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Cultural Elements in Mother 2009 Film
The Mother 2009 is a Korean film about an unnamed mother who lives with her son called Do-Joon. Do-Joon is twenty-seven years old, and he suffers from mental health. They live quietly, and as the film begins, the mother is seen as a good mother who does everything in her power to protect his son. The mother of Do-Joon is a known herb and acupuncture specialist who offers herbal treatment to the neighbors. As the film progresses, some cultural elements are witnessed.
The film brings out the aspect of the ineffectiveness of some cultural elements. Do-Joon’s mother is a known herb and acupuncture specialist who administers traditional. She believes in her herbs and acupuncture practices, but she cannot use the same traditional medicines to heal her son’s mental health. If the medicine were effective as it was believed by society, the first person she could have cured is her son. Since she is unable to heal her son, she opts to overprotect him and sees him as the most innocent child. She feels guilty for failing her son and end up being a murderer and putting an innocent boy in prison.
The second cultural element is seen at the beginning of the film, where Do-Joon shares a bed with her mother even though he’s twenty-seven years old. This act of sharing a bed with a grown man is against Korean culture (An 156). Even though the mother considers him as a child with a mental disability, he is still a man with feelings. As Do-Joon sleeps with the mother, he’s seen touching his mother’s breast. The whole scenario is incest, and it’s against Korean culture. This type of incidence is punishable by law. What the mother does by sharing a bed with him is taboo and should not be accepted by society. Even though she portrays herself as a traditional woman in society, she goes against the same society by sharing a bed with a grown man who is his son.
In the film, the element of culture is witnessed by the fact of Do-joon being an herbalist and acupuncture specialist. She helps bring up the idea of how Korean people use herbs and traditional medicine to treat people. Do-Joon’s mother supports the viewer to understand that despite the modernization in Korea, many traditional herbs and acupuncture are still used and appreciated. Most Korean believes in culture. Do-Joon’s mother uses herbs and acupuncture as bait to the garbage collector to get the information she wanted. If the herbs and acupuncture were not still used in society, the garbage collector could not have fallen for her trap.
As the film comes to an end, there is an aspect of culture that is felt. The final scene shows that the Korean people believed in acupuncture. This is seen when Do-Joon’s mother performs acupuncture before leaving out of guilt of killing a witness and letting an innocent man go to jail. She believes that the acupuncture will make her forget what just happened. The mother even dances on with other passengers after the ritual, considering that the acupuncture has cleansed her against what he did. From the incidence, it can be seen that the aspect of acupuncture is all about misconceptions and myths that cannot be proved. The mother believes that performing the ritual helped her immediately and even joins in a dance. But the same acupuncture does not work on her son when she uses it on him. She performed the traditional ritual on her son to make him forget that she tried to poison him when he was five, but it does not work.
From the film, the culture of motherly love is seen from Do-Joon’s mother. She tries her best to the best mother to her son. Do- Joon is protected by the mother against every bad thing that happens. Even if Do-Joon does something wrong, the mother believes that his friend Jin-tae influenced it. He ends up killing Ah-Jung, a young schoolgirl, but the mother still thinks he is innocent. The film shows how the culture of mothers excessively loving their children can be blinding and may lead them to trouble like in the case of Do-Joon’s mother.
The culture of a mother’s love can also be viewed from another perspective. From the film, Do-Joon’s mother is seen as an ideal parent who is always going out of her way to protect her son. But there is something more than the love she shows the son. The film highlighted that she tried to poison him when he was five years old due to life’s hardship. From this scene, it can be said that the love she’s showing her son Do-joon is out of guilty. There are high chances that the mental problem of Do-Joon resulted from this poisoning incidence. She might be covering up her guilt by showing excessive love. The incidence helps the viewers to understand that sometimes motherly love might not be genuine as it looks. It is assumed that mothers always show unconditional love to their children, but this belief might be true with Do-Joon’s mother.
Mother 2009 is a sad film that is played funnily. It is a film that highlights many personal biases and sexual human desires among people. Various cultural elements come up within the film. They include things like the use of herbs and acupuncture by Do-Joon’s mother. The cultural elements in the film make it flow and interesting.
Work Cited
An, Ji-yoon. “The Korean mother in contemporary thriller films: a Monster or just modern?.” Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 11.2 (2019): 154-169.