The Good Mother's Self (Ish) - Sacrifice Violence, Redemption, and Deconstructed Ethics in Bong Joon-Ho's Mother (2009)
The Good Mother's Self (Ish) - Sacrifice Violence, Redemption, and Deconstructed Ethics in Bong Joon-Ho's Mother (2009)
doi: 10.25024/kj.2021.61.3.223
© The Academy of Korean Studies, 2021
Abstract
This paper examines the permutations of ethical norms within the “good”
mother- figure in Bong Joon-ho’s Mother (2009) in relation to South Korea’s
historical relationship with redemption. As a symptom of anxiety that stems
from a particularly oppressive modern history of political subordination,
civil division, and economic struggle, South Korea has exhibited a pattern
of retrospection—repetitions of communal overcoming and remembering—
to combat national “failures” and redeem national sovereignty. Similarly, the
“good” mother’s condition of possibility is maintained by a recurrent loop of
responsibility that obligates not only perpetual selflessness, but also never-
ending guilt. Considering the “good” mother’s entrenchment in the parameters
of nationhood, the film becomes an ideal site to interrogate the formation and
viability of her sacrificial and redemptive moral framework. Looking beyond
defining maternal identity within the scope of the national and historical, the
film offers an opportunity to investigate how, reversely, this “retrospective”
identity may also work to outline, or limit, the conditions of her ethical
conscience. Bringing to the fore the “good” mother’s affective dependency
within guilt and the subsequent moral twists, the paper presents the possibility
of breaking from the totalizing nature of her self-sacrifice.
Keywords: sacrifice, redemption, guilt, ethics, national identity, motherhood, South
Korean film, Bong Joon-ho
Sue Heun K. ASOKAN is a visiting assistant professor of Korean literature and culture at the
University of Colorado, Boulder. E-mail: [email protected].
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Introduction
Mother’s blood-splattered face fills the screen as she mutters with disgust,
“You’re not even worth the dirt in my son’s toenails” (Fig. 1). Her expression
remains distant yet determined, even as she wipes a speck of blood from the
corner of her eye. It is only when she notices the pool of blood oozing from
the man’s bludgeoned head that she regains awareness and shifts to a more
human response. She screams and starts to frantically mop up the blood.
The panic does not last long, however, as she quickly returns to her stony
glare and slips back, both physically and mentally, into her role as the good
mother.
This scene from Bong Joon-ho’s aptly titled Mother (Madeo, 2009),
exemplifies the film’s narrative theme of transgression. The director presents
the moral archetype of the good mother-figure only to upend her pre-
determined identity and utilize its tropes, not as demonstrations of proper
behavior, but as justifications for gross misdeeds and violent indiscretions.
The act of bludgeoning a man to death, in of itself, is immoral in any
circumstance. But, when the violence is committed by a doting mother
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whose sole motivation in life is to protect her son, the murderous deed
enters an ethical gray zone. She does not commit these acts of her own
accord, but is compelled to do so by her pre-ordained title of mother. Her
maternal duties trump her individual morality and in the end, any action,
whether moral or immoral, performed under the umbrella of motherhood
is considered an act of selfless sacrifice.
This paper examines such permutations of ethical norms within Bong’s
Mother and juxtaposes the film’s narrative themes against the backdrop
of South Korea’s historical relationship with redemption. As a symptom
of anxiety that stems from a particularly oppressive modern history of
political subordination, civil division, and economic struggle, South Korea
(hereafter, Korea) has exhibited a pattern of retrospection—repetitions of
communal overcoming and remembering—to combat national “failures”
and redeem national sovereignty. Similarly, the good mother’s condition of
possibility is maintained by a recurrent loop of responsibility that obligates
not only perpetual selflessness, but also never-ending guilt. Considering
the good mother’s entrenchment in the parameters of nationhood, then, the
film Mother becomes an ideal site to interrogate the formation and viability
of her sacrificial moral framework, precisely because it operates within
the same network of redemptive retrospection. Looking beyond defining
maternal identity within the scope of the national and historical, the film
offers an opportunity to investigate how, reversely, her retrospective identity
may also work to outline, or limit, the conditions of her ethical conscience. I
argue that the inherent reversals within the good mother’s pre-determined
subjecthood actually possess the capacity to not only transform her selfless
sacrifice into an act of violent redemption, but also, conversely, mistake that
violence for a performance of sacrificial motherhood. Bringing to the fore
the good mother’s affective dependency within guilt and the subsequent
moral twists, this paper presents the possibility of breaking from the
totalizing nature of her self-sacrifice. Ultimately, by deconstructing one of
the nation’s most foundational moral pillars, I hope to not only expand the
understanding of Korean subjectivity, but also highlight the importance
of considering ethical identity, apart from national identity, within an
increasingly dissonant world order.
