viewer. This jarring effect is deepened through the words of Korean poet Ham Min Bok, who portrays humans as incongruous with the natural world: “all living beings on earth” are “startled” when they see humans. The poem plays on the dual connotation of “startle” (both to surprise and to shock), a nuance the film exploits skillfully.
Hearing the statistics about our waste, particularly plastic waste (46 million metric cubes expected to triple by 2060), is indeed startling. It's equally startling to realize that there is no end in sight; the waste accumulates, gradually colonizing natural habitats, even dominating the film's visual frame. An aerial shot over a landfill underscores this looming catastrophe with the ominous statement: “the garbage covers the entire globe.”
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This opening sequence ironically illustrates our "right to forget," that is, our ability to continue living our consumerist lives driven by a relentless purchase-to-waste cycle, devoid of conscience or memory. The film then progresses through sites of agency and possibility (as I mentioned earlier, one could think of these sites as case studies), each highlighting modes of interventions to counteract this impending ecological disaster. Each case study features someone or something—a business entity or a collective—that has chosen not to exercise the right to forget, instead foregrounding the duty to remember.
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The logic of forgetting and remembering along with the logic of attachment to discarded objects is one of the key structuring threads of the film. As the narration explains, these forgotten objects, once loved by us, are now sheer waste, and the landfill becomes their graveyard. The narration seeks to rekindle our emotional connection to what we have discarded. This shift starts with Miyo Yu, director of Eco-Christ, who challenges the very notion of trash: it is not just about sorting waste into proper recycling bins; rather, it’s about questioning what counts as waste in the first place. The neoliberal global economy favors a model of acquisition predicated on the new, the latest or the most up-to-date model; one that always keeps up with its times, the advances of technology, one that forces us to retire objects that, although functioning perfectly, become obsolete. Built-in obsolescence is now replaced by a built-in desire for the new. Against this tendency, the film’s narration attempts to transform the drudgery of recycling into pleasurable, socially conscious, and collective-generating experiences, experiences that spark “friendly” connections. The different case studies that follow suit show how creative and responsible thinking in Korea transforms this seeming chore into something appealing, even ludic and profitable. The case studies examined throughout the film follow the trajectory of a human life: from childhood (focused on toys) to adulthood (culminating in ultimate questions, such as the spiritual duty to respect the earth) and they show us the many ways forgetting can turn into remembering. We see how a relation to the world that objectifies and discards its trash can be transformed into a relation of mindful care.
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The first case study examines “the Elephant factory,” an “eco station” dedicated to recycling discarded toys by repairing them and shipping them to children in need worldwide. Lee Chaein insists on the way in which this venture creates an ever-larger community: what starts as a father’s toy repair project evolves into a larger and more complex volunteer group, and eventually becomes a factory with global ambitions. It thus provides a model of positive growth. As images in the film focus on different steps in the work involved, we become aware of the power of individuals and communities to effect change in our linear and destructive economies—from “using up and discarding” to reprocessing and recrafting, from a linear to a circular model. And it all starts with toys—objects we form emotional bonds with during childhood. As the narration concludes: “The Elephant factory is like a good friend, who wants to revive the memories we once had.” The emotional context is important, as the seeds of a differently organized economy should be planted in our earliest childhood connections in order to blossom.
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Before delving into the next site of agency, I would like to add one minor comment about the narration. Throughout the film, it guides our attention, explains, describes and serves as a unifying presence. There is a tension in the film between the voice, which takes a more explicit and didactic tone, and the image-sound nexus of the film, which works more affectively (and perhaps effectively). The images and testimonials speak so powerfully such that they do not seem to need the explicit clarification of the narration. Nevertheless, the narration does serve to unify the different case studies.
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If Elephant factory attempts to reactivate our childhood memories—perhaps an explicit nod to the elephant’s phenomenal memory—the next initiative concerns Superbin, a company that creates robots (called Nephron) turning trash into something ludic and profitable. Superbin taps into the circuits of the market economy (acknowledging money as a legitimate impetus for action) by providing a monetary reward for recycling; at the same time, Superbin gamifies this process, thereby making recycling “fun.” Jeong Bin Kim’s explicit goal, however, is to modify the traditional shape of economies: to transform plastic waste into high-quality raw materials or industrial resources that can be reinjected into the economy, in turn transforming the linear logic of consumption—that ends in the waste lands of landfills—into a circular economy operating on resource reprocessing. Here again, the narration stresses how the Superbin-IM factory becomes “popular friends” (here semantics of friendship and care as opposed to economics). The same affective charge is deployed in the waste-free food delivery system as imagined by the company Return-it.
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The final chapter of the film leaves the innovative business models for discursive practices that channel these new economic visions into the culture: hence the last segment concerns the “active Christians” of United Christian Churches of Korea (“how to care for God’s created world”). Here the process of reattachment and reactivation to the world takes a spiritual turn: it is no longer because it is ludic or profitable that we should remember, but because there is an ethical and spiritual duty. Faith becomes a primary motivator for the logic of care. To draw on the language in the title: caring for the God-created world is a “duty to remember” or “ecological repentance.” The film shows how Christians discover that the duty to care for the world derives from their faith. Members of the Church become “environmental missionaries” (as is also the case for the Almang market, a refill store with a zero-waste and no-containers policy). The film comes full circle with Miho Yu, the first interviewee of the film, in charge of a training program called Environmental Missionary.
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The film ends with the earlier idyllic views of nature (Dream Park); but we realize that these images were not just unspoiled nature or virgin lands made into a park; rather, it was a landfill waste site returned to a habitable space: the “Dream Park has been reborn as an ecological park.” And cinema, well known as a dream-factory, keeps alive this possibility in spite of the seemingly impossible nature of the task; perhaps the flight towards the dream becomes an effective tool that enables a process of “landing” (in Latour’s phrase), which is literal in the end of the film: remaking land from trash.
To conclude: The Right to Forget, the Duty to Remember is an urgent film, thoughtfully and well-constructed, positive in its outlook, and fascinating in its focus on pre-existent strands in cultural practices that can function as pragmatic solutions to a problem that we still are not confronting seriously enough. It is my hope that this film finds its deserved audience (and on a personal level, it inspired me to reflect on changes that I can make in my own ecological practices). I am grateful for having had the opportunity to respond to this film.
Sincerely,
Sonja Bertucci, MFA, PhD
Assistant Professor
Languages, Literatures and Cultures
Film Studies
University of Richmond