Mothers, Whores and Filial Daughters: Redefining the Female and the Family in Korean Melodrama

I’m nerdy about a lot of things. One of the biggest things is Korean Cinema, which I studied while going to NYU. Every once in a while I will write a paper (or long article) eventually figuring that I will write a book. Today’s post is an experiment. Can I post a long article, and how to format it. This paper examines how the role of women in Korean family melodramas has changed over the years, and how it helps to define the Korean family (and through that a sense of what it means to be Korean). Enjoy, I’m fairly proud of this one.

Traditionally Korea’s national division is thought of as the geographical and ideological split along the 38^th parallel. This is certainly valid, as it is one of Korea’s most unique features: a country permanently in a state of war with itself.[i] This North-South division is a main focal point for much of South Korea’s literature and film cultures as the South Korean people struggle to answer questions of national identity in the post-war, post-colonial culture. Throughout the recent filmic and literary history, we have seen stories that imagine the division as issues of class division, sexuality, economic agency, and even memory and history among many other things. The site of this exploration also largely takes place within the family, as it forms the smallest unit of the country and the problems of the nation are easily translated into issues of family strife. Adding further tension is the fact that the family remains the essential building block of traditional, Confucian culture – an aspect casually at odds with modern, progressive values. One thing that is consistent among much of these films, short stories, and novels, however, is that national trauma is constructed as a masculine crisis that reaffirms a patriarchal power structure comfortable with the status quo, and unwilling to affirm the growing status of women in Korean society. The patriarch’s on-going resistance to female emancipation allows cinema and literature, to re-imagine social and cultural cohesion in a country struggling to find its post-colonial identity.

In this paper I will be discussing the role of women as it relates to the family structure and the attempt to redefine it in Aimless Bullet (Obaltan, Yu Hyônmok, 1961), The Coachman (Mabu, Kang Tae-jin, 1961) and A Good Lawyer’s Wife (Baramnan Kajok, Im Sang-su, 2003). I chose these films because they offer differing points in history in which Korea was forced to redefine what its national identity was, and in doing so redefines the institution of the family. The Coachman is a film with a conservative view of post-war history and as such contains the restructuring and continuation of the Confucian patriarchy in a new form of family that is actually based on female economic agency. Aimless Bullet is a far more liberal and pessimistic view of post-war Korea in which the family is broken down, something that is accelerated and supported by female suffering. In both films we see the roles that Korean film tends to relegate to women when put in context with the family: the Mother, the Whore/Corrupt Daughter, and the Filial Daughter. Through these roles the women serve as agents to help the male figure (and through him the nation) realize and take action towards (or resolve) his crisis, but their own crises are marginalized in an attempt to normalize South Korea’s history as a site of masculine anxiety and disorder. A Good Lawyer’s Wife, on the other hand, offers a look at the modern upper-middle class family and its dissolution. In this film the institution of family is attacked and questioned in Korea’s new post-industrial society, with the woman characters finding liberation through sexual freedom, and the trauma is familial, rather than historic or socio-economic.

Andrew Higson writes “Cinema never simply reflects or expresses an already fully-formed and homogeneous national culture and identity, as if it were the undeniable property of all national subjects; certainly, it privileges only a limited range of subject positions which thereby become naturalized or reproduced as the only legitimate positions of the national subject.”[ii] In this way, national cinema is a constantly changing matrix of meaning and identity creation. This is especially obvious in Korea, when post-war cinema became a site to explore memory, tradition, and attempt to invent definitive ideas and ideals of Korean-ness. Interestingly it chose to define tradition and history as specifically patriarchal in nature, even though Confucian ideals of patriarchy are not innately Korean, and, in fact, historically Korea was at one time intensely matriarchal.[iii] This re-imagining of history as a site of masculine power naturalizes a male-dominated society and creates the masculine figure as the legitimate site where national identity is explored. The family becomes the structure under which masculine power is normalized as the national subject and women are forced to either submit or be cast out, rejected as being something Other than Korean if they attempt to exert their own individual agency.

