Uncertainty in a postwar reality

The themes of loneliness, despair, and hopelessness, which are embodied by all of the characters in Aimless Bullet, as well as by South Korea as a nation, are vividly represented in the film when Chol Ho sits silently pondering on top of a hill overlooking his city. After the shameful experience of witnessing his sister, Myong Sook, in the arms of an American soldier, he slowly trudges home only to find “home” to be as devastating as his sister’s actions of prostituting herself. While standing at the front door, Chol Ho hears his elderly mother say, “Let’s get out of here,” a line which she continuously repeats and which signifies the family’s—and nation’s—desperate situation: the family’s poverty and “life without a future,” as well as the “dismal reality of South Korea after the Korean War” (Cho, 99). Chol Ho illustrates his desire to escape these dismal circumstances when he hesitates at his front door before turning and walking away. In the next shot, however, he yawns as he hears and then looks up to see four military jets, the sounds of which terrify his mother; here we perceive that Chol Ho cannot in fact escape from the reality of postwar South Korea—it is all around him, continually bringing itself to his attention. When he then walks to the top of a hill from which he has a view of the city, the city itself looks grey and dilapidated and as hopeless as its war-torn residents. This image perfectly portrays the state of South Korea after the war, as well as the irony that the “victims of communism” who had fled (or been “liberated”) from North Korea have arrived in a much darker and uncertain world (Cho, 99).