Butterflies, Yeo-il, the Traditional and the Post-human

Butterflies serve as a recurring and poignant theme in the 2005 film Welcome to Dongmakgol. We first see them as Smith, an American pilot, is about to crash into the mountains near the eponymous village; we see them later destroy invading soldiers’ parachutes, and then again at the end of the film as the North and South Korean soldiers die protecting Dongmakgol. In his article Welcome to Panmunjeom: Encounters with the north in contemporary South Korean cinema, Jake Bevan says that “these yellow butterflies […] are the spirits of the ancestors of Dongmakgol, protecting the town and doing all they can to shield it from the war” (53). This is certainly a legitimate reading; however, perhaps a more nuanced understanding is necessary.

Every time the butterflies appear in the film, they are accompanied by Yeo-il, a young female character who serves as the archetypal “crazy girl” and as comic relief. Yeo-il is also representative of traditional values and, along with the rest of the village, of peaceful innocence and naiveté. There are several points when Yeo-il appears to influence or communicate with the butterflies--in these sequences, we often see close-ups of Yeo-il waving or reaching into the sky, followed by butterflies flying after her hand upwards.

Yeo-il herself seems somehow more animal-like than human--she rarely talks, and instead expresses herself openly through facial expressions and physical movements. While her fellow villagers are unaware of modern inventions and history, they seem to understand some social conventions and non-verbal cues; Yeo-il, meanwhile, does not. Her communication and empathy with the butterflies, and her non-human behaviour, seem to suggest that Yeo-il is not only representative of communication with and understanding of traditional values--she also represents a link between the human and the animal that the soldiers, in their decidedly modern world of war and conflict, have lost.

Bevan suggests that Welcome to Dongmakgol, along with other contemporary Korean films, is an attempt to both define a distinctive South Korean culture and a unified, common Korean one. Within this framework, Yeo-il connects traditional Korean culture with post-modern, post-human sensibilities. This reading generates interesting questions about the nature of tradition within contemporary contexts, and should be examined more closely.