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The image of the good mother has long occupied the social and cultural
fabric of Korea. While much of the parameters of ideal Korean motherhood
is rooted in neo-Confucian principles, the canonization of the national
maternal was in part an extension of Korea’s search for modern subjectivity
during the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Choi 2009).1 For this reason,
it is important to first understand the discursive construction of Korea’s
national identity in order to situate the filmic representation of the “good”
mother’s “retrospective” identity.
Korea’s modern history is a history of identification. The question
of what it means to be Korean is a matter of constant inquiry among
historians and sociologists alike. Despite continuing debates on the origins
of Korean nationhood and identity, many recent scholars have stated that
the ideological conception of the Korean nation and the identification of its
people (minjok) occurred in conjunction with, and in some ways in reaction
to, modernity (Em 1999; Schmid 2002; Shin 2006).2 As collective opposition
to the loss of state, citizenry, and thereby national identity during the period
of Japanese colonization, Korean intellectuals of the time tasked themselves
with articulating a uniquely Korean subjecthood that did not require
physical boundaries or an active government. By taking inspiration from
native foundational myths (i.e., Dangun), they conceived of an “autonomous
subject for the nation”—an “essence of Koreanness” (minjokseong)—that not
only toted civilization and enlightenment as its guiding principles, but also
1. The national maternal is most often invoked with the ideological moniker, wise mother, good
wife role (hyeonmo yangcheo). Choi approaches, “the ideology of ‘wise mother and good wife’
as a modern construct with significant influence from Japanese colonial gender ideology and
the import of Western domesticity and modernity” (Choi 2009, 3).
2. The debate regarding the origins of Korean nationhood and the historical foundations
for its nationalism has been cogently outlined in Shin (2006, 4–8), Em (1999), and Park
(1999). Historiographical trends within the study of Korea, ranging from nationalist, post-
nationalist, post-colonial, to modernist (or postmodernist), are discussed. Henry Em’s more
recent book, The Great Enterprise (2013), further elaborates on the discourse regarding the
historiography of modern Korea over the past two centuries.
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3. As an extension of this essence, many of these same intellectuals constructed and employed
a metonymic image of the ideal women—wise mother, good wife (hyeonmo yangcheo)—
that would emerge as a new social and political platform and serve “an integral part of
the transformative experience Koreans had in their pursuit of modernity and national
sovereignty” (Choi 2009, 5).
4. Focusing primarily on the Japanese Other, Jerry Won Lee (2014) also discusses how the
rhetorical construction of South Korean national identity is inextricably linked to a process
of “othering.”
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tradition of authoritarian rule that lasted well into the late 1980s. While
there is no question that these imperialistic and militaristic regimes under
Rhee Syngman, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan demanded physical,
political, and spiritual sacrifices from the nation, it is also important to
note that citizen reaction to these decades of political strong-holding also
exhibited a desire to redeem from past failures. Despite the nation’s rapid
economic growth, especially during Park’s reign, student activists interpreted
Korea’s post-war experiences with modernity as detrimental to the nation’s
collective conscience. Calling for the end to authoritarianism and foreign
imperialism, they began what is called the minjung movement, or the
people’s movement, to recover what they saw as Korea’s lost subjectivity from
the post-colonial narrative of negative and failed modernity. By articulating
and then opposing a number of totalizing “others,” such as communism,
state oppression, and American intervention, the minjung practitioners or
intellectuals (undonggwon) aimed to resituate the past’s negativity formed
through passivity to a rebellious and active agency capable of transformation
(Lee 2009). Successively, this retrospective framework to redeem was further
cemented during the democratic era, especially after the Asian Financial
Crisis of 1997. Called the “IMF period” by Koreans because of the state’s
bailout of US$58 billion by the International Monetary Fund, this economic
breakdown demanded a collective act of sacrifice in the form of not only
gold, but also national diligence to bring the nation back from the brink of
economic ruin (Cho and Kim 2002). Ultimately, such unfortunate histories
solidified the nation under a common goal to recover, and that common
goal further intensified the need for a nationalized identity fueled by a
unified and retrospective conscience.
