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The Contaminated Host -- Boon Joon-ho's The Host

When we think about a parasite, we treat it as a harmful organism. But what about the host?

The definition of the host is “an animal or plant on which a parasite or commensal organism lives.” The film The Host (2006, dir. Boon Joon-ho) tells the story of the protagonist Park Gang-du and his family fighting with a monster in the Han River. The monster was created by the toxic chemicals that an American military pathologist commanded his Korean assistant to dump, and the film discusses the culpability of the host, which allows the parasite to thrive.

The protagonist Park Gang-du’s daughter, Hyun-seo, was captured by the monster as he accidentally saved another girl instead of his daughter when fighting with the monster. Then, Gang-du and his family, along with the families of other victims, gather in a basketball court, which the government uses as a refuge for the victims’ families. Each family forms a small circle and sits on the floor, crying and grieving for their lost ones. Behind them is a giant wall of portraits of the victims, but the nonstop camera flashes keep interrupting the last moment between the deceased and their families. While Gang-du and his family grieve in the court, an officer in a high-saturated, yellow full-protected suit with a disinfectant face mask enters the room. The officer’s suit is extremely noticeable under the blue tone and the ragged shirts among the victims’ families, and his power is immediately established as he is the only one standing, physically above everyone else in the frame. However, his appearance doesn’t get anyone’s attention until he slips and falls on the floor. It is also worth noting that the officer’s protective suit suggests the potential virus that the monster might spread, but the government only protects the officer instead of the people in the room. Within a few seconds, the film diminishes the power of this government representative, showing his incompetence during a catastrophe.

Then, the officer asks everyone to report if they were near Han River during the attack, threatening that their families will be affected if they return home. Albeit all of them are the victims’ families, whom the government should protect and comfort, they follow the instructions without hesitation. The room is completely silent, with only the officer speaking, presenting this world of silent people under the absolute control of the government instead of receiving any help. Then, Gang-du’s brother, Hae-il, an unemployed college graduate who is a former political activist, stands up and questions the officer to explain the attack, which is the first and only opposing voice in the room. When Hae-il speakers to the officer, the camera captures the entire wall of the pictures of the victims right behind him and on his shoulder and head level in a long shot; the camera crops the people sitting on the floor with only their heads in the frame, below Hae-il’s knee level. This shot forms a great metaphor that only the deceased people have Hae-il’s back, supporting the only one who speaks a different voice with the government, and the rest of the people just accept their deprived right to know. The blocked information is further revealed when the officer tries to respond to Hae-il by turning on the news on the TV, but none of the TV channels is broadcasting the monster, as if not announcing the monster to the public will erase its existence. Before more people start questioning the situation, a team of officers in identical protective suits rush into the room, spraying disinfecting chemicals without providing any face covering to the victims’ families, treating them like they are also lifeless. The fog formed by the chemicals both blocks the people’s sight and obscures their knowledge of the situation, further revealing the irresponsible and dehumanizing nature of the South Korean government in the film. As the host of this land, Korea shows no mercy to its people and provides this perfect condition to be occupied and controlled by an external parasite.

Soon, Gang-du is under extreme monitoring once he admits that he was in contact with the monster. Gang-du is surrounded by numerous doctors that investigate potential viruses in his body. The camera captures two doctors putting their masks and protective glasses on and turning on the screens to show Gang-du’s brain in a hurry when they see an American researcher walk in, pretending to work for the country's security only in front of the foreign force. The American researcher starts by comforting Gang-du with a different attitude from the Korean representatives, presenting an illusion of the arrival of a savior. But the camera captures their close-ups from a low angle, planting the pressure silently with the cinematography. And their intention is soon revealed when the American researcher tells the translator that there is no virus behind Gang-du’s back. However, Gang-du overhears and understands when the American researcher says “no virus” in his sentence, confirming the dehumanizing and compulsive actions by both the parasite and the host. What is more ironic is that Gang-du, an uneducated man, understands these English words because around 30% of the Korean language is originated from English, and the foreign parasite has been deep in the host’s culture. This scene juxtaposes the host and parasite relationship between the Korean and American governments, which the host is being cheated by the peaceful illusion that the parasite brings without understanding its actual intention. The combination of an ignorant host and an intruding parasite becomes the actual monster that harms Gang-du and other innocent people on the land.

