Oh Dae-su and Oedipus: Tracing Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy

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Saptarshi Ghosh, UG 3, Roll: 19, History, Literature and Criticism Term Paper (6th Semester)

ABSTRACT: The paper attempts to perform a comparative study of two texts: Park Chan-wook’s 2003 film Oldboy and Sophocles’ tragedy Oedipus Rex. It seeks to trace the similarities and differences between the two, while analyzing certain broad issues that both texts deal with.

INTRODUCTION

After the commercial success of his film Joint Security Area (2000), South Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook embarked upon his Vengeance trilogy [Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005)], which is “imbued with excessive violence and gory images” 1. Oldboy (2002) is the second instalment in this trilogy, and it earned Park the Grand Prix award at Cannes in 2002. Loosely adapted from an eight-volume Japanese manga series of the same name by Tsuchiya Garon and Minegishi Nobuak, the film makes use of the narrative technique and stylistics of manga 2. The film is not an official adaptation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; in fact, Park Chan-wook only mentions Sophocles as one of the influences on his work. The differences between the two texts are stark and evident: one is a revenge drama full of violence and gore, while the other is one of the most studied and revered texts among the Greek tragedies. However, there are similarities between the two in terms of broad themes that occur in both the texts. This paper seeks to engage in a critical comparative study of these two texts. It tries to trace out the convergences as well as the departures by scrutinizing how these broad themes have been dealt with individually by Sophocles and Park Chan-wook. This paper is divided into four sections, each of which concerns itself with a major issue.

I. TRUTH AND REVENGE

The quest for knowledge and identity is a major theme in both Oedipus Rex and Oldboy. Both Oh Dae-su, the protagonist of Oldboy, and Oedipus are obdurately committed to the task of finding out the ‘truth’ behind their current predicament, and they go about it in a relentless manner. Oedipus, the King of Thebes, wants to find out the cause of the deadly plague that had brought about widespread death and destruction in his city. This soon turns into a quest for finding out the culprits who had murdered his predecessor Laius, in course of which, Oedipus ends up learning dark, disturbing secrets about himself. Oldboy begins with Dae-su being abducted while returning home on his daughter’s birthday. He is kept locked in a makeshift private prison, without human contact, for fifteen years. His only source of contact with the world outside is a television. As time passes, he finds out that his wife had been murdered and he had been framed as the culprit. Gradually, the isolation gets the better of him and Oh Dae-su gets psychologically paralyzed by “his Kafkaesque situation” 3. Oh Dae-su during his incarceration is constantly gnawed by such questions – Why was he being held imprisoned? Who was responsible for it? The extent to which his mind was occupied with such questions is well brought out in an incident that occurs a few months after he is imprisoned. In the scene, Oh Dae-su is shown to be gripping the feet of the prison functionary who had come to serve him food through a small trap door, so that he could not leave without hearing what he had to say. He begs and pleads the man to tell him why he was being held, and in return he promises that he would not ask them to release him: “I won’t ask you to let me go again. Just tell me why I’m here, please. I have a right to know why!” 4 He is plagued by his inexplicable imprisonment to such an extent that he is willing to forsake even his liberation at the cost of receiving answers to his burning questions.

Eventually he starts to train himself rigorously. He paints out a human target on the wall and practises combat by punching and kicking the human outline. He even starts to carve out a way for escape from the prison using a chopstick. But suddenly, after fifteen years of solitary confinement, in a manner as inexplicable as his abduction, Oh Dae-su is released. What follows is Oh Dae-su’s quest for finding answers. He is aided in this project by Mi-do, a young chef whom he meets in a Japanese restaurant he visits after being released. He takes up shelter in Mi-do’s house and they begin to share a fragile relationship, which kicks off with a sense of distrust, but soon turns into a romantic one. They end up making love, totally oblivious of the true nature of their relationship. Mi-do is actually his daughter and unbeknownst to the two of them, they had entered into an incestuous relationship. Ultimately the pieces of the puzzle fall into their places, and at the end Oh Dae-su is confronted with several unpleasant truths, like his Sophoclean counterpart. 

Oh Dae-su’s quest for ‘truth’ is also bound up by a fuming desire for vengeance against those responsible for his predicament. As he is shown punching the walls relentlessly with bleeding knuckles, Oh Dae-su’s voice over is heard: “Who had imprisoned me? Was it Yoo Heung-sam? Lee So-yeoung or Kang Chang-suk? Whoever it was, wait. Just you wait. I’ll rip your body limb from limb, and your remains will never be found. Because I will swallow every bit.” Interestingly, Oedipus too starts out as an avenger hoping to put an end to the bloodguilt that had lead to the pollution of the land: “You will see me as a true ally/ avenging this land and Phoebus Apollo.” (Lines 135 – 6) 5. However after Tiresias’ arrival, Oedipus’ project becomes solely devoted to joining the dots and finding out how Laius was killed, and subsequently, his true parentage. 

