Regressive Filmmaking in Lee Chang-dong’s Peppermint Candy
	Watching Lee Chang-dong’s film Peppermint Candy feels like playing a game—one
which you quickly realize is rigged, and not in your favor. The film’s skeleton is a series of chronologically regressing chapters centered on dates with immense historical significance in recent Korean history—yet each chapter focuses on a the narrative of Kim Yeong-ho—his various jobs, decisions, family, and his psychological state. While moving backwards through a linear narrative focused on one character, the film highlights certain critical moral and emotional moments in the Kim Yeong-ho’s life which are shocking or difficult to understand, then supplies psychologically satisfying explanations for his behavior in a series of restrained and calculated moves. This creates a reverse parallel “narrative” that is external to the “historical/fictional” reality of the narrative which, when imaginatively reconstructed in the memory of the viewer as chronologically progressive, is logically entropic. The external “narrative”, however, operates on a logic of crisis followed by understanding—loneliness followed by reunion—separation followed by rejoining.
	The external narrative, which is constructed before our eyes with manipulated footage
(the reversed shots from the back of the train), explanatory title cards, deliberately exaggerated repetitions of key objects and characters, and a sweeping, saccharine score, is never presented as anything other than fantasy. The ability to understand and heal, according to the logic of this film, is a function of artificial reconstruction, and does not occur in the “real” world.
	Like many Korean films, Peppermint Candy represents socio-historical situations—and
transposes opinions and conclusions about Korean history—in the context of a fictional structure, the artificiality of which is exaggerated or demonstrated explicitly through popular cinematic conventions. Peppermint Candy doesn’t play out the fantastical aspect of its temporal remapping in the reactions of the central character—as does Memento (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2000), a film with which it is often compared—but instead watches and records the behaviors of its central character with the objective pretense of a psychological case study. The effect for the viewer—who must always be tracking the two parallel narratives simultaneously—is one of entrapment: this is a case study that has been constructed to yield predetermined results. In this respect, the film bears a philosophical similarity to Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible (France, 2002).
	In relation to an “average” Korean audience—that is, an audience that enters with a pre-
existent knowledge of official historical representations, their own personal experiences, and oral histories of the events referenced in the film—Peppermint Candy becomes a problematic film. We must ask why the filmmaker—while exaggerating the fantastical nature of psychological resolutions through heavy-handed structural and stylistic interventions into the “realism” of the linear narrative, and while stressing a singular, traumatic reading of objective history through the rigid and precise symbolic linking of historical events to the destruction of a fictional character’s psyche—chooses to use a character-based narrative at all, when his concern seems to lie so transparently in commenting on the effects of social trauma on Korean society as a whole. Furthermore, why is the construction of fictional tortured male characters and dysfunctional families to symbolize social trauma a recurrent tactic in popular contemporary Korean cinema?
	In Peppermint Candy, the character of Kim Yeong-ho, like many other male anti-heroes
of contemporary Korean films, is presented as both tortured and torturer—ethically impossible conflations of victim and aggressor. Perhaps the experience of watching these filmmakers and actors—representatives of a new, different Korea—is not one of coming to socio-historical conclusions or even one of social catharsis, but rather a cinematic self-flagellation—a masochistic reflex of a cultural production/consumer system that has not moved past the resonant effects of massive, traumatic social change. The Korean film industry, as dependent upon the production and economic methods it adopted out of practical necessity as it is, is to some extent attempting to make films from new ideas in the forms of films it has already seen. The more virtuosic the formal reproduction, the more painful would be the recognition that these forms—imports and impositions of the same nature as any other economic or social structure—are as unsatisfying and ineffective as the ones they’ve left behind. In this light, the regressive point at the end of Peppermint Candy—which Kim Soyoung, in her essay about the film, calls a “totalitarian state ideology”[1] —is a subliminal reminder that unless conceptual and political ideas are accompanied by formal and technical innovation, the investigation of Korean history in film is doomed to repeat itself.
[1] Kim Soyoung. “Do Not Include Me in Your ‘Us’: Peppermint Candy and the Politics of Difference.” P. 82.