Bong Joon Ho’s film Memories of Murder is a detective about a small town where a horrible murder happens. The detectives of the town in which the murder takes place are Detective Park and Detective Cho and who are assigned the case are clearly not up to the job. A man named Detective Seo comes from Seoul to help him. The main comparison of the film is about modernity. I think Detective Seo represents the modernity of South Korea as he comes to help with the case using new methods and deciding that the murderer is a serial killer whereas Detectives Park/Cho use more old school ways and misses out on key evidence as he does not use proper methods of collecting it. In viewing the film in a more political context I think that Detectives Park/Cho represents North Korea and the use of violence that he uses to get information could demonstrate how the director sees the people of North Korea. Perhaps the fact that the ending is left open could be the idea that even when both modern and non-modern worlds collide the result is not always conclusive.
Question 1: The main plot of the film is trying to find out who is involved with killing the victims yet at the end of the film does not have a narrative conclusion. I was quite confused about this but after I read Jin Hee Choi’s reading he talks about how since the story was based on a real murder that was never solved he said “The anonymity makes the memories of the killings ‘collective’ rather than ‘individual’ {...} diverges from a Hollywood Crime/Detective films(150)”. Could this refer to Korea’s suffering and how it parallels that it is a collective and not an individually rooted suffering ?
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