In the movie "Mints", a man in a suit, swinging to the river into a group of people who are grilling meat, drinking and singing and partying, is recognized as Kim Young-ho, who turned out to be a party called by friends on the radio 20 years ago, he came to the river as promised, but his crazy behavior made everyone confused, and then he walked straight to the tracks and shouted: "I want to go back to the past!"
Behind the camera is the train speeding towards it. The time is 1999, which is the end of the story, the beginning of the movie.
The film consists of seven passages, and the flashbacks present the character of "Kim Young-ho" in different years to highlight his "change". In the last 1999 we see the crazy and irrational short-sighted, but in the first 1979 he was just meeting with the same group of people in the same place and falling in love with Ms. Yin Shunlin.
"The scenery is still the same, the personnel is no longer the same" can roughly express the sadness of this before and after comparison.
Chronologically, then at the beginning was in 1980, Yin Shunlin, who came to visit Kim Hao-young in the army, could not meet guests, because of the unknown "martial law", and therefore the urgent mobilization of the army, in the process of hastily packing up, the symbol of pure love between him and her: mint candy, which was crushed by soldiers in a hurry, which was a symbol, and placed at the end of the movie like revealing the mystery.
At this time, Jin Haoying was a timid young man, following the army to the city to sweep, but procrastination was simply not enough to have the appearance of a "soldier", even the citizens who wanted to arrest at night were inexplicably shot in the leg, crying and running while waiting for rescue, a female student told him that his home was just past the railway tracks and begging to pass, he still had humanity after losing blood, and asked the female student to go back quickly.
At this time, the army came, and Kim Ho-young shouted to go back while symbolically firing two shots, just to have the appearance of a "soldier". And it was this pretense that killed this female student by mistake, and the innocent death was like the crushing of fresh mints, and since then Kim Ho-young has also changed into a person.
In 1984, Kim Ho-young became a police officer, watching his seniors beat up prisoners and asking, "Do you want to try it?" He had no choice but to brutalize the prisoners with his scalp, and then to himself, and then to himself, and the purity would never exist again.
In the face of her visiting first love, Yoon Soon-rim, she bought a camera in 1979 with a meager salary accumulated in the factory pack mints, but he let her see his praised hands that were praised as kind, stroked the buttocks of the female clerk who had a crush on Kim Hao-young, and returned the camera to her on the train, ending in 1984.
In 1987, Kim Ho-young was already an old bird policeman who tortured or said that he was familiar with police violence, and the female clerk three years ago became his wife, but there was no affection between them, and after going out on a mission to stalk dissidents, Kim Ho-young met a bar woman, and the two became lonely dependents on each other, seemingly seducing women, but it was a word for the irretrievable first love: there was no need to meet, just think of her place, see the same mountain, the same sea, the same rain.
At this time, Jin Haoying was already a cold-blooded abuser, but the original self also returned to his soul from time to time, but he could only pour out on this kind of one-night stand, just like in the military and in the police, the patriarchal culture required "masculinity", Jin Haoying must be a "Kim Haoying", so he must erase himself, erase his innocent self, and obliterate his kind self.
In 1994, Jin Haoying, improper police and business, stock money companies also make money, his wife gave birth to children in addition to his own extramarital affairs with the company's small staff, but interesting is that his wife's cheating Jin Haoying was credited to catch monkeys, but he beat more not Xiao Wang but a spouse.
At home, the housewarming party cried at his wife and kicked the dog Kim Ho-young, at this time he compared to the end of the story lying at the door of his ex-wife's room and saying that he wanted to see his daughter and see the dog, and it could be found that Kim Ho-young had become an empty shell. When the personality moves from one side to the self-dissipation produced by the opposition, Jin Haoying's personality has completely evaporated.
Another scene near the end is that three days before the 1999 suicide day, Yoon Soon-lin's husband went to the broken house to find Kim Hao-young, told him that his wife wanted to see him, and handed the camera to him to say that he had only kept it on his behalf. But he still went to the hospital bed, crying out the innocence of mint love, one crying and leaving the scene, one unconscious and shedding tears.