Albeit the film starts with the monster killing and intruding on the country, it explicitly criticizes how the American force takes control over the South Korean government in Korea. When the parasite is the active disrupting force, the host is never inculpable of its blind, incompetent, and indifferent nature. In the end, Gang-du uses his foot to turn off the TV which broadcasts the confession and explanation of both the Korean and American governments on the nonexisting virus. Instead of listening to the fabricated news from the host and parasite, Gang-du grabs his gun, stares into the dark, and protects his uncontaminated mind and body to host his life.

 

 

 

The Child in Cell - Lee Hwan-kyung's Miracle in Cell No.7

What would a prison be like if there are children in the cell?

The film Miracle in Cell No.7 (2013, dir. Lee Hwan-kyung) tells the story of Yong-gu and his six-year-old daughter Ye-sung’s experience in a prison cell with other criminals. Yong-gu is mentally disabled with only the intelligence of a six-year-old, and he is falsely accused of rape and murder of the police commissioner’s daughter. Although Yong-gu is charged with death penalty, he treats the desperate cell as a friendly environment as he used to do and saves the prison gang leader Yang-ho’s life when the prisoners in another cell attack Yang-ho. As a return, Yang-ho and other cellmates plan to sneak Yong-gu’s daughter into the cell for their reunion.

The first shot when Ye-sung arrives at the cell is the prisoners ripping off the tape of a large snack box. The aerial shot of the box fills the entire frame, and when it first opens, only her cloth is visible. When the camera pushes backwards, Ye-sung’s entire body is revealed. She lies as an infant, tightly confined in the box, and then sits up as a newborn. Ye-sung’s arrival is portrayed as the unboxing of a gift delivered in the cell, and Ye-sung indeed functions as a gift which brings the prisoners a new life in the cold, hopeless, and entrapped cell. When Yang-ho sees Ye-sung, he mispronounces her name as “Ye-su,” which means “Jesus” in Korean. This subtle line plants the idea that Ye-sung is the savior of the cell, gathering the prisoners and awakening their kindness beneath the crime. Then, Ye-sung sees her dad, but she is still in the box, like how Yong-gu is trapped in the cell. Yong-gu crawls to Ye-sung like a toddler, hugging her and taking her out of the box. Although both are confined in a small space, the camera follows his movement, presenting love’s power to break the claustrophobia in jail. It is also worth noting that the rest of the box is filled with bread and milk boxes, suggesting that Ye-sung uses the space they use to deliver food. Giving up the space for food to sneak Ye-sung in for a brief reunion with Yong-gu, the cell shows the first miracle that love and friendship outweigh the luxurious snacks for the prisoners, whom got caught in the jail because they broke the law for their self-interests.

Inspired by Ye-sung’s drawing of a hot air balloon, the prisoners decided to help Yong-gu escape the cell the day before his execution to avoid his death penalty, which is the day of the prison’s Christmas concert. Ye-sung performs with other kids, and each of them holds hands with a prisoner. Although the kids are surrounded by prisoners, there is no handcuff on the prisoners nor weapon on the prison guards. All we can see is the happiness on everyone’s face. The prisoners are in orange uniforms, the kids are wearing red ties, and the shot is layered with a warm filter, maximizing the feeling of warmth in the cold jail. Yong-gu’s cellmates clear a way for them to get into the hot air balloon among all other prisoners and release the rope to let it fly. All prisoners, including those that are their opponents, assist Yong-gu and Ye-sung to be the only people on the hot air balloon selflessly. None of them tries to take advantage of this possibility to escape, and all of them fight with the guards to ensure Yong-gu can leave. And when they are fighting, Ye-sung says that “everyone is dancing,” still perceiving the dangerous world in the most innocent way that only children have, further proving that the kindness in a child’s mind is what touches all the criminals. However, the fairy tale ends when the wire gate traps the rope. Unlike Yong-gu’s desperate cellmates, he appreciates the view with Ye-sung on the hot air balloon. The kids’ mindset filters the negative ideas, viewing this as a peaceful moment of reunion. The dreadful, dirty, hopeless prison traps the adults physically and mentally, but it can't trap the love of a father and a daughter and their purist love of the world. When the extreme long shot of Yong-gu and Ye-sung appreciating the sunset in the hot air balloon cuts to Ye-sung’s drawing of a hot air balloon above a castle in the cell, juxtaposes the world in and out of the cell. The warm and saturated colors of her painting cover the cold and plain wall, hiding the brutal reality with innocence and imagination. They failed to make Yong-gu escape from the cell, and Yong-gu's death penalty comes the next day, but he accepts his death peacefully.

