Questioning ethical possibility: thigh slicing as ritual for the initiation of compassion and filial piety in Kim Ki-duk’s Pietà (2012)

ABSTRACT Filial piety forms the core of human relations in Confucian morality. One form of filial piety is ‘filial cannibalism’, a term for incidents in which children offer their own flesh to their parents out of filial piety (Wang, Sixiang. 2012. “The Filial Daughter of Kwaksan: Finger Servering, Confucian Virtues, and Envoy Poetry in Early Chosǒn.” Seoul Journal of Korean Studies 25 (2): 175–212). One method of filial cannibalism during the Joseon dynasty in Korea (1392–1910) was thigh slicing. This motif appears in Kim Ki-duk’s film Pietà, in which the male protagonist Gangdo slices his thigh and offers his flesh to Miseon, a woman pretending to be his mother. While many studies on Pietà examine the Christian references and decode the film’s title as a reference to compassion, this study suggests there is also value in examining Confucian references. The act of cannibalism in the film can be understood as initiation of compassion and filial piety, although it is still clear that the relation between Gangdo and Miseon is based on betrayal and revenge. Arguably, filial piety– the very core of Confucian morality– can be understood as representative of Confucianism itself, similar to the way that compassion is one of the central concepts of Christianity. The film’s disturbing usage of both concepts seems to reveal what Steve Choe calls the ‘possibility of ethical impossibility’ (Choe, Steve. 2007. “Kim Ki-Duk’s Cinema of Cruelty: Ethics and Spectatorship in the Global Economy.” Positions 15 (1): 65–90).