Oh Dae-su proves himself to be a deft and efficient avenger, and he follows a very logical strategy to find out the identity of his persecutor. First, he tries to locate the prison by hunting down the Chinese restaurant that had delivered the fried dumplings he had eaten for fifteen years. The only clue he has is the name of the restaurant: “Blue Dragon”. Oh Dae-su’s sheer dedication to his cause and the extent to which he could go to get to the bottom of the mystery get highlighted when he visits every Chinese restaurant in Seoul of that name; he visits each place, orders fried dumplings and eats them in order to check whether their taste matched to those he had had for fifteen years. After locating the prison, he interrogates the jailer for information and gets hold of a pack of audiotapes where he listens to the mysterious villain explain the reason for his imprisonment: “Oh Dae-Su speaks too much.”

This is followed by the famous corridor fight scene where Oh Dae-su singlehandedly takes on almost a dozen goons who man the prison. This scene, which is captured in a single shot, runs for almost four minutes and perfectly captures Oh Dae-su’s relentlessness in his quest for vengeance and answers. He gets fatigued, is beaten up, yet he still continues to get up and take down his opponents one by one with a hammer. In his staunch commitment to action, Oh Dae-su almost reminds us of Oedipus who himself is a man of swift and vigorous action. Oedipus too wastes no time in trying to find out the cause behind the plague that had hit Thebes. While conversing with the priest in the beginning of the play, he describes his agony and anxiety over the state of privation and wretchedness his city had sunk into: “Sleepless I pace and weep and my mind/ Wanders all the roads of thought/ In search of remedy” (Lines 66 – 68). Immediately later, we learn that he had already sent his brother-in-law, Creon, to consult the oracle of Apollo at Delphi: “The only

[remedy]

I found/was this: to send my kinsman Creon, / Menoeceus’ son, my wife Jocasta’s brother, / to the Pythia at the shrine of Phoebus Apollo, / to ask the god what I could do or say to save my city” (Lines 68 – 72). When the chorus suggests that he should consult Tiresias “who sees most like Phoebus”, Oedipus reveals that he had already sent messengers to fetch the blind seer. Later during his confrontation with Creon, he says: “I must be as quick. / Otherwise, he will act while I wait/ and all my aims miss their targets” (Lines 619 – 621).

Soon after his release, Oh Dae-su is contacted by his mysterious adversary for the first time via the cell phone which he had sent him along with a wallet full of notes. The man reveals that he was “a scholar studying Oh Dae-su” and taunts him by asking, “How is life in a bigger prison, Oh Dae-su?” During their brief conversation, he prompts our protagonist to think back on his life and poses an enigma by saying “Remember this: Be it a rock or a grain of sand, in water they sink all the same.” This conversation initiates a new trial for Oh Dae-Su, as he turns into a pawn in the villain’s sinister “game”, the rules and goals of which remain obscure.

A day after their first conversation on the phone, Oh Dae-su tracks down his adversary in an apartment overlooking Mi-do’s where Oh Dae-su had put up. He is shown to be a wealthy young man, flanked by a personal bodyguard, and apparently he had been keeping watch on Oh Dae-su and Mi-do. He challenges Oh Dae-su to seek out the answers that had plagued him for the past fifteen years: “It’s a game. First ‘who’? Then ‘why’?” When Oh Dae-su grips his throat and tries to slit it with a knife, the man, gasping for breath, chillingly says: “Wow, you’re strong, Mr. Monster. Yes, you are the monster I created. But you will never find out why if you carry on with this. You have been curious for fifteen years. Are you still going to kill me?” Oh Dae-su considers for a few seconds before letting go of him. But then as he is about to begin torturing his adversary by extracting his teeth with a hammer, the man grins and reveals that he had a remote-controlled pacemaker implanted inside his chest which he could immediately switch off if he wanted. If Oh Dae-su carried on with his torture, he would kill himself and Oh Dae-su would forever remain in the dark as to what had resulted in his predicament. The man clearly offers him a choice: “Revenge? Or truth?” Oh Dae-su lets him go, clearly choosing the latter option. Thus for Oh Dae-su, killing the man responsible for his insufferable misery does not constitute the entirety of his agenda. He needs to find out the answers that might explain his ontological condition. Finding out the truth is as important to him as exacting revenge. This is what makes Oh Dae-su a unique avenger – he is not the “monster” he thinks he is who would tear the person responsible for his pain and suffering limb to limb and devour the pieces. He exercises temperance and restrain and does not kill his enemy, because revenge is not what solely propels him in his journey. He is filled with burning questions as to who had destroyed his life and why would that person punish him so severely.

In the latter half of the film, we see the flip side of the coin when Oh Dae-su refuses to give up his quest for vengeance even after finding out the answers he had been desperately looking for. Mi-do tells him: “It’s over now. You were fighting for the truth and not for revenge, weren’t you? Now we’ll run away where he can never follow us.” But Oh Dae-su responds: “I can’t end it like this. Vengeance has become a part of me.” And he sets off to meet his adversary in a final face-off. Thus Oh Dae-su needs to find out answers and seek revenge, and not one at the cost of the other. This is a far cry from conventional revenge film narratives which solely deal with the wronged protagonist overcoming obstacles and seeking revenge. This is what makes Park Chan-wook’s film stand out among other revenge films.  An interesting dimension in this interaction between “truth” and “revenge” is brought out when the man tells Oh Dae-su in their first encounter: “If you succeed in finding out the answers, I’ll kill myself instead of Mi-do.” Therefore, revenge is offered as a reward for discovering the truth.