Some critics view the plot of escaping the jail with a hot air balloon as highly inauthentic and overdramatic, but if we view this from a six-year-old kid’s perspective, it is just a beautiful resolution of a story. In a corrupted world that charges innocent people, a little fairy tale is the only comfort for other people in the dark. In the end, Ye-sung and Yong-gu’s cellmates, now living an ordinary life after their prison terms 20 years after Yong-gu's death, prove Yong-gu’s innocence at the court. There was no miracle when a six-year-old and a room of prisoners were trying to save Yong-gu’s life, and Yong-gu's death after Chrismas eve is irreversible. However, it is a miracle that Yong-gu and Ye-sung filled the cramped cell with love, support, and justice.

The Mountain in the Sea: Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave (2022)

Numerous flashlights shine in different directions from the bottom of a dark mountain. The film cuts to an aerial wide shot of an old man’s dead body. He lies upside down on a giant rock, like a floating dead fish in the ocean. None of his belongings are around him; even though he only takes a small portion of the frame, his red hiking outfit makes him eye-catching among the police officers and forensics in uniforms. This unnatural death in the mountain opens Park Chan-wook’s film, Decision to Leave (2022).

The dead man is the main character Seo-rae’s husband, and detective Hae-jun is investigating the case. As a young Chinese woman who moved to Korea because of the murder of her mother, Seo-rae becomes the primary suspect, and she is the murderer of her husband indeed. When Hae-jun questions her in the interrogation room, the camera catches them from the side. Their bodies and reflections in the mirror equally split the screen, and their heights match almost perfectly. Albeit it is the first encounter between a detective and a suspect, a man and a woman, their power dynamic is stable and balanced. The focus is on both of their bodies, blurring their reflections in the mirror. Then, Seo-rae quotes the Chinese philosopher Confucius’s saying that “the benevolent likes the mountain, and the wise likes the water.” When she adds, “I’m not the benevolent. I like the sea,” the focus is on Seo-rae’s body and Hae-jun’s reflection in the mirror, forming a perfect symmetrical mix of their identities. The cinematography projects the duality of both Seo-rae and Hae-jun. Seo-rae is an attractive and vulnerable widow, but she also displays her dangerousness and brutality to Hae-jun to seduce him. Hae-jun, who is supposed to be a logical detective, agrees with Seo-rae’s reasoning about mountain and sea, suggesting his hidden desire of risk is projected by Seo-rae, building an invisible connection with her. Then, the camera racks focus on Seo-rae’s reflection in the mirror and Hae-jun’s body in reality. The change in focus seems like separating them, but indeed suggesting their hidden link is like how the water reflects the mountain and projects a distorted image. In the confined interrogation room, their dualities are like twins, echoing their similarities and building this fated but unjustified love. Seo-rae displays the dangerous part that Hae-jun is hiding as a detective, and Hae-jun shows the security that Seo-rae needs in her heart.

The mountain is never about benevolent to Seo-rae. After Hae-jun knows that Seo-rae killed her husband from the mountain and poisoned her mother, Seo-rae asks Hae-jun to spray her mother’s bone ashes from the mountain. At the mountain cliff, Seo-rae wears a headlamp and adjusts the light to directly target Hae-jun, just like how the detectives are using the flashlights to locate Seo-rae’s husband’s dead body at the beginning. In the dark, Seo-rae’s headlamp is the only light source on the screen, examining the surroundings and Hae-jun, like the predator locating its prey. Then, Seo-rae turns the light to the cliff, directing Hae-jun to walk to the cliff's edge to spray her mother’s bone ash. The scene is silent except for Seo-rae’s footsteps and Hae-jun’s accelerating breaths. A hand-held camera approaches Hae-jun from the back, shaking, tilting, speeding up, and cuts to a shot facing Hae-jun with the sound of two bodies crashing together. The cinematography suggests Seo-rae can push Hae-jun off the cliff, but it turns out to be a back hug. Hae-jun’s reaction of closing his eyes, pausing, and breathing heavily shows Seo-rae’s shift from evil to love surprises him, as well. The mountain of death becomes where Seo-rae’s mother’s body returns, and Seo-rae’s love settles.

But Hae-jun can’t cover Seo-rae’s crime, and as she can’t give him up, she commits suicide. She stands in a sand hole with only her head above the ground, drinking a bottle of alcohol. Behind her is a pile of sand, forming the shape of a mountain. The camera pulls back, revealing the ebb that fills up the hole with the sand that buries her. We can only hear the wave hitting the sand, meshing the sea and the mountain, gradually wiping away the trace of her existence.

