The plot in the movie is far more complicated and exciting than my outline. I always feel that it is not a pure entertainment film, but a rather serious film. It discusses not only a murderous case that shocked a generation of Koreans, but also some deeper issues. In the movie I saw a series of profound oppositions.
From the perspective of the role setting, the fat police officer Park and the thin police officer Xu are a pair of stark contrasts. Fat and thin are already an opposition in appearance, and the two men's methods of handling cases and receiving people and things are completely opposite: the fat policeman has only studied in high school, and he has been in high school for 4 years, so he is very rude. When I first met Officer Xu, I mistakenly believed that he was a rapist, and beat him indiscriminately. Under the pressure of solving the case within a time limit, he determined that the idiot son of the rotisserie owner was the murderer. In order to convict him, he did not hesitate to forge the shoe prints at the scene. He also made the violence-loving Police Officer Cao beat and kick the idiot boy, and later took him to the mountain. Threatened to bury him. What is even more absurd is that when the case was in trouble, he followed his wife's words on the pillow, visited a goddess, and bought a few magic talismans. (This detail is not entirely fictitious. When investigating the case, it is said that the South Korean police also followed the advice of Mr. Feng Shui and moved the gate of the police station to a "good position" in order to change their luck and catch the murderer quickly. Did you use it?) In the case, the only reasoning he put forward based on the scene of the crime was: the prisoner at the scene did not leave ym when he committed the rape crime, then he must have no ym to stay, and the murderer must be a white tiger! So he soaked in the bath all day and night, soaking his skin cracked, trying to detect a white tiger man. There was a scene where he was soaking in a pool and suddenly his eyes lit up. He found such a person! As a result, the man approached, but he was a kid. In Officer Park, such black humor can be seen everywhere, but it dilutes the brutality and ignorance of this person's character, making people feel simple and cute. This is a very successful character.
As his antithesis, Officer Xu is a bit more facial. He is a university graduate and works in a big city like Seoul. He believes in the power of science and believes that data will not lie. He insisted on his own opinions, and didn't bother to interact with people like the fat police officer. Soon after he appeared, he successfully predicted the criminal pattern of the murderer through the weather forecast data and the law of the victims, and finally caught the suspect, but at a critical moment, the science he had always believed in betrayed him-science proves that the suspect is not the murderer. At this time, Officer Xu was already in madness. The appraisal report from the United States was thrown aside by him. It was crushed by the passing train. The suspect who had already escaped from crime wanted to leave. Officer Xu actually took out a pistol to lynch him. ! This ironic scene gave science a resounding slap in the face.
As mentioned above, the stark conflict and opposition between obscurity and science promotes the dramatic development of the entire movie. In addition, there are other less conspicuous oppositions in the movie. This movie claims to be the most used location in Korean movies at that time. We pay attention to the vast spaces in the film, wheat fields, vegetable borders, Korean-style cabins, barbecue shops, sanitary stations, marshes... The film has created a series of images of poor and traditional Korean villages, but one appeared at the end of the film. Heterogeneous scene-more than 10 years later, the home of the fat police officer Park who has become a salesman. His home is a typical affluent middle-class family scene, with wooden chairs, a dining table, and a family gathered around the dining table to have breakfast.
The content of this breakfast is also quite interesting, full of Western-style food such as juice, bread, milk, etc. This Western-style breakfast and the food that appeared in the previous movie also constitute a set of opposites. There are many eating scenes in this movie. In the role setting, the father of the idiot child is the restaurant owner. The camera has done close-ups of Korean barbecue on those iron plates more than once; in the scene where one of the victims waited for her husband to come home for dinner, the close-up showed steaming rice, kimchi, whole fish and other very ethnic groups. Special Korean dinner.
In most of the dining scenes in the previous movie, the characters were sitting on the ground in a traditional Korean style, and the camera was shot overhead. And in the breakfast scene at the end, the fat police officer’s family, like the perfect modern family in the advertisement, has a sunny restaurant. The family sits on wooden chairs and enjoys a meal based on bread and milk. Breakfast. At the same time, the film author chose an unusually unique angle to shoot. The camera was hidden to the lower left of the screen and shot upside down. This narrow angle is like a peeping eye—the ending time is running out, and it is impossible to unfold a broad social picture. The film author can only choose such a unique lens that can be expressed to express a "restricted view" of the modern society of South Korea, a society that has been westernized.