II. MEMORY AND RECONSTRUCTION OF PAST

Oh Dae-su’s adversary gives him five days to find out the answers, failing which he would kill Mi-do. In a race against time, Oh Dae-su hunts for the truth in a journey that takes him back to his past, where the key to explaining his current predicament lies.  In course of his investigation, Oh Dae-su learns that the person who had ordered his abduction was a high-school classmate of his named Lee Woo-jin. The film’s title is explained here for Lee Woo-jin and Oh Dae-su are “old boys” i.e. alumni of Sangnok (Evergreen) Catholic High School; hence the ex-students of this school were also known as the Evergreens. Terrence McSweeney feels that “for a film which is a meditation on memory and the impact of the past upon the present, the title is apt”6. Eventually, Dae-su recalls that he had spied on Lee Woo-jin having sex with his sister Lee Soo-ah in an empty classroom and had gossiped about it with a friend. However he had no clue that they were siblings, and had even warned his friend not to tell it to anyone. He had left school soon after to shift to Seoul and had no knowledge about the fact that the rumours of the siblings’ incestuous affair had spread like wildfire. Ultimately, Lee Soo-ah had committed suicide due to the rumours. The incident had been so trivial for Oh Dae-su that he had completely forgotten about it; yet its aftermath had shattered lives and had turned Lee Woo-jin into a vicious avenger, who had solely dedicated his life to orchestrating the perfect revenge against Oh Dae-su. It is thus revealed that the story is not about just Oh Dae-su’s revenge, but Lee Woo-jin’s as well. In fact, Oh Dae-su’s predicament – his imprisonment, suffering and everything that had propelled the narrative of the film so far, was part of Lee Woo-jin’s revenge for his beloved sister’s death. This imparts the film a Möbius strip structure, according to Eleftheria Thanouli 7. She writes: “Oldboy acquires thus a Möbius strip structure that assigns its protagonists doubly coded roles with shifting qualities and dimensions. Who is the perpetrator, who is the victim, which is the revenge, which is the punishment, who is in charge of the story, and who is finally vindicated are all questions that become ambiguous, as the positions of the hero and the antihero turn out to be doubly occupied by the two male protagonists.”

Memory and recollection of past events become important issues in this film. The final clue that completes Oh Dae-su’s investigation comes not from some document or a witness, but from his own memory, and the final act is what McSweeney calls an “active remembering process” undertaken by Oh Dae-su. After Oh Dae-su identifies his captor, what still remains unclear is the reason why Lee Woo-jin was so viciously committed to destroying Oh Dae-su. It is at this point that Oh Dae-su has to recollect forgotten memories and trace back to the moment of his original sin. The film showcases recollection as an “involuntary” act, in a Proustian sense. Oh Dae-su has no control over his past, or whether he wants to remember something or not. He is as powerless over his memories as he is over his life which was being governed by the rules of Lee Woo-jin. Oh Dae-su’s forgotten memories get triggered by the sight of the bare knees of a young girl who enters the parlour where he is trying to obtain some information and the ring of the bell above the door when it shuts.  Proust in the last volume of his novel series, Time Regained, distinguishes between two kinds of memory – “voluntary” and “involuntary”. Cretien van Campen describes the two in the following manner: “Voluntary memory is governed by the will of the individual and is goal-directed. […] By contrast, involuntary memory functions largely independent of personal will, breaking into consciousness unbidden and at unexpected moments” 8. For Proust, an image or even a smell could trigger “involuntary memories” and transport the person back to that original moment of experience. In Proust, the clear demarcation between past and present vanishes, as the ‘Sensuous Sign’ memory bridges the temporal gap between the two and allows one to relive the original experience with all its dynamism. This is what happens in Oldboy where the sight of the bare knees and the ring of the door bell immediately remind Oh Dae-su of the bell of the bicycle that Lee Woo-jin’s sister rode and her bare knees.

Oldboy does not use the conventional flashback in depicting this transaction between the past and the present.  Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, in his writings on cinema, described the flashback as “precisely a closed circuit that goes back from the present to the past, then brings us back to the present” 9. Flashbacks introduce an idea of time in which the demarcation between the past and the present is clear and sharply distinct. There is movement from the present to the past whereby memories are rendered onscreen, following which the narrative returns back to the present and continues forward. In Oldboy however, there is no clear demarcation between the present and the past; the temporal gap between the two often disappears, paving the way for old memories to flood into the present. The film casts the older Dae-su as a literal witness to the past events as they had occurred to him when he was a high-school teenager. According to Joseph Jeon, “the flashback scene in Oldboy […] acts as an instance of psychic time travel in which one anachronistically occupies the same time and space with a past or future version of oneself without the science-fictional conceits of actual time travel” 10. As the original event plays out in front of him, Oh Dae-su actively takes part in it. We see a young Oh Dae-su spy on Lee Woo-jin and his sister, as they have sex, through a broken window. The couple hear a noise, and they look at the window only to find an older Oh Dae-su in place of his younger self.