If the narrative is pushed forward again and again, it will go to Kim Ho-young's adolescence, childhood and then toddlerhood, so we will return to a moment when an innocent baby was just born into this world, moral difficulties arise, if we follow the train of the movie retrograde with time to the past, how should we treat this baby?
He is Kim Ho-young, and this Kim Ho-young will also shoot (even if by mistake) innocent schoolgirls, suppress citizens, torture suspects, etc., although the law can only be examined in terms of the principle of "simultaneity", that is to say, Kim Hao-young in infancy is indeed as pure as skin, and can only judge this person when evil occurs.
However, the law is not comprehensive, and at the human level, Kim Ho-young in 1999 does have "identity" with the baby:
The argument of a party is necessarily that it has not been (not yet) involved in any crime and should not be punished in any way;
The argument on the other side must be that killing him avoids many evils.
So this leads us to the question of whether to kill a baby (or some other famous evil person).
The story presented in the film also makes us think about what is "sin" and do we really have the free will to do good and evil? Or is it that circumstances compel us to do so, so that any inference of attribution is nothing more than an arbitrary imposition of sin?
The former argument ignores other influencing factors outside the individual, while the latter argument negates the subjective initiative of man. The problem arises again at a point where reality must fall between the two parties, but this point is not fixed point, but drifting, and in the process of drifting, that is, in the attribution of each event, there will always be a lack of omissions, so it may be ignored that this environmental factor has a proportion of the influence on the formation of evil deeds, or in fact, the perpetrator has a higher ability to choose and space to prevent himself from being evil.
However, we are always uncertain about where we are, and yet we are living in this century and have to face such problems, and we can only accept that any decision made will inevitably face the cost of losing the other direction.
In particular, Kim Ho-young in the movie is in South Korea in the authoritarian era, from the culture of the police to the martial law mobilization of the military, to the usurpation and reaction, and the world bipolar system facing north Korea at a 38-degree line, and then extending to all parts of the world, we also find that not only in time, but also in space, we can not find a "main cause" that can be blamed.
Modernization makes people look at the past history or anthropology to find the traditional customs of tribes that have preserved ancient cultures, and seem to feel outdated, how prayer can be effective, how prayer can be cured, and even how fire can be the wrath of God. However, any of our actions to confirm the "causal relationship" is not too ancient for humans to blame the earthquake on the wrath of the mountain gods, and our execution of death row prisoners to practice any value belief is actually no different from sacrificing to the natives of the volcano.
When we think we are advanced and civilized, we are in fact still barbaric and primitive, and even this concept of reciprocity (without left and without right) is only the concept of later human creation.
"Mints" even metaphorically connects the personality identity of Kim Hao-young at different times by comparing the "pistol purchased by the last money" and the "camera purchased by the last money", just as the word "shoot" pointed out by Sontag in his book "Watching the Pain of Others" represents both shooting and photography in both Chinese and English.
That is to say, the whole action of determining reality with power includes the reality of capturing a specific fragment with a camera and giving meaning through subjective interpretation to make others accept it, and shooting a projectile at another human body with a pistol and pulling the objective reality into one less life, which is equivalent to the violence of the two.
From timid to cold-blooded, the "protagonist" shows the institutional problems through the personality transformation of the "protagonist".
Many Korean cultural works reflect on the persecution of people by the authoritarian system in the past, and often we see the people who are crushed by the state apparatus, but in fact, the system often oppresses not only those people, even those military and police who represent the country, but also become the oppressed party because of their existence as citizens.
As the patriarchal culture also demonstrated in the film, in fact, this masculine gender role impression has also become a shackle to the male individual, but usually this is the neglected part. Just as Kim Ho-young, as an authoritarian thug, everyone sees him as a pawn in suppressing the people's atrocities, but we ignore that he is also a victim of state violence.
This is not to say that Kim Ho-young is a microcosm of the perpetrators of the authoritarian era, because we cannot deny that some people are pure evil, but it should be noted that there are "victims of victims" like "Kim Hao-young" who struggle to survive. As a result, the work is frankly presented with crushed mints, giving us more room for sympathy and understanding, even if in reality we are difficult to blame, but at least we can have a little more room for reflection.