Revenge, Korean Style

 I read PAYBACK: KOREAN REVENGE DRAMAS WILL DO IT FOR YOU yesterday. Today, I got thinking about one story that has been in my head for a long time and which I have never gotten past the opening premise. A long time ago, close to twenty-five years ago now, I ran into the children of an ex-girlfriend who were filing bankruptcy which they said was due to how their mother's best friend handled their mother's probate estate. I never saw them again, and I never verified the facts. Mostly I just felt terrible, but I did that about a lot of things. Only most of those things have not itched in my brain like this. Their mother was a kind, sweet-hearted woman murdered by a husband; the woman administering the estate was wholly different. Then while working, one thought jumped the rails onto another.

If there was one particular part of the Koran revenge article that caused the jump it is this one:

What keeps the audiences for contemporary Korean revenge dramas captivated, so unable to turn away, is that the dramas, and the characters in them, are always just a little unhinged. The unhinged, of course, is to be expected in the genre: driven to existential despair and desperation, driven by spite, avengers are not generally known for their stability and restraint. But what makes Korean revenge dramas distinct is that they offer the cathartic spectacle of unbridled fury, and then pull it back, whether through laughter or romance. Their characters are also remarkably consistent in seeing things through to the end, in going beyond retaliation to total destruction. For audiences, the release is achieved through purgative vengeance offset by visual and narrative pleasures. As Shin Hye-sun’s character in Mr. Queen smugly observes, while admiring her pre-battle makeover: revenge is best served flamboyantly, with glamour.

While watching these dramas, we are going to be taken to the edge time and again—witness to overwhelming shame, humiliation, betrayal, and violence—but then brought back by someone’s antic disposition or a hint of sexual tension between the leads. The character of Moon Dong-eun in The Glory, for example, seeks a kind of absolute revenge for her victimization: a punishment that annihilates rather than restores. “There will be no forgiveness,” she declares. The ancient law of retaliation, eye for an eye: “that sounds too fair to me.” The scales are balanced in a different way for viewers: horrific scenes of the young Dong-eun’s torture in high school, on the one hand, and the visuals of Song Hye-kyo and Jung Sung-il, on the other. Likewise, one of Dong-eun’s abusers is going to be buried alive in concrete, but only after he has delivered some of the drama’s best comic lines.

Or it may be here:

But there is something else happening in these dramas. It is not simply the tropological structure, black hat/white hat, that now facilitates viewer investments. Part of the appeal is that the genre’s common themes of class entitlement, predatory debt, school bullying, exploitation, and sexual assault embed and turn on, in the double sense, social commentary. But more broadly, revenge dramas are playing on, and playing out, a fantasy structure that takes a knife to the heart of all those whose crimes, big and small, have caused harm.

Just as the global zeitgeist turns toward the correction of historical wrongs, these dramas float idealized notions of belated punishment and vindication, of redress and repair, and of a playing field made level. These notions are of course themselves fantasy, as Park Yeon-jin, perhaps the greatest villain in our list of dramas, sneers to Dong-eun: “Why do the poor always believe in things like poetic justice or karma?” 

I do wonder how much it is different from English revenge plays. Time is obvious. Maybe not so much social commentary. My sense is that Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedies (of the Jacobean, I have read only The Dutchess of Malfi) focus on the futility of revenge more than do these Koran TV shows. I also suspect that is wrong. Is it not widely known that revenge may be immediately pleasurable and profitless in the long run.

sch 2/5