Sympathy for Lady Vengeance

Sympathy For Lady Vengeance

A Korean psychological thriller with heavy cultural and religious symbolic, Lady Vengeance (2005), sometimes called Sympathy For Lady Vengeance) is the last piece of Park Chan Wook’s ‘vengeance trilogy’, and possibly its most dissenting, following Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) and Oldboy (2003). It is the story of a woman’s suffering and thirst for revenge after spending over a decade in prison for a crime she did not commit, and after seeing her child taken away by the man who framed her. More stylistic, less engaging, easier to sit through, less accessible, the critiques are never ending and on both ends of the spectrum. We are dealing with a collection of fragments from the present, the past, and the many different characters that enter the protagonist’s life and plans. However, Lady Vengeance is more than a simple kidnapping thriller with a vengeful protagonist, and using Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek’s teachings and philosophies, we will analyse themes such as sacrifice, the event, the act, objet a, and suffering. What is the true meaning of the protagonist’s fight for redemption? And can atonement be found through sacrifice and revenge?

The first point we can make is regarding ethical significance of justice and tragedy, of this antihero that we cheer for. In a way, Geum-Ja Lee is quite the opposite of Badiou’s heroic figure and the notion of Good and Evil. Within Geum-Ja herself, there doesn’t seem to be good or evil, simply the actions she deems necessary to accomplish her goal. However, she still fits Badiou’s hero’s role in the way that she represents the greatest conflicts of human life, including betrayal, loss, justice, vengeance, reunion. Another matter is image and cinema as an art of identification; although Lady Vengeance uses heavy symbolic materials and imagery, like aforementioned, and therefore makes it difficult for the audience to identify with very stereotypical, blatant characters and flaws, there is still recognition of these in ourselves. In a similar way to the very clichéd personalities seen in Magnolia, or more commonly in superhero movies, the audience will always find a way to identify with parts of the characters, whether their good or bad side. In Geum-Ja Lee, the audience sees a broken and used young girl who has spent almost half of her life in prison, they see a mother who has lost everything including her own child, a woman who is looking for atonement for her wrongdoings.

And so to go on to our next point which is the events in Lady Vengeance, we have to look back to the event in general. What we know about the event is its role of displacement, how it affects people and places. We can think of people who are continuously displaced, the powerless, such as migrants, students, etc. In order to have an event, there has to be an intervention, something that will change the rules of the situation; the intervention says that the event has taken place. In Geum-Ja’s case, the first intervention would be her pregnancy and what it achieved: to displace her to Mr. Baek’s (antagonist) home and surroundings. This put her on the path to the second intervention: Won-Mo’s kidnapping and visit to the jjimjilbang, which displaced her to the prison where she spend the next 13 years of her life. These interventions made it possible for the events to exist, they changed the rules of the situation. Moreover, we can also observe events in regards to places. If we take the example of the abandoned school in the middle of nowhere, the intervention of Geum-Ja and the parents of the kidnapped children transformed the school into a slaughterhouse. An event that has a lot of importance and when she starts telling the truth about what truly happened to Won-Mo, which takes place after she has sex with the bakery worker, Geun-sik. This is believed to be the moment she starts letting go and forgiving herself, as she does not call herself Won-Mo’s murderer anymore.

Moving on to a very important trope of the film, sacrifice. We could start by mentioning Geum-Ja's sacrifice: spending thirteen years of her life in prison for a crime she did not commit; although she considered that she did not have a choice as her child's life was in danger. Even while she was serving her time in prison, she sacrificed everything for her revenge plan, and this is why: after Geum-Ja is released from prison, people she knew before and during her time there keep mentioning that she has changed, however, we quickly realise that she was simply acting like someone else during the entirety of her time there, as part of her plan. She sacrificed her body as well, giving away one of her kidneys for a promise of future help. However, the most significant and meaningful sacrifice has to be Mr. Baek's death; what she had longed for since she was arrested, what she had been working towards for almost half of her life, she gave it away to the parents of the murdered children. The protagonist fails to fulfill Lacan’s definition of heroism, as she cannot resist the temptation of the sacrifice. These sacrifices pose the existence of the Other. The Other does not truly exist, but the sacrifice(s) made by the subject, here Geum-Ja, conceal its non-existence, give it a meaning, make it exist. Following Lacan’s ideas and Zizek’s words: “no sacrifice can compensate for this lack of the Other” in Geum-Ja’s case, redemption. Lady Vengeance’s protagonist does not accomplish the suspension of the symbolic order as most of her acts are sacrifices.

This brings us to the notion of the act, the suspension of symbolic fiction. The symbolic universe caused Geum-Ja to do things that are inconsistent and not in line with the real. Zizek defines the act proper and authentic as a way to redefine oneself, not simply as a way to express one’s inner nature. This related

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