questioning my morale
Read at your own risk, content may contain spoilers for the film OLDBOY
i pretty much remember watching oldboy when i was a kid. i know, i know. "kid??", is what y'all are thinking. but, trust me, i don't remember the plot neither did i understand. so, i watched it again. this time, i felt like i actually understood the movie. the cinematography, the sound tracks, the story-line, just top notch. the way the story moved in the first-half and the way things connected with eachother and the story paced-up felt like listening to swan lake. so intense. i, at times, forgot to breathe. this entire movie reminds me of a line which i read in a book,
how can something so wrong, feel so right?
the whole movie is built on that contradiction and i didn't clock it until i sat down to write this out.
my sister, who is in her early teen and my friend were watching it along with me, and it was both of their first time watching this movie. my sister being herself, slept half-way through the movie. my friend and i were so hooked-up in the plot.
i am someone who is very comfortable in watching and reading incestuous stories, so i didn't have any cultural shock moment, but what rather shocked me was the way the antagonist being so narcissitic and adamant that he wouldn't take accountability for what he did!!!!!!! he was anything but a normal human.
and it really was my first time seeing a protagonist so weak, so helpess, so pathetic, with very low self-esteem.
for context, the villain abducted the hero and put him in a room with single television for 15 YEARS. and he also murderded hero's wife and framed the hero for it. all this goes way back into time, when they were teens, hero encountered the villain and his biological sister being intimate in school's top floor room, and told it to his friend and asked him not to tell anyone but he did exactly the opposite and the rumor spread like a wildfire that the villain's sister killed herself. and her last words were,
i do not have any regrets for what we had, i love you with all my heart.
(*the above image shows the antagonist with his sister)
when the hero was released he falls in love with this young girl, poor him only gets to know that its his own daughter towards the end, after being intimate with her.
such a heart-wrenching situation the hero had to face. all of this was well planned by the villain himself. in the climax, the hero literally cuts his tongue off, begging the villain not to let his daughter ever find out.
(*the above image shows us the hero begging the villain)
later the villain shoots himself after all this catastrope.
(*the above image shows us the villain)
towards the end of the movie, hero does something which we all might have never even imagined him doing it, but he chooses to erase his memory and continue to live with the girl as her lover.
(*the above image shows us the daughter and the hero)
the villain before dying tells the hero,
atleast my sister and i know that we loved eachother, would you do the same?
the most depressing thing is, the way the hero begs the villain: licking his shoes, barking for him, wagging his "tail", so cruel that the villain enjoyed all of this.
personally, why i felt my morale being questioned is that, i couldn't feel bad for hero choosing the role of lover over father. the whole philosophy of hero being split into 2 personalities: the monster, dae-su. where the monster leaves with the bad memories, and dae-su lives with the good memories. it doesn't seem right, but doesn't seem wrong either. it is so grey. in the note that he writes to the hypnotist, he doesn't justify it rather places one simple question,
even though I'm no better than a beast... don't i have the right to live?
where we can already see that he thinks so bad of himself though the fault was not his at all. but what is left is that a new life waiting ahead.
we can also notice that at the end hero struggles a smile, but fights something from the inside, this is speculated online that he never really forgets the incident and is going to live with it forever.
overall the movie was emotionally and psychologically wrecking. i still don't know if it's the most cowardly thing he could've done or the only mercy either of them had left. i think that's the question the whole film wants you to sit with, and i still don't have an answer.