She runs around grabbing people’s butts to get psychic visions. He keeps assaulting random strangers under the assumption they must have done something wrong.
There’s a lot of implied violence just in the premise of the new Netflix drama, Behind Your Touch, (giggle) – I mean it requires the female lead to find new and interesting ways to touch strangers’ behinds. And yet I found the first few episodes to be a fun, zippy and eminently watchable piece of nonsense – until the inevitable serial killer dragged away a struggling woman and stabbed her.
Unfortunately, this post will probably not establish the exact point at which televisual violence becomes voyeuristic – despite the optimistically definite nature of its title. It’s more going to canvass the point at which I personally found myself angry or even disgusted at the way in which a show used violence. This is something that will be different for all of us. In this, I suspect, violence is like art: subjective.
There are shows where I found the violence (usually against women) so manipulative and so designed to titillate the (probably male) viewer that I considered it unwatchable. Only to discover that other viewers watched it without issue and even looked confused when I tried to explain my position on it.
Others as well where I found the violence so cartoonish that I couldn’t take it seriously. The violence in Cafe Minamdang or the first three episodes of Behind Your Touch seemed so divorced from reality that I either enjoyed it or at least ignored it. Yet other viewers were put off by it.
Is there nonetheless some indefinable line that, in crossing, causes a drama to go from interesting, educational, or even just straight up enjoyable to something else…
The award-winning, critically-acclaimed 2020 drama, Beyond Evil, was an intelligent and well-produced story that I even reviewed as it aired. Yet despite my overall respect for the show, I struggled with the way in which it veered into voyeurism in its portrayal of male-on-female violence.
As the camera slides lovingly across a helpless woman’s body while she’s being assaulted, abused or even killed, is it designed to shock? To enrage? Or to allow the male viewer to imagine being the perpetrator, to live out a sick fantasy of dominance while maintaining the outward pretence at outrage?
I barely lasted 20 minutes into Korea’s Luther remake, Less than Evil, because I found its lingering, almost fetishistic shots of the killer’s violence (again against women) too exploitative.
These voyeuristic uses of violence can often have a dual purpose. Both to allow viewers the fantasy of the assault but also the fantasy of the resulting violence they can claim it justifies. The 2021 drama, Taxi Driver, deliberately and exploitatively portrayed deeply disturbing and extended scenes of abuse towards women to provide justification for the male lead’s use of violence against the offender. Thus the viewer is allowed the double titillation of imagining themselves both perpetrator and saviour.
Perhaps the violence in these shows is deliberately designed to reinforce the patriarchal standard: women need violent men to protect them from violent men. Therefore upholding the idea that male violence is natural and even desirable and that women rely on it to protect themselves against incipient victimhood. Which begs the question of course: what if we promoted the idea that men just shouldn’t be violent to begin with?
There is, of course, a kind of inherent violence in Behind Your Touch and its rather bizarre premise. After being struck by a meteorite, country vet, Bong Ye-bun (Han Ji-min) gains psychic powers – but only when she touches someone’s butt. She soon finds herself at the beck and call of disgraced Seoul detective, Moon Jang-yeol (Lee Min-ki), as he tries to impress the top brass to get himself back to the big city.
Tonally, Behind Your Touch’s first three episodes were a haphazard cartoon strip of slapstick, witty asides, banter, strange detours into drama parodies, and just a sense of general randomness. The male lead attacks people for little reason and runs around town looking for drugs by tasting every powder he can find – including fish food and rat poison. The female lead, when she’s not involved in broad humour involving cows, has long, loving scenes of her stroking the posteriors of everything from pet dogs to her confused best friend. She’s frequently seen trying to devise ways to touch men’s arses, even being arrested for sexual assault on a bus.
At one point, the female lead’s Aunt sells her into slavery, something that was bizarrely played for laughs. I had to assume the drama didn’t expect me to take any of this seriously and I was more than happy to oblige.
The Butt Show’s sheer randomness and strange humour has shades of Baek Mi-kyung, who once infamously gave us PTSD – Post-traumatic Stress Dolphin – in her truly awful 2019 drama, Melting Me Softly. A drama where a character declared she didn’t want stories about princes riding horses but stories of horses riding princes.
Baek Mi-kyung, of course, is also known for using cartoonish violence for humour, notably in her most-famous piece, Strong Woman Do Bong-soon.
And yet, one of the show’s credited writers is instead Lee Nam-gyu, who’s co-credited with the controversial but deeply emotional 2019 drama, The Light In Your Eyes. It’s a far cry from that to this strange mix of slapstick, parody and sexual assault.
It was in episode three of Behind Your Touch that I first noticed the odd jarring note. When our butt-kneading protagonist accidentally touches the backside* of her University Sunbae, she sees him tormenting an abducted woman. It was an odd flash of extremely gendered violence in a show that till now we’d been exhorted+ to see as pure fluffy nonsense.
*If you told me I’d have to google “synonym for butts” to write one of these posts I would not have believed you
+Accidentally typed “extorted” this may be Freudian
It’s not until this week’s second episode that we started to see the show tease out a problematic tale of extreme violence against women. The woman in the vision turns out to be a social influencer. After she’s rescued from the psychotic fan who had abducted, imprisoned and nearly murdered her, we’re treated to scene after scene of her being rude, grasping, shallow and fake. Other characters display contempt for her bad manners and manufactured image; people we’re supposed to like berate her for rudeness.
She’s then dragged off and murdered in a sudden horrific piece of violence that the show seems to be saying might be exactly what she deserves.
As someone who’d been watching the show on an auto pilot requiring limited brain power (for which I was grateful) I found the abduction victim’s treatment by the script made this brain-in-neutral watch more and more difficult. Why should a woman who was just abducted and nearly murdered be polite to strange men? Especially ones who approach her after dark or who suddenly jab her in the shoulder from behind. She doesn’t know that the man who approached her after she crashed her car is the local dairy farmer who shares our female lead’s hands-on talents. For all she knows he’s as bad as the man who – and I cannot stress this enough – just abducted her, held her prisoner and tried to kill her.
Why wouldn’t a social influencer try to cope with what happened to her by streaming her experience live and using the trauma to raise money for what is no doubt going to be a hefty hospital bill?
This scenario also unfolded with an extended sequence where Ye-bun herself needs to be rescued by Detective Moon – of course using some of that violence his character has been seen using indiscriminately. If you punch enough people, one of them will deserve it. Aren’t you glad he didn’t stop?
More importantly, the drama seems to be dividing women into deserving and undeserving victims: those who ask for and deserve male protection from male violence and those who do not. As our streamer is being murdered for the second time, the show seems to be asking the important social question: Would this be happening to her if she’d just been nicer to men?
Behind Your Touch has made a decision that this woman’s fate is inevitable, as though she’d “asked for it” or somehow brought it upon herself. So as the mysterious dancing serial killer (it’s the convenience store clerk, duh!) drags her struggling frame past the voyeuristic camera to a secluded spot to stab her to death, I realise.
I’m out.
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