A screenshot from "Oldboy" / Courtesy of ShowEast

It's fascinating to me just how much and how little my international students know about Korea and its culture. Many of them will talk passionately with me about each member of NCT, recount the various releases of Seventeen, and provide opinions about the ongoing saga between Bang Si-hyuk and Min Hee-jin. Then, these very same students will look pensively at the board and ask, "Professor, what does BoA mean?" or "Who is Lee Hyori? Is she an actor?"

With this in mind, I decided to show my Korean Cinema students Park Chan-wook's 2003 masterpiece "Oldboy" yesterday. I think Park is one of the true greats of Korean art. Yes, people will talk about RM's latest solo work as a 4-star production and "Itaewon Class" as edgy and progressive. But none of these truly compares to what director Park has produced over the years. A long list of breathtaking movies, memorable characters, and scenes and moments that stay with you years, decades even, after watching them.

With it being July 5th, a date heavily featured in the movie, I decided it was our fate to watch it together. I had previously omitted it from courses because I was worried it was too provocative to show in a university classroom. None of the class had seen it and only a few had even heard of it. I provided a disclaimer before we began: anyone that felt uncomfortable during the movie was welcome to leave the class. A few looked at me with a smirk, as if to say, "Professor. Don't worry. You're old movies can't shock us."

The release

Originally released in November 2003, the movie became an instant hit here in Korea. It also became one of the first pieces of Korean culture to have an impact on the West. If there is a Hallyu talked about today, the spread of culture from Korean shores to the outside world, "Oldboy" is one of the earliest riders. While the 2002 drama "Winter Sonata" and Bae Yong-joon had captured the hearts of horny Japanese housewives with its saccharine and nostalgic look at first love, achieving success in East Asia was one thing. Gaining recognition in Europe and America was another. But that is exactly what "Oldboy" and Park Chan-wook did in a world long before either "Squid Game" or "Parasite" were born.

Quentin Tarantino was influential in helping it become the first Korean film to win Cannes' Grand Prix award and has frequently sung the praises of Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. Winning that prestigious award in 2004 saw many Koreans in tears. There was a sense of immense pride at the recognition the country was receiving, emerging out of the shadows of Japanese colonization, domestic dictatorship, and the existential dread of the Asian Financial Crisis.

So dark were those periods of oppression that the freedom that finally emerged was clutched and exploited by Korean artists as greedily as possible. Park himself suggests that the election of President Kim Dae-jung in 1998 was pivotal in allowing freedom of expression to finally flourish. An explosion of art emerged, painted by people such as Kim Jee-won, Ryoo Seung-wan, Jang Sun-woo, and Hong Sang-soo.

The unspeakable world

There is a world in front of you composed of great complexity. It is total in its existence and you are part of it. We can try to define what we see ("That's a desk, and there is a shadow. A coffee cup. Birds chirping outside. A slight breeze" and so on) but we can never convey it all. There is a Taoist idea that the five colors make a person blind and the five tones make a person deaf. Because if you force all of color into a specific number or all sound into a single octave, you are losing the great infinite spectrum of all that exists. It is only by abandoning the concepts of sight and sound that we can finally see and hear that which is truly there. We gain access to the unspeakable world.

Korean cinema at its best is like this. It contains the unspeakable world and the depths of the human soul. Gone are the simple ideas of good and evil. Erased are the ideas of a moral protagonist and their immoral antagonist. Western ideas of right and wrong simply don't exist. Who is the good guy in "Parasite," in "Memories of Murder," in "Oldboy," or "Decision to Leave"? Yes there are main characters, but you would struggle to call them "good." But because they are not good, or at least defined as such by their creators, they become something much larger, realer, and more complete than the archetypes we are spoon-fed elsewhere.

Park Chan-wook has described this as portraying something irrational: a phenomenon that cannot be explained logically. A portrait of humanity as neither good nor evil but rather as a complex existence. This is why when you watch the movie, you feel it. Not just on an emotional level, but also physically. I could see those effects ripple through the class as I sat at the back of the lecture hall. I saw the blonde American girl dramatically cover her mouth in disbelief when the twist was revealed, as if not wanting what was being spoken on screen to come out of her own mouth. The lads from Singapore inched forward during the fights, their own muscles twitching in preparation. The Chinese girls turned away when the hammer was pushed towards the teeth. Park has the ability to make you move and you feel tired after watching "Oldboy." The kind of ecstatic or erotic tiredness you feel after a good workout.

He's also spoken about the influence of Kafka on his movies and that provides the surrealism and the absurdity: the ants, the imprisonment. The ennui.

David A. Tizzard has a doctorate in Korean Studies and lectures at Seoul Women's University and Hanyang University. He is a social-cultural commentator and musician who has lived in Korea for nearly two decades. He is also the host of the "Korea Deconstructed" podcast, which can be found online. He can be reached at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.