‘기억의 윤리’의 관점에서 바라본 <택시운전사>(2017)와 <1987>(2017)

Abstract

The “democratization movement” that continued throughout the 1980s was a huge historical trend and the spirit of the times, and much of the memory of this is not separated from guilt or trauma. Among them, <Taxi Driver> and <1987>, which are the subject of the 5.18 Gwangju Uprising and the June 1987 Uprising, are films that have gained the status of “national narrative” and “collective memory” by achieving popular success. <Taxi Driver> structures the narrative through the “double position” as a petit bourgeois and a witness of a historical tragedy of the protagonist, while at the same time drawing the audience's identification. However, this film emphasizes citizens' naive perception of the political context of slaughter and atrocities, and omits the forms of active resistance to unrighteous violence, such as armed militias. As a result, the citizens of Gwangju at that time are not only portrayed as pure and helpless victims, but the causes and facts of the state violence that killed their own citizens with knives and guns are overlooked. In addition, by being silent about the trauma that people who have experienced massacres like 5.18 have, it avoids the reproduction of pain, which is the most powerful means of memory and healing. As a result, <Taxi Driver> leaves a regret that it cannot face the tragic past and cannot properly shape the trauma. <1987> is a very dynamic weaving of the historical inevitability of the June Uprising, in which millions of citizens participated and the military regime surrendered. The film is largely composed of two axes: the fierce battle between the dictatorship and the people's camp over the truth of Park Jong-cheol's death, and the people who stand up in order not to waste their righteous death. In the process, the film tensely reproduces the dynamics of the struggle between the ruling power and the opposing power in a thriller style. The second half, centering on the relationship between Yeon-hee and Hanyeol, shows how an accidental encounter in the historical time and space of the June Uprising leads to a encounter with the ‘unmeasurable’ that demands a new creation of existence. However, the ideology of this film, which ends the June Uprising left with half of success and lost dreams with ‘the heat of the plaza’, asks another question about ethics of memory in a different sense from <Taxi Driver> in that it leaves the June Uprising only as a memory of victory. The vivid cinematic representation performed by the two films serves to summon our forgotten past into a living present and make the audience into a “community of mourning” for the sufferings of the past people. At the same time, it provides an opportunity for the audience to socially share the loss and trauma in them while facing the painful history. However, in order for this process to move toward reflective overcoming of trauma, the invention and re-creation of social memories of history through more diverse films in the future are constantly required.