Such collective efforts to retroactively “fix” the past, I argue, is where the
confluence of nation, historiography, and identity seep its way into affecting
the formation and practice of local ethics. In line with Benedict Anderson’s
contention that the origins of nationalism are based on the “imagined”
conceptions of a limited and sovereign community, in combination with
Melissa Brown’s depiction of national identity as reliant on “constructed
narratives of the past” (what she calls ‘narratives of unfolding’), I emphasize
the preconditions of moral trajectory set forth by its entrenchment in the
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5. In her discussion of Taiwan’s process of identity negotiation, Melissa Brown (2004) describes
how ideologies of a solidified and unified nation undermine singular and particular
experiences of belonging or departing. She studies the complex mechanisms at play in
Taiwan’s construction of the national and asks the question: “Is Taiwan Chinese?” Her
answer is in the negative and the basis for this lies in her characterization that identity
is primarily informed, not by culture or ancestry, but social experience. Distinguishing
between “constructed narratives of the past and the totality of what is actually known about
past events” (2004, 5) she labels the former as “narratives of unfolding,” which places identity
negotiation within the realm of ideology and politics, thereby forbidding variability and
flexibility.
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6. McHugh and Abelmann (2005) define the Golden Age of film as taking place between the
years of 1955 and 1972.
7. Kelly Jeong (2006, 2013) discusses a similar trend within the “nationalized” patriarch.
8. Peter Brooks (1976) defines the “melodramatic mode” as a construct to reveal the “moral
occult” of the real world hidden within the gestures and emotions shown in metaphoric
narratives.
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operate under strict binaries that leave little room for moral ambiguity. But
Mother does not continue this tradition. Instead, Mother, in her never-
ending quest for an absolute and impossible selflessness, demonstrates
the good mother’s moral paradox. The film portrays Mother’s condition
of possibility as governed, not by her inherent goodness as one might
assume, but by an inescapable loop of guilt and responsibility that demands
continuous retrospection. Her unconditional love, rather than signal a love
with no bounds, works to indicate and delimit the very conditions of her
unconditionality. Her devotion remains atemporal, illogical, and most of
all, never completely fulfilled. In following, Mother’s inevitable failure to
perform this conditional unconditionality, in turn, demands a perpetual
cycle of redemption that can only end in violent sacrifice. Required to
persistently overcompensate as a way to meet impossible expectations,
the good mother’s retrospective identity shapes the direction of her ethical
foundation.
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take the blame. The film’s ending shows Mother at a station, waiting with
Do-joon to board her leisure tour bus. Just before she is about to leave, Do-
joon slides a scorched tin box across her lap, scolding her for leaving such
valuables for anyone to find. Mother recognizes the box as her acupuncture
kit and looks up at Do-joon in horror as she realizes that he must have
found it among the ruins of the workhouse fire and was now fully aware of
her murderous sacrifices. Sitting quietly on the bus, Mother carefully takes
out a needle from the tin, lifts her skirt, and jabs her upper thigh. After a
moment of silence and now seemingly blind to her past misdeeds, Mother
slowly stands up to join the dancing crowd.
The film’s moribund setting in rural Korea with its seedy and
destitute inhabitants only adds to the tragic plotline. No stranger to social
commentary, Bong Joon-ho often employs themes of criminal injustice,
poverty, and societal dysfunction in his films. Having gained international
attention through films such as Memories of Murder (Salin-ui chueok, 2003),
The Host (Gwoemul, 2006), Snowpiercer (2014), and most recently the Oscar-
winning Parasite (2019), Bong is often noted to appropriate and rework
common genre conventions, “using them as a framework for exploring
and critiquing South Korean social and political issues” (Klein 2008, 873).