At this point we can briefly summarize some of the opposing items in the film.
Intuition-Science
Rune-Data
Violent Law Enforcement-Civilized Law Enforcement
Tradition-Modern
East-Western
Poverty-Prosperity
Barbecue-Juice Milk
In fact, there is a hidden opposition in the movie: despotism and democracy. If divided by time, the movie can be divided into two parts. In the epilogue, the scene of the fat police officer who has become a businessman eating breakfast is marked with subtitles to be in 2003, so the epilogue can be a separate paragraph, and the previous stories happened. At the end of the 80s. Such a division is meaningless to audiences outside of South Korea, but there is a subtext for Korean audiences: The scene in 2003 is the "post-democratic era" in South Korea. In the film, when the fat and thin police officers are busy with the rape case, it is when the democratization process in South Korea is in full swing. Before the end of the 1980s, South Korea had been under the rule of a military authoritarian government. In the 1950s, we killed millions of lives for North Korea, in exchange for a hereditary regime that was more peaceful in the north. However, the Rhee Seungman regime established in the south was not a good product. Rhee Seungman initiated political dictatorship and suppressed democracy. His successors followed the rule of the Republic of Korea, but Korean college students have the backbone and have never given up fighting. The riots occurred one after another, with the Gwangju Movement being the most intense in the 1980s. In 1988, when the serial rape case was most rampant, it was the crucial moment for South Korea to host the Olympics. In order to display a harmonious domestic image, the rulers had to compromise with the surging student movement, but once the floodgates were opened, the democratic process became impossible. In reverse, South Korea finally established a relatively complete democratic representative government in the 1990s.
The historical picture of the struggle against students in "Memories of Murder" also shows some examples, such as intercepting the president's car and taking to the streets to demonstrate. Among them, the dwarf policeman Cao who likes to kick people has performed the task of beating and rioting students. The outcome of this man is very intriguing-when he beat an innocent student, he was nailed to his right foot and contracted tetanus. Finally, he had to amputate his entire right foot. The next shot after he was amputated is the friend Fat Police Officer looking at the leather boots he left in the police station. There is a cloth bag on his right boot. In the past, Police Officer Cao liked to kick with his right foot covered with a cloth bag. People, so as not to leave trauma to the victim. To the retribution, he was amputated by the right leg which happened to be his best. Back then, I didn't understand this cruel detail, but now I want to understand it. This is a metaphor: the violent law enforcement of the South Korean police in the past was actually an inevitable product of the autocratic system. The democratization reform in the late 1980s gradually eliminated the autocratic regime in South Korea, and the violent law enforcement derived from it has no roots. ——It is vividly shown in the movie: Officer Cao’s criminal right leg was amputated, and he can no longer fight the people. The film does not directly express the progress and success of the democratic movement, but the Korean audience sitting in the theater will understand the significance of entering the bright and bright 2003 scene after experiencing the dark 80s images-democracy has been established and the people are rich. With social stability, the former fat police officer has become a successful middle-class man operating green appliances. This is the antithesis that the film has always used as the background: autocracy-democracy.
