3
4
1
Ditch the victim consciousness and own the narrative
This is going to be a very personal review about a drama that I both enjoyed and needed to dive into and explain to myself. I love Park Hae Young’s work, it always leaves a long tail. Weeks, months, years after watching them I am still thinking, wtf was that drama about. And each time you revisit the memory of it, you come out with something new. A lot of things in this drama resonated with me as I have had to go through the process of remaking the narrative. So this time, I want to unpack a few thoughts about it immediately after finishing it.
The opening is typical. The characters irritate you, and you wonder if you can make it out of first base. Then the last scene of the first episode just opens it up and you realise, yes, I sort of know where we are going here. I’ll stick with it.
There is a reason it was set in the film industry. The setting is a metaphor for the stories that we tell ourselves and the difficulty that we have both bringing stories into the real world and also believing in the stories that we create.
The perspective of the drama is about the disconnect between what we feel and how we interpret our feelings, the narrative that we place those emotions in. The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and our experiences. The characters are written with that very rare trait of self observance and introspection. They often speak unreal lines, but you go along with it because it’s like an inner voice explaining what’s happening on an emotional level. The use of emotion watches (watches that identify what your are feeling) was a clever device to allow this to be understood and make it credible.
It is also a love story, but we only glimpse the intimacies of that through voice-overs and the odd scene where Dong Man and Eun A make a connection. This must have been a very deliberate choice. Perhaps Park Hae Young did not want the drama and the focus to be highjacked by the “romance” label, or whether she just wanted that emotion to be unspoken. At one point there is a conversation about love not being one of the emotions displayed on the watch, as it is not a raw emotion. So she follows that through by showing how the characters react to each other in a kaleidoscope of different ways that constitute care, closeness and empathy.
As always with her writing, every character has a carefully curated arc and a totally filled out personality. They are larger than life, wearing their inner lives like an outer visible skin. You may not like every character, or even any of them. But the magic of Park Hae Young is that she has the ability to connect you to them. To enable you to see their vulnerabilities in a way that evokes compassion rather than dismissal.
The drama explores how most of the characters’ narratives involve the demonisation of others. The shifting of the responsibility for their misery onto something or someone else and labelling the other as the perpetrator and themselves as the victim. In doing so they cling to the situation or other person as justification for their emotions. This results in trying to manipulate and control the other to fit the self-made narrative. When this manipulation synchs from both sides, such as Dong Man and Gyeong Se, this becomes a co-dependant relationship of mutually assured destruction.
In fact the true narrative, revealed by the correct identification of emotions, is about each person alone. There is short key scene late in the drama where a counsellor explains that once you can correctly identify an emotion, put the correct description to it, you can begin to see the sometimes hidden narrative that lies behind it and change it to something positive. The other situation/person was/is only the catalyst. Each character creates their own storyline, and now lives it, believing that taking revenge, or running away, or indulging someone will in some way free them from the pain. But only the character alone can change it. The path to fulfilment lies in being able to be free themselves from the notion that the fault /responsibility lies elsewhere or with others.
The genius of Park Hae Young is to craft a story of complex and tangled relationships that brings these truths to life. The actors really bring themselves to the table and invest everything. There was not a weak performance amongst the leads. But personally, I fell for Kang Mal Geum as Ko Hye Jin. Whenever I see Go Youn Jung, I feel that her eyes are like black wells that plumb the hidden depths, and here the cinematographer and director did a wonderful job of capturing that ability. Koo Kyo Hwan courageously put everything he had into Dong Man and exploded onto the screen. His total commitment and exposure hit me like a train. It was an all or nothing performance and a less confident portrayal would have been catastrophic for the whole drama.
Overall, another stunning offering.
The opening is typical. The characters irritate you, and you wonder if you can make it out of first base. Then the last scene of the first episode just opens it up and you realise, yes, I sort of know where we are going here. I’ll stick with it.
There is a reason it was set in the film industry. The setting is a metaphor for the stories that we tell ourselves and the difficulty that we have both bringing stories into the real world and also believing in the stories that we create.
The perspective of the drama is about the disconnect between what we feel and how we interpret our feelings, the narrative that we place those emotions in. The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves and our experiences. The characters are written with that very rare trait of self observance and introspection. They often speak unreal lines, but you go along with it because it’s like an inner voice explaining what’s happening on an emotional level. The use of emotion watches (watches that identify what your are feeling) was a clever device to allow this to be understood and make it credible.
It is also a love story, but we only glimpse the intimacies of that through voice-overs and the odd scene where Dong Man and Eun A make a connection. This must have been a very deliberate choice. Perhaps Park Hae Young did not want the drama and the focus to be highjacked by the “romance” label, or whether she just wanted that emotion to be unspoken. At one point there is a conversation about love not being one of the emotions displayed on the watch, as it is not a raw emotion. So she follows that through by showing how the characters react to each other in a kaleidoscope of different ways that constitute care, closeness and empathy.
As always with her writing, every character has a carefully curated arc and a totally filled out personality. They are larger than life, wearing their inner lives like an outer visible skin. You may not like every character, or even any of them. But the magic of Park Hae Young is that she has the ability to connect you to them. To enable you to see their vulnerabilities in a way that evokes compassion rather than dismissal.
The drama explores how most of the characters’ narratives involve the demonisation of others. The shifting of the responsibility for their misery onto something or someone else and labelling the other as the perpetrator and themselves as the victim. In doing so they cling to the situation or other person as justification for their emotions. This results in trying to manipulate and control the other to fit the self-made narrative. When this manipulation synchs from both sides, such as Dong Man and Gyeong Se, this becomes a co-dependant relationship of mutually assured destruction.
In fact the true narrative, revealed by the correct identification of emotions, is about each person alone. There is short key scene late in the drama where a counsellor explains that once you can correctly identify an emotion, put the correct description to it, you can begin to see the sometimes hidden narrative that lies behind it and change it to something positive. The other situation/person was/is only the catalyst. Each character creates their own storyline, and now lives it, believing that taking revenge, or running away, or indulging someone will in some way free them from the pain. But only the character alone can change it. The path to fulfilment lies in being able to be free themselves from the notion that the fault /responsibility lies elsewhere or with others.
The genius of Park Hae Young is to craft a story of complex and tangled relationships that brings these truths to life. The actors really bring themselves to the table and invest everything. There was not a weak performance amongst the leads. But personally, I fell for Kang Mal Geum as Ko Hye Jin. Whenever I see Go Youn Jung, I feel that her eyes are like black wells that plumb the hidden depths, and here the cinematographer and director did a wonderful job of capturing that ability. Koo Kyo Hwan courageously put everything he had into Dong Man and exploded onto the screen. His total commitment and exposure hit me like a train. It was an all or nothing performance and a less confident portrayal would have been catastrophic for the whole drama.
Overall, another stunning offering.
Was this review helpful to you?