In line with such interpretations of his work, readings of Mother’s violent
transgressions have focused mainly on her relationship to the elements
of patriarchy represented throughout the film. Mother’s violence is made
inevitable by the male-dominated society and “is effectively pardoned
through the (re)constitution of the patriarchal family” (Abelmann and Sohn
2013, 35).
Ji-yoon An, for example, reads Mother’s “extremization” of maternal
instinct as not only conforming to “motherhood cultivated and fostered
by patriarchy,” but further reinforcing the contemporary prevalence of that
very ideology (An 2019). Michelle Cho, specifically invoking the “generic”
signification of Kim Hye-ja (the actress playing Mother) as her own genre,
also discusses how her activation of a “fantasy of idealized maternity”
highlights the dangerous effects of a national ideology centered on the
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preeminence of the family (Cho 2014, 188).9 And Sungjun Yi argues that
Mother’s transformation to murderer (‘from mother to murder’) expresses
Korean society’s need to re-evaluate its understanding of motherhood (Yi
2013). To further engage with these readings, which envisions Mother’s
excessive display of maternal instinct as a product of or reaction to dominant
social norms, I would like to direct attention to the good mother’s inner
workings to reveal not only the imbalance of such social predeterminations,
but also and more importantly the inherent paradoxes of redemptive
sacrifice itself. By placing ethics at the forefront of my reading, I bring
attention to Mother’s transgression of moral boundaries in order to expose
the inevitable nature of her transgression in the first place.
As if caught in a loop, Mother begins and ends with the same scene: Mother
dances carelessly, first in an empty field and then on a crowded tour bus, with
a haunting expression on her face (Fig. 2). This visual choice to repeat the
beginning mimics the film’s narrative theme that focuses on a cyclical return
9. Kim Kyong-Ae (2010) also discusses Kim Hye-ja’s face and treats it as a “psychological space”
actively depicting Mother’s unstoppable spiral into violence.
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Figure 3. Mother stares at her son while he relieves himself in Mother (2009)
Source: CJ Entertainment.
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continuously seek redemption. Mother can never give enough, and so her
ensuing guilt forces her to cyclically redeem. And in the case of the film, her
redemption is practiced through an act of murder, a literal sacrifice, for the
sake of her son, thereby forcing her within a loop of retroactive justification.
The film narrativizes this cycle of guilt and redemption and also
presents a distinct point of origin for its beginning—namely that Mother is
responsible for her son’s current state of mental disability. When Do-joon
was a child, Mother fed him pesticides before taking some herself as a means
to escape destitution. As a result, the self-inflicted quality of Mother’s guilt
transports it to the symbolic realm, in which redemption is not achieved
through actions towards the son, but through punishments directed towards
the self: Mother’s guilt demands atonement. Within the realm of atonement,
the victim’s (Do-joon’s) right to enact retributive punishment for the crime
is replaced with the aggressor’s need to punish oneself. But, since retribution
against the self is impossible, a substitute offering for and of the self must be
made. And so, Mother atones for her sins by making a sacrifice to her son,
while at the same time, working to achieve redemption for herself in the
process.
Mother’s first redemptive attempt to locate a sacrificial victim for her
atonement fails. Blindly assuming her son’s innocence, Mother looks to
place blame on Jin-tae, a low-life character that has taken Do-joon under his
wing. Determined to find evidence that could implicate him in the crime,
Mother sneaks into Jin-tae’s house but is disrupted by his return. Clutching
a “bloodied” golf club, Mother hides behind a curtain and watches Jin-
tae and his girlfriend have sex until they fall asleep. When Mother submits
the golf club as evidence, however, the police discover that the “blood” is
actually lipstick and Jin-tae had been with his girlfriend at the time of the
murder. Soon after, Jin-tae confronts Mother and forces her subjugation in
a stark scene, where Mother kneels down in front of a topless and hyper-
masculinized Jin-tae to ask for forgiveness.10 In a sudden turn of events, Jin-
10. Ann Meejung Kim (2016) reads this scene as indication of a past sexual relationship between
Mother and Jin-tae. She situates Mother’s sexualization as mechanism to disorient traditional
representations of motherhood.