A mountain is formed by sand and rock, while the sea gathers water and takes away remnants of sand and rock from the mountain. Seo-rae has been trying to deny the remnant of kindness in her, convincing herself that all she needs is the wisdom of the water instead of the mountain. However, at the end, she uses the sand to make herself a part of the mountain buried by the sea, accepting the benevolent part of her wins her wisdom because of love. Juxtaposed through film, mountain and sea are reconciled in Seo-rae’s act. She makes herself part of both, a mountain buried in the sea, accepting their inseparable nature, the co-existence of love and death, a balance of wisdom and benevolence.

 

Humans are Grey: Park Hoon-jung's New World

Imagine yourself being the closest person to one of the potential successors of the chairman in the largest prorate crime syndicate. When the chairman accidentally dies, your superior fully trusts you to oversee the gang when he is absent for other businesses; however, the policeman threatens you to share internal information about the gangsters. Whose side would you choose?

But what if you are actually an undercover policeman?

The film New World (2013, dir. Park Hoon-jung) presents this dilemma of loyalty that the protagonist, Lee Ja-sung, faces in the eighth year of his undercover in the Goldmoon International crime syndicate. Ja-sung thrives in the gang and expects the police chief Kang to end his mission, but Kang rejects and threatens him with his pregnant wife and his true identity, leading to Ja-sung’s betrayal – killing Kang and becoming the new chairman of the crime syndicate. While the film is not about the battle between justice and crime, but the discovery of loyalty in the grey area that is shifting between black and white.

Ja-sung’s loyalty to his job as an undercover is unquestionable before his betrayal. Killing people for Jung and conducting crimes are both physically and mentally challenging. He has to risk his life every day dealing with the gangsters, doing things that violate all his moral standards as a policeman. More importantly, he has to hide his identity from everyone he knows in the crime syndicate. Although Ja-sung makes such sacrifices, Kang uses Ja-sung’s wife and plants other undercovers in Goldmoon to watch Ja-sung's every action. Not to mention that whenever the police department gains information from him during his go-game lessons, they only ask him questions without sharing any plans from the police side. This forms a great metaphor that Ja-sung seems to be one of the players in this game; however, he is nothing but an insignificant chessman in the battle between the black and white. Ja-sung is isolated from both sides of his world to complete his mission as an undercover, which requires tremendous faith to sustain a torn life like this for eight years. Albeit it is understandable from the police’s perspective to secure their plan, they forget that before Ja-sung becomes a policeman or a gangster, he is a human who needs emotional support instead of a negligible chessman doomed to be either black or white. The audience would not blame Ja-sung for betraying the law because it is the police department that ignores and exploits his loyalty first.

Ja-sung’s loyalty to his superior, Jung Chung, is more complicated. Getting Jung’s trust is the most important part of his mission, so he has to act his loyalty from the moment he meets Jung deliberately. Whenever they meet Jung’s opponent in Goldmoon, Lee Joong-gu, Ja-sung never bows as other members do to show his disrespect. It seems like an insignificant action, but it requires a strong determination that Ja-sung will never be against Jung’s side in the gang because he is purposefully building a boundary and provoking Jung’s opponent. But not every action can be faked. When Joong-gu tries to scare Jung by almost hitting Jung with a car, Ja-sung stands in front of Jung to protect him without hesitation. Within the second that a car is rushing towards you, it is not the brain that evaluates the situation and makes an action, but your instinct instead, and nobody’s subconscious is born protecting others first. As time passes, his acted loyalty becomes a reality.

But why? Why would an undercover, who is supposed to hate all the dirt and crime, have such a strong attachment to a gangster? The reason might be indeed simple – loyalty is two-sided. Unlike Kang’s constant suspicion, Jung always calls Ja-sung “brother,” and he never uses violence nor threatens Ja-sung. They build a bromance over the eight years of fighting against the brutality in the criminal world with each other. Living in a grey area with dividing sides, Ja-sung feels warmth, connection, and company in this dark environment with Jung. And when the world of justice treats him as an opponent, he is being pushed closer to the black side.

It might also be how everyone in Goldmoon prioritizes their internal bonds taught Ja-sung what loyalty is and made him become part of them. When Kang tries to bribe Jung to leak evidence to arrest his opponent Joong-gu, Jung immediately rejects and despises this external source’s intervention. There is no actual benefit to Jung by not accepting Kang’s offer, but it is against what he values the most – the brotherhood code. It is more ironic that what Kang uses to trade with Jung is a list of undercovers that will doubtlessly be killed by Jung once revealed.

