First of all this is going to be major spoilers for Old Boy, so if you don’t want that (and you shouldn’t) stop reading now. I mean it, that movie kicks ass, if you haven’t seen it and you have the stomach for brutal emotional devastation it needs to go on your must-watch list immediately. This last sentence and the one after it are mostly to make sure that the auto-publish pagebreak occurs before I get to any actual content.
Okay? Are we good? I think we’re good. The primary antagonist of Old Boy, Lee Woo-Jin, is a fascinatingly intricate character, and like any good villain he reveals an interesting aspect of the protagonist. Obviously he goes to incredible, perhaps even inhuman lengths to punish Oh Dae-Su for his crime. Let’s consider briefly what he needed to do in order to reach the heights of villainy he achieves in the movie:
- Not allow the trauma of the death of his lover prevent him from material success.
- Become financially successful and skillful enough that he becomes the head of a multi-million dollar trading conglomerate.
- Hold on to his yearning for vengeance through several decades without letting it interfere with his normal life or his planning/execution of said revenge.
- Know how to convert his financial holdings into the formation and maintenance of contacts capable of locating, surveying, and perhaps subtly manipulating any given individual.
That’s a lot to ask of a person, to the point that it is almost literally unbelievable. Lee Woo-Jin is an incredible person. He must have had, at highschool age, the dedication necessary to metabolize rage and grief into studying and training in order to have climbed as far up the corporate ladder as fast as he did. Unless his family was already rich, he must’ve also maintained an industriousness that would fund the prestigious schools he’s need to attend and a charisma that’d give him access to the social class he was aspiring towards.
Lee could’ve already been aiming to become a corporate success before he started his path for revenge, of course. But his strength of character to keep himself on that path despite the intense trauma he experienced is nonetheless impressive. And however justified you may think his actions are or are not regarding his revenge on Oh Dae-Su, there’s no denying that he was, however indirectly, a cause of the worst thing to ever happen in Lee’s life. He watched his sister, and his lover, kill herself and failed to save her. The weight of that trauma is literally unimaginable. It does ultimately claim him, as we see at the end that his devotion to his sister was so great that once she is avenged he sees no reason to continue living, even after all that he has accomplished. I would expect an average person would be overwhelmed by grief, unable to function in normal society and possibly even ready to resign themselves to death after the passing of a few days, much less decades.
But Lee Woo-Jin is not average, he is exceptional. And that exceptionality provides an interesting comment on Oh Dae-Su’s character. Because, while many other directors might’ve chalked up his crossing someone like Lee Woo-Jin to rotten luck, Park Chan-Wook takes an opportunity with their history to reinforce one of the main themes of the movie, that being the inevitability of fate. Remember, during the “hero’s” incarceration he makes a list of every bad thing he has ever done, every person he has ever wronged, as he tries to determine who might have cause to imprison and torture him.
There are two noteworthy things about this. One is that as he does so, he fills up over a dozen notebooks. I want you to think, honestly think carefully, of how many crimes, large or small, that you have committed. Could you fill up even five? Do you honestly think it would actually take up all of one? No normal person has lived a life so filled with sin that they could create encyclopedias dedicated to them. Oh Dae-Su is also incredible, for a different reason; he truly is a despicable human being. And the degree of his indifference to this fact is revealed in another, related fact: after writing all of that out Lee Woo-Jin and his sister are not on the list! Granted, he was unaware of the repercussions of his gossip after spying on them, but nonetheless, if he remembered them at all he should’ve considered revealing their secret to be a crime against them. Of course, as we see, that’s a pretty big “if.”
The simple fact is that the protagonist cared precious little about the harm he did to his fellow man. He acted with wanton spite against what appears to be nearly everyone he came across. Behaving as he did, it’s actually no wonder that eventually one of the myriad people he would sleight would be someone as exceptional as Lee Woo-Jin. In this way, Oh Dae-Su was fated to eventually do something that would attract the vengeance of the most exceptional student in his school. He was always going to one day be a jerk to the wrong person, and that person was always going to be Lee Woo-Jin. He is not merely a particularly strong-willed, talented, and twisted individual; he is a divine instrument of destiny itself.
Signs of Yellow 