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tae accepts Mother’s monetary bribe and begins to help in her investigation,
essentially aiding the search for his replacement and Mother’s sacrificial
victim.
With Jin-tae’s help, Mother discovers that the murdered girl, Ah-jung,
had been prostituting herself in exchange for rice to feed her grandmother
suffering from dementia. After obtaining Ah-jung’s cell phone, which
contained pictures of all her sexual partners, Mother recognizes one of the
men as the neighborhood junk collector. When the man reveals the truth—
that Do-joon is the real killer—Mother bludgeons him to death, returning us
to the scene introduced at the start of this paper. And so, Mother finally finds
her opportunity to sacrifice to her son. As opposed to Girard’s “scapegoat
mechanism” in which persecutors must remain unconscious of the victim’s
innocence, a paradox lies within sacrificial atonement. The entire process
of atonement depends upon the open knowledge of the victim’s innocence
(Girard 1988). Only when the sacrificial object is innocent and worthy of
sacrifice, will the process of atonement be complete (Halbertal 2015). In
other words, Mother’s murderous act does not meet the requirements of
her redemptive return to a truly selfless motherhood unless her sacrificial
act involves an actual risk on her part. In lieu of her physical self-sacrifice,
Mother must present a substitution that is equally valuable. Her sacrifice
requires sin rather than morality, and in turn, her act of atonement begets
further atonement.
It is at this point that Mother demonstrates the film’s third instance
of selfless violence: Mother’s morality is ironically justified and bolstered
by her immorality. It is important to note that Mother’s initial sin, ensuing
guilt, and attempt to alleviate that guilt through atonement have all been
self-inflicted. While her physical offering of an innocent victim can act as a
substitute for the self, a symbolic offering manifested through suffering can
substitute the need for punishment of the self. This atonement through self-
inflicted suffering is the foundation upon which self-sacrificial martyrdom
is formed. Within this element of redemption through self-victimization lies
the ultimate reversal that connects the act of self-sacrifice with its inherent
aptitude to promote violence against morality itself.
After Mother is finally convinced of her son’s guilt, the police detective
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substitute, she only achieves full redemption as a good mother when she is
righteous enough to sacrifice her morality itself. Only a good mother would
risk her morality for the sake of her son and only a redeemed mother would
feel guilt even after performing such a selfless act. Mother’s violent atonement
grants her the right not only to further violence, but more importantly
to see herself as a sacrificial victim in her own right. Thus, the impossible
nature of Mother’s unconditional role leads her to seek redemption through
a repetitive and perpetual cycle of self-sacrifice in order to fulfill her duty
as the good mother. But, as the films shows, the good mother does not
perform sacrifices for morality, but in fact, insists on sacrifices of it. Mother’s
selflessness, rather than perpetuate self-sacrifice for the sake of, actually
works to accentuate a self-victimization in spite of her responsibility for her
child. In other words, Mother’s self-sacrifice transforms to a selfish sacrifice.
Figure 4. Do-joon gives back Mother’s acupuncture kit and returns her
sacrificial gifts in Mother (2009)
Source: CJ Entertainment.
The ending scenes depict Mother and Do-joon sitting at a bus-stop just
before she is about to go on a trip tailored for the retired and elderly. With
a concerned look, Do-joon offers Mother advice as he slides her scorched
metal acupuncture kit across her lap. “You shouldn’t leave this kind of
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thing just lying around. What if someone else had found it?” he whispers
(Fig. 4). Mother’s expression turns from confusion to pure horror, as she
realizes that Do-joon has discovered her violent acts of atonement. The
hierarchical relationship, in which Mother was the only one empowered to
give, breaks down as Do-joon is finally able to offer his gift of silence. With
this equilibrium, the necessarily selfless duty of the maternal crumbles. Since
her son has also sacrificed his morality for the sake of his mother, her own
previous acts of “sacrifice,” committed in the name of selfless motherhood,
can no longer be designated as such. Mother must finally confront her
acts of violence for what they are; she must come to terms with her selfish
motherhood.
