#thank you wonderful gif makers of tumblr for helping me illustrate my point

[ranchthoughts]

The Eight Sense and missing pieces

(this is going to be long. I apologize in advance)

The Eighth Sense, from the cinematography to the narrative, is about what is missing, what isn’t shown, what we don’t see. The whole show feels like peering at the edges of a jigsaw puzzle: the uneven margin of tabs and blanks hinting that there is something missing, a broader picture, just beyond our line of sight.

I’ve talked about this before, but the filming style of The Eighth Sense leaves so much out. The backgrounds of shots are often so blurry we can’t see what is lurking out there, though sometimes we know there is something we are missing out on, something we can’t fully see. Other times, the shots are shaky and tight, leaving pieces we would generally consider important out of frame, like the filming of their ocean kiss in ep. 6.

And then in the narrative, like @chaoticfandomthot and @asianmade mention in their posts (1, 2), there are so many things we don’t see or know.

There are large parts of Jaewon’s backstory missing to us (and to Jihyun) which are filled in a bit as the show continues, but not all the way. We never see Jaewon’s brother’s accident, or Jaewon’s dad. We don’t see the incident where the camera is broken, just flashes of it smashing on the ground and the aftermath. These are things Jaewon doesn’t even share with his friends - they don’t know about his home life, or his brother’s death, as @lurkingshan points out. Jaewon hides things from the people in his life just as the show hides them from us.

Though, like Jihyun, we the audience get closer than anyone has before. We step into Jaewon’s life, we see his therapist, we catch those occasional flashes like with the camera incident, we watch him open up to Jihyun, and like Jihyun we get many of the pieces of Jaewon and his story he hides from everyone else.

There are other scenes in the story missing from the show too. We never see Jihyun’s accident, or Jihyun in the hospital. We never even really hear what happens. We don’t see Jaewon reuniting with Eun Ji after the accident, or much of their relationship before the first breakup or the second. We do hear about what precipitated their first breakup in a rare moment of explicit explanation, but this comes after much of the show has gone by and we don’t see it, we just hear about it.

"the hole they left inhabits the narrative more than their presence ever would have" - the show is about what we don't see. It’s about the trauma that haunts Jaewon, his home life, what he hides from others. It’s about Jaewon’s brother, who isn’t in the show except briefly in flashbacks, but has shaped Jaewon’s life and his relationships with others in innumerable ways. It’s about the trauma that Jihyun and Jaewon experience at the beach that isn’t shown, even to the audience.

@respectthepetty writes about how The Eighth Sense is all about tradition: Tae Hyung wants to continue the traditions of their seniors even though it caused him pain, Ae Ri wants to break with traditions she finds are stifling, much of Jaewon’s trauma comes from his family and familial expectations (the death of his brother, his desire to pursue a career in photography, etc.), and so on. But this “tradition” is in many ways curiously missing from the show. We don’t see the forces and people imposing tradition on Jaewon, like his time in the military, or his father, or his home life. We don’t see the club seniors or hazing Tae Hyung references, even in flashbacks. “Tradition” structures the characters and therefore the events of the show, but it is also more of a looming spectre, blurry in the background, just out of frame.

Half the show we have to piece together - what happened on the beach? Is Jihyun really dead? What happened to the camera? Who did that? Things are missing, told out of order, fragmented... and the cinematography echoes that.

This style of storytelling and filming works so well for the characters. Many people, like @emotionallychargedtowel, have talked about how Jaewon is a survivor of trauma and how that affects how he acts and sees the world. He is depressed, he has been through horrible events, he hides from others - and the narrative and camera work of The Eighth Sense reflects that. The backgrounds are blurry and unfocused, the shots are shaky, the framing shows flashes but not always the full picture, sometimes the chronology of shots is unusual.

@emotionallychargedtowel and @jjsanguine and many others offer (1, 2) that the filming style of The Eighth Sense, particularly at the end of ep.6 reflects/is caused by Jaewon’s mental state. He has just been through another traumatic event, which greatly resembles the one from his past, so consequently his recollection of events will be blurry, shaky, incomplete. Even the colouring gets darker and greyer. Jaewon’s mental state and emotions are so strong they are altering the form and the filming of the narrative. He is responsible for many of the conspicious absences in the show. We don’t see his brother’s accident or Jihyun’s accident or confrontations with his dad because we can’t - Jaewon can’t or won’t let himself remember them, at least not in their entirety.

