Term Paper on "Oldboy an Analysis of Chan-Wook Park"

Term Paper 10 pages (3330 words) Sources: 5

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Oldboy

An Analysis of Chan-Wook Park's Oldboy

Chan-wook Park's Oldboy (2003) is a South Korean film that is one part mystery and one part Greek tragedy. One might easily compare it to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, but doing so still leaves much to be said of the Asian tour-de-force of the heart. The subject matter is, of course, taboo -- but the taboo is not really revealed into the final moments of the film, and then it is pressed home with a hammer. But even it is not the real theme of the film -- neither is revenge -- and Oldboy is often quoted as a being a "revenge film." It is a film about revenge -- and the twist at the end which reveals just who is being revenged on whom actually delivers more than the satisfaction of vengeance: it delivers a near-paralyzing moral about gossip. In other words, Chan-wook Park crafts a film that appears to be many things at once -- or at least at intervals -- but in the final analysis Oldboy is a warning film more than anything else. This paper will analyze the different elements of Oldboy to show how effectively transitions from genre to genre and slowly peels back the layers of itself to reveal that at its core it is a simple morality play.

Time

The flashback/flashforward sequence is used to open the film and get the viewer up-to-speed on everything that he is needed to know in order to allow the film to proceed as a mystery. The use of time is then used again in the final revelatory portion of Oldboy in order to give the viewer even more information on the title character's past actions.

Chan-wook Park's Oldboy begins with a close-up of a fist clenched around a necktie. The head at the other end of the necktie is out of frame and, in fact, provides the perspective for the camera, which pans up to reveal the silhouette of a man, nearly eclipsing the shining sun overhead. This is Park's introductory shot and what it reveals is a dark, menacing figure whose identity is indiscernible -- unless shaggy hair and rage are characteristics that may be used to identify someone. The shot cuts to the menacing figure's perspective and we now see the man belonging to the necktie: he is clutching a white poodle to his chest and dangling (or, rather, it appears that he is being dangled) from the rooftop of a skyscraper. He seems to know no more about what is happening than we do -- and he demands to know the identity of the man holding him by the necktie, who has thus far only stated that he wants to tell his story. The silhouetted stranger now begins to stammer, and Park then flashes back in time to a much less mangier stranger as he drunkenly pronounces his name "Oh Dae-su" in a police station. Tissue paper is stuffed up one side of his nostril. His eyes are glazed. Obviously, some transformation has taken place -- and we assume that what we are now witnessing is the story that Oh Dae-su wants to tell.

Several jump cuts are used to illustrate the riotous and contentious nature of the man we are meeting now. At one moment he is sitting, pestering those next to him; the next minute he is up attempting to urinate in the corner; the next he is being collared by a couple of cops; the next he is attempting to joust with a coat hanger; then he is shouting obscenities drunkenly -- and so on. The scene is humorously and jarringly constructed with handheld camera work that is as off-balance as Oh Dae-su, who is continuously within the framework of the jump cuts. The mise-en-scene reveals a station room whose interior low-key lighting is a stark contrast to the exterior scene that preceded it. Judging from the blackness in the windows directly behind Oh Dae-su, it is night. The walls and costumes of the characters are a combination of brightness and drab, slightly depressed colors. At one point in his drunken spectacle, Oh Dae-su rips off his shirt and rolls on the floor topless. He is a man, we surmise, who has no control over himself -- and who will allow himself to play the fool. Yet twenty minutes into the narrative, this same Oh Dae-su, whose story (beginning with his disappearance on the night of his release from the police station) up till now has been re-capped, now states derisively (after a glance around at his surrounding from the skyscraper rooftop) that his captor was a fool for releasing him there. It is a moment of significance for two reasons: 1) it is the pot calling the kettle black, and 2) it foreshadows the greater mystery and ultimate revelation in the climax -- when Oh Dae-su learns the reason for both his captivity and his release. Till that moment he has remained in ignorance of both himself and the consequences of his actions. Park gives us this subtle reminder of Oh Dae-su's ignorance lest we forget (by his transformation) that he is the same ignorant fool depicted in the opening sequence 15 years earlier in the police station.

Throughout the film, time elapses at varying intervals: in an early fight sequence, the film is sped up momentarily in order to effect a sense of rapid movement. Towards the end of the film, when Oh Dae-su is given five days to find out why he has been released, time is marked by an automated calendar that rolls across the action as a means of supplying a sense of immediacy to Oh Dae-su's search for knowledge. Park plays with time at all moments in the film -- right up to the very end scene which takes place in a snowy forest at some point in the future. The sense is that time has disappeared following Oh Dae-su's self-inflicted punishment -- and like Oedipus who was accompanied by his daughter, Oh Dae-su (likewise accompanied by his daughter/lover) is freed from the memory of his incest and now exists on a different plane of being -- a plane of pure love where time has no place: the world is still, majestic -- and frozen like the landscape.

Narration

As James Berardinelli states, "Oldboy could be considered a mystery. Or a bloody revenge picture. Or a twisted romance. Or a tale of extreme karma." Narrowing it down as the narration unfolds is part of the fun -- but the one thing that holds the film together is its willingness to laugh at itself. Humor is the key to the film -- and it remains a factor throughout, until near the end, when Oh Dae-su's lovable friend (who bails him out of jail in the beginning) gets caught and murdered by Oh Dae-su's nemesis. Just as the fool disappears in Shakespeare's King Lear, leaving the rest of the drama without mirth -- the murder of Oh Dae-su's friend in the final denouement finally removes the glue of the narrative -- the humor -- and supplies the key to the lock of the narrative: the riddle of the picture is solved. Oldboy is not a comedy -- it is a story of accepted guilt.

Yet, when Berardinelli states that "Oldboy features a delightfully twisty story…told from Dae-su's point-of-view," he cuts to the narrative structure of the film -- which is indeed primarily set up as a mystery: Oh Dae-su is the man who has seemingly lost his identity and must work to understand why everything has happened to him and who is responsible. His journey is humorous, shocking, and violent at times -- but when we (like him) find out that he himself is responsible, the film reaches a level of narrative pathos that is unexpected. Sean Axmaker states that "the tough compassion and hard understanding of emotional impulses that start the dominoes tumbling are lost in the revenge opera overkill" -- but to say that anything is lost in Oldboy would be incorrect. The narrative never truly loses anything -- it simply peels back another layer of genre film to reveal an even older genre at its heart -- the Grecian tragedy and the necessity of love.

Indeed, Oldboy runs through several genres as it unburdens itself of its many layers. It spans crime/noir/mystery/martial arts/comedy/romance/action/revenge and horror before finally settling down with simple drama: the effects of gossip in adolescence come to revisit a man in his adulthood. As the film slips from genre to genre, Oh Dae-su's voice-over narration helps us to fill in the gaps that need filling: we hear his inner voice when no one else does. We experience what he experiences, first-hand -- compelling us to take the moral of the story even more to heart. At times the narration seems unreliable (as when in Oh Dae-su's madness during captivity he imagines himself crawling with ants) -- but these moments are at least recorded in… READ MORE

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