The president's barber

In the movie, The President’s Barber, the main protagonist, Seung Han-Mo is a barber and owns a shop in Hyojadong where the Blue House is located. This movie also demonstrates April revolution in South Korea in 1960. The most interesting thing in this movie was the barber was considered as a doctor. In the beginning of the movie, when Han-Mo tries to go to the hospital with his pregnant wife, some protesters ask him to care about their injured people as a doctor. This scene was very funny and I thought that the director changed one’s way of thinking because I never thought that barber can be considered as a doctor even though they wear white gown. However, I felt like Han-Mo is doctor at the end of the movie because his son gets his walking ability back through all Han-Mo’s effort. According to the ascetic, in few years, one of the dragons will die and will hold a funeral in a car with chrysanthemum. He tells Han-Mo to dig that dragon’s eye and make medicine with dry chrysanthemum. Later, when the president dies, he actually makes that medicine and his son starts to walk. It seems like he overcomes his handicap because of his father’s medicine, but it is possible that “the compulsion to repeat which now replaces the impulsion to remember” (151) makes him to overcome. He seems like very optimistic and probably repeats his walking until he can walk.

          

Other interesting fact in this movie was that the demonstration of undeveloped Korea during 1960s. It was right after the Korean War and the Korea was developing rapidly. However, there were illegal election and many other corruptions during this period. In the movie, when the North Korean spies come down to South Korea and plan to kill the president of South Korea, many people are suspected. Han-Mo’s son also gets tortured even though his young and through this torture he loses his walking ability. I felt like Korean government seems like atrocious. I thought that South Korea were exactly the same as Japan when they colonized Korea because of their coercion and the power of authority.

The President's Barber

I’ve never watched Forrest Gump myself, so despite hearing the similarities, it’s hard to picture them. What I realized from The President’s Barber, however, was that Song Kang-ho’s character Han-mo definitely did not belong. Like in The Host, his character was a little simpleminded. When he was a regular barber he had a normal life, but had no status, reputation or whatsoever. However, when one day Han-mo somehow ended up as the president’s barber, it was not hard to tell that from that day onwards, his life would changed forever. He was able to travel to the United States with the president, just because he was the president's barber. People would ask him for favours, and he was highly respected amongst friends and family. However, with a reputation comes equal stress. He struggled to play by the rules of his new life, and his son was tortured along the way. The President seemed like a normal person, getting his beard shaved and his hair cut, just like every other man in this world, but when standing next to Han-mo, he was someone who had more power and reputation than anyone else in Korea. This contrast between Han-mo and the president is what made this movie so interesting, because it’s least expected. Don’t presidents have high-class designated specialists as their barbers? 

Nevertheless, in the end the president was assassinated and when Han-mo was asked to return to the presidential palace to become the barber of the new president, Han-mo refused. Maybe he thought that being the president’s barber one time was enough: yes, he gained reputation, but lost his dignity along the way. He was there when the government needed him, but where was the government when his son was taken and tortured?

Dear mr president

After a whole semester’s movie watching I feel really related, if not attracted to the actor Song Kang-ho. It is not to say, of course, that the characters he played really speak to me as a person, but more like they are genuinely the image I prefer, or always have for Korean men. Indeed, the other K pop stars are pretty, and they might be truly the epitome of Korean masculinity, but Song Kang-ho is real – personal opinion: He represents the majority of Korean (middle aged) men who couldn’t care less of international politics or body-building. Hard to speak of high moral principle, very domestically centralized, paternalistic in nature yet flexible when pressured, humorous, and generally speaking – not that good looking.

YMCA baseball team, the good the bad the weird, the host and the president’s barber – he is always this marginalized class pressured to perform his best and consequently and accidently save someone – without conscious higher mission in mind. Unlike, say, the Hollywood heroes.

Song Kang-ho and his characters resemble more of Mr Bean than Arnold Schwarzenegger, but without the former’s rigidness. Song has a spirit of mob – and an easily scattered one.

I guess in the end I would venture that very Korean man has a mob mentality, somewhere, somehow – probably too much speculation, I know.

So if Han-mo was going to write a letter to the president (which I doubt), unlike Pink’s provocative style, he probably would say: Dear Mr President, please just leave my family alone. We could move out of town if we are in your way – it was a pleasure to cut your hair. We will always carry a picture of you.

I was not too sure if this week’s reading was for this movie or, more like, paprika? Anyway, was totally carried away and disturbed by Freud's description of sexualized parent-children relationship and I wouldn't term it for this family for sure.

Han-mo's docility; transition to darkness

"The President's Barber" stars our everyman Song Kang Ho, this time as a barber who gains the trust of president Park--but of course, not without mistakes, roadblocks, and traumas.

One thing that struck me was Han-mo's lack of assertive emotion throughout most of the movie. As I reviewed the film to write my blog post, I noticed that nearly every frame I skipped to, Han-mo had the exact same face: expressionless and almost helpless. At first I attributed this to Han-mo's almost humorous mundaneness, but then it occurred to me that there may be more to this. Two things come to mind: perhaps Han-mo's almost docile nature allows him--and his story--to be more relatable for the viewer because we as viewers, like Han-mo, have no power in the film's plot. Secondly, perhaps Han-mo's lack of assertiveness almost allows his character to be a sort of experiment--taking someone who has almost no control/assertion, and putting him in an environment/under circumstances where he is highly controlled. It is only until Han-mo suffers the loss of his son that he begins to gain some emotional authority.