The show also feels so queer because of this style. I talked about this in my other post, and @talistheintrovert​ talked about it in this post too, but the way the cinematography is fragmented into close up shots, shaky camera work, montages... the tension of being queer, not knowing if you crush likes you or could ever like you or if them knowing you like them is a threat to your safety, the dream-like safe bubble of two people loving one another amongst the outside world... Being queer, sizing up another person, it’s all about looking closely but not lingering, searching carefully for details that are hidden to most others. Like @jemmo​ says, “queerness can often hide in plain sight” - it’s the things broader society doesn’t see that hold the most significance for queer people. Of course a queer narrative wouldn’t be able to show things clearly, of course they must be hidden and hinted at but never explicitly said, never fully or clearly shown - eyes lingering in the shower, hands held for a moment and then released in the next shot, montages of an evening at the beach together.

We see the edges of the pieces, and from that we can understand most of the picture. The Eighth Sense is about the holes, the absences, the lingering presences of characters and scenes and moments we don’t see. It is about what isn’t shown explicitly, what the character’s can’t remember clearly, what the characters are avoiding remembering, what the characters hide from themselves and others and even us, the audience. It is about paying attention to what isn’t there and why it isn’t there and how we know what is missing.

[ranchthoughts]

The Eighth Sense has this way of filming where the background of shots are SO hazy and out of focus, and I love it

It increases the tension in the scenes because you don’t know if someone is lurking out there. There have been moments where the focus has gone in and out and revealed something hidden in the blur, so we know that the technique doesn’t always mean there is nothing of note in the background; in fact, it seems to be more often used when there is something important back there. @asianmade​ talks in this post about the sense of impending doom in the show as we (and Jihyun) know there is so much backstory for Jaewon we are just getting glimpses of. This filming style is like the visual representation of that: there’s so many shots where we can’t see what is going on in the background; or times where we just get glimpses, enough to tell us there is something with nothing there, but we don’t get to see it in its entirety/in focus; or moments when we the audience knows who’s there but the characters do not, cannot seem to see what’s right in front (or rather, behind) them.

It also works so well for the characters - Jihyun and especially Jaewon are so wrapped up in each other and themselves that everything else in the world is reduced to a blur. A couple of people ( @asianmade​ again with that post and @talistheintrovert with this post ) have talked about how queer and meaningful the very close-up, shaky camera work is and I think the blurred background filming style has the same effect. Paired with the extreme closeups, the world is reduced to one or maybe two subjects, just like the world is for Jihyun and Jaewon.

I am thinking of the scene at the end of ep. 9, when Jaewon is approaching Jihyun’s dorm and he moves out of the blur into focus as he comes closer - that is what Jihyun is seeing: a big world that doesn’t matter focusing and coalescing on one singular point of importance (Jaewon, emerging from the murky, indistinct surroundings).

And the scene in the library where we realize Jihyun is sitting across the library behind Jaewon’s shoulder and as he realizes too the focus of the camera switches and it’s like we are Jaewon: the rest of the world is blurry because the only thing that matters and catches his attention is Jihyun. Or the scene at the beach, where Eunji is talking to Jaewon but he sees Jihyun and immediately all his attention is there.

I think it works especially well for Jaewon because it reflects his mental state. He is depressed, masking all the time and unable to show his real self and concerns to anyone (except Jihyun), and the camera reflects that. The world is blurry, out of focus, claustrophobic almost in the way it films tightly and we don’t know what is lurking out of focus or out of shot. The world to Jaewon is a haze. There are so many things he wants to keep hidden, to keep pushed down and repressed, that of course to him his surroundings would be reduced to a shallow depth of field, mostly obscured in mist-like blur. Everything except Jihyun.

The visuals of the show feel soft and close, reduced to the space between two people who love each other, but also dense and maybe threatening. What aren’t they showing? What lingers out of shot? What do they want to keep unclear?

They also feel so queer, like @talistheintrovert says - fragments, glimpses, glances. Montages, flashes, close-ups, shots that linger on eyes and shoulders and cut parts of the subject out, those omnipresent blurred backgrounds... The tension of existing and flirting and being out and visible in a homophobic society as a queer person (expectations, homophobia, judgement filling your surroundings like a cloud). The dream-like quality of being in love and finding a safe place in a world that has given so much pain. And the other type of tension, between you and someone else, as you try to figure out if they are also queer, if they are also interested in you. The fear to linger, to look too long or too closely or too clearly because what if the other person isn’t queer?

Emotions and people that can’t be summed up in one crystal clear picture but instead can only be shown shakily, fractured, half in focus, obscured, just out of frame.