The President's Barber

On Friday afternoon, I was lucky enough to be able to attend Professor Ju Hui Judy Han’s talk on contentious religious politics in Seoul. I’ve taken a course here at McGill on East Asian religions, and during the course, we studied Korean Christianity. I found this topic extremely fascinating, so I was very much looking forward to this talk.  She began telling us about the spectacular growth of Korean Christianity in recent decades, and the spread of Protestantism in particular.  The institutional vitality, numerical proliferation, and territorial expansion–all which have been extremely impressive in Korea–is demonstrated by the sea of neon red crosses that dominate the night cityscape in Seoul. One of her main topics was about the rise of the megachurch in Korea.  If the criteria for a megachurch is a church with the capacity to hold 2,000 or more people, then in Seoul, there is a megachurch in every neighborhood.  If we’re talking about massive megachurches, holding tens or hundreds of thousands of people, Korea has many of those also.  Of the largest churches in the world, more than half of the list were located in Korea.  She also touched on the values of the churches. Chunghyeon Church, based off Norte Dame (which is odd for a Protestant church) has assets valued at $885 million USD, and land valued at $443 million USD. Its current membership is estimated at 13,000 people.  As a Protestant Christian myself, these numbers and values are extremely hard to fathom. My Presbyterian church in Washington, D.C. has maybe 150 people at each service. I won’t even attempt to guess at what its assets are valued, but I know it can be only a tiny fraction of Chunghyeon Church’s. I really enjoyed the rest of her talk, about some of the churches’ relationships with the LGBT community, the obnoxious street evangelism, the relationship between the trade labor union movement and churches, and the collective struggles in contested urban spaces (extreme forms of protesting, sacrifice, etc.). Seeing her so passionate about this subject is just one more reason why I want to travel to South Korea and learn about it myself. 

The President’s Barber, our last film screening of the year, showed the events in Korea over a few decades through the eyes of a man who was once a commoner, but who turned into a local celebrity. Although Seong Han-mo is the protagonist of the story, his son Nak-an is the voice the audience hears throughout the movie. As Professor Cho said, The President’s Barber can be compared to Forrest Gump in the sense that the audience is experiencing major events in Korean history through the lens of a normal citizen who ends up being thrown into the middle of the action. Han-mo is played by Song Kang-ho, who we’ve seen in a multiplicity of movies before The President’s Barber.  Song Kang-ho frequently seems to play the simple, easy-going, maybe a little bit oblivious character, and this time was no exception. Han-mo always seemed to be thrown into a situation, like when he was rigging an election, without even thinking about the potential consequences that could arise.  He just joins in with whoever he sees as an authority figure, not thinking about where this might land him.  Han-mo runs a barbershop in the neighborhood of the Blue House, where President Park Chung-hee began his reign. One of the President’s KCIA agents ends up stopping by Han-mo’s shop, and the next thing you know Han-mo is known as the President’s barber.  What struck me most about this movie was the way a president who came to power through a military coup and led a military regime was portrayed. Learning about him in history classes, there is a huge emphasis on the human rights abuses he committed, his corruption, and his strict authoritarian rule. However, when put in a harmless and non-political setting (like when he was getting his hair cut), you would see Park Chung-hee as a human. Of course, this doesn’t prove his innocence in questionable situations, but you did get to see that he often just seemed like a regular guy.