Oldboy is a 2003 South-Korean film directed by Park Chan-wook. The story revolves around Oh Dae-su, a middle-aged man who was kidnapped and kept in a prison, while being framed for the murder of his wife. He spends 15 years in the prison, only to be let out suddenly with his journals and some money. Taunted by the faceless voice of the man who kidnapped him, the film follows Oh Dae-su and his strange new companion Mi-do as he tries to uncover who is behind the act, and why he is being punished in the first place.
Throughout the film, we are as in the dark as Oh Dae-su on why he is in his current situation. Chan-wook allows the story to unfold in a variety of ways, and his idea of memory is different from what we see in commercial movies. An early example of this can be seen when Oh Dae-su successfully identifies the prison he was kept in simply by visiting every restaurant with the name “Blue Dragon” and tasting their dumplings. The power of taste in this scene is apparent as the memory of those dumplings is seared into Dae-su’s mind. The first “flashback” we see takes place right at the beginning of the movie and is pretty standard as flashbacks go. Oh Dae-su regales his tale to a man about to jump off a building, and the plot then continues from that point onwards. However, it is the latter half of the film when we see Chan-wook’s real experimentation with memory, and his unique take on flashback scenes.
Oh Dae-su discovers that the man behind is kidnapping is named Lee Woo-jin and was a student at his high school. He entrusts Mi-do with the prison owner (who has his own issues with Woo-jin), and leaved to his childhood town to finally discover the truth. Once he arrives, he visits an old classmate’s hair salon, and she chatters about their school days but provides no useful information. She calls a friend and they gossip about Woo-jin’s sister, Lee Soo-ah. At this moment, a woman enters the shop, ringing the bell at the door and Dae-su gets a glimpse of her knees. This triggers his memory and he is taken back to a time when he was a young boy at school, watching Soo-ah ride on her bicycle, her knees exposed and ringing the bell.
This flashback is a pivotal moment of the film. Chan-wook has stated before, “I think flashbacks lend to the surreal quality of dreams. When people remember things in films you always wonder ‘Is that true?’, and there’s always this ambiguity in the flashbacks in my films” (in Spencer 2004: 19). This description could not be more accurate. We watch as Oh Dae-su moves around the school in two different temporal planes – one as a teenager and the other as an adult. He chases after his past self, in pursuit of a memory he has long forgotten. A traditional movie flashback depicts memories of the past, explored in a chronological manner, that reveals a detail important to the present, following which the flashback ends. The memory is witnessed, not experienced. This lends to the modern idea of time moving in a straight line, and memories being something one can recall without immersing oneself. Gilles Deleuze described flashbacks as “a precisely closed circuit which goes from the present to the past, then leads us back to the present”. In Oldboy, memory is not so rigid, and often gets triggered involuntarily, such as the kind suggested by Proust. Proust viewed involuntary memory as containing the "essence of the past," claiming that it was lacking from voluntary memory. When Oh Dae-su discovers his lover Mi-do is his daughter, it is through a series of images. When Woo-jin recalls his sister’s death, he is physically present at the dam. Finally, when Oh Dae-su wants to erase his memory, he must physically experience walking away from it. In this way, Park Chan-wook abandons the traditional notions of memory, instead showing memory as something that is experienced, rather than recalled.
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