Hello friends, it feels nice to get back to blogging, so let us waste no time and get right into the thick of things. The hour I spent phone-less passed with relative ease; no severe panic attacks or massive hemorrhaging and so forth. One thing I did notice about the phone free challenge was that I stressed more over the simple ability not to use my phone rather than my self-induced social isolation. The inability to do something weighs out as more distressing than actually not performing the action for me. This got me to thinking about how the priorities, if switched, would play out. I figured an hour would not suffice, so I increased my theoretical isolation to days, then weeks, and so on. I eventually drifted into years upon years of social isolation, a prison like removal of all social interaction.
At first I had a lot of trouble trying to find a film to connect this to and still have enough to talk about; I didn't want to make some simple connection to a film and say "Oh yeah, Super has a guy who's totally socially isolated and has no friends, also he's played by Dwight from the Office". I had waited for a time to talk about Korean Cinema, and now the time has come, and there is one quintessential film that I must talk about: Oldboy. The premise to the film is that Oh Dae-Su, a new father and a bit of a drunk, gets imprisoned in a hotel room for 15 years for no known reason to him, his captors then release him and give him a total of 5 days to discover who locked him up and for what purpose. While the actual screen-time of the imprisonment only lasts around 20 minutes, the experience obviously influences every part of Oh Dae-Su's existence. For example, the saying "Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone" is etched on his hotel room wall, Dae-Su takes this saying to heart, forcing himself to smile during situations of stress and anguish. His isolation also had more than mental effects on the protagonist. The Korean language went through a massive change through the 80s and 90s, dividing into two sects a written, very formal version, and a simple speaking version derived from the former. Oh Dae-Su misses all of this change, however, and speaks in a tongue akin Elizabethan English for Americans. This independent development displayed by the protagonist of Oldboy leads me to my point: the South Korean film industry has grown independent of Hollywood for decades, and they now produce some of the most diverse, intelligent, and amazing films today. Sometimes removal from the mainstream turns into something wonderful, in this case, while still paralleling the mainstream in terms of content. Korean westerns exist, Korean dramas are the best today, Korean horror alienates and disturbs unlike most modern American films of the same genre, and I think you can see where I am going with this. The funny thing about this blog entry is that Oldboy happens to be the film that put this country on the map as a major film producer.
Anyways, I'm making a small amendment to my general structure, so here's a trailer of the film Oldboy
Your post makes me think a lot about what people who may have been living in hiding for the past couple decades would think about all our technology. The movie "Blast from the Past" seemed to have premiered too early-- although the 80's is quite a scary time to come back to reality. There's always the question about whether or not all this technology is actually benefiting us. Medically, sure, intellectually, arguable, but socially? Technology when at use has the power to both connect and isolate all at once. Could the people of the past have been better off?
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