In this blog post, I would like to look back at the meaning of motherhood, guilt, and oblivion through the film “Mother” by director Bong Joon-ho.
The concept of “motherhood” is often associated with warm words such as unconditional love and devotion. However, the emotions of the mother played by Kim Hye-ja in the movie Mother toward her son cannot be simply explained by the word “devotion.” This is because director Bong Joon-ho did not portray the emotions of Mother in such a simple way. In addition, the relationships between the other characters are also linked to the director’s unique metaphors, making it difficult to understand from a single perspective. Based on my understanding after watching the movie, I would like to talk about this work.
The movie revolves around a murder case. A high school girl named Ah-jung, who makes a living by prostitution, is murdered, and Do-joon, who has intellectual disability, is named as a suspect. His mother, “Mother,” does not believe that her son is the criminal and tries to uncover the truth of the case. However, the real culprit of the incident was none other than her son, and after realizing that what she had firmly believed was not the truth, Mother chooses to cover her eyes and kills the only witness to the murder.
Perhaps it was not important to Mother who the real culprit of the incident was in the first place. She would have found a solution with her distorted maternal love, as long as it was not her son. What is interesting is how Mother’s maternal instinct is revealed in the film. Mother’s maternal instinct in the film is expressed as if she is trying to wash away her guilt. Although the film does not explicitly state it, it is implied that the pesticide that Mother fed to Do-jun when she tried to commit suicide when he was five years old is the cause of his intellectual disability. Mother seems to feel guilty about the fact, and is deeply distressed when Do-joon occasionally thinks about it. In this context, Mother’s overprotection of Do-joon and her attempts to prove his innocence are depicted as a desperate effort to escape the original sin of being a bad mother. However, most of her efforts are futile. Until the dramatic final scene, that is, until Mother commits the murder, her efforts are like swimming in the mud flats, and the more she tries to escape the tragic situation in which her son is trapped, the deeper she gets into it, and the greater the crime she ends up committing. Nevertheless, in the end, she succeeds in rescuing her son.
There is a saying that Mother always used to say to Do-jun in relation to his intellectual disability. It is to not to hold back when he is called a “fool.” This is probably due to the guilt she feels for making her son a fool, as mentioned earlier. Mother’s insistence acts like brainwashing on Do-jun, and the word “fool” becomes a trigger for him. When Do-jun hears the word “idiot,” he assaults the person or glares at them as if he is going to kill them. This kind of trigger leads to the murder of “rice cake girl” A-jeong. What is interesting is that A-jeong also had triggers. A-jeong prostitutes herself to make a living because she is poor. To her, who was called a “girl who receives rice and makes rice cakes,” a man would have been nothing more than a slave to sexual desire. To her, Do-joon, who asks, “Do you hate men?” has unintentionally triggered something that makes her lose her reason. An-jung, who is angry, throws a stone at Do-joon, calling him a “fool,” and in response, Do-joon throws a stone and kills An-jung. Mother’s insistence that she should not hold back, driven by her guilt, eventually became the motivation for her to kill someone. The fight that broke out by touching the shortcomings of each, Do-joon and Ah-jeong, who are lacking, is depicted as a bitter fight between the lower classes that director Bong Joon-ho often depicts.
As mentioned earlier, Mother also ends up killing someone, just like Do-joon. When she committed a shocking act that was almost as bad as the one she committed to Do-joon, her coping mechanism was “oblivion.” In the opening scene of the film, Mother dances a bizarre dance. The place where she dances appears to be the same place where she killed the witness. She dances as if she is in pain and shudders as if she is trying to forget what she did. In addition, Mother tries to forget the memories that have been tormenting her, such as by using a needle to numb her memory. However, her efforts are in vain, as Do Joon hands her the needle that she left at the scene of the murder, saying, “How could you leave something like this lying around?” implying that he knows about her murder. An uncomfortable cohabitation begins between Mother, who knows that her son has committed murder, and her son, who knows that Mother has committed murder. In the ending, Mother dances on the bus again. This time, she dances in a crowd of people, and it becomes impossible to identify who “Mother” is. This scene is like watching a painful skit of many mothers.
In addition to this, the film features many sexual metaphors. There are direct descriptions, such as the scene where we see the sexual relationship between the rice cake girl and Mina and Jin-tae, but there are also implicit descriptions, such as golf clubs and white blood. Along with the main theme of the murder that drives the film, sexual metaphors appear throughout, reminding us of the connection between sex, life, and death.
This film shows how extreme maternal love can be. The dance of the numerous “mothers” in the ending shows the painful state of the many mothers living under the bondage of maternal love, connecting the “mothers” in the film to reality. It is a distorted image of a mother, not the ideal image of a mother. After seeing the reality of a slightly distorted maternal love, which is different from the image of a mother that I had expected, the emotions that linger in my mind do not easily disappear even after watching the movie.