As we are all human beings instead of chessmen that could be either black or white, we constantly shift in the spectrum of different shades of grey. After Jung’s death, he kills everyone who used to stand in Jung’s way to continue the code of brotherhood and takes Jung's position. Although he betrayed Jung as an undercover in the past and betrays his job as a policeman, he finishes his journey of discovering his need for emotional connections as a human and starts to be loyal to himself.

The Price of Money: Boon Joon-ho's Barking Dogs Never Bite

A quote says, “there are some things that money can’t buy, like manners, morals, and integrity.” But will the opposite work? Can we “buy” money by giving up morals?

Boon Joon-ho’s film Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000) explores this possibility by telling the story of an aspiring college professor, Ko Yun-ju, who struggles with his career and life. The film’s first shot is Yun-ju appreciating the nature view that his cheap apartment faces. He is unemployed because he despises the behavior of bribing the dean with $100,000 to get the professor’s position. Nevertheless, as a man with ambition and is desperate to prove himself in the society, this shortcut is undoubtedly appealing. When Yun-ju is torn between borrowing money to bribe the dean and keeping his meritoriousness, the barking dog that disturbs him whenever he thinks about his career path becomes the only issue he can control himself. Hence, he kills the dog – which does no harm but bark – to demonstrate that there is something in his life that he can make an immediate decision about and take action to achieve his goal. This is the first time Yun-ju gives up his morals to escape his incapability to fight the corrupted world. Yun-ju carries the vicious cycle of determining others’ life and death, just as what he experienced in the society.

Yun-ju eventually bribes the dean and gets his dream job. He gives up his morals and obtains the position. The film ends with him fading into darkness when his student covers the view of nature outside the window with the curtains before class. The nature outside becomes a luxury that Yun-ju can’t afford anymore as he used to have every day. Yun-ju shows that you can buy money with morals, but your freedom is an additional inevitable price. It is also ironic that the position Yun-ju commits in this dirty transaction is a college professor, who is supposed to represent and enforce social order and justice.

However, if we consider Yun-ju’s life from a realistic perspective, he has a job that can make more money to provide a higher living standard for his family. He won’t be ordered by his wife anymore but have her respect instead. More importantly, his social status as a college professor will also satisfy society’s expectations on males and solve his anxiety as a home husband. Isn’t this a win?

The film also presents the tradeoff between human’s desire for money and morality with other characters. Hyun-nam, the bookkeeper and custodian of the apartment that Yun-ju lives in, experiences the opposite situation. Although she has a stable job, she is unsatisfied with her life as she dreams about getting famous by being on television. Therefore, the story of the missing dogs excites her with the possibility of being a hero in the neighborhood. Hyun-nam’s dissatisfaction with her ordinary career leads to her desire for surprise and freedom in life. She represents the impossibility of people buying emotional achievements with money and shows the jejune lifestyle that people without money dream of. Eventually, she loses her job as she is not focusing on her work. When Yun-ju loses joy after he sacrifices his freedom for the job, Hyun-nam can go hiking with her friend, which she dreamed about when she was working. But again, if we take a step back, Hyun-nam’s freedom is only temporary. She cannot sustain her life without a job and has to give her freedom back in exchange for the money.

The homeless, who eats the dogs in the neighborhood, is another character Boon shows the conflicting costs and benefits of life. For the homeless, ethics is a luxury idea to consider. All that matters is being able to survive. By eating the dogs and secretly living in the apartment’s basement, which the vast majority find immoral, the homeless can have a great meal with meat and a safe place to live. Food and housing are the top priorities that people would buy when they have money. But when money is a scarcity, freedom, danger, and dignity are nothing but his only asset to trade for a higher quality of life. Although he ends up being caught, he explicitly says he is excited about his life in jail as he won’t worry about food and house anymore. The homeless carries the fundamental concern about which way to trade money and freedom is more beneficial and pushes the audience to think if keeping a moral standard is indeed helpful in a desperate life.

Boon made the film when he was 30, and this is his first feature film. The conflicting and torn perspective towards using unjustified ways to achieve one’s goals is also a display of Boon’s struggle with exploring justice in the world at that age. Boon shows compassion when criticizing the characters’ decisions, leaving it to us to judge if they have made a better deal between money and freedom.

When the world is dark, should we light up a fire, or should we just close our eyes and sink into part of the darkness? And when the immoral darkness is monetarily beneficial, should we accept it? Are we making the social codes and moral standards the lights or another unseen trap in the darkness?

