Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance Trilogy

Part of what I love about movies is living vicariously through their characters. This might at least partially explain my love of bad sci-fi films, since I can never hope be the world's leading expert on ancient Egyptian languages who translates hieroglyphics on some stones and opens a portal to another planet. It might also explain my love of certain children's movies and bad romantic comedies, since no one can stay so happy and naive for so long. Sometimes it's important to experience what the characters feel, as in Schindler's List or House of Sand and Fog, precisely because you will never - you hope - experience the horror and injustice the characters face.


But of all the emotions I relish experiencing through film, the one I might love most is vengeance. It's dirty, it's bad and it's not nearly as fulfilling as pardon and redemption, but it is entirely satisfying while it's happening and it is so far from my own experience that I can only experience it through film (or literature). When characters experience unthinkable tragedy, their quests for revenge are all-consuming, enveloping not only those they seek to punish but themselves as well. They become single-minded to the point of insanity, obliterating everything that stands in their way, inevitably leading to complete self-destruction.

For my money, no films have pursued the concept of vengeance as fully or as graphically as Park Chan-Wook's Vengeance trilogy, comprised of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. I started with Oldboy in November last year and ended with Lady Vengeance several weeks ago, watching character after character invite vengeance to destroy their lives. These movies are full of some of the most awful violence and some of the darkest humor I've ever seen, without exaggeration. (Is it funny when someone has just cut out his own tongue with a pair of scissors and then starts to sing a song? Maybe, maybe not...)


It's hard to see the problem with revenge when it's warranted, but the complication is in deciding who gets to make that call. In Park's trilogy, everyone does, from the evil to the innocent. So when one person does it you're cheering them on and when the other does you're horrified. This is the problem with vengeance: you can't make it universally okay because not every person will exact it for the right reasons and because it's really difficult to tell when you've gotten it. If your child is murdered, is it enough for the murderer to be murdered? If your kidney is stolen, is it enough to take the thief's kidney? What if he only has one?