Reclaiming the past is fundamental to Sophocles’ tragedy as well. The play unfolds through a constant negotiation between the past and the present.  Unlike Oh Dae-su, in whose case “active remembering” of forgotten memories sheds light on his predicament, Oedipus has to rely on knowledge of future events, his memory and the accounts of the others. He recounts how he had done something in order to avoid doing something terrible that had been prophesised, only to realize later from the accounts of others that he had ended up fulfilling the dreadful prophecy. In this sense, third-person accounts of past events allow him to revise his memories; they make him realize how inadequate his knowledge was, and how utterly futile his actions were.

The longest ‘flashback’ in the play involves Jocasta recounting the terrible prophecy uttered by an oracle that had made Lauis order for the execution of his newborn child. She also revisits the alleged circumstances of Laius’ death at the hands of unknown bandits at Phocis. This triggers memories of a similar event in Oedipus whereby he recalls how he had killed a few men in a skirmish at a place similar to that described by Jocasta.  Subsequently, Oedipus informs Jocasta about the oracle’s prophecies regarding his future when he had visited Delphi in his youth. Thus, there is constant back-and-forth movement between the past and present which introduces two prophecies – one made to Oedipus by the Delphic oracle and the other made by an unknown prophet to Laius and Jocasta. Until this point, both Oedipus and Jocasta are safely lodged in their comfortable position of ignorance – they are still under the impression that their prophecies have not been fulfilled, since Oedipus’ true parentage was unknown to both of them. Oedipus gets more convinced about his innocence when the Corinthian messenger arrives with the news of Polybus’ death. The king had died a natural death and hence Oedipus could not have murdered him. However the first bombshell is dropped when the Corinthian messenger declares that Polybus was not his true father. By the time Oedipus sends for the Theban shepherd who had been assigned the responsibility of getting rid of Laius’ son, the impending doom had already begun to loom in the horizon. Jocasta pleads him to not pursue this line of inquiry (Lines 1060-1061) but he pays no heed to her – “You cannot stop me from learning the truth” (Line 1065). He subjects both the Corinthian messenger and the old shepherd to thorough questioning, and ultimately arrives at the truth. This shows how Oedipus has to constantly revise what he knows by piecing together the memories of others.  In the end, Oedipus “sees at last how the past has led to the present” like Oh Dae-su does, when the latter observes Lee Woo-jin and his sister making love a second time, while reliving his past memory 11. Oedipus’ and Oh Dae-su’s disturbing engagement with the past ultimately brings coherence to their lives in that it finally explains their ontological condition.

III. INCEST AND SELF-MUTILATION

In the climax of the film, Oh Dae-su confronts Lee Woo-jin in the latter’s luxurious penthouse, in a final showdown. As Oh Dae-su discloses what he had unearthed recently, confident that he was in control of the “game” they were playing, Lee Woo-jin’s revelations make him realize that he still was and always had been a puppet under his adversary’s control. Oh Dae-su learns that his meeting with Mi-do was a part of Lee Woo-jin’s larger plan: by use of “post-hypnotic suggestion”, Lee Woo-jin had manipulated both their unconscious to make them fall in love. Lee Woo-jin’s authority becomes all the more evident when he declares: “You’re gravest mistake wasn’t failing to find the right answer. If you keep asking the wrong questions, you’ll never find the right answer. It’s not, ’Why did Woo-jin imprison me?’ It’s, ‘Why did he release me?’ Once again, why did Woo-jin release Dae-su after fifteen years?” Thus Lee Woo-jin indicates that Oh Dae-su’s incarceration too was a part of his plan. This is followed by the scene of climactic revelation when Lee Woo-jin leads to Dae-su to a gift on a table, playfully using a laser pointer. Brimming with childish excitement, Wu-jin can barely contain his glee as he directs Dae-su to open the box wrapped in a purple package. Inside the box, Oh Dae-su finds a family album, which begins with a shot of him and his family before his abduction. The subsequent photographs feature his daughter and follow her growing from a baby to a teenager, and eventually a woman through the years. She is revealed to be none other than Mi-do, with whom Oh Dae-su is now in love and having a sexual relationship.  

Such a revelation can only lead to death and destruction, just like it does in Oedipus Rex. Oh Dae-su cuts off his tongue in order to punish himself, when Lee Woo-jin threatens to inform Mi-do that Oh Dae-su was her biological father. Kyung Hyun Kim notes that unlike any other “commercial film” which would “normally favour the victim”, in Oldboy, it is Lee Woo-jin who “ironically has the last laugh” in this encounter 12. He had managed to exact the perfect revenge by making Oh Dae-su commit the same act of transgression that he had himself committed. It was revenge that had given Woo-jin a purpose to live. Now that it was done, he had nothing left to live for. The film hints that his health had deteriorated after his sister’s death. He had had a heart transplant. Kim feels that it was Lee Woo-jin’s attempt to resuscitate his life artificially for “his heart had already died many years earlier”. It was also revenge that had kept him going all these years despite his failing health. During his first encounter with Oh Dae-su, he himself had sermonized him about the therapeutic powers of seeking vengeance: “Seeking revenge is the best cure for someone who has been hurt. [..] Revenge is good for your health”. But what happens after one has taken revenge? The answer is speculated by Lee Woo-jin himself later on in that same speech: “I bet that hidden pain probably emerges again.” And it does. As Lee Woo-jin steps into the elevator, he recollects his moment of trauma when his sister had committed suicide in front of his eyes, in a manner similar to Oh Dae-su’s recollection. Like Oh Dae-su, Woo-jin too gets transported back to his past, anachronistically occupying it simultaneously with his younger self. Reliving those traumatic memories, Lee Woo-jin realizes that it was impossible to alleviate his pain. Putting a gun to his head, he shoots himself. 