“I always try to look for another side to that which we always praise or
worship something for— like seeing the dark side of the moon. We tend
to regard the maternal instinct as being wonderous, holy and noble. But
there must be another, darker side to it. That’s the sort of twisted approach
that I took.”—Bong Joon-ho (Bong and Bell 2010, 24)11
11. In an interview with the Korean film magazine Cine21 that has now become infamous,
Bong Joon-ho also made this comment about Mother’s transgression, “Mother is actually a
film about sex. The characters are divided between humans that can have sex and humans
that can’t. Kim Hye-ja’s character is also sexually constrained at first but then enters a sexual
realm. The previously dry mother who seemed to have no connection to that world is
moving into the moist world” (quoted in J. Kim [2019, 1], translation my own).
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is set in the present… However, the past is all mixed up into it. … I wanted
to break away from territorial [and temporal] boundaries” (Bong and Bell
2010, 25).
Such themes that juxtapose moralistic universals against a critique
of the state of contemporary society is greatly reminiscent of Korea’s own
experience with modernism.12 In a span of about thirty years, Korea has
positioned itself as one of the most economically developed nations in
the world. Korea’s sudden emergence into the politics of modernity and
industrialization, which Kyung-Sup Chang has referred to as “compressed
modernity,” has undoubtedly affected the social and moral structure of
the nation that once touted homogeneity and tradition as its founding
principles. Authors, such as Chang and Gi-Wook Shin, have commented
on the schisms that globalization, urbanization, and democratization has
brought to the fabric of Korean society (Shin 2006). Focusing mainly on the
transformation of the family, Chang laments that one of the unfortunate side
effects of rapid modernization is that it has degenerated “traditional” familial
values into a sort of “familial egoism” that prevents development of the
social, and in some ways moral, elements of the Korean community. Calling
Korea’s current state a “situation of accidental pluralism,” he attributes the
nation’s societal disorganization to the inadvertent mixing of indigenous
values and “Western” institutions without proper harmonization (Chang
2011). The generational dissonance incurred by the rapid succession of shifts
in sociocultural patterns is so great, in fact, that some scholars have dubbed
Korea’s version of modernity a “quasi-modernity” that exhibits a “mixture
of heterogeneous and conflicting institutional and cultural programs, with
native Korean, Chinese, Confucian, Japanese, American, and European
elements” (Hwang and Lim 2015, 87).
Cultural theorists, such as Frederic Jameson and Lauren Berlant, have
spoken to postmodern society’s tendency to rely on misguided perceptions
of the present as a way to extend the current era’s fractured belonging.
While Berlant disagrees with Jameson’s contention that postmodernism is
12. So Jeong Moon (2010) also reads Mother as allegorically depicting Korea’s shifting familial
values during the neoliberal age.
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13. Lauren Berlant states that the postmodern predicament is defined by a state of “crisis
ordinariness” in which society has lost the ability to apprehend the true state of its
surroundings because it has accustomed itself to modes of survival that obfuscate the present
impasse. Her term “cruel optimism” articulates an affective structure that “exists when
something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (2011, 1). While I do not
fundamentally disagree with this contention, I find it inappropriate for the Korean context
because of the nation’s tendency towards critical retrospection rather than anticipatory
optimism.
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14. So Jin Park (2010) discusses neologisms, such as “helicopter mothers,” that contemporary
mothers have been exposed to as neoliberal maternal subjects.
15. Geum-dong Kim (2010) examines these subtle “layers of meaning” within Mother and
attributes each character as representing the tragedies of Korean modern history, such
as Japanese occupation, North-South division, democratization movements, and foreign
imperialism.
16. As the director himself states, “From the very beginning, I was most interested in portraying
the mother as a dark destructive figure—not the typical gentle maternal representation…
Simultaneously, although it is dark, I wanted people to think, ‘I would do that,’ or ‘My mother
would do that.’ I needed the universality to be there, despite the extremity of the situations”
(Soares 2010).
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17. This comment was made by Bong in reference to both Mother and his next film, Snowpiercer
(2014).
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