The transition from light and easy-to-watch film to heavy, helpless film is also a recurring theme in this class. This transition often has to do with the presence of the "Other." For instance, when Han-mo's barbershop friend becomes obsessed with American music and enlists in the army, his hopes are squandered when no one is interested in talking to him. Other moments of America in the film are portrayed in black-and-white film; here, the Other is cold, detached, etc.--characteristics of the latter halves of these films. What most obviously characterizes the latter half of the film is the disappearance of Han-mo's son, and his reappearance with a body mutilated from electric shock. Han-mo must spend the rest of the film dealing with the consequences of his son's broken body--the result of his time spent in some Other Limbo, which is never really explained or discussed in depth.

The Host: Source of Trauma

The film "The Host" stars Song Kang-ho, the loveable "every man" actor we have seen come up time and again in this class as well as last semester's. His character--easy to sympathize with due to his total normalness--allows us to imagine that we are in the space of the film almost every time, and it succeeds again in "The Host."

One theme in particular stands out: repeated traumas. This has directly to do with the Anisfield reading, which proposes the monster movie Godzilla as a working through of the nuclear disasters for Japanese people, while the same film acts as a source of guilt for American viewers. What sort of trauma does "The Host" represent--is it a single event from an outside source, or rather a deep and historical, internal societal issue?

Attempting to understand allegory in "The Host," we have to consider what the monster is and what he does. In "The Host" the monster itself is a product of a white man's clumsy laboratory management (to the dismay of his Korean lab partner)--here is perhaps a very obvious moment of blame in the film. Secondly, the monster evolves from a small mutated creature into its full horror. In this aspect, the monster is different than the story of Godzilla, in which the monster (supposedly) represents a single disaster. Thirdly, the monster in "The Host" lurks in the darkness of the water, but his "home" is in a man-made sewer in the depths of the man-made city. The incorporation of the monster into the human world--its reliance on humans both as a source of food and home--is striking (hence the title "host" can have more than one meaning--the fictitious disease as well as the monster hosting on the city). What does it mean for the monster--or, more metaphorically, the problem--to "need" humans to survive? Does this point to a societal issue rather than a single, isolated disaster/event?

The process of remembering in The President's Barber

Freud's article "Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through"explores hypnosis as a method of uncovering repressed memories of the patient: "in hypnotic treatments the process of remembering took a very simple form. The patient put himself back into an earlier situation, which he seemed never to confuse with the present one, and gave a mental account of the processes belonging to it" (148). The doctor is portrayed as a successful extractor of earlier reality, there to "fill in the gaps in memory" which may have been repressed.
Reading this article against The President's Barber seemed quite ironic to me, as this is a film that presents an account of national history through the seemingly oblivious eyes of commoner Han-mo. This film is not meant to be a documentary-like account of 1960s-70s South Korea, but instead disputes the authenticity of history by satirizing otherwise horrible and violent events such as the 4.19 student protest, with Han-mo's comic incompetence. The use of the tragi-comedy genre sets up history and memory at odds with each other, as the film is narrated by a retroactively-gazing Nak-han, and our access to politics is tinged with Han-mo's tribulations as the President's barber. The question here is what is the "right" way to remember history? Is it through the people who "make it happen," for example people in positions of authority, law-makers, governments...or through the eyes of the people who were decidedly apolitical, trying to make a living and raise a family, dealing with the mediocrity of everyday life when they happened to get roped into issues they might not really understand?
I think The President's Barber was an exploration of how Park's authoritarian regime affected the everyman, and how seemingly common people contribute to the formation and re-interpretation of collective memory. Han-mo starts off without much political opinion, happy to appease as many people as he can and not make a stir. However, when his son is tortured for being a suspect of the "Marxus disease," he shows the first sign of real outrage and anger at the regime, running out into the street yelling for justice for his son. In contrast with Freud's straight-forward "uncovering" of memory, The President's Barber is demonstrating that there is much more to it than that: it is a dynamic process of construal and modification that takes as many forms as there are narrators to tell their story.

Repetition in the President’s Barber

The President’s Barber follows the Park Chung Hee’s barber the years after Park’s reelection up until his assassination. The film specifically is following the movement to eradicate South Korea of North Korean spies, and the illness that the spies brought to the South.

I noticed a lot of repetition in this film, be it through the narrative, through camera movements, or through sounds. Sung Han Mo spoke the repetition that most people probably caught on to. He would say, ‘Yes, President’, often. I also noticed that there was a certain noise played during the rooftop scenes, when the men thought they saw North Korean spies. There was also a repetition in the narrative of the son hurting other children that he plays with in order to protect the reputation of his father.

This brings in a great way to include Professor Han’s lecture on Korean megachurches. Professor Han mentioned that church membership received exponential grown during the Park regime. I think that repetition is an action that reinforces a certain belief or understanding, and that in the case of megachurches, the repetition of going and growing reinforces the strength of the church, and how it is able to gain control of a certain percent of the population. The control is, of course, far less powerful than that of the Park regime, but it is a control nonetheless, especially with the privatized bus routes and now with the public transportation metro exit leading into a church.

Interestingly, there is that one humorous scene in which the President is trying to say Sung’s name but repeats it incorrectly every single time. What does it mean when repetition is used to signify something of importance (reputation, spies, or class) but the people of the highest class do not need to perform repetition correctly? If repetition is a form of remembering or associating, what does it mean when Park Chung Hee doesn’t have to remember, but the other citizens, and even the viewers do?