Unlocked Potential: Death, Capitalism, and Transformation
“Unlocked” (2023), directed by Kim Tae-joon, offers us a terrifying glimpse of the potential of late-stage capitalism, consumerism, and the limits of technological transformation in the present age. At first glance, “Unlocked” is little more than a thriller about the dangers of cell phone hackers. Lee Na-Mi (Chun Woo-Hee) is a cute, fun-loving, social girl who uses her phone for just about everything (as everyone else does, too, it seems) — from ordering food to paying bills to playing games and calling a cab home. After a longer glance, perhaps “Unlocked” is a message about parenting, adults in a post-adult world (for who ever grows up anymore?), or the collapse of privacy and data ownership in the world of social technology. Still further, however, I want to claim that “Unlocked” is a film about death, transformation, and the role of this type of horror in our present-day technological landscape.
The particular way that “Unlocked” is filmed aims to show the viewer just how much (and how little is left out) of the eye of the camera. That is, put simply, what the camera sees, with an emphasis on how it is seeing. I claim no technical terminology of filmmaking, so I’ll suffice to say that the film makes primary use of what I call “first-person” perspectives, that is, shots that intend to place the viewer into a sort of privileged, though markedly limited position, affording them identification not with a specific character per se, but with the scene as a part of a totality, the entire frame of the specific motion happening within the scene. In other words, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of transformation, the viewer engages throughout the film in various kinds of becoming-phone, becoming-hacker, and becoming-camera. The viewer is both limited by their perspective of the camera and at the same time liberated from the gaze of (an)other human being(s), since even when looked at by a “user,” the “used” do not become actual, but rather remain virtual — the viewer does not emerge as something to be seen. How could they? If only they had a body.
Why is this important and/or relevant? Na-Mi doesn’t care, at least at first, who sees her online. She is as visible as everybody else, that is, for the most part, not very visible except under certain circumstances. She posts to her friends, coworkers, and the public (through her job as a marketer at a start-up company). People use their phones to navigate their lives, to organize their meetings, and to make fun of their hungover friends. But what Na-Mi does not realize until it is too late is the nightmare every paranoid with a cellphone comes to fear: very likely, almost certainly, your phone (and anyone who has access to it) knows more about you than you do. Basically, dear viewer/reader, when you see what the phone/camera/hacker sees, you glimpse a world without immediate sense, without sensation, without sensibility. And simply put, without sensibility, a kind of dark transformation awaits. The third-person camera view which is really first-person becoming-camera enables not only a kind of being-toward-death, but at the same time a release from the limits of organic life by identification with any one character, object, or other subject in the film. In short, by becoming a part of the play, fully a part, becoming-camera (and other transformations like it), we access a realm of life beyond what we already know, one more open, more liberating, and more terrifying than we can know or imagine presently.
Late-stage capitalism, characterized by clinically insane over-consumption, ecological collapse, and the scapegoat of the “ethical consumer,” runs on a kind of, for lack of a better term, “suicidal libido.” Suicidal because it chases down death with a passion, often without any hope for life, since life here-and-now is all we really have, in all its dying glory. Libidinal because it runs on desire. Desire for what? Production. Production of what? Producing? Producing what? Suicidal libido. Consumption is just another form of production. We could call it another name: a willingness to die in the name of progress. To risk and suffer death as the cost to change everything. The desire to jump, to leap into the abyss where solutions lie and ends meet. What abyss had Nietzsche meant if not the only one which can gaze back at us, that is, the mirror, a desiring machine producing only more production, only more parts and pieces, more eyes peering back at us behind the lens? “Unlocked” has as much to do with cell phone privacy as it does with keeping life itself private, that is, to ourselves, staying alive, out of view.
The hacker Jun-Yeong (Im Si-Wan) keeps detailed notes of all his victims (written out meticulously on paper), in addition to the various paraphernalia and trophies he’s collected in his exploits. Spoiler! The detective Woo Ji-Man (Kim Hee-Won) suspects, unwillingly, that his son whom he’d abandoned seven years prior is the perpetrator of a collection of murders in addition to the ensuing drama of Na-Mi’s manipulation by a hacker through her phone — however, the finale of the film reveals that even this ploy, to frame the detective’s son, is a possible and likely untruth. There is no reason, no sense we might say, to believe anything Jun-Yeong says in the final moments before his death. Contrary to escapism, what the hacker persona taps into is a rather old form of subtle terrorism: the proliferation of spyware, blackmail, malicious data in order to control and manipulate, and so on. Nobody is safe, everything is available under the right circumstances. In this world of late capitalism, the line demarcating software and hardware is beyond blurred. The cyber-social machine which enables (produces) Na-Mi to lose her phone, Jun-Yeong to read and manipulate it, and Woo Ji-Man to track it down is nothing more than enigmatic parts in a machine producing more parts — nothing but parts.
What is the purpose of such horror? To scare us not to use our phones? To show us the dangers of becoming-camera? How it reduces us to parts, nothing but parts? Maybe. In the conclusion of the film, Jun-Yeong pleads for his life and shifts between lies before he is shot by Na-Mi, who drags herself out of the bathroom and grabs the other policeman’s gun. Jun-Yeong, who is (probably) not actually Jun-Yeong, but rather some no-name psychopath with a penchant for plums, changing identities, and voyeurism, is revealed to be nothing but another part in the end. Another eye among many behind another lens — this is a nihilist reading, perhaps. So what does “Unlocked” have to say about us, now? Who watches the watcher? Is there no safety in ethics? Is there no stability, no ground on which to shoot our shot? If you saw the movie, you know there is, at least briefly, before the credits roll.
I’d like to think “Unlocked” is also a good metaphor about being a father (the mythical figure of authority), how it doesn’t matter what you do, where you keep your eyes, whether you abandon your kids or keep a close watch, they will end up playing their part, whatever that is. Na-Mi’s father, as well as the dullard detective, offer little in the realm of safety and show the viewer the impotence of power in a world blurred by technology. One can point to countless tales teaching the same horrible truth. Oedipus’s father would like a word. In “Unlocked,” symbolically, it is only after baptism via her father’s possible death that Na-Mi has the strength and desire to do what no late-capitalist production could: shoot the perpetrator dead. She played her part, the part Woo Ji-Man could not.
In the end, there is no hero in “Unlocked.” Nor is there the cliched “everybody’s a victim.” There are no heroes in a suicidal society. Even the most lively and courageous must suffer death in order to be reborn after uploading/consumption/transformation. We must take your picture; it comes with the program. Please provide proof of your identification. Did Jun-Yeong kill himself by his own doing? Who was Jun-Yeong anyway? Suicide, in this context, is the death of the organism, shot dead by Na-Mi, in order to live on as pure potential, in the horrific mirror of cyberspace, unlocked and free to haunt our dreams, our late-capitalist consumption. Hauntology is in vogue, dead and old is the new new. The individual may die, but something yet lives, without organs, in only parts, a file, a folder, a phone, a profile, just parts here and there. Is this the kind of freedom we’re heading toward? Dust does not collect on Facebook, though we might imagine it. Is this not the fate of the post-capitalist subject? Uploaded to the cloud, pure data, no body. No-body. Nobody left. Laid out in cyberspace, clinging desperately to flesh and lies and tears until the final moment.
This is more than a lesson about what is possible. I think this is the horror we need to see.
“Unlocked” (2023): 9/10.
