Memory as Melodrama or Noir: Remembering Modern Korean History in Peppermint Candy (2000) and Memories of Murder (2003)

Abstract

Traces of cultural pain left by colonialism, neo-colonialism, war and military dictatorship suffuse modern South Korean history. In particular, the 1980s was marked by the maximized intensity of both the people’s calls for democracy and of the military dictatorship’s suppressions. One incident that encapsulates the conflicts and tensions between the government and citizens is the Gwangju Uprising, a massacre that occurred in Gwangju in 1980, but has been repressed because of the military government’s insecurity. Since the late 1980s, however, Korean cultural products have depicted such cultural histories that were once disavowed and forgotten. Peppermint Candy (Changdong Lee, 1999) and Memories of Murder (Junho Bong, 2003) emerged from this cinematic endeavor to re-seize repressed pasts and reshape cultural memories. Like other cultural representations of the time, these films portray the political-social brutalities and corruptions of the 1980s. However, they take divergent generic paths: melodrama and film noir respectively. Here, both genres psychologically charge the screened cultural memories, yet in different modes, perhaps helping Korean society generate refreshed understandings about the dark period in the Korean modern time. Based on these observations, this project explores how these two films present the disavowed history of Korea under military rule, thereby contributing to the (re-)moulding of the collective memory of Korean modernization at the turn of the new millennium.