It may be useful here to briefly explore a film made during the Japanese colonial period first in order to place the introduction of Western goods and the idea of the Modern Woman in its historical context, as these markers serve as part of the discourse of Korean-ness as they relate to women in the films we will be discussing. In both Aimless Bullet and The Coachman Western goods mark a betrayal to the nation and the family within the body of the woman. Until recently Sweet Dream (Yang Ju-nam, 1936) was the oldest known Korean film in existence.[iv] The film follows the middle class housewife Ae-soon (portrayed one of the most famous actresses at the time Moon Yae-bong) who is vain and not interested in playing the role of the Mother within her family. She would rather shop for expensive Western clothes than shop for her daughter, and eventually ends up leaving her family to stay in a hotel with a con man that she thinks is a wealthy modern man. When she finds that he is really poor, she reports him to the police and leaves for Busan. On her way to the train the taxi she is in runs over her daughter, both women end up at the hospital where her daughter regains consciousness, but Ae-soon resorts to suicide for her betrayal. The movie was released in Japanese occupied Korea soon after Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House debuted during a time where debates about the rise of New Women were on the public consciousness.[v] Kim Su-jin writes:

In colonial Korea, the “modern girl” became another name for new woman. It was also an imaginary location where all the “bad” elements of emulation congregated, and was used as a term that effectively expresses the “vanity” and “shell” of a new woman. The elements included fascination with new goods and customs symbolized by bobbed hair and western-hybrid dresses, and the awakening to bodies and sexual desires. The Korean modern girl was a new woman as the object of envy, scorn, or voyeurism. But such objectification was ambivalent. On the one hand, bodies, sexuality, and modern customs were criticized as decadent and corrupt, but on the other hand, they were fascinating.[vi]

This is true of Sweet Dream as well. The narrative structure is simple and the characters are stereotypes. Ae-soon is merely meant to be as scandalous as possible (she smokes in bed with a man who is not her husband) in order to portray the idea of a modern woman as immoral and shocking. As far from a Confucian Mother and housewife as possible, Ae-soon must be punished by the narrative for forgoing her role as the Mother in order to pursue her own desires. Despite this the character type of the Modern Woman would be one of the most used in Korean filmic culture. They were fascinating for audiences at the time, and after the war especially.[vii] This early example of Korean melodrama lays the groundwork for much of the following filmic history, and sets the castigation of modern women as the site on which post-war cinema would bring to bear the trauma of division and the struggle for identity.

Aimless Bullet is based on a book by the same name, and is widely considered one of the best Korean Golden Age films[viii]. The film follows Chul-ho a clerk at an accountant’s office who is the head of a household living in Haebangch’on (Liberation Village): a village for North Korean refugees in a post-war Seoul. His meager earnings must support his mentally ill mother, his pregnant wife, his sister Myôngsuk, his children and his unemployed brother. He cannot even afford to pull a rotten tooth out of his mouth. The film is shot in a stark neo-realist style and depicts the brutality of life following the Korean War. It was produced in the brief period of freedom following the April 19 revolution and released right before the 5.16 coup.[ix] The film is intensely pessimistic; the trauma of the war has torn this family apart and drives its members to self-destruction in attempts to better their situation.

The women in Aimless Bullet are the ones who undergo the most suffering within the film. However their crises exist on the fringes of the diegetic world, and exist to propel the masculine crises even further. Kelly Y. Jeong writes that “the women’s suffering registers on screen only as the man’s symptom, because the camera does not capture the images of women’s suffering directly, but expresses it by visualizing how it affects men who are responsible for the women’s well-being.”[x] Unlike the females in The Coachman, who provide a stable base for the males to reestablish their own identities upon, the females in Aimless Bullet fail to provide a stable base for the masculine figure and because of this the family falls apart. The Mother figure in the film is insane, constantly screaming, “Let’s go!” in reference both to their economic situation in the Liberation Village and the fact that they have been disposed from their home in the North. Her suffering merely serves to drive the plight of Chul-ho home to the audience; her mad cries accentuate the impossibility of escaping the harsh realities of life in post-war Korea. Finally Chul-ho even appropriates his mother’s suffering as his own, when he echoes these insane words, bleeding in the back of the cab. The Mother is not denigrated, but rather created as a figure needed for familial stability and success. Clearly the Mother figure within the film is largely absent with one insane, and the other dying (on the edges of the frame) from malnutrition. Indeed this second Mother, Chul-ho’s wife, dies giving birth to their child bringing yet another burden onto Chul-ho while leaving her place within the diegtic world as the only person who could have taken the role of the Mother and created a stable home for the patriarch. Indeed, the lack of a Mother figure within the film is highly traumatic, and as Jeong points out the loss of the second Mother figure in the film eventually drives Chul-ho to recognize the impossibility of his situation and lead him to action, even if that action is self-destructive.[xi] With his wife dead, his brother in jail and his sister a prostitute Chul-ho is forced to realize that the structure and moral code he has held onto for the entire film cannot sustain him or his family (or indeed even allow the concept of a family to exist) within the harsh reality of post-war Seoul.