The film’s link with Oedipus Rex is borne out most explicitly in the episode concerning revelation of incest and Oh Dae-su’s subsequent self-mutilation. Park Chan-wook had said in an interview that he had deliberately named his protagonist Oh Dae-su “to remind the viewer of Oedipus” 13. Elsewhere too, Park had discussed his film’s very evident semblance with Sophocles’ tragedy:  “I didn’t particularly have Sophocles in mind when I was working on the script. But I couldn’t avoid the association when the idea of incest appeared. Then I gradually came to think of a way to insert a scene in the film that would parallel Oedipus poking his own eyes.” 14

Georges Devereux had argued that Oedipus’ self-blinding was more of an act of punishment for incest than parricide 15. However in case of Oh Dae-su, the self-mutilation is a punishment for “talking too much” and not for incest. It is Oh Dae-su’s blabbering tongue that had spread the rumours about the incestuous relationship between the siblings, and had led to Soo-ah’s death.  Evidently enough, Oh Dae-su’s tongue is the guilty member here which he himself punishes by chopping it off. However it is important to note that cutting out the tongue is the final act in the series of strategies deployed by Oh Dae-su to win over Lee Woo-jin when he reveals his intention of showing the fatal photo album to Mi-do. Sitting prostrate before his adversary, in a state of utter misery, Oh Dae-su first admits his guilt: “I have committed an unforgiveable sin against your sister. And I also did you wrong.” Immediately after this, in a radical change of temperament, Oh Dae-su flies into a state of vengeful wrath and lashes out at Woo-jin: “If by any chance Mi-do finds out the truth, you son of a bitch, I’ll tear you limb from limb. And your remains will never be found! Why? Because I’m going to swallow every last bit!” His anger almost immediately fizzles out and he apologizes for his rash words. He falls before Woo-jin’s feet and tries to evoke a sense of brotherhood and bonding between himself and his adversary by alluding to the fact that they used to be students of the same school. He even willingly sacrifices his personal freedom by declaring himself to be Lee Woo-jin’s pet dog. However, when none of these tactics work, Oh Dae-su picks up the scissor and chops off his tongue in a state of frenzy. On the other hand, Oedipus carries out the act of self-mutilation in a state of “madness” upon discovering Jocasta’s hanging body 16. It is a spontaneous act that he performs out of horror, shame, guilt, and not to prevent someone from doing something undesirable. In these final moments of the climactic sequence, Oh Dae-su willingly acquiesces for the first time to the position of a puppet under Lee Woo-jin’s control, which he was from the very beginning. He voluntarily foregoes his agency, and ends up punishing himself, thus staging the final act of Woo-jin’s elaborate act of vengeance himself. 

Devereux had emphatically argued that Oedipus’s self-blinding was an act of symbolic castration. In Oldboy, even though Oh Dae-su’s tongue was guilty of Soo-ah’s death and not incest, the tongue-phallus association does occur in the film. Park Chan-wook had revealed that his “original plan was for Oh Dae-su to cut off his own penis after he found out he had sex with his own daughter” 17. Therefore Park’s initial plan was to make Oh Dae-su mutilate the organ responsible for incest and not that which had ruined the lives of Woo-jin and Soo-ah. The tongue-phallus association occurs explicitly in the film when Lee Woo-jin recalls the catastrophic effects of Oh Dae-su’s callous blabbering. The rumours got to Soo-ah’s head and she started to think that she was pregnant. Her periods stopped, and apparently, her belly began to swell. “It wasn’t my dick that impregnated my sister. It was your tongue,” explains Lee Woo-jin. By incorporating this statement in the film, Park makes Oh Dae-su guilty of a sexual transgression (not incest, though), albeit in a symbolic sense. Therefore, Oh Dae-su’s slicing of the tongue too can be seen as an act of symbolic castration similar, though not identical, to that performed by Oedipus. 

