Through the Lens of Crushed Artistic Desire

      Symbolism is an immensely prominent feature in the movie Peppermint Candy. The symbolism of trains, peppermint candy and mirrors become important on multiple levels. Although all these symbols are vastly represented and easily spotted in the movie, it is the symbolism of the camera Sun-Nim attempts to gift Yong-Ho with which was of most interest to me.From my interpretation the symbolism of the camera transcends many layers of potential meaning and importance to the movie as well as relevance to the depicted society of the time. However, in his article “Peppermint Candy: The Will not to Forget” Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park seems to limit the camera's symbolic importance to that of the rejected past “[...] since it is an apparatus designed to capture a moment of the present in order to establish its reality of the past for the future” and seeing as Yong-Ho repeatedly rejects the gifted camera (165).

      I originally had taken my interpretation of the symbolic camera deeper and compared the scene where Yong-Ho shares his dream of being a photographer with Sun-Nim to the scene when Yong-Ho pawns the camera and destroys the film in a fit of rage. I had originally believed that the comparison of these two scenes illustrated the camera as symbolic of how the Korean society has evolved to value money over art and consequently value the economical prosperity of the nation over individual happiness and wellbeing. The camera being one of the few, if not the only, symbol of artistic expression is painstakingly sacrificed by Yong-Ho, who has been molded by society into a being who can longer produce art or see the potential artistic beauty in the world. Can Yong-Ho's abandonment of the camera be accurately interpreted if disregarding the important link to Sun-Nim? Does Yong-Ho give hints of having realized the impossibility of becoming artistic in the society?

 

Source Cited:

Aaron Han Joon Magnan-Park. "Peppermint Candy: The Will not to Forget," in New Korean Cinema, ed. Julian Stringer and Chi-Yun Shin. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005. 159- 169.