살부, 복수 그리고 여성 서사 - 영화 <산이 울다>와 <김복남 살인사건의 전말> 읽기

Abstract

Chinese Director Larry Yang’s Mountain Cry and Korean Director Jang Cheol-soo’s Bedevilled are films that sought a narrative in which a subaltern woman who has lived, suffering all kinds of violence in an isolated space, kills her husband to revenge the world that oppressed her and is born again as an existential subject. In the two films, the female characters were castrated by society; however, they turned into the image of Vagina dentata that resists the world by killing their husbands. These women are female monsters born in the process in which they would destroy the male-dominated history and the patriarchal world, and the public feel catharsis, watching the process in which such monsters destroy the order and system of the symbolic. However, in the films, for the clear revelation of the female character’s revenge and process of becoming a subject clearly and by the legitimacy of their actions, in other words, by the genre convention of the films operated to attract the public easily through criticism and reflection on social institutions and environmental contexts, the two female characters’ act of killing a husband was expressed just as the act of a character in a thriller or cult movie, not the weak’s struggle to survive. Along with this, the two films are left as narratives of incomplete becoming of a subject that a woman/monster’s revenge cannot but consequently remain in the realm of the eternal other by concluding it as the mad struggle for a woman’s rebirth as a subject is turned over by the identity of reason.