IV. FATE AND FATHERS

Oedipus Rex has been interpreted as a supreme example of the ‘tragedy of fate’. Even before Oedipus was born, he was doomed to kill his father and marry his mother. And he ends up committing these acts unwittingly, despite trying his best to avoid them, which highlights the impotence of man’s will before the inflexible nature of fate. Both H. D. F. Kitto and Bernard Knox have built up their critical stances in opposition to this age-old interpretation. They both feel that Oedipus is an active agent who exercises free will. Kitto writes: “Sophocles still makes it entirely plausible that tragic victims can only bring their fates upon themselves because of the type of people that they are.”18 Knox opines that: “Oedipus did have one freedom: he was free to find out or not find out the truth. This was the element of Sophoclean sleight-of-hand that enabled him to make a drama out of the situation which the philosophers used as the classic demonstration of man’s subjection to fate.” 19 Kitto attributes Oedipus’s leaving Corinth to prevent the fulfilment of the prophecies, his slaying of the strangers at Phocis (including his father, Laius) and his stubborn persistence in uncovering the truth to be instances where Oedipus exercises his free will, and is not subject to external powers beyond his understanding. Knox cites two passages from the text which clearly highlight Oedipus’ wilful agency: “When the messenger comes from inside the palace to describe the catastrophe he uses words which emphasize the independence of this action: ‘terrible things, and none done blindly now, / all done with a will’ (1359–60). And as Oedipus, wearing a mask with blood running from the eye sockets, stumbles on stage, he makes the same distinction when the chorus asks him what power impelled him to attack his eyes: ‘Apollo, friends, Apollo— / he ordained my agonies—these, my pains on pains! / But the hand that struck my eyes was mine, / mine alone—no one else— / I did it all myself!’ (1467–71) These two passages suggest that in his decision to blind himself Oedipus is acting freely, that the intricate pattern of his destiny was complete when he knew the truth.”

However, Park Chan-wook’s film offers a bleaker insight into human existence since it snatches away the protagonist’s agency to shape his own destiny, although there is one exception which will be dealt with later. From the moment of his abduction at the beginning of the film, to the climactic face-off between the two adversaries in the end, Oh Dae-su’s actions are manoeuvred by Lee Woo-jin, either by use of hypnosis or by goading Oh Dae-su. The very quest of seeking vengeance and the truth that Oh Dae-su embarks upon after his release is revealed to be a farce in the end. It was all part of a larger “game” being played by Lee Woo-jin so that he could exact revenge on Oh Dae-su. Both Oh Dae-su and Mi-do were regularly subjected to hypnosis sessions even before they met, which ultimately made them fall in love and engage in a sexual relationship. Oh Dae-su races against time to hunt down the answers within five days, because Lee Woo-jin had threatened to kill Mi-do otherwise.  Every action he had performed prior to the final showdown was governed and controlled by Woo-jin. Oh Dae-su is almost always subjected to a force beyond his control which determines his action. The identity of this external force in the film is clear: it is Lee Woo-jin. Knox had written: “The voice of destiny in the play is the oracle of Apollo.” Therefore it can be said that Woo-jin is Park’s characterization of fate/oracle of Apollo in his film. I would like to build upon this characterization of fate in the form of Lee Woo-jin by borrowing elements from Peter Paik’s and Joseph Jeon’s readings of the film.

Jeon’s radical interpretation casts Oh Dae-su in the figurative role of an ordinary salary man working in a chaebŏl 20, whose life is bound by the authority of Lee Woo-jin, a representative of the quintessential owner of the chaebŏl .21 Peter Paik summarizes Jeon’s major argument in the following manner: “Joseph Jeon, in a detailed reading of the film, makes the case that Oldboy should be understood as an allegory for the fate of the salary men betrayed and cast adrift by the chaebŏl in the wake of the collapse of the South Korean economy and the bailout by the IMF in 1997. Workers for the chaebŏl had been promised lifetime employment by these conglomerates, which had extended their reach into almost every sphere of the South Korean economy. But as these corporations engaged in mass layoffs to restore themselves to profitability, they broke the core promise at the heart of the so-called Confucian capitalism, which was instrumental in the rise of South Korea from poverty and privation to affluence and prosperity: in exchange for their hard work and loyalty, the employees of the chaebŏl would be granted lifetime employment. […]Oldboy, Jeon contends, must be read as a narrative of the exploitation, betrayal, and oppression of middle class workers by callous corporate entities concerned only about profit, seeking their continued survival at the expense of those who labour for them.”22

Jeon points out that “when we see the drunken Dae-su in the police station, we see a typical salary man who has overindulged in a typical activity for his type: excessive drinking in an effort to relieve himself from the stress of corporate life”. On the other hand, Woo-jin, “the scion of a rich family”, “figures corporate authority”. In the film, it appears that Woo-jin had inherited his family business. He lives in a luxurious penthouse on the top storey of a high-rise, is followed by business advisers and has a personal bodyguard in his employment. Jeon posits that “Dae-su’s protracted labours at Woo-jin’s behest might be read as a cynical rejoinder to the promise of lifetime employment whose emptiness the IMF crisis confirmed to South Korean workers”. Although Oh Dae-su’s career as a salary man ends after his abduction, his life continues to be circumscribed by Lee Woo-jin’s authority; he continues to labour away – he follows a strict regimen of physical training, he tries to dig out a passage using a chopstick, he fills journal after journal with confessions of wrongdoings. After coming out of the prison, he sets out to look for answers in a determined and unremitting manner.