In The Coachman, the story begins with a broken family, whose mother has passed away. The father, Chun-sam, is a cart driver whose job, because of the rapid modernization following the war, is quickly becoming obsolete. Like many post-war art works, the family is lower working class and as such is to be seen as more connected to the Korean identity, as those who were in power or had money were often seen as (and often were) colonial collaborators. The absence of the Mother in The Coachman, however, is not as traumatic as in Aimless Bullet, but it is still a space that must be filled in order for the masculine crises to be resolved. Soowon, a maid in the household of the owners of Chun-sam’s horses, ends up filling this space as an emotional and economic agent that allows the family to be restored. Soowon is an interesting character as when she becomes the Mother in the family, the family is redefined as subject to female labor. It is Soowon’s economic agency that allows Chun-sam to continue with his job, and Soo-up to continue with his studies (which would eventually lead to upward social mobility).  She is allowed to have this independent wealth because she uses this wealth to invest back into the family, supporting the patriarchal foundation at the same time as creating a new family structure in which the patriarch is no longer the primary financial provider.

In Lee Soo-won’s essay “The Cheong Space: A Zone of Non-Exchange in Korean Human relationships” he proposes that in Korea because of the Korean concept cheong[xii], human relations are defined as non-exchange relationships where the individual sheds the sense of self and attempts to further the interests of others, with value placed on existing in solidarity with the group rather than what you receive from the relationship. Western relationships are based off of social exchange where the individuals enter into relationships for personal gain, which inevitably lead to conflict because of self interest.[xiii] Soowon’s financial investment also allows for a new structure under which the eldest son can use education to better his standing within society, rather than the traditional system of taking over his father’s place in the family business (which is failing under the pressure of modernization). It also represents this concept of cheong, and non-exchange relationships.  Yet Soowon’s financial success is favorable when contrasted with the daughter Okhee’s attempts at creating her own financial independence.

Unlike Soowon, who uses her wealth to further insert herself into a patriarchal family structure, Okhee is attempting to use material wealth to escape the family and attempt upward mobility only for herself. . Her attempts at economic agency is based off of the concept of social exchange, and it is this sense of independence from the family, as well as Okhee’s deceptive means of achieving it, that leads to her inevitable failure and a severe beating at the hands of the man she was trying to seduce.  Okhee’s leaving of the ‘traditional’ Confucian values for selfish capitalistic gain is marked by her appearance in Western dress as an attempt to disguise her class background. Early in the film, in response to Okhee’s complaint that her dress is too shabby, her friend Mija tells her “There is nothing you can’t fix for a larger gain, right?” This fix is obviously to reject the essence of Korean-ness that the film is struggling to identify within this lower class family, and accept a middle class western lifestyle of excess and overt feminine sexuality. The scene in which Mija teaches Okhee how to act western (and therefore modern) is a perfect example of this. Through the act of being taught how to walk and dress to please and entice wealthy men, we see Okhee consciously attempting to reject her old identity and create a new false identity as a modern woman. Remember Ae-soon? Like her and all Modern Women who leave the cheong space and the family behind, Okhee must be punished. Especially given the rather conservative sentiments of the film, rejecting a sense of propriety and Korean-ness will only be met with tragedy. Again Soowon is contrasted to Okhee as she helps the family to continue with their traditional makeup, all the while playing the role of the dutiful Mother and housekeeper, a role marked visually by her constant attire of traditional Korean dress. It is not that the film denigrates the financial agency of these women; rather it promotes it as long as it is serving the need of the family and is the wish of the patriarch. In Aimless Bullet on the other hand financial agency is left completely up to the masculine characters, even if they are economically impotent, and the female is left with only one method of financial income.