What Does the Helper Need? Park Chan-Wook’s Lady Vengeance

Why do we help others?

To feel happy? To feel needed? To fulfill a certain responsibility? To ease guilt? Or out of self-interest?

These are questions explored in Park Chan-Wook’s 2005 Lady Vengeance.

The main character, Geum-ja has been imprisoned for 13 years after a wrongful conviction for the murder of a 6 year-old-boy. In fact, she was manipulated into a confession by the villainous Mr. Baek, who kidnapped and threatened her infant daughter. Baek has kidnapped many children from many families for ransom, and Geum-ja helped him kidnapping the boy so that Baek would help her and her daughter without knowing that Baek will ultimately murder the boy.

The direct translation of the title is actually “The Kind-hearted Geum-ja,” and indeed Geum-ja acts like an angel in prison and helps almost everyone selflessly. But Geum-ja kindness is not without reason. Everyone she helps is essential to her revenge, and her kindness in prison is what convinced other prisoners to help her.

In fact, Geum-ja doesn’t hide her dark side. Once she is released, she even purposefully reveals herself as evil. Korean has a tradition of giving the released prisoner a piece of tofu as a symbol of starting a new life that is pure and innocent as the color of the tofu. However, Geum-ja throws away the tofu in front of a group of people when she is released, ignoring, and even confronting this suggestion of guiltlessness. She also starts putting on blood-red eye shadow and wearing all-black outfits. Most importantly, the angel who used to smile at all criminals never smiles again once she gets out of prison. She is desperate to show everyone, and herself, that all her kindness is out of purpose, and now it is her time to achieve that only goal. Geum-ja completely wipes away her innocence and even loathes her past kindness. Because only doing so can this young and attractive woman be determined to fight a murderer. Geum-ja must hide any compassion she has to convince herself that she is stronger and more brutal than Baek to conduct her revenge. As human beings are conflicting figures, the best way to disguise our intentions is to present the opposite side, just as the revenge-motivated angel in prison and the desperate evil outside that Geum-ja shows.

Her conflicting mentality is also shown by how she separates herself from the rest of the people involved in her plan. She makes her revenge like a ritual event where she is the goddess who controls everything without being an actual part of it. Geum-ja gathers all the families of Baek’s victims and asks them to kill Baek together. In contrast, she doesn’t even touch Baek during the entire murder process. More dramatically, Geum-ja provides identical raincoats for all the victims’ families to prevent getting blood on their bodies. With all the families sitting together in the raincoats, it looks like a uniform that unifies them and creates the bond of their shared crime. She then takes a group picture with all the families in the raincoat, with blood on their bodies, and brings everyone to a celebration with her hand-made black cake to keep enforcing the bond between the families. Again, she doesn’t eat that cake, but makes herself a white one in the same shape of the tofu and throws her face into the cake at the end. As if immersing herself in that cake can wash her soul and cleans her guilt, and she can cover her darkness displaying outside. It is Geum-ja’s revenge, but she makes it seem like she is helping the families to avenge instead of for her personal hatred. Through this, Geum-ja can get herself out of the cycle of revenge and eliminate her guilt.

Geum-ja is not the only one who “fakes” kindness. The priest, who encourages Geum-ja the entire time she is in prison and gives the tofu to Geum-ja, is indeed following Baek’s order to keep an eye on Geum-ja in case she avenges. Typically, we judge the priest’s betrayal behavior immediately as he pretends to be a “good person.” But here, the priest is doing the same thing as Geum-ja, the protagonist whom we are directed to support, and it becomes a moral dilemma that we can’t tell who is doing the “right thing” or if there really is anyone who is doing the right thing.

To me, the film is definitely not portraying Geum-ja as an innocent figure, nor making anyone in her an absolute demon. Geum-ja conducted the kidnap in exchange of receiving help from Baek when she was pregnant, and she also murdered someone to help a prisoner whom she knows that she will need her help to revenge. She selfishly helps people but kills Baek morally. The conflicting behaviors we see from her are just an unspoken consensus that people all act for self-benefits, whether we are being conscious about it or not. This invisible cost-benefit analysis leads to whether we display ourselves as a kind-hearted evil or a brutal victim.

If there is no pure angel nor ultimate devil, what does the helper actually want?

To feel the kindness in their heart, or plan to receive help in the future?

 

Can we manipulate who we actually hate, and who we truly love?

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.