The episode from the film which remarkably brings out Oh Dae-su’s status as an employee toiling relentlessly under a capitalist system, according to Jeon, is the corridor fight scene. Jeon writes: “[In this scene] fighting feels more like physical labour and less like a battle of will, strength, or skill. Unlike the typically fast, dizzying choreography of Hollywood action films, this scene contains numerous pauses in the action during which Dae-su doubles over and gasps for air while his adversaries lie writhing on the ground before the fighting resumes. In one of the promotional interviews for the film’s release, Park Chan-wook mentions that the shot took two days and seventeen takes and that the scene exhausted Choe Min-sik, since, having no cuts, the scene had to be performed each time in its entirety. In a nation that often boasts the longest workweeks in the world, the fight scene emblematizes Dae-su’s salary-man disposition: motivated, focused and determined even in the face of long hours and exhaustion.”

Jeon also points out that shortly before slicing off his tongue, Oh Dae-su crawls to Lee Woo-jin’s feet, and calls him “Ŭrŭsin hoejangnim” which can be translated as “magnificent” or “awesome chairman”; but “hoejang” refers not just to any sort of boss, but specifically to the chief of a chaebŏl. The depth of subjection is brought out by the utter helplessness that characterizes Oh Dae-su’s actions at this point. Peter Paik, with reference to this sequence, writes: “The worker is once again crushed by the overwhelming might of the capitalist exploiter”. He goes on to declare that “Oldboy is the illustration of the all-pervasive and irresistible might of capitalism”.

I would like to take the readings put forward by Jeon and Paik one step further and argue that the role played by fate in Oedipus Rex is fulfilled by capitalism in Oldboy, mediated through the figure of Woo-jin. Lee Woo-jin, being the figure of “corporate authority”, is in a position that allows him to hatch such an elaborate plot to seek vengeance. It is his abundant wealth that enables him to imprison Oh Dae-su for fifteen years, and hire a hypnotist to manipulate both Oh Dae-su’s and Mi-do’s unconscious. He is able to buy off the prison manager and bring up Mi-do in Oh Dae-su’s absence due to the very same reason. Oh Dae-su struggles and fights to be at the helm of the wicked “game”, but ultimately realizes that it had been an unfair “game” from the very outset. The insidious external forces that constantly manipulate Oh Dae-su’s actions can therefore be traced back to Lee Woo-jin’s position of authority in a capitalist system. Thus Park Chan-wook supplants the role of fate in the play with the power wielded by capitalism, in his film set in contemporary times.  

Paik invokes Hegel’s dialectic of lordship and bondage and reads Oh Dae-su’s fight against Lee Woo-jin as an attempt on Oh Dae-su’s part to be equal to his capitalist master. He is seized by a burning passion ever since his days of imprisonment to take down the man responsible for destroying his life. He undergoes a radical transformation in the course of his imprisonment. The Oh Dae-su who got abducted on a rainy night was an unruly drunkard who was in the habit of flirting with married women; he is no more the same person when he emerges from the prison fifteen years later. The prolonged period of solitary confinement had accorded him “a transcendental, god-like status” 23. He now speaks mostly in voiceovers and can hardly be comprehended by others. Several characters throughout the film ask him, “Why do you speak that way?” After his release, he throws himself into the task of seeking vengeance with ferocity and single-minded determination.

What is interesting to note is that Oh Dae-su’s improvement is brought about by Lee Woo-jin himself, because he has been pulling the strings all the time. However, Paik points out, this equality that Oh Dae-su feels he has achieved is a trap. He writes: “[T]his hard-won equality […] proves to be the trap, as Dae-su has obtained it on the basis of incomplete knowledge. He does not realize that becoming an equal to Woo-jin entails tasting his enemy’s pleasures, if not quite grieving his enemy’s losses. Woo-jin’s plan, after all, has been to make Dae-su unknowingly commit incest with his daughter and then shatter him with the revelation of his act.” The equality that Oh Dae-su thought he had attained thus turns out to be an illusion and the sheer control of the capitalist master/fate over Oh Dae-su becomes evident by its shattering.

Woo-jin, the incarnation of fate/capitalism in the film, assumes another identity in course of his conversation with Oh Dae-su in the final climactic sequence. After the alarming disclosure that Oh Dae-su was Mi-do’s biological father, Lee Woo-jin reveals his identity as her symbolic father. Still reeling under the impact of the horrible revelation of incest, Oh Dae-su learns that Woo-jin had “secretly been raising Mi-do since she was three”. This becomes a cause for further anxiety in Oh Dae-su, as he gets implicitly cast in the role of an incompetent father. This characterization is in direct contrast to Lee Woo-jin who himself had been the capable, competent father ever since he had started taking care of Mi-do after Oh Dae-su’s abduction. However, this anxiety, I argue, gets resolved in the only moment in the film prior to Woo-jin’s death, when Oh Dae-su exercises his own free will. It occurs when Oh Dae-su chops off his tongue in a bid to protect Mi-do from knowing his true identity and the true nature of their relationship. It is at this moment, Oh Dae-su gets reinstated into the role of a capable father, by ousting Lee Woo-jin from that position. Oh Dae-su is able to do what Lee Woo-jin had failed to do – he is able to save his loved one. Unlike Woo-jin who had been unable to stop Soo-ah from committing suicide, Oh Dae-su manages to shield Mi-do from the truth, thereby preventing a further calamity. By cutting off his tongue, Oh Dae-su manages to satiate Woo-jin’s hunger for vengeance. He abandons his devious plans, satisfied with his victory. Leaving behind a broken Oh Dae-su, he enters the elevator, unconscious of the anxiety that had been triggered in him by Oh Dae-su’s success in protecting Mi-do. In the elevator he is transported to that fateful day when Soo-ah had committed suicide. He relives those traumatic memories which re-enact his incompetence in saving his sister. Unable to bear the pain anymore, he puts a bullet through his head. 