Myôngsuk’s character in Aimless Bullet is similar to Okhee in many ways. They both desire to get out of their family and financial situation and seek financial independence for their self rather than the family. In both films their betrayal to the familial structure (and therefore their Korean-ness) is marked visually (and aurally in Aimless Bullet) by Western culture. However the betrayal in Aimless Bullet goes far further than an aesthetic choice based on pretense. Myôngsuk’s betrayal is far more direct and incendiary; she goes from playing the Filial Daughter (as a sister to Chul-ho) to playing the Whore. While Okhee’s betrayal to the nation (if the family is the building block of culture) is only on the surface, Myôngsuk’s betrayal is both a physical and primal betrayal. She is literally selling herself to the foreign invaders, and her body becomes the symbolic site of the colonial experience. However Myôngsuk’s suffering, like the two destitute Mother’s in her family, is not her own and it merely serves to further Chul-ho’s downward spiral. Jeong writes “the film depicts the brother’s witnessing of his sister’s prostitution as more painful than what his sister’s own experience as a prostitute [is].”[xiv] The woman’s pain as a prostitute only exists to serve as a symbol for the threat of an invading masculine force against the Korean sense of masculinity. Myôngsuk is therefore portrayed as betraying the family and nation, and because her betrayal runs too deep she can never restore her relations with the patriarch of the family. In the end she attempts to buy her way back into the family by giving her brother money, but she can never return as she is marked as violated by the Other. Her money only spurs Chul-ho into self-destructive action, and the family is already destroyed beyond repair.

Okhee on the other hand is able to restore her filial relations with her father. She makes a conscious decision (after being beaten for her betrayal) to return to the patriarch and follow his wishes of finding financial agency through her work at the factory. Through this action she is redeemed and welcomed back into the family unit. She reenters the cheong space and its non-exchange relationships. She becomes useful to the patriarch while remaining loyal, something that the other Filial Daughter character in the film (Okrae) cannot. Okrae is the strongest example of traditional filial loyalty within the films, but she is deaf mute who cannot exert or insert herself within the world and therefore she lacks the agency that the female characters need in this re-structuring of the family. Jeong proposes that her suicide is a “final act of desperation but also of defiance and refusal of the status quo that oppressed her in life.”[xv] (Jeong, 176). I disagree; in my interpretation her suicide is a final act of service to the family. It is the ultimate expression of filial piety. She cannot function in the changing times and in order for the family to evolve, she must be disposed of. Her suffering is important yes, but as with the females in A Stray Bullet it is merely a projection of the patriarch’s inability (in this case his economic impotence) to provide for his family. With her gone, the film forgets her and her diegetic space (that of the caregiver within the home and kitchen) is filled with the new Mother, Soowon. Her absence is the catalyst that allows all the events to fall into place that bring the new family to fruition. In these ways the family becomes not only the site of national identity, but also an institution of safety that can protect its members from trauma. It is these concepts that are broken during the course of A Good Lawyer’s Wife.

A Good Lawyer’s Wife is actually a rather poor translation of the title and gives the impression that Hojung, the titular wife, exists merely to support her husband’s career. The Korean title Baramnan Kajok could be roughly translated to A Family Having Affairs. This is much more accurate as to what goes on in the film. Hojung begins the film as a seemingly modern example of a Confucian Mother. She had given up her career as a dancer to take care of her adopted son Sooin and support her husband Youngjak and his career. She enjoys much more freedom than any of the women found in the previous movies, due to the globalized nature of post-industrial Korea and the imported ideas of feminism. In fact the very Western visual markers that marked Ae-soon, Myôngsuk, and Okhee as betraying their Korean identity, are everywhere within this film. Korean identity is presented as global and westernized. Traditional culture is connected with the lower class, and is shown as backwards and in need of help by the upper class. Here history is acknowledged, but hidden.

Hojung is marked as modern and desirable because of these material objects. She still pursues her art by teaching at the local dance school, and the family also does not have to worry about economic power. They are part of the new wealthy upper class (the nouveau riche), and they have survived the trauma of the IMF Crisis. She is a devoted mother to her son Sooin, even if he is adopted, and even a dutiful daughter-in-law. She is helping Sooin through his coming to terms with his adoption and the father-in-law through his battle with liver cancer. Yes she is an agent to help these people through their trauma, but she never is subjugated to them. It becomes clear that she needs something more and is sexually frustrated and bored with her husband, as seen in the scene where she begins masturbating after he fails to please her. Her husband spends most of his time either at work or with his mistress, a woman who is sexually free and with whom he can inebriate his frustrations through sex.[xvi] Interestingly the film’s main tragedy, the death of Sooin, isn’t used as a punishment for the female’s affair (as the daughters accident is used in Sweet Dream) but rather is a direct result of an accident caused by Youngjak.

