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The Dangers Of Biosecurity: Movie Analysis

Decent Essays

In “The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host and the Geopolitics of Outbreak,” Hsuan T. Hsu claims Bong Joon-ho’s The Host utilizes Gang-du and the monster, the protagonist and antagonist respectively, in the film to allude to real-life issues specifically concerned with American intervention, monetary crisis, medical emergency, and social subsistence, and juxtapose them with the events within Bong’s film. To start off, Hsu asserts that the U.S. can maliciously influence other countries. He informs that the scene which the American scientist dumped a substantial amount of toxic chemicals into the sewer which leads to the Han River comes from a real-life example. From that incident, enraged Korean protesters backlash against the United States. The American scientist negatively influences …show more content…

Due to the privatization of Korean companies and the neoliberal market structure, Korean citizens, especially males, couldn’t support their families and started jumping into the Han River as the economy declined. As a result, there were plentiful of bodies for the monster to devour; hence, the monster “fed on the skyrocketing number of suicides.” Additionally, Hsu discusses that The Host depicts the issue of medical outbreaks. He initially comments that movies besides The Host, such as Jaws, Outbreak, and Godzilla, associate with biological epidemics. Hsu then argues that westerners, especially Americans, focus on the wrong points when attempting to solve worldwide epidemics; instead of addressing fiscal imbalances for destitute countries, Americans obsess with discovering a cure through research, regardless if it is required or not. To illustrate, Hsu mentions Bong Joon-ho’s satire. In The Host, the U.S. attempts to eliminate the monster by pouring in dangerous chemicals named Agent

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