On Hellbound

The apocalyptic YouTuber from Hellbound

This month, Los Angeles finally opened a museum for the movies. It’s telling that it took LA over a century to open a commemoration of its greatest achievement — California has never been much for dwelling on the past. Yet I wonder if the opening of the museum is also something on a tombstone, marking the end of the era when Hollywood ruled the world.

I pondered this as I watched the latest Netflix hit show, Hellbound. It’s a South Korean horror drama, in which humanity is beset by a bizarre supernatural phenomenon. An ‘angel’ — a ghostly yellow face — appears to people and tells them that they are bound for hell, and then gives them the precise date and time when they will die. At that time, three shadowy monsters appear and rip the person apart.

The first thing to note about Hellbound is this is Netflix’s biggest global show, two months after Squid Game, another South Korean export, became its most-watched show ever.

South Korea has suddenly become the cultural powerhouse of the world — it has the Oscar for Best Picture (Parasite), the most popular band in the world (BTS), and the two most watched TV shows in the world.

Britain used to pride itself on being the creative Athens to the United States’ Rome. But what was the last British TV show you streamed? Or the last British movie? Bond, Doctor Who, British Bake-Off, or yet another period drama — we are stuck in repeat.

France likewise prides itself on its superior creative content. In July, the French government tried to boost its creative industries by giving every 18-year-old Eu300 to spend on the arts. But rather than buying Houllebecq or Balzac, the teens spent half of it on Japanese manga.

Know what the highest-grossing film was in 2020? Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — The Movie: Mugen Train. I haven’t heard of it either, but apparently it’s a Japanese anime. Five other of the top ten movies are Chinese. This year, the top two highest grossing films are Chinese, with Bond coming in third.

I’m not sure China has gained global cultural dominance — I’m presuming The Battle at Lake Changjin became the highest-grossing film worldwide this year largely thanks to domestic sales. But South Korea and Japan have achieved dominance in Western culture. And that, in large part, is thanks to Netflix.

In other words, the cultural supremacy of Hollywood (and therefore the West) is being eroded by a Hollywood company. As Netflix grows like a mushroom out of Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood could slowly decompose around it.

It makes me wonder about the future of Hollywood and Los Angeles. Driving through Los Angeles last night, I was struck by how Asian the city is. There’s the enormous Korea Town, as well as Little Tokyo, Chinatown and Filipino Town. As Janan Ganesh wrote in the FT this week: ‘It is certainly a better place than London or New York from which to feel the gravitational pull of a continent that would be the world’s largest even without China’.

In fact, California has long served as the cultural bridge between Asia and the West — it’s where Asian philosophy and religion entered the western mindset, via Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and a host of Indian and Japanese gurus who came here in the 20th century. So Netflix is continuing that role of Asian semiconductor.

But will the decline of Hollywood supremacy be bad news for LA, or will a new generation of Asian stars move into the mansions of Malibu and Laurel Canyon? Will it be born again, or will it fade and become…a museum?

Anyway, back to Hellbound. What I found so interesting and refreshingly un-western about it was that it took religion seriously, and offered a serious theological discussion on how to interpret weird occurrences.

A church springs up to interpret the ‘visitations’, called the Church of the New Truth, led by a young prophet called Chairman Jun Jing-Su. He shares videos of the visitations and argues God is giving us visceral judgements of the guilty to call humanity back to righteousness.

When a young mother receives the angelic warning that she is bound for hell, the New Church offers her billions of won if they can video the judgement. After her grisly televised death, the world kneels to the New Church. It becomes the ultimate South Korean mega-church.

There’s also an online guerrilla movement called the Arrowhead, led by a weird YouTube shaman, which calls for the violent punishment of the guilty. They’re like a Christian ISIS, videoing their beatings of the sinful. They release photos and personal information of anyone they deem sinful, and it becomes a collective online demon-hunt.

This reminds me of the sort of ecstatic victim-shaming that occurred in communist China and communist North Korea. It also reminds me of episodes of Black Mirror, which showed how the internet and social media promote collective scapegoating (in China, online shaming is called ‘human flesh search engine’).

And it also really makes me think of online Satanic conspiracy theories like Qanon, where strangers join together to hunt down the demons. I think that’s what Hellbound gets so well. We seem very prone to medieval manias and Satanic panics right now. We’re not nearly as modern as we think we are.

What I love about Hellbound, finally, is its theological uncertainty. I don’t want to give too much away, but one of the key questions of the series is why these visitations are happening. Are they really divine punishments for the guilty? Or are they random events?

I’ve spent many years thinking about ecstatic and spiritual experiences, and feel like my life was saved by one such experience — the near-death experience I often bang on about.

That salvation experience prompted me to try and unlock the secret of ecstatic experiences, and to find where they came from and Who or What they connected us to. My search was a failure. I didn’t get anywhere with working out Who’s in charge or what is happening on the level above us. I just got the message: ‘You’re OK. You’re loved. You don’t have to prove anything. Relax and enjoy life.’

I ended up a hopeful agnostic — I am sure there is a lot more going on that we can understand, and that there are forces or intelligences far superior to ours, and in my experience those forces are very loving and helpful (though this may not always be the case). That’s about as far as I got.