Gay Panic

My Heart Is Going to Explode!

The setup is as eccentric as it is relatable. After a one-night stand with a mysterious girl she remembers as being all green halo and sensual gazes, Soojin has a hard time staying present in her high school’s common room. At night, long after school hours, she and her peers seem busy with crafty preparations for some festivity but even more occupied with vaping in the halls and partying on the rooftop. Subverting the rules and choreographies of the institution cracks open a space for mischief—the perfect backdrop for the ever-intensifying anguish that comes from falling for your one-night stand.

In-Hyuk Jung’s third short film moves in opposite directions: as Soojin’s attraction to her fling keeps growing, the world around her seems to crumble. Suddenly, a neon pink heart-shaped plastic UFO appears on a cardboard sky; people’s hearts start exploding, while others are struck by cartoonish fluorescent lightning. My Heart Is Going to Explode! remains an exercise in experimenting, which it couches as a verb, an action, and an ongoing process with no verdict. Within seconds, we could find ourselves inside an apocalyptic mockumentary, a zany medical drama, a kitschy romance, or a flashy midnight movie. Jumping (or sometimes fading, blurring, zooming) back and forth between genres incites just as much visual turmoil as any first romantic spark would.

Flashy and jittery, everything about the film’s quest-like rhythm feels anxiety-inducing. Adventurous arcade melodies give way to acoustic guitars and piano tunes composed by Kim Dong-myeong, which mirror the emotional landscape of an intense crush you’re not supposed to have. The title card, quoting queer icon and singer Phoebe Bridgers, speaks to the film’s arc, a story centering on “inner personal issues” that unfold against “a bigger turmoil in the world, like a diary about your crush during the apocalypse”. This is no empty name-dropping; the words double as a kind of mission statement for the short—while elegantly baiting specifically lesbian audiences to whom Bridgers might be a household name. In its juxtaposing music and sounds, its zooming in and out of Soojin’s face, My Heart Is Going to Explode! perpetuates the idea of feeling out of place as inherently queer.

In a 2014 talk, activist-scholar bell hooks described queer as “being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live”. In Soojin’s case, carving out a place for herself means confronting a friend who lashes at her for thinking about her crush (as well as for being selfish, a bad friend, a bad partner) while their world is turning into a pandemonium. That is until the friend’s heart explodes—a radically comedic twist that speaks to the kind of negotiations between embracing or (self-)censoring queer desires, and how unbearable the process feels.

It takes some punk energy and ruthless tone-shifting to find counter-narratives that “invent and create” in the sense that bell hooks intended. In My Heart Is Going to Explode!, everything comes as an exaggeration. From cinematographer Pyo Tae-uk’s transitional camera swooshes to gooey pieces of plastic hearts sticking to Soojin’s face to a set that makes no secret of its artifice—the desire that lies at the bottom of all these excesses is still taken seriously.

One might write off these flourishes as over-the-top clichés of teenage high school dramas. But the short’s campy DIY touches are as inventive as they are commemorative of the 1990s “New Queer Cinema” era. The midnight-pink aesthetic, for one, harks back to Gregg Araki’s cult teen films like The Doom Generation (1995), which also sought a synthesis of glowing darkness and popping colours. Seen in that light, Jung’s short might even be read as a queer rendition of that period’s tones for young K-Pop-enthusiastic audiences.

Yet the film’s queerest aspect might not be its aesthetic but the way it seems to exist in a state of constant searching—for extra scissors, for a crush, or for a solution to the apocalypse. In its subversion of linear storytelling and the A-to-B progression of human relationships, My Heart Is Going to Explode! refuses any coherence, pushing us unapologetically into a search for new languages of desire.