Default chose the wrong target for “Default”

In the term “scapegoat,” the “goat” refers to an animal. People would transfer their sins onto this animal and sacrifice it, then sprinkle its blood on the altar and believe they had been saved. In relation to God, sinful human beings could thus neatly overcome the past and move forward.

The problem arises when the search for a scapegoat takes place in human relationships. In that case, things do not end as cleanly as they do in one’s relationship with God. A voiceless goat cannot protest even if it dies unjustly, but when one human being makes another into a scapegoat, there are bound to be consequences.

The theater as the “front line” of scapegoat-hunting

Let us shift the focus to the present. In the 21st century, when religion has lost much of its power, films now serve as the “altar” for scapegoat-hunting. People want to watch villains meet miserable ends on screen. One advantage of film is that it is forgiven for distorting reality to some extent under the pretext of “entertainment.”

The scapegoats in films have something in common. They are usually characters who have lost all humanity. They are not merely somewhat bad villains; they appear as evil itself. Audiences build up their anger as they watch these demonic characters in action. And when the protagonist finally punishes them, viewers want them to be finished off as brutally and spectacularly as possible.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. There is nothing wrong with weary audiences taking pleasure in movies built on the idea that “bad guys die.” In fact, a society with many such moviegoers may even be a sign of social health.

Quentin Tarantino, the American director famous for Kill Bill, also built his reputation on this kind of cathartic scapegoat-hunting. In films like Django and Death Proof, Tarantino lets villains who seem too monstrous to exist in the real world run wild early on, only to dispose of them brutally at the end. The audience breaks into applause.

At first glance, Koreans too seem deeply absorbed in this cinematic search for scapegoats. But there is one major difference between the Korean style and Tarantino’s films. Tarantino makes sure to sacrifice the goat before the movie ends, so that audiences can leave the theater feeling lighter.

Characteristics of the Korean style of scapegoat-hunting

Korean films are different. Korean directors often sacrifice good people instead. In doing so, they intensify the audience’s stress and anger all the more. Then they ask, “This is what reality is like now—are you just going to put up with it?” At that point, it becomes unclear whether the film is propaganda or entertainment.

For example, Miracle in Cell No. 7 spun a “perfect lie” about the last execution carried out in Korea in December 1997 and drew more than 10 million viewers. Purely for the sake of entertainment and forced tears disguised as emotion, public authority—including the police—was portrayed as the exclusive domain of cold-blooded people with neither pity nor compassion.

At the end of 2018, Default was released and became popular. Here the problem is far more complicated. It stirs audience anger by blaming a handful of scapegoats for an economic crisis that cannot possibly be explained by any one variable. Boldly, the film attributes the IMF crisis—the greatest economic crisis in Korean history—to a few individuals.

If one goes only by the film, the Korean economy fell into crisis because a few incompetent and wicked officials, including the vice minister-level official at the Bureau of Public Finance (Jo Woo-jin), joined forces with large corporations pursuing only their own interests to form “MOFIA.” In particular, that vice minister character is a human embodiment of what some mistakenly take “neoliberalism” to be. Could such a person really exist?

Excessive simplification destroys any room for reflection and reduces us to foolish masses who do nothing but blame others. If you were outraged by the remark that “the people are nothing but dogs and pigs,” then you should be equally outraged by attempts like this that turn us into simplistic human beings.

Economic problems are not that simple

The film portrays things as though hating a few villains who never actually existed were enough for us to understand the economic crisis Korea went through in the late 1990s. It reduces the meaning of this enormous event to the level of a puppet show. We should recognize that to the extent we choose to watch a fictional film and imagine we have understood that time, instead of confronting real history, we become “simple-minded citizens.”

As for what alternative there was to going to the IMF (International Monetary Fund) at the time, even Kim Hye-soo’s character—the only righteous and intelligent figure in the film, who plays a Bank of Korea monetary policy Senior Researcher—cannot properly answer the question. All she eventually says is something generic along the lines of, “Even without the IMF, if we join forces we can create a better world.”

Moreover, the actual record shows that it was in fact the officials at the Ministry of Finance and Economy—portrayed as villains in the film—who tried as much as possible to delay going to the IMF. The person who actively argued for going to the IMF was the governor of the Bank of Korea. Another major flaw in the film is its conspiratorial interpretation of the presence of U.S. government officials at the negotiations, something that was entirely natural under the circumstances. One can detect an intention to stir up anti-American sentiment there.

None of us is a perfect human being, and yet someone must still make decisions—that is the basic reality of national policy and economics. To believe that there must have been some flawless choice amid the tangled and complex realities of the time is, in a sense, the product of the arrogance that believes “human beings can create heaven on earth.”

The filmmakers may have made the movie to flaunt their sense of justice, but in the end they only reveal a shallow view of human nature and a superficial understanding of history and economics. Default chose a subject too large for it to handle and, as a result, fell into a fatal misstep of its own making. It picked the wrong opponent.

Wonwoo Lee / Writer

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Original title: ‘국가부도의 날’은 상대를 잘못 골랐다

Author: Won-woo Lee

Date: 2018-12-12

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=15&idx=11291