4 - “Do Not Include Me in Your ‘Us’” : Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference

Summary

Abstract

To understand the historical burdens borne by Korean society, it is argued that the trauma played out in Peppermint Candy (Bakasatang, 2000) is an endemically male trauma, and the gendered trauma of Korean society rather than “general” trauma. This gendered trauma, which is displayed under the pretence of “progressive” political historiography, renders women's traumas invisible and unpresentable in public discourse. The male-gendered trauma also blurs the classification of perpetrators and victims by making use of “homosocial” bonding as a platform for spectatorial identification. Considering the complex problematic of historical representation on film, both the critical positioning of historical materials as well as the modes of cinematic representation deployed is taken into consideration.

Keywords: gendered trauma, male self-serving masochism

The new, open Korean sociopolitical order has allowed a critique of the former military dictatorships that is unprecedented in Korean history. This essay examines how a film that launches such a critique, which is furthermore considered to be “progressive,” emulates, like a mirror image, the very patriarchal and totalitarian thinking it purports to refute. This is not only an attempt to revisit the issue of progress in the name of feminism, but also to offer a critical framework for understanding similar films by deconstructing what is recognized as a contemporary canonical text constructed on male self-serving masochism and narcissism.

The Cold War, Dictatorships, and Globalization, or Garibongdong, Gwangju, and Seoul

In this section, I examine how the Cold War and military dictatorships are represented as cinematic memories in Peppermint Candy (Bakasatang, Lee Chang-dong, 2000) and how that historical site of memory is reconfigured in the cinematic space. Peppermint Candy deals with the 20-year span from 1979 to 1999, and two historical incidents and their resultant traumas are taken up as the kernel of the film. The two incidents are the May 18 Gwangju Democratic Uprising and the IMF financial crisis of 1997. As far as the Gwangju Democratic Uprising is concerned, the following explanation has been presented as its origin: Given that the contradictions arising from the uneven growth of South Korean capitalism and the uneven power distribution among different regions during the period of dictatorship came to be felt even deeper at the regional level, Gwangju citizens’ political consciousness was heightened, and they made an all-out effort to resist the dictatorship.