Oldboy (2003), is a South Korean neo-noir film directed by Park Chan-wook. The film starts with the main character, Oh Dae-su, being kidnapped on his daughter’s birthday and locked in a sealed hotel room for 15 years. It is undoubtedly that the story develops with Oh’s avenge of the person who kidnapped him, but the film is indeed more about love.
While the film is shot from Oh’s perspective, I would like to interpret the love and hatred of the antagonist, Lee woo-jin’s view. Lee fell in love with his sister, and Oh accidentally saw their incest in their high school. After Oh told the story to his friends, rumors spread out in their neighborhood and eventually led to Lee’s sister’s suicide. As bystanders, we recognize his sister’s death as the tragedy of the judgment from society towards incest. However, for Lee, Oh is the only specific person he could possibly blame, especially deep inside his mind, he knows that his cowardess and weakness to protect the forbidden love is another determinant of his sister’s suicide. Lee’s sister’s photos are all over Lee’s wall in his penthouse, but outside his house, he almost never committed his love for her to anyone. Lee’s sister is his most valuable treasure but his deepest secret. The beginning of Lee’s hatred of Oh is the only solution that Lee could think of to make justice for his existence after his sister’s death. Lee can’t manipulate the world to accept their love, but at least he can manipulate Oh.
Therefore, Lee uses hypnosis to set Oh to fall in love with his daughter, Mi-do, after he is set free from the cell. For Lee, letting Oh experience incest is the best way to revenge and torture him. Nevertheless, at the climax of the film, when Lee reveals that Mi-do is Oh’s daughter, Lee doesn’t gain the excitement he has been expecting for 15 years. To prevent Lee from telling Mi-do the truth, Oh knees down and licks Lee’s shoes, begging him like a dog. Eventually, Oh uses the scissors to cut his tongue, using this extreme way to punish himself for saying Lee’s incest, even though it was supposed to be the moment that Oh avenges Lee for the 15 years of torture he had been through. Both of them know that Lee has complete control over Oh, but Oh’s desperate reaction to keep the secret convinces Lee of his love for Mi-do and also arouses Lee’s compunction for letting his sister suicided. His hatred becomes the respect he has for the man who is now experiencing the same torn for loving his blood family, and Oh’s valor to protect Mi-do is what Lee wished he could have had. While in terms of the mise-en-scene, the intense violence and distorting bloodiness in this sequence were disturbing to watch at first, while it also functions as a way to contradict the dirty world and pure love. No matter how much blood they get, there is a place in their heart that needs to be kept absolutely clean.
The love between the immediate blood family in the film is controversial, and we never know if the love between Oh and Mi-do is because of manipulation or not. But if we think about this, the concept of “incest” is also the product of social restraint, a cage that human beings build for ourselves. And when this uncontrollable feeling appears as how it is, shall we embrace it, forget it, or destroy it? Should we manipulate our minds and fight against the world to protect the purity of our love, like how Oh chooses to get hypnotized again and forget that Mi-do is his daughter? Or should we give up on our lives like Lee and his sister and try reaching another world where there are no interruptions from outside?
Instead of searching for the answer to who we love, it might be easier to just accept the feelings we have and do our best to protect this uncontrollable feeling that almost every human being has.
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