JSA: Joint Security Area

A note on the politics of this movie, since a lot of people view it as a sort of centrist, neutral (like the Swiss-Korean lady is supposed to be) story which doesn't take 'any side'. That only works if the political spectrum one sees is extremely narrow. The commenting on the futility and absurdity of borders is outside of liberalism and conservatism and authoritarianism, as those are utterly unimaginative ideologies. That's why the porousness of friendship and sexual & romantic attraction as depicted among those men is important thematically. Also, characters very correctly identify the problem here, and it's American imperialism and the neutrality of the countries who formed the NNSC (the Neutral Nations blabla Supervisory Commission), like Sweden and Switzerland :) That's not really apolitical! The movie actually has a lot to say politically (including re: gender roles and masculinity, for instance), but smartly, it's never a question of: are the capitalist puppets right or the commies? That would have severely undermined the themes of it all. Like, the only way this comments on the communist regime in NK is just by showing how certain items (the chocolate cookies, lol, bless you Song Kang-ho for *that* gem of a moment!, the porn magazine) are not available, but that's just because this is how capitalism deals with communist regimes, by blocking access. It's not really a moral judgment.

That's why the framing device with the investigation is vital to the story and the themes. It plays with expectations one might have from American movies (this, done by an American, would have ruined the balance of the quartet, by making one ideology - liberalism - seem better than the authoritarian communist regime, see so many fucking Cold War era movies about spies) and then proceeds to trample them. It makes you think the whodunit aspect is important with like, geopolitical consequences, but the whydunit is more important: and the why is that said geopolitics is absolute arbitrary bullshit.

There's also something interesting re: schismogenesis (I just have to be pretentious), aka the dynamic between two adjoined groups or cultures or tribes to change by defining themselves as opposites (as referenced in David Graeber and Davis Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything). Kind of makes you think how the two Koreas have changed so that they become *more different*. So that everything makes sense!

The movie is so complicated emotionally on that front. Obviously, the groups might appear to be different, but the individuals have no problem connecting with each other and being kind of the same. Humans and all that, smoking and making jokes and teaching each other how to shoe shine (I'm sorry, that was so sexually loaded, that scene, lol). After the tragedy, Oh and Lee, who have experienced such a great degree of intimacy and closeness, know that it is over and that it will never happen again, because of these insanely greater forces like borders and armies and the American empire keeping them apart, even if the physical distance between them is so absolutely small. The complexity of those moments when they see each other after, briefly, not allowed to be themselves with each other... The intimacy of pretending to strangle someone so that you save them from revealing their guilt??? The despair that Lee feels in his final scene, the guilt, and - this I might have projected or interpreted through my own lens - feeling the futility of living in a world like this, so constricted, that will tear him apart from someone he loves. Insanely beautiful on an emotional level. So fucking rich.

And then you have the most delightful scene of Lee's girlfriend talking to Swiss-Korean lady while matter-of-factly putting on what you see is some sort of a furry costume. My brain was imploding, waiting to see what the headpiece was. Just a phenomenal moment of levity, expertly directed.