Masculinity in Peppermint Candy

In Peppermint Candy, the events of Yong-ho’s life leading up to his suicide in 1999 are told in reverse chronological order. The film ends in the autumn of 1979 when the mystery of Yong-ho’s suicide begins to unfold. Yong-ho is young and innocent and expresses deep feelings of affection for Yun Sun-im by giving her flowers and throwing her longing looks. As the story progresses to May, 1980, Sun-im visits him at his military camp but Yong-ho pretends that he doesn’t see or recognize her. With the scene of Yong-ho riding on the back of a truck filled with soldiers who are objectifying Sun-im, the film reveals that his love for her was never consummated and that his masculinity has suffered since then and has taken on the form of fear to speak up or to recognize the true events of the past—that Yong-ho was too scared to act on his feelings for Sun-im. From that moment on, memories of his past that are directly connected to his unconsummated love with Sun-im, such as her continuous visits which he quells, pieces of peppermint candy which she had given to him in the autumn of 1979, and the camera that Sun-im had saved up money to purchase as a gift for Yong-ho, have turned to what Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park calls “mnemic traces” in his essay “Peppermint Candy: The Will Not to Forget.” Mnemic traces are images of a past repressed scenario which return to the present again and again. According to Park, Yong-ho’s haunting past represents Korea’s repressed historical events of the Kwangju Massacre, police interrogation and torture in the 1980’s, and the consequences of the 1997 IMF crisis. Might Korea’s willingness to forget these horrific events mirror its repression of the nation’s masculinity crisis that we have witnessed in previous films including Aimless Bullet and Chilsu and Mansu? Perhaps the events leading up to Yong-ho’s suicide, such as the accidental shooting of a female student in 1980 and his service as a police detective, signify his battle with regaining masculinity and his suicide shows that he failed to achieve his unfulfilled wish. Park suggests that Korea can only truly move forward once it has willfully accepted its past, and perhaps the same is true for Yong-ho.