CONCLUSION

A detailed reading of Oldboy shows us how Park Chan-wook has added on the themes he has borrowed from the play. Oh Dae-su’s quest can be read as an allegory of the postmodern man’s struggle for survival in a world where insidious, invisible forces operate to curb him from exercising free will and sever him from memory and history. Park’s protagonist is shown to be resisting these forces from the very beginning. During his incarceration, Oh Dae-su tries hard not just to retain his sanity, but also his sense of history. He fills journal after journal with accounts of his life, confession of sins, and names of people who might have had a hand in his imprisonment. He fills these prison notebooks with his memories as this is the only way by which he can cling on to his identity in face of harrowing isolation. Kyung Hyun Kim has argued that after his release, Oh Dae-su emerges as a man “devoid of history” for he now occupies a position of “a-temporality”. I argue against this, for even after he is released he carries his prison journals. In fact he is shown to be clutching them close to his heart, when he wakes up to find himself in Mi-do’s apartment after their first meeting. He also tries to locate his daughter, but instead is confronted by the gaping hole in his history that no amount of journal writing could fill. Park shapes his Oedipus as an avenger seeking vengeance for what he has lost. But in the fatal moment of revelation, Oh Dae-su realizes that that the memories he had desperately tried to cling to, had been manipulated under Lee Woo-jin’s command. Grovelling at the feet of Woo-jin, Oh Dae-su understands that his antagonist/capitalist master had therefore successfully managed to rewrite the very history he had tried to protect.

Lee Woo-jin had often ironically exhorted Oh Dae-su to “free himself”: “Like a gazelle from the hands of a hunter, like a bird from the snare of a fowler, free yourself”. But Oldboy shows that such an escape into freedom is impossible because remaining trapped is the inevitable predicament of man in the postmodern age.

END NOTES:

  1. Jinhee Choi, South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 164.
  2. Kyung Hyun Kim, “‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu  in the Dumpling’: Reading Park Chan-wook’s ‘Unknowable’ Oldboy,” in Horror to the Extreme: Changing Boundaries in Asian Cinema, ed. Jinhee Choi and Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, 181 (Aberdeen, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2009).
  3. Terence McSweeney, “Memory as Cultural Battleground in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy,” in Millennial Cinema: Memory in Global Film, ed. Amresh Sinha and Terence McSweeney, 225 (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2011).
  4. Oldboy. DVD, dir. Park Chan-wook (2003; Seoul: dts ES, 2003).
  5. Sophocles, The Theban Plays, trans. Ruth Fainlight and Robert J. Littman (Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins University Press, 2009).
  6. McSweeney, “Memory as Cultural Background,” 229.
  7. Eleftheria Thanouli, “Looking for Access in Narrative Complexity: The New and the Old in Oldboy,” in Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema, ed. Warren Buckland, 221 (West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
  8. Cretien van Campen, The Proust Effect: The Senses as Doorways to Lost Memories, trans. Julian Ross (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2014).
  9. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).
  10. Joseph Jeon, “Residual Selves: Trauma and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 728.
  11. Jeon, “Residual Selves,” 730.
  12. Kim, “‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu’,” 186.
  13. Park Chan-wook, “Sympathy for the Old Boy,” interview by Choi Aryong, Ikonen Magazine, June 8, 2008, http://www.ikonenmagazin.de/interview/Park.htm.
  14. You-hui Lim and Soo-mee Park, Park Chan-wook: Savior of Violence (Seoul: Korean Film Council, 2006).
  15. Devereux, G. “The Self-Blinding of Oidipous in Sophokles: OidipousTyrannos.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 93 (1973): 36.
  16. Devereux, “The Self-Blinding of Oidipous,” 39.
  17. Lim and Soo-mee, Park Chan-wook.
  18. Sophocles, Antigone, Oedipus the King and Electra. 9. trans. H. D. F. Kitto (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2009).
  19. Bernard Knox, “Introduction to Oedipus the King,” in Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretation: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, ed. Harold Bloom, 89 (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2007).
  20. A chaebŏl is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a large, often family-owned, conglomerate in South Korea”
  21. Jeon, “Residual Selves,” 56 – 67
  22. Peter Paik, “The Master who Mistook Himself for A Monster: History As Artifice in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy” The Journal of Literature and Film (Spring 2013); 33.
  23. Kim, “‘Tell the Kitchen That There’s Too Much Buchu’,” 184.
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