The 48th Parallel: An Ocean Apart

 

The movie Shiri left me feeling uneasy about the  divide between North and South Korea. This movie, in my opinion, did an awfully good job at demonizing North Koreans. The only “humane” moment we observe of the North Koreans appears when General Park Mu-Yong verbalizes the disgust he feels when seeing the over consumption and abundance of food in South Korean when just North of the 48^th parallel countless are dying of desperation and starvation. These thought provoking words are undermined in the rest of the movie by the North Korean agent's characterization and terrorist acts. 

What shocked me more than the representation of the North Koreans was the importance given to certain symbols over others in the movie, which ultimately reflects the director's perspective. As Kim Kyung Hyun states in her article the unborn child of the North Korean Lee Bang Hee and the South Korean agent Yu Jong-Won "crucially embodied the reconciliatory spirit between the North and the South” (261). This symbol of the reconciliation was hardly present in the movie as it was mentioned, almost in passing, at the very end of the movie after Hee's death. Had the possible reconciliation between the North and the South been of importance to the director the symbol of the unborn child would have been much more present than the symbol of the ocean, which was omnipresent through the frequent representations of fish, fish tanks, water and the ocean. 

 In the South Korean context the ocean is a very important resource as it provides much of the nation's food and livelihood. It also seems to me that the ocean can be symbolic of the South's self sufficiency and national independence. With this said, is the omnipresent symbolism of the ocean, compared to the once mentioned symbol of the unborn child, the director's attempt to illustrate that South Korea is self sufficient and has nothing to gain from reconciliation with the North? How is it symbolic that fish were used by Hee to infiltrate the South's secret services? In the final seconds of the movie the camera slowly pans out to the vast ocean, could this be symbolic of the growing gap between the North and the South?

Source Cited:

Kyung-hyun Kim, “’Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves’: Transgressive Agents, National Security, and Blockbuster Aesthetics in Shiri and Joint Security Area” The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, 259-276.