So, what exactly does this series of opposing projects show? In my opinion, these deep oppositions express the ambition of this movie. It is not just a movie that tries to sensationalize through the scars of a nation like the Great Tangshan Earthquake. It not only shows the barbaric ignorance under the Eastern autocratic tradition, but also shows the distrust of Western modernity with democratic rationality at its core. . The first half of the movie is a critique of autocracy and ignorance. There is a detail in the movie: Police Officer Xu has speculated through scientific reasoning that the murderer will order a song called "Sad Love Song" on the radio on a rainy night, and then go out to kill. That night the radio played the song again, and it started raining outside the window. The prosecutor immediately called the army and asked for an emergency garrison. However, the army replied that all their personnel had been sent to suppress the student demonstrations, and there was no one to take care of them. Officer Xu and they can only watch the crime happen—many victims do not have to die, but the authoritarian government is busy maintaining its reactionary rule, forgetting to protect its citizens. But from the second half of the time when Officer Xu was eager to solve the case and fell into madness, the film turned to criticize modernity. The most suspected suspect in the film is undoubtedly the real criminal. Although the film author did not give a clear explanation, the director admitted afterwards that the criminal in the crime scene in the film was played by the last suspect. This suspect, who was picked out by strict logical reasoning, was denied by a document from the United States, the representative country of the modern spirit. It is worth noting that in real incidents, there are indeed DNA control checks on suspect samples and on-site semen samples. However, the country that was sent for inspection was Japan, not the United States. This change by the film author is really intriguing. The United States has always been regarded as a modern country founded on the spirit of the French Enlightenment, advocating rationality, pursuing empirical science, and representing a democratic, powerful and civilized Western modernism. In the movie, the two fat and thin police officers also mentioned the image of the United States in a quarrel. The fat police officer said to the thin police officer: "Why don't you go to the United States? The FBI talks about science. But do you know why the United States talks about science? Big! What about our South Korea? The little ones are like my jb! Talk about Mao science?!" This person’s words are quite reasonable, and they are also the usual argument of those who defend the Eastern autocratic tradition: In this world, there are some places and some people. , Is not suitable for democracy by nature, "Westernization is Americanization"! .
But then South Korea finally embarked on the path of Americanization. While gaining democracy and prosperity, they also saw the dark side of modernization. From the first democratically elected president, Kim Young-sam, to Kim Dae-jung, to Roh Moo-hyun, each Everyone has had a black gold corruption scandal, and Roh Moo-hyun was forced to jump off the Owl Cliff by rumors. On the screen, the "U.S. Inspection Report" vividly shows the illusion and unreliability of modern science.
The ignorant and barbaric represented by the fat police officer is naturally rejected by modern people. However, the scientific democracy represented by the police officer Xu is also unreliable. So far, mankind has truly fallen into absolute isolation and helplessness. From this perspective, this is a masterpiece that expresses postmodern thinking.
Many people hate South Korea, and so am I. But I have to admit that there are many good movies in Korea. "Memories of Murder" is a very exciting Korean movie. The content of the film is not fabricated out of thin air, but directly based on the sensational serial rape and murder cases that occurred between 1986 and 1991. During the five-year crime cycle, the murderer killed 10 women intermittently, using the same technique: after subduing the victim, they put their underwear into their mouths, and tied their hands and feet with bra straps or stockings. , And finally strangled them to death with their handbag straps. It is particularly cruel that the murderer will torture the victim in a peculiar way-the victim’s vagina is often stuffed with strange things, one of the victims is stuffed with peach fragments (including sharp and hard peach pits), and one The murdered middle school student was stuffed with ballpoint pens and spoons she carried with her. In more than 10 murder cases, the oldest victim was 70 years old, and the youngest was a teenage middle school student, and there was only one survivor. In order to solve this case, South Korea used 300,000 police forces to invest in investigations and investigated more than 3,000 suspects, but until now, the murderer is still at large. The murderer's rampant crimes and the strong anti-reconnaissance capabilities are really incredible. "Memories of Murder" was released in 2003, and as of 2006, the last case that occurred in 1991 has passed the final prosecution period. In theory, even if the murderer is captured now, it is no longer possible to convict him.
Although the case is mind-blowing, the film wisely chose the angle of police detectives to show the incident. The story is about a serial rape and murder case in a small place near Seoul, South Korea. The main people responsible for this case are the fat policeman Park who believes in instinct to solve the case, and the fat policeman who loves violence and specializes in torture and interrogation. As you can imagine, these two useless police made a mess of things, many people were implicated by innocent people, and crimes continued to happen. So the Seoul police sent a thin police officer Xu. He was very different from the previous two. He believed in scientific searches and valued evidence. His mantra was: Numbers cannot lie. After this man came, the case had a huge turnaround, and after several setbacks, the suspect was finally captured. All the evidence in the film points to this white and handsome suspect. All the police have to do is to send samples of this person and the semen found on the corpse to the United States for testing, and then wait for the results, thinking that they can be brought to justice. . Unexpectedly, the conclusion from the United States showed that the suspect's samples did not match the evidence at the scene-science tells us that this extremely suspect person is not the murderer.
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