Park Chan Wook's 2003 classic, Oldboy, has a lot to say.
*SPOILERS AHEAD*
"Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water, they sink the same."
Oldboy, released in 2003, is the second film in a loose "vengeance" trilogy that comes to us from director Park Chan Wook. It deals with a troubled man who disappears under an umbrella one night and wakes up in a jail cell, where he will stay for the next 15 years. The man, Oh Dae-Su, begs to know why he was picked to be captured and how long he will have to suffer this punishment. In the cell, all he has is a bed, a small bathroom cubicle, a desk, and most importantly a TV. Chan Wook wants us to see the importance of this TV as a gripping form of information and education. For 15 years this is all that Oh knows. This is his only form of laughter and of love. It is how he keeps up with the current events of the world. It is his only friend. This is only part of a larger commentary on technology and how the world is now becoming too absorbed by it. However, later we see that what he sees on TV and what his seclusion has taught him doesn't translate in the real world, as he tries to sexually assault a female later on and gets clobbered. Can technology really teach us anything if that is all we rely on for our education?
After year five of being in the cell, he begins working out and later begins to escape. During the fifteenth year, he calculates that he will only need one more month to successfully escape. Later that night he is gassed and we see a lady come into his cell and hypnotize him. After this, he wakes up in a suitcase on the top of an apartment building with his belongings from the cell. He sees a man on the ledge about to kill himself and the man utters "Even though I'm no better than a beast, don't I have the right to live?". This takes us back to the first shot of the film where we see Oh's character holding the suicidal man off the ledge by his tie. This is a shot that will recur again later on in an important segment.
The rest of the film deals with Oh's attempt at revenge and inquisitive approach towards his captors. Along the way, Oh meets Mido who he first meets in a bar and says she looks "familiar". This scene gives us the incredible moment where Oh requests something to eat that is living. Oh doesn't necessarily like or want to eat something that is living, but he believes that it will give him a true taste of life that he has missed. Oh then proceeds to eat an octopus, something that was actually done on set and took four takes to get. Throughout the film, Oh and Mido begin to get closer and closer and one night they finally make love. Later we meet, Lee Woo-jin who went to school with Oh. In a flashback towards the end of the film, we see that Lee Woo-jin is sexually experimenting with his sister. Unintentionally, not knowing the full levity of the situation Oh witnesses the scene. Oh mentions to his friends that he saw two people engage in sexual acts, not knowing that it was incestuous. Right around this time, Oh transfers to a school in Seoul and forgets all about what has happened. On the flip side, Lee Woo-jin and his sister begin hearing rumors, and eventually, the sister believes that she has somehow gotten pregnant. After much turmoil and confusion, the sister believes her only escape to be suicide. Chan-Wook then gives us this incredible match shot between the sister's suicide and the first shot of the film when Oh is holding the suicidal man by the tie. Both the man and the sister believe they have no escape, but in one situation (Oh's at the beginning of the film) the person on the other side doesn't care about the suicide holding on to him by a piece of his clothing, and in the other (Lee Woo-jin holding his sister up from death) it means everything to him, holding on to her by her wrist.
Here we see the parallel between Oh and Woo-jin's character.
After we learn all the backstory and have all the exposition, Chan-Wook gives us a gut-punch of a climax. Woo-jin gives Oh a photo album beginning with a photo of him, his wife, and their daughter. As Oh flips the pages again and again we see that his daughter is all grown up now and is actually Mido. The audience can do nothing but sit and watch in horror at what we are seeing alongside Oh. We learn that Woo-jin was not only imprisoning and hypnotizing Oh but at the same time doing the same thing to Mido. This is why Oh was imprisoned for 15 years because this was the perfect amount of time to hypnotize them but also to let Mido grow up. Woo-jin has achieved everything that he has wanted as he has punished Oh and Mido in the same way that made his sister kill herself. Oh is confused, angered, and devastated. He first begins to try to kill Woo-jin, but later submits to him telling him he will do anything for him, including cutting off his tongue, which he does, as long as he doesn't tell Mido the truth. Woo-jin then recounts the suicide of his sister and shoots himself in the head.
At the end of the movie Oh is out in a remote location and is trying to become hypnotized again, to forget everything that has happened. In a letter, to try to get a hypnotist to come he writes about his life story and closes his letter with the same line that we hear the suicidal man say at the beginning of the film, "Even though I'm no more than a beast, don't I, too, have the right to live?" We then see Mido embrace Oh at a later date and she tells him he loves her. Oh begins to smirk and the smirk then slowly fades into a harsh grimace.
Very few films come across as this angry. Park Chan-Wook is extremely angry throughout the film. You can tell that he is angry at technology, as without technology almost all of this could have been avoided. Everything from cameras to tape machines, to television. You can clearly see that Chan-Wook is fed up with society's obsession with technology. Chan-Wook is also angry and displeased at institutions and government. It can be inferred that Oh is not the only inmate in the whole floor of cells. It seems as if it is almost institutionalized. We also get that incredible shot of Oh kneeling down to Woo-jin and begging him to not tell Mido the truth. The camera pans up and we see Woo-jin laughing into a cloth. Woo-jin is an institution or government here, whereas Oh is a mere peasant being laughed upon at the mercy of the institution.
I also think that Chan-Wook is delving into religious issues or more specifically the idea of forgiveness. We see suicides or suicide attempts throughout the film and this coincides with the idea of forgiveness. Can Woo-jin forgive the tongue of Oh? Can Oh forgive Woo-jin for punishing him for 15 years? Can the suicidal man forgive himself? All of these questions go back to one of the central questions of the film, "Even though I'm no more of a beast, don't I, too, have the right to live? Have we all sinned too much to be forgiven? If we have sinned should we have the right to live? I don't believe Chan-Wook gives us a final statement on this, but he was raised Catholic and is now an atheist so that can clue us into what he himself is thinking.
The Man of Sorrows (1891) - James Endor
There is one last thing I want to talk about. The painting pictured above is seen in Oh's cell. I believe it represents the entire movie. The painting is James Endor's The Man of Sorrows, completed in 1891. The painting is a grotesque and horrifying depiction of Jesus Christ wearing a devil's mask. Endor can give us many clues about what Chan-Wook is thinking. Endor was an extremely troubled man and at the time of this painting felt that he was being misunderstood through his art and was also deeply depressed. Endor felt that representing Christ this way was a visual representation of none other than himself. Endor was also supposedly fed up with being forced to conform to society at the time, and we see many of the same ideas in Oldboy. We can also see that Endor is upset at religion, which I believe Chan-Wook is as well. In Oldboy, the painting has a phrase at the bottom that we hear multiple times throughout the film. The phrase reads, "Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone." You could read this phrase as trying to comment on hundreds of different things, but I think it goes back to loneliness and who you can and cannot trust. Throughout the film Oh is confused because he doesn't know who he can trust and this gets him into many troubling situations. Can we trust our government? Can we trust institutions? Can we trust society? And most importantly, can we trust people?
I'd argue that one of the biggest points of Oldboy is telling us that we can't.
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