The representations in the marines who never returned

It is rather interesting that in Diffirient’s article he mentions that the girl represents the “in between status of most civilians during the seesaw war… those who were put into compromised positions and force to take sides (39)” as well as one end of familial division. My knowledge on this topic is too limited to make efficient critiques – instead, I will just pose some questions that confuse me through the readings and the film.

At first I thought the girl was just a general representation of the familial connection lost/ambiguous to the marines – it might be a technical problem to show such affiliation of a group of macho men with

1.     a lover -distracting, easily falls into the melodrama kind;

2.     or an aging mother back home, which is rather banal during the fifties

Therefore, a close tie with an orphan is quite a smart manipulation – showing both the tender dynamic of the marines as well as the unpredictable future: what happed/will happen to the girl, one may ask?

But the problem – at least for me – is that the marines and Yong Hui are just too intimate, to a level of accumulating uncomfortable tension: more than enough touching!

So this bonding actually re-introduces the concept of “the compromised position of the civilian” – it seems that at surface Yong Hui accepts and accommodates the “family” with will and self-initiatives, but also it is a conditional compromise resulted from the enforced (by the particular war-time environment) warmth and human connections – she then at last takes a side, preferring the ROK. This is exactly what the film The Marines Who Never Returned is doing: change mentality by exercising soft psychological manipulation through media and emotional appeal.

There is a theory of citizenship being eroticized by the state – could the film be the cunning signal of that?

Anyway, he also talks about the gentrification, which to me is a bit of far stretching. If these two new comers are indeed intentionally characterized as “melodrama” and “comedy” then at least the other marines would have some genre representations as well so that it is systematically consistent?