Memories and history

When I watched the movie, I just couldn’t help relating it to Peppermint Candy. Perhaps, it’s detective Jo’s violent act reminds me of Yongho’s transmission from an innocent youth to a mentally ill suicidal person. Similarly, these two movies both play with time and show how people have changed within the time. In Peppermint Candy, the individual events Yongho has been through can be seen as the historical events that happened in South Korea society. Thus, audiences relate their own experiences with Yongho’s life trajectory and revisit South Korean contemporary history through flashbacks. While in the Memories of Murder, people identify themselves not with any particular characters, but with the overall social context that the story structures upon. The shanty houses, the ongoing safety drills, the unease student demonstrations, the disguise of authoritarians, the blue or black uniforms, the night shift, and so on. The setting recalls the collective national memory of the 1980s, a period when people were asked by the government to sacrifice their own individual interest for the sake of fast growth national economy. However the economic miracle did not necessarily benefit the people. In the scene when detective Jo enters the house of second suspect to collect evident, the camera first captures the family pictures and then it’s followed by a cut to a shot from high angle showing the internal decoration of the house. The coughing wife lies on the bed, and her two children play on the same bed regardless the fact that she needs rest. This portrait of the dysfunctional family might remind many audiences of their childhood. According to Chang, she pinpoints the causality of these hazardous consequences is the compressed modernity which has made the drastic economic growth in South Korea. If the process of modernization is supposed to bring revolutionary transition to every aspects of the society, how can this strategy of labor-exploitation be legitimized in a democratic country like South Korea? It reminds me of one of the Chinese policies that was prevalence in the 1980s, it provokes the inner regions to support the coastal regions to let them get rich first, and the inner regions will be brought along and through this process which will ultimately result in the common prosperity of the entire population. The similarity of these two policies exists in the exclusion of a group of people in the distribution of economic achievement. Overall, it’s an awesome movie since it not only does a good job in conveying a mysterious and breathtaking story, but also empowers its setting to tell history.