Epitaph and Modernity

January 13. 2014

Class this week was the first time I had really given the word “modern” any critical thought.  Before attending class and reading Reddy’s excerpt on the word, I had defined modern as a word describing anything of the present day and not of the distant past.  I also never thought of it was an offensive or perverse word.  However, Reddy makes the point that modern no longer merely meant “of today,” but came to have a connotation associated with quality, as if modern meant better.  As Reddy puts it, modern is not necessarily synonymous with but is certainly related to “terms such as ‘progress,’ ‘development,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘society,’ and ‘civilization’” (page 2). The past, anything not modern, was associated with backwardness and outdatedness.  This leads to the perversity (a word which, after using it in class, I think is very apt at describing modernity) of colonialism.  It is fact that the colonizers of any country or place honestly believed that they their mission was charitable, that it was their moral responsibility to modernize, which in their minds probably meant something closer to fix, the lesser individuals of a less progressive, modern society.  

When Professor Cho asked us to jot down our personal definitions of or associations with the word “modern,” it got me to think about the modernization theory I have studied in various political science classes.  As one of our peers stated, in some sense to modernize means to erase.  The modernization theory, while no longer a major theory in the discourse of political science, basically claims that any underdeveloped society must replace their pre-modern or backwards traditions with more modern ones seen in first world countries in order to develop.  This theory claims that development into a freer and wealthier country is not possible with the existence of tradition.   

We also screened the film Epitaph on Thursday evening.  The movie begins with a black and white, antiquated film clip of a graphic, bloody, brain surgery.  Although we all knew it was a horror movie, we were quickly thrown straight into the horror.  I also noticed the colors of the film were very neutral, and each scene was either very bright, like when they are working in the morgue and everything is a blinding white or a shiny silver, or very dark.  When a color would catch my eye, it was almost always the color red; a piece of clothing, a blood stain, a painting.  These color schemes definitely intensified the grim and gruesome setting and subsequently the terror I experienced.  Most of the movie takes place during the colonization of Korea by the Japanese.  The loss and pain each separate story reflects the feelings of the occupied country, a country losing its culture and individuality.