봉준호 영화 <마더>와 희생양 메커니즘

Abstract

Director Juneho Bong’s film <Mother> shows diverse types of scapegoats : Ajung, a girl scapegoat, Jongpal, the substitute scapegoat, mother, both scapegoat and tormentor. These scapegoats are excluded from society in the forms of death, imprisonment and expulsion. The lives of these scapegoats coincide with Rene Girard’s typical diagram of disaster-crime- symptom-violence. The scapegoat mechanism in the film <Mother> is distinguished by disappearance of difference, repetition of copied desire, wrongly intended oppressor and absence of divinity. The mentally retarded Dojoon involuntarily committed crime and another mentally retarded orphan, Jongpal is unfairly framed and imprisoned. The lower class junk shop old man is murdered by mother obsessed with copied desire. Dojoon and mother commit incest and the junk shop old man commits sexual crime. Mother, a devilish oppressor commits murder to cover the murder of Dojoon. Mother suffers from guilty conscious because she believed that she was the one who made Dojoon a fool. This guilty conscious gnaws her spirit and made a monster. She is finally victimized as a scapegoat of mad maternity. Girard believes society is healed through consecration of scapegoat. <Mother> leaves out the consecration of scapegoats. The uncertainly of truth to the murder case lies dormant in the town and the uneasiness becomes a symbol of allegory about modern society. Juneho Bong’s <Mother> delivers unsettled symptom of society through scapegoat mechanism.