Tragic Life of Yongho, who was once innocent

 To be honest, up until half-way through the movie, I did not understand the context of the movie, nor why the title of the movie was called Peppermint. When I finally understood the film was reversed chronologically to show the pure innocence that the protagonist originally had, I felt a rush of blood in my body as I realized how tragic and depressing Yongho’s life resulted in due to the society’s economic, political and social instability that caused his loss of innocence.

The “mnemic trace” that De certeau proposes, is the element of Yongho’s past that he attempts to erase from his memory but which continues to return in disguise( Magnan-Park, 163). Sunim as a character provides the symbolism of innocence brings back these “mnemic traces”, which Yongho refuses to accept, since they remind him of the horrible past experiences caused by society.  Yongho’s hand symbolizes the process of becoming contaminated and depraved as a person.  The scene where Yongho is a soldier who is extremely disturbed by the fact that he had accidentally killed a civilian and the scene where he is a "formidable police detective who has to partake in the torture of suspected civilians" seem to resemble each other. These two scenes parallel in that in both scenes yongho is touching blood and defecate in the latter, which symbolizes the loss of innocence due to the inevitable political circumstances that affected Yongho as he worked as a public service personnel.  Furthermore, in one of the scenes where Sunim visits Yongho and tells him that he has a generous looking hand, he touches Hongja’s body to show that he is not innocent anymore, and perhaps also to allow sunim to keep her innocence and distance herself from Yongho.  Thus, his refusal to engage with the past is almost absolute because it is a past that can only cause him grief (p165)The song “What should I do” best demonstrates the pain that Yongho went through for the twenty years that eventually caused him to commit suicide, as the song appears in both the beginning and the ending scene.