Oh Seyeon’s Fanatic is definitely a student project, since she was still studying film at university when it was first shown at Korean film festivals in 2021. As such it’s also a deeply personal film. Oh explores the mystery of fandom, especially the downside, and takes off from her own adolescent crush on a K-pop singer who was eventually arrested and tried for gang rape and distributing videos of his victims. An air of embarrassed amateurness pervades the documentary, even if Oh, having already tasted the limelight as a fan, seems confident in her ability to hold your attention. 

That literal 15 minutes of fame when she met her idol, Jung Joon-young, in person at a fan event broadcast on TV, is the centerpiece of the film since it not only describes the depth of her devotion, but made it possible for her later to reach out to other fans who came to know her by reputation. She interviews a dozen young women, both Jung fans and some who had crushes on other stars. What they all have in common is that their idols eventually disappointed them, either through criminal activity or scandal. Predictably, their enmity became as fierce as their adoration had been. “I want him to die in jail,” one woman, hiding beneath a hoodie, says of Jung after he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. Despite the fact that Oh herself professes to only being able to talk frankly about it while drunk, she’s philosophical about her feelings, as are almost all her interlocutors, who are self-aware enough to probe their own fanaticism. The defensiveness of hardcore K-pop fans is well-known, but for some reason Oh doesn’t go into that aspect of the matter, maybe because from her perspective defensiveness is more or less natural, but as a reformed seongdeok (fanatic) she certainly knows how it feels, and at one point makes the connection between rabid K-pop fandom and right wing politics by visiting a rally for the release of imprisoned former president Park Geun-hye, where one of the activities was writing fan letters to Park that the organizers would deliver to her. As someone who has had a lot of experience penning sweet meaningless love notes to someone she doesn’t know personally, Oh felt as if she were among comrades, despite the fact that most were old enough to be her grandparents and she didn’t have any particular feelings about Park.

She also avoids the elephant in the room, especially with regard to K-pop, which is that most stars are manufactured, their whole public existence built on cultivating devotees like Oh. One of the women Oh interviews had a crush not on a K-pop star but on an indie rock artist, which would seem to contradict Oh’s thesis, since indie artists are, by definition, self-made. But the woman didn’t sound any less disciplined in her devotion than the K-pop fans did, and was similarly destroyed when the artist she followed was brought down by scandal. It also would have been interesting had Oh interviewed some men, but maybe their own brand of fandom scans differently than women’s.

Thankfully, Oh doesn’t take herself seriously, even if her movie is formally meticulous. At least half her production budget was apparently spent on taking the train from Busan, where she’s from, to Seoul in order to attend Jung’s trial, which like any function related to K-pop “sold out” in 5 minutes. (It’s implied that she got into the courtroom by paying a scalper.) She also interviews her mother about her own feelings regarding an actor she idolized who similarly ended his career in disgrace. The parallels with her daughter’s situation are both sobering and hilarious, and when Oh asks her if she was worried about her daughter’s obsession with Jung, the mother says, “No. I thought it was good that you stuck to one thing for so long.” Let’s hope she sticks to filmmaking with the same dedication.

Veteran documentarian Laura Poitras has years of experience on Oh, not to mention an Oscar, and her award-winning All the Beauty and Bloodshed traces a more nuanced look at obsession, specifically through the experiences of famed photographer Nan Goldin. Poitras’s film is more overtly political than Oh’s, but there’s a similar determination at play to get at the heart of the mystery of obsession, even if it leaves out the fanaticism part. The target of Goldin’s attention is the Sackler family, which owned Purdue Pharma, the company that made billions on the prescription opioid OxyContin and thus was eventually found responsible for the deaths of millions of Americans through addiction to the drug, which the company not only knew about but encouraged. Goldin was one of those addicts, though she survived her own overdose and afterwards made Sackler a project that required even more of her typically fierce concentration than her art did.

Since Poitras is an observer, she presents Goldin’s crusade as part of a feature-length biography that goes deep into the artist’s battles with mental illness, the history of her nominally transgressive art, and the carefully curated, years-long legal case she brought against the Sacklers. The early biographical material charts Goldin’s rise as a photographer on the east coast—chiefly the queer mecca, Provincetown—where she was a fixture of the demimonde who went from shoplifting and living in relative squalor to producing what is generally considered the most revolutionary photography exhibition of the 1980s, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. In the end, she incorporates this theme of conquering the art world into her mission of taking down the Sacklers by destroying them as patrons of art. Over the years, the family has funded many museums, and Goldin is a powerful enough artist in her own right to influence these museums’ self-regard by refusing them to show her work as long as they take her nemeses’ money. It’s perhaps the most elemental depiction of the conflict between art and commerce I’ve ever seen on film, and the drama this conflict evokes is powerful. There’s even palpable intrigue when Goldin discovers she’s being stalked by agents of the Sacklers’ legal team.

It helps that Goldin is articulate about her anger, a quality that’s developed through countless encounters with lawyers and the public as she has beat the drum for greater accountability on the Sacklers’ part. Poitras gives her free rein, and while purists may question the film’s lack of objectivity, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (the title comes from a medical report about the suicide of Goldin’s beloved sister at the age of 18) is meant to be an emotional journey. It is not journalism in the strict sense. It is a chronicle of rage that ends up being a work of art in its own right.

Fanatic, in Korean, is now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Fanatic home page in Japanese

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed home page in Japanese

All the Beautry and the Bloodshed photo (c) 2022 Participant Film, LLC