Hojung begins an affair with her high school aged neighbor, and in doing such sets herself free. Unlike many other Korean works where sex is a vehicle for the masculine to overcome his own inefficiencies, usually through the rape or subjugation of the Korean woman, here female sexuality is represented as power. Both Hojung and Byunghan, Youngjak’s mother, find freedom and happiness by taking their sexual agency into their own hands. Hojung actually exercises the trauma of her failed marriage and loosing her son by subjugating the younger Jiwoon, and finding her release through sex. In the climatic sex scene between the two she sheds tears of sadness and joy as she orgasms, which happens only when she dominates Jiwoon. She is now free, and the pregnancy resulting in this affair essentially replaces Sooin, much like Soowon replacing Okrae. It is a complete gender reversal of the traditional Korean cinematic paradigm. These affairs also break these ideas of the non-exchange Korean relationships, and are instead examples of social exchange relationships. Cheong ceases to exist as these women reclaim the sense of I. Unlike Myôngsuk, Okhee, and Ae-soon’s transgressions, these affairs are not punished and the trauma that is transplanted onto the women in that family here it remains within the realm of the masculine.

The Coachman and Aimless Bullet’s male characters suffer from economic impotence within the newly emerging post-war class system. Their trauma is directly related to the war and to the re-building of the nation. For instance in The Coachman, Chun-sam’s job as a horseman is in danger from Korea’s rush to modernity, yet through the female economic agency and the promise of upward mobility thanks to Soo-up’s promotion as prosecutor the trauma is healed. This film is conservative in the way that it depicts the modern myth of success coming from hard work, here it is directly connected the promotion of the family to an upper class that American aid and “guidance” created. The family in The Coachman insulates those within its structure from the outside world, and provides a stable base from which they can face the future. The historical trauma suffered in Aimless Bullet however, creates a space in which the family is torn apart due to economic and social lack. Insanity, violence and death result from this trauma and the family cannot provide shelter for the character.

The trauma in A Good Lawyer’s Wife is much more complex. The film does allude to the historical trauma of the war and division, but it is far from the main problem. Youngjak as working on a case involving an uncovered grave of Korean War victims, whose skulls are dug up and become an example of the atrocities that modern Korea would rather forget, but cannot. His father’s alcoholism is a result of the trauma of leaving his mother and sisters in North Korea, where they were killed, and as he lies dying he begins singing North Korean songs. (Echoing the Mother’s cries of “Let’s Go” in Aimless Bullet) Yet despite these facts it is the family that is the source of the trauma. Unlike in The Coachman, where humanity and decency are naively portrayed and the family becomes a mythological institution that can right all wrongs, the Hojung’s family is the source of the trauma. Their inability to communicate with each other, and the boredom with life that the bourgeois existence affords them, causes their unhappiness. It offers them no protection; rather their unhappiness only increases the more they attempt to hold the family together. The historical trauma does not affect them directly; to Youngjak the case represents a chance to exercise his professional power (perhaps because he lacks emotional power) for good. The father remains stubborn that the problem is his, remaining in good spirits despite the fact that this trauma has robbed him of a career, the ability to sexually satisfy his wife, the ability to be a good father, and the ability to die peacefully. His death, which would have served as a catalyst for destruction in an earlier or more conservative film, actually allows Byunghan to find happiness with another man, which in earlier films would go so much against Confucian thought it would be punished by tragedy. Here she becomes livelier and kinder, once she rediscovers the orgasm after 15 years. Her new husband is not set to become the new patriarch of the family; rather she completely leaves the family and the country. The new patriarch is Youngjak, but it is an empty patriarchy because the family is no longer in existence. Yet everyone seems to be fine in the end of the film, even Youngjak gives a little jig after one last failed attempt at reconciliation with Hojung. If The Coachman set up the new familial structure for post-war Korea, A Good Lawyer’s Wife completely tears it down.

