Migrant Crash

This article locates in the dénouement of Hamaguchi Ryusuke's acclaimed 2021 film, Drive My Car (Doraibu Mai Kā ), an ultimately ambivalent figure of transnational migration, tacitly a Zainichi Korean, juxtaposed in contrasting relation to a triumphant spectacle of transnational commodity circulation. Embodying both the ancient and modern senses of catastrophe—with the former simply implying the fact of dramatic conclusion and the latter implying tragic disaster—the film's ending, with its sudden move from Japan to South Korea, both indexes and elides the colonial material history that has shaped relations between the two nations since the beginning of the 20th century. In this manner, the film recursively processes history, displacing it onto provisional forms, while simultaneously disrupting these operations, expressing discomfort with its own formal solutions. Teleological and backward looking at the same time, catastrophe in the film thus implies a philosophy of history in the sense Walter Benjamin famously articulated, with the forward propulsion of driving haunted by the urgencies of contemporary migration that countervail accelerant visions of progress.