전성현: 읺어버린 일기장

한국어 유창을 위해서 다시 쉬운 아동 책을 읽기로 했는데 몇권의 뒷커버를 읽었다가 ㅈㅐ미있는 내용을 찾았다.  커버에서 "일기자에 몰래 찾아든 다섯 아이의 비밀스런 고백과 소통"이라는 말에 Bronx Masquerade이란 미국 책이 떠올랐다.  사실 전술한 책과 비슷한 점이 많았지만 놀라운 점 하나 있었다.  그는 꽤 야한 내용이 있는 점이다.  정말 아동 책인가 하는 생각이 들 정도 말이다.  초경, 몽종 등을 언급하는 미국 아동 책을 본 적이 없는데 한국에 이러한 주제를 솔직히 다루는 책이 있는 사실 다행이다.  또 다른 한국의 쟁점을 독단적이지 않게 다룬다: 이혼, 가난, 사생, 다 아동들이 이해할 수 있는 식으로 대해서 한국 아들이 읽을 보람이 있다.

Stendahl: The Red and the Black

Not only does this book come highly recommended by Ward's Lifetime of Reading (a schedule that, with this book, takes me into its 8th year), but it also was consistently urged on me by my literature professor turned friend C.K. Pellow.  If I had approached this book with no more expectation than I had brought to Flaubert, I might have been pleasantly surprised.  Weighed down, though, as I was with such a buildup, I found myself more than a little dissapointed. 


Stendahl's language is marvelous, and there are enough epigrammatic little moments to thoroughly justify the reading, my favorite of which is:


"Mind-made love is of course subtler than true love, but its moments of enthusiasm are limited: it understands itself too well; it is always evaluating, passing judgement" (341).


Perhaps it is for this reason that I found the book beneath my expectations.  Amour de tete, as Stendahl puts it, is all I've ever experienced in my life.  Perhaps the love story held in these pages is beyond my understanding, and people really do behave in these utterly unfathomable ways.  Perhaps Stendahl has painted a masterfully honest picture of something that I cannot grasp.  Whatever the cause, however, I found the characters to be inconsistent, the plot unneccesarily delicate, and the book in general to be thematically unexceptional.  It is not a complement when I say that I think it would make a fine movie.

The Best Years of our Lives and 하녀 (The Housemaid)

As I work my way down the list of the AFI's list of American films, it comes to my notice that the Korean Film Institute has developed a similar list.  Might it prove amusing to view items from the two lists side by side?  Having done so purely by accident this first time, I find an interesting contrast, one that might bear comparison.

The American film in question is that rarest of creatures, an entirely original work that has not been duplicated, and has no predecessor.  In very nearly every way--tone, technique, execution--it resembles other films from its period.  But the role that it was created to fill is quite singular, one that has since been filled largely by documentary films, not scripted ones.  At the end of the great war, America experienced something that was not entirely alien, the return of large numbers of men who found themselves and their country other than as they remembered.  Each of the three men whose return and readjustment director William Wyler chronicles need to remember what it is to love, and each does so in his own way.  For Fredric March, this means loving a wife (stunningly portrayed by Myrna Loy) who is not exactly the woman he left behind, and children who are children no longer.  The ostensible protagonist of the film, Dana Andrews, must find love in the more Hollywood sense, and his story taken individually is basically indistinguishable from a generic romance.  The most difficult love, that of oneself, must be found by Harold Russell.  It is this role that takes the movie to another level, filled necessarily and without flourish by real life amputee Harold Russell.  Taken individually, each story would serve for a pretty decent movie.  Seen simultaneously, they transform the movie from one America wanted, to one it needed. 

As destabilizing as WWII was for America, the Korean War was unfathomably more so for Korea.  Imagine that the Civil War had not only been lost, but that the North and South remained in that conflict for over 50 years.  As South Korea moved through--not to say recovered from--this period, Director Kim Kiyoung (notably born in the North) took a wildly different approach to filmmaking than Wyler had.  There is no talk of love.  No talk of recovery.  No mention even of the war, which might make the parallel rather forced in some eyes.  But the very fact that these themes, so craved in America at the time of her recovery, are not even considered in this film, which tops all lists of the best Korean films ever made, makes the contrast that much more remarkable.  What Korea needed after the armistice was not healing.  Such a thing was impossible.  The country would never recover, and to even dream of it would be to surrender to despair.  What it needed was to muddle through somehow with the horrors that were now reality.  And that is the idea of the film.  Man is not noble and redemmable, as in The Best Years.  He is a savage, of whom the best we can hope is that he be controlled.  As is observed in a jarringly didactic final scene,

--그게 남자의 약점이야. 높은 산을 보면 올라가고 싶구, 깊은 물을 보면 돌을 던지고 싶구, 여자를 보면 원시로 돌아가고 싶어

--원시가 뭐예요, 솔직히 남자란 야비한 동물이라고 하세요. 이 집에 젊은 하녀를 둔것이 아마, 범의 입에 날고긴가부다.

 

For Kim, in a way that Wyler could not have conceived, man cannot see a mountain without climbing it, a lake without throwing a stone into it, or a woman without wanting to have his way with her.  And women fare little better in the film.  The title character is, of course, a beast of pure desire, but the seemingly innocent wife is just as lustful--for wealth and status.  It is this lesson that Kim wished to impart to the post war audiences of Korea, interestingly with no admonition to overcome it.  Simply a darkly frank admission that it was inescapable.