From a Blue Umbrella to a Single Spark to a Burning Red Flame

Two visual motifs that stood out to me in A Single Spark were the recurring images of a blue umbrella and a lighter’s spark, which later quickly grows into a blazing red flame.

We see the blue umbrella twice in the movie, the first time being when a younger Tae-Il is out in the rain trying to make money by selling blue umbrellas, and we see him rejected and disrespected by an older woman who throws the umbrella he tries to sell her to the ground. We see the blue umbrella again when Yong-Su is out in the rain and observes a young boy selling them. When Yong-Su purchases one from the boy to give to a police officer, the police officer only pushes the boy away. In both cases where the blue umbrella is observed, the carrier is disrespected and portrayed as dysfunctional in his society.

We see the single spark when Tae-Il lights his lighter, fully resolved to sacrifice himself for his people’s cause. And this small spark quickly spreads into a burning red flame. And when we see this bright red flame, we see a tenacity and bravery from the carrier of the red flame that will not be put out by anyone else.

In “Post-Trauma and Historical Remembrance in A Single Spark and A Petal,“ Kim Kyung Hyun explains that “Park helped lead Korean cinema out of the 1980s, when quasi-pornographic films and melodramas featuring dysfunctional males proliferated. With A Single Spark, Park further recuperated young masculine men who were confident, rational, and expedient” (Hyun 110). Could this transition of motifs from blueness into redness be an illustration of this very movement from dysfunctional masculinity to confident strength of the men of Korea? Is this the purpose of these two colors being used so conspicuously in the film, i.e., to represent Tae-Il's transition into confident masculinity? 

In addition, while trying to figure out the meaning of the combined use of these two colors, red and blue, I remembered that those are two of the colors on the Korean flag!

A quick Wikipedia search taught me that “the Taegeuk represents the origin of all things in the universe, holding the two principles of yin and yang in perfect balance—the former being the negative aspect rendered in blue, and the latter as the positive aspect rendered in red” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_South_Korea) .  If this is true, then it puts an even deeper meaning to the usage of the two colors in the movie. Since the Korean flag presents red as positive and blue as negative, does this not correlate to the film’s respective utilization of both colors with its blue umbrellas and blazing red flames to illustrate the functionality of men?