After
the Korean War ended in 1953, the government in Seoul cultivated
a culture of military preparedness second to none in the world.
Military training became so rigorous that many died before
completing the required three-year stint; daily beatings of
various body parts have been reported by recruits. Even male
children have, until very recently, been subjected to similar
corporal assaults in school. Korean wives, rather than suffering
abusive outbursts, have been generally submissive to their
husband’s orders. Accordingly, we might expect that rough
sex would occur throughout the country. When Jang Jung Il
wrote Tell Me a Lie, a novel dealing with sadomasochistic
sex, he was imprisoned, his book was banned, and copies of
the book were destroyed by the government. Now director Jang
Sun Woo has brought the story to the screen in the film Lies
(Gojitmal), which is also banned in Korea but
was released with some cuts by the censors after being selected
for screening in the film festival circuit. The story of Lies
is punctuated by interviews with the two lead actors, who
profess not to relish their first-time screen roles, and by
numerous screen titles that appear to be chapter titles. J
(played by Lee Sang Hyun, a sculptor in real life) is a thin,
bespectacled 38-year-old sculptor married to an artist G (played
by Hyun Joo Choi), who fled to Paris to escape J’s sexual
brutality. Y (played by Kim Tae Yeon) is an attractive, shapely
18-year-old high school girl whose older sisters were raped
at a young age; one sister committed suicide after the rape,
the other married her rapist and moved to Brazil. Fearing
inevitable rape, Y wanted to choose her sexual partner rather
than be chosen. One day Y called J, in answer to J’s sex ad
in a newspaper, found his telephone voice sexy, and begged
to have sex with him. J then consented to a sex date. After
the two met at a train station, they went to a hotel room,
and the two enjoyed a very complete sexual experience in which
he inserted into all three of her orifices, and she pretended
to be raped. No brutality emerged until the third or fourth
such hotel encounter, when he began to slap her posterior.
Since Y welcomed the kinky initiative, J continued, and the
one-night-stand sex dates escalated gradually into more extreme
flagellation, leaving permanent scars. One day Y began to
cry, and J realized that she could not continue to take any
more abuse, so he begged for her to whip him. Having learned
her lessons well, Y then became the dominant person in the
relationship. Soon, she entered college, and they were not
able to see each other for three months, so he flew to join
his wife in Paris. When J begged his wife to whip him, she
protested that he was a pervert, so he returned to Seoul in
order to rekindle his relationship as a thoroughly obsessed
sex slave to Y. However, Y’s macho motorcylist brother (played
by Kwon Taek Han), suspicious that Y was having illicit sex,
confronted her former Lesbian roommate Woori (played by Hye
Jin Jeon), who earlier beat Y for infidelity and then relished
vicariously the retelling of each sexual experience. Woori
told her brother about the sadomasochistic love affair, so
he tried to track J down to stop the affair, presumably by
killing him. At one point he burned J’s house, so J then began
moving from hotel to hotel, running up credit card debts and
borrowing from friends. However, Y decided to reveal the location
of her hotel trysts to her brother, whom she knew would race
one step behind them until an inevitable fatal crash that
would at last liberate Y from control by anyone. Meanwhile,
the sexual experiences escalated, even to a point where J
ate a portion of Y’s feces. Since the next step appeared to
be that Y would beat J so hard that he might die, they backed
down. J then returned to his wife in Paris, lying about a
tattoo that Y gave him, while Y moved to join her sister in
Brazil. The lies that both J and Y had to tell others in order
to cover up their relationship would doubtless continue, both
in Brazil and in Paris. But the truth of the film is that
a succession of Korean military dictatorships has nurtured
a culture, not unlike the Paris of the Marquis de Sade depicted
in Quills (2000).
That the current democratic government censors in Korea want
us to believe otherwise is yet another lie. Clearly destined
to be a sexual cult film, not pornographic because the two
partners are devoted and willing, Lies makes
the on-screen statement that the true sadist is unable to
consummate sex, whereas J and Y use kinky beatings as foreplay
to express passionate love. Yet J becomes trapped in his obsessions,
whereas Y liberates herself from her fears. Given the backgrounds
of the two, one fearful of rape and the other so thin that
he must have feared beatings during army training, we can
understand why kinky sex was the appropriate psychological
response. In an effort to explain why Germans accepted Nazism,
Theodore Reik observed in Masochism in Modern Man
(1941) that brutal violence can become less fearful either
by becoming the aggressor, by identifying with the aggressor,
or by transforming the brutality into an act of intense sexuality.
Lies deliberately seeks to outrage the Korean
government by exposing how decades of military rule have warped
many interpersonal relationships, driving many Koreans on
occasion to extreme ways to cope psychologically. Yet the
Korean public is content to resort to lies about how the political
has polluted the personal. MH
I
want to comment on this film