If the family is the central building block of the nation, it is no wonder that Korean plays its cultural anxieties about national identity through the genre of family melodramas. Both Aimless Bullet and The Coachman place the Korean family within an economic division, and the division between tradition and modernity. They represent an era in which Korea attempted to determine where the line will be drawn between the two, and how to rewrite the familial structure in the face of modernity and Western influence. Yet while this history and new family are strongly patriarchal, the familial structure evolves (or destructs) because of the female. The Coachman’s family succeeds because the females provide the economic security necessary to guarantee the family’s future upward mobility and continued patriarchy. Aimless Bullet’s family fails because the females are either insane, sick, or betray their bodies and through them the nation to the Western Other. It is the woman who is connected most to the change in modernity versus tradition (as the visual codes of traditional and western wear suggest) and their suffering is readily but it exists only within the borders of the increasing male anxiety. By marginalizing feminine suffering, in normalizes a patriarchal power structure under which the female is only given several approved roles within the family. A Good Lawyer’s Wife, although very much removed historically, takes a similar look at Korea during a time of change. The growth of the bourgeois and newfound economic freedom in a capitalistic society, as well as the advent of women’s rights and equality, forces a new definition of the family. The women are strong and independent, and find happiness not through aiding the continuation of the Confucian system, but through sexual and emotional independence. Although the suffering belongs to the female figure as well as the masculine, the females are now able to exercise their own traumas, and the males have no outlet. The Confucian family does not provide protection against trauma; rather it antagonizes it. There is no alternative presented, and the film offers no answers. Korean society is having the same problem, and with the rising divorce rates it appears that it is time to reevaluate the concept of family.

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[i] The Korean War started June 25, 1950 and an armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. The war has not officially ended and to date skirmishes still erupt along the border and in contested waters.

[ii] Andrew Higson. “The Concept of National Cinema” Screen 30, no. 4 (Autumn, 1989) reprinted in Film and Nationalism, ed. Alan Williams, 63.

[iii] Confucian culture was imported from China along with Buddhism during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC-668 when the Silla kingdom triumphed over Goguryeo), but would come to full fruition during the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) where Confucian ideals such as hyo (filial piety) were greatly encouraged and became the primary belief among the yangban rulers and scholars of the time. Traditionally Korea was shamanistic in nature, and only females could be shamans. There were also several important female rulers of early kingdoms.

[iv] This honor now belongs to Yun Baek-nam’s Cheongchun’s Sipjaro first screened in Seoul in 1934, which was recently discovered by a theater manager.

[v] http://www.koreafilm.org/feature/100_1.asp

[vi] Kim Su-jin. Excess of the Modern: Three Archetypes of the New Woman and Colonial Identity in Korea, 1920s to 1930s. Doctoral Thesis, Seoul National University 2005. 1.

[vii] The enormous popularity of films such as Jayu Buin (Madame Freedom, 1956) and Hanyeo (The Housemaid, 1960) attest to this.

[viii] The Golden Age of Korean Cinema lasts from the late 1950s into the early 1970s by which time government censorship and industry practices had resulted in a dramatic decline in quality of domestic films.

[ix] The April 19 Revolution (1960) was a student lead uprising against then president Syngman Rhee. In my opinion this was the one period of true Korean independence since before the Japanese occupation, and it allowed such works as The Aimless Bullet and Choi In-hoon’s novel The Square, which used the freedom of the time to ask difficult questions about the division of the country. This period was ended by the May 16, 1961 coup by Park Chung-hee’s military regime. The Aimless Bullet was quickly banned by the government for portraying post-war life in a harsh and negative light, as well as the perceived North Korean sympathies of the line “Let’s Go” said repeatedly by the Mother.

[x] Kelly Y. Jeong. “Projections of Masculinities: Nation Re-building and Postwar Korean Cinema,” from “Multiple Beginnings: Crisis of Gender Masculinity, Nationhood, and Many Arrivals of Modernity in Modern Korean Literature and Cinema,” Ph.d., diss. 2003, 188

[xi] Ibid., 191

[xii] Cheong is a word not easily translated into English. Loosely it is the idea of togetherness and belonging that exists when you have a space within a group. In sociological terms it can be viewed as the space in which the individual social units “I” and “You” become one unified “we”. However this “we” is not a unit made of two individual units, but rather a singular unit where the individuals have shed their sense of self and become one with their partners views.

[xiii] Soo-Won Lee, “The Cheong Space: A Zone of Non-Exchange in Korean Human Relationships,” in Psychology of the Korean People: Individualism and Collectivism, ed Gene Yoon and Sang-Chin Choi (Seoul: Donga Publishing Corporation, 1991)

[xiv] Kelly Y. Jeong. “Projections of Masculinities: Nation Re-building and Postwar Korean Cinema,” from “Multiple Beginnings: Crisis of Gender Masculinity, Nationhood, and Many Arrivals of Modernity in Modern Korean Literature and Cinema,” Ph.d., diss. 2003, 189

[xv] Ibid., 176

[xvi] Virtually all of the adult characters in the film are having an extra-marital affair, and rather explicit ones at that. The advertising campaign clearly pushed this aspect showing actress Moon So-ri in very provocative poses. It worked, and the film quickly became a box office success.