Lady Vengeance

Yeong-ae Lee, Min-sik Choi

It has been awhile but the Soderstrum Institute for Republican Values that has been working on a translation of the Bible is back. Scholars have been working long and hard to remove any reference to helping the poor and Jesus’ leftist leanings, leaving the Holy Scriptures about the size of a People magazine and much easier to read. So, we are proud to present the New Republican Parable of the Prodigal Son.

“Jesus continued, ‘There was a man who had two sons. He was a straight man, whose wife must have died a few years back as a righteous man would never get divorced. The younger son said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ The father said he would love to but until the Republican Party gets rid of the death tax, it would be impossible. So the young man cashed in his 401K and headed off to a distant university and there squandered all the wisdom he had gained from his father by listening to liberal professors. Pretty soon, he believed the social welfare state was a good thing, then came notions of tolerating, and, nay, supporting homosexuals, and that censorship might be a bad thing. Pretty soon, dare I say the words, he was voting Democratic, had joined the Sierra Club, renounced his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association, and was driving an electric car with a ‘Hillary in ‘08’ bumper sticker. Needless to say, after he had spent everything, there was a severe recession in the land brought on by a leftist administration who tried to do such wacky things like balancing the budget, and the young man found himself in need. So he jumped on the public dole until his benefits ran out because he was too proud to take a job that was beneath him for minimum wage. So after spending everything he had, pawning what he could, and maxing out his credit cards, he came to his senses, and he said, ‘How many of my father’s employees have a paycheck and some even have benefits.’ I will set out and go back to my father and say to him. ‘Father, I have eaten organic fruits and vegetables, signed a petition on behalf of Green Peace, and even watched Queer Eye For the Straight Guy a few times, and am no longer worthy of being called your son, but I noticed you have a position in your mail room.’ So he got up and went to his father. His father knowing a good deal when he saw one quickly hired him. Meanwhile, the older son was in his corporate office when his younger brother’s paperwork crossed his desk. The older brother became angry and did what any good angry brother does, he stuffs that rage into his heart and fired his worthless brother after his father died because he could hire a kid right out of high school to do the same job for half the pay. What is the moral of this parable? Getting revenge is a dish well worth waiting for!’”

Revenge and violence are as American as mom, apple pie, and television sets made in China, but seems in stark contradiction to a people who claim to follow a carpenter that mumbled something about how we should turn the other cheek. These two themes dominate our history, especially when it comes to our entertainment. Our action adventure movies are dominated by No-Necked He-Men who seek revenge and let the body count pile up. Korean director Park Chan-wook, who has a degree in philosophy from Sogang University, noticed these revenge-minded fantasies and decided to explore the darker side of the human psyche with a trilogy of vengeance films - Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy, and Lady Vengeance. All 3 films are almost spiritual meditations on the subject, a peek on what happens internally when one sets down that path. Although the characters in each film are different, they are ordinary people who think that they are doing the right thing to disastrous results. Park has stated that, “My films are stories of people who place the blame for their actions on others because they refuse to take on the blame themselves.” They are not feel-good films. Rather, dark tales of what is possible in even the best of us. In fact, I literally watched someone get sick to their stomach, not by what is on the screen, but by how the film makes you feel. The first film, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, tells two parallel stories. The first is the story of a deaf, young man, Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) who takes care of his sister (Ji-Eun Lim) who has kidney problems. When Ryu is fired for missing work due to his sister’s illness and a possible transplant on the horizon if he has the money, he must come up with means to achieve his goals. His former boss, Park Dong-jin (Kang-ho Song), who has always considered himself a kind and descent man, a great person to work for, is searching for the people who kidnapped his daughter. The Second film, Oldboy, tells the story of a businessman, Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi), who is kidnapped off the streets late one evening and held in a hotel room for 15 years. During that time, whoever his kidnapper is has killed his family. Dae-su, who cannot think of anything he has ever done wrong, is released one day without explanation. Who is this mysterious kidnapper and why has he targeted this ordinary businessman? (An English language remake starring Nicholas Cage is due out next year.) The Shakespearean/Greek tragedy themes continue in the final film, Lady Vengeance. A 19-year-old girl named Lee Geum-Ja (Lee Yeong-ae) who is sent to prison for 13 years for murder and the abduction of a 5-year-old boy, a crime she committed on behalf of an accomplice named Mr. Baek (Min-sik Choi). Once behind bars, she realizes that she is a patsy and has been betrayed. Locked away from the world, she methodically plans her revenge. Taking the idea of killing someone with kindness almost too literally, she becomes the model prisoner and slowly wins the friendship of those around her. Everyone begins to call her the "Kind Ms. Geum-Ja." Hell has no fury like a woman scorned and this is revenge from a female perspective. Once released, with the aid of her new friends, she sets out to even the score. Not nearly as violent as the first 2 films, the audience is slowly led by the hand to discover what her master plan is piece by piece. For Oldboy fans, this film is just as good and concludes one of the best non-English trilogies ever made. If this was a Hollywood film, audiences would be putting Lee Yeong-ae’s name along side Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The last couple of years I have been extremely disappointed with what Hollywood is pumping out. Nine out of ten times you feel like you have wasted your hard earned money, but we are currently in the golden age of Korean cinema. Films like Green Chair, A Tale of Two Sisters, My Beautiful Days, Il Mare, The Isle, Save the Green Planet, and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring are better than anything put out in this country.

I think Christians could learn a thing or two from this trilogy of films. Jesus talks about turning the other cheek. To most conservatives that sounds pretty wimpy, especially after 9/11. But turning the other cheek does not mean retreating into the corner and whimpering about how you belong to the slapped. It means taking control of the situation. Not becoming like the person who slapped you. We, in a sense, slapped back after 9/11 and somewhere in the process we changed. We started torturing people, kidnapped people off the street without due process, pushing around other countries, even invading a country that was no threat to us, and somewhere in our dance with the devil, we started to change. All the good will we had with the world disappeared until many nations began to think about us as bigger threat than the terrorists we are trying to defeat. If we would have kept our ideals as we prosecuted this war, shown our enemy that there is a better way, the American way, we wouldn't be in the fix we are now in.

Verdict: A Home Run