Monsters?

            
         During Park Chung-hee and Jun Doo-hwan’s military regime in the 1960’s through the late 1980’s, the North Koreans were depicted in movies as ‘red commies’ and ‘monsters.’ They were ruthless villains whom the South Koreans soldiers heroically fought against in order to save the country. Towards the end of the 1980’s when the film censorship was lifted, movies such as “Nambugun: North Korean Partisan in South Korea” by Jung Ji-young and “Tae-baek Mountains” by Im Kwon-taek were released, portraying the North Koreans as victims of war, just like the South Koreans. In 1998, president Kim Dae-jung announced the Sunshine Policy, in which the main aim was to soften North and South relationship by encouraging interaction and economic assistance. The movie “Shiri” was released in 1998, just in time as the Sunshine Policy began. If “Shiri” was released any time before, I don’t think it would have been such a major hit. The success of “Shiri” gave rise to movies such as “JSA” “Welcome to Dongmakgol” “Secret Reunion” and most recently “Secretly, Gently,” depicting the North Korean soldiers and secret agents as more humanistic than ever. The gradual change in the way films portray North Koreans, and the changes in the ways people perceive them can be seen throughout “Shiri”.

In the beginning, we see the upbringing of killing machines that brutally kill even their own people to get hands-on practice in killing. Their living conditions are inhumane and the way they were shown was enough to make me think of them as monsters without feelings, created to slaughter. However as I came to realize that Lee Bang-hee is Lee Myung-hyun, I sympathized for her. The fact that she doesn’t even have a proper identity, the dilemma she would have had to face every time she killed someone near Joong-won made me feel sorry for her and her situation. My sympathy heightened as Park Mu-young shouted in agony about the people in the North dying of hunger while the South were eating rotten cheese and hamburgers. He wasn’t killing on order just because he wanted to terrorize South Korea; he was doing it for his people just as Joong-won was trying to save the innocent citizens. Even up until this point, I still saw them as “North Koreans”, who were victims of war and tyranny. But when Bang-hee pulled her gun away from her fiancée and chose to shoot at the car driving by, the notion broke. She was no less humane than anyone, who couldn’t pull the trigger on someone she loves. She was not a “monster” or a “North Korean,” she was just a woman, a human being.