Peppermint Candy Essay

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Peppermint Candy showed the change of Korea in 20 years (1979-1999) through the life of the main character – Yong-ho. The movie started with the scene which Yong-ho stand on the train track to commit suicide and yelled ‘I want to go back again’. With his exclaim, the movie flashback to expose his life in these 20 years and reveal the reason why he wanted to commit suicide, what makes his life change. In the flashback, we can see that Yong-ho originally is an innocent person. He wanted to be a photographer who capture down all the beautiful moments under his camera. However, with the required 26 month duty in the military, the Gwangju massacre made him no longer innocent instead he became more and more cynical and violent when he became a policeman. During the Gwangju massacre, he killed an innocent student, which made him to think of his first love, Sun-im. With his guilty of killing innocent student, he thinks that he cannot use his hand to hold Sun-im anymore. In the struggle between his past and future, he desire to forget his past, but the Gwangju massacre and his guilty has already injected deep inside his heart and cannot be forgotten. According to Magnan-Park, Joon, Aaron Han (2005), ‘In Peppermint Candy, regardless of Yong-ho’s desire to forget his past, the events of his past cannot help but haunt his present and continue to haunt him into the future.’ This Gwangju massacre had affected his whole life, to make him live under the shadow of guilty and made him to become a cynical person. This reflected the situation in Korea, Gwangju massacre is a huge humiliation of the government and this massacre affected millions of people, some are living under guilty like Yong-ho, the parents of the death are living under anger. The Gwangju massacre affected the whole life of Korea and this is a history that should not be forgotten. However, in the year of 2002,

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