I am fond of noir films, so when I saw the trailer for Hot Blood (Tteugeoun pi), I rushed to book a ticket and went to see it. I liked it more than I expected, and afterward I tracked down the novel and read it too. That brought a different kind of pleasure from the film.
The movie felt like a grand showdown among alpha males. Busan was a perfect backdrop for that story. The eccentric characters stayed with me, and the way they puffed themselves up and snarled at one another like lions fighting over territory was handled with style. It was violent, but the shabby and gloomy gangster world had its own strange pull.
The closing narration over the protagonist Hee-soo also lingered in my mind. It felt like a fitting way to close the story.
“Everything hot has vanished. It has turned hollow and meaningless, like a ghost. Still, I will live draped in illusion, my feet planted in shame and sorrow.”
The novel had a different flavor. Quite a bit was omitted or altered in the film, and the book filled in situational details that the screen could not really carry. Things that had not clicked completely after watching only the movie began to make sense once I read the prose.
The characters also come across as pettier, meaner, and more pitiful in the novel than in the film. The book opens like this:
The thugs of Gwangan do not wear suits.
They do not cover themselves in tattoos, either. They do not swagger around in sharp tailoring. Their uniform is a tracksuit. Instead of charismatic heavies, the page is filled with small-time, ignorant men.
Hee-soo, the protagonist, appears in the film mostly as Gwangan’s ace, but in the novel he is nearing forty, buried in debt, drifting from cheap hotel room to cheap hotel room, almost like a self-parody. The debt hanging over him is many times greater than what the movie suggests.
Overall, the plot moves in much the same way in both versions. But the author’s afterword pulls in a somewhat different direction from the film’s tone.
… People become cooler, more polite, more humorous. They become considerate and generous. Everyone studies the other person carefully so as not to wound them. It is pleasant, genteel, neat. Yet I feel suffocated in those polite, humorous relationships. Meeting people grows harder and emptier. This city can afford to be so courteous and tolerant because nobody opens their door.
People are no longer hot. Everything hot was driven off like vermin, accused of being immature, provincial, uncivilized. Whenever that happens, I find myself missing the messy life of Gwangan. Back then it was irritating, tangled with love and hate, flipping tables in drunken rage. But at least it wasn’t this lonely.
Tonight, opening a bottle of soju alone, I try to imagine a way to love without hurting and to be loved without being hurt. Then I shake my head. That kind of life does not exist. Everything good is tangled up with the bad. Close the door and the stench stays out, but so does the scent of flowers. …
In the film, “hot” belonged to the gangsters. In the novel, “hot” belonged to friends, neighbors, coworkers, to people. It meant a kind of warmth that was rough, excessive, and impossible to tidy away. A petty argument at someone’s funeral that ended in overturned tables and flying fists, only for everyone to face each other again the next day as if nothing had happened. The same guy making the same dull jokes until your blood pressure rose, and yet you still remembered him as “rough, but basically decent.” That kind of heat.
In a world steadily cooling toward lukewarm, I was glad to have read a book like that just for the sheer pleasure of it.