With the exception of watching old war documentaries of the
Japanese kicking the crap out of the British in the invasion of Singapore and being
captain of the school karate team, I’ve never had much of an interest in Japan
or Korea. I was always more interested in China, India and the Arab and Persian
World. This only got exaggerated as I got older. My benefactors were inevitably
from the Sub-continent and by the time I started working, China had become the
market for just about everything.
Well, I’ve suddenly found myself becoming more interested in
the Korean Peninsula thanks to the “circuit breaker.” I’m getting to know
Netflix and its offerings and one of my great discoveries is Korean TV series. The
most recent Korean TV series to have caught my interest is Crash Landing On
You, which is the love story between a South Korean Heiress and a North Korean
soldier. The story is unrealistic and shmoltzy but its great fun. More can be
found at:
What makes this particularly interesting is North Korea, the
evil twin of South Korea. While the South is a hyper-capitalist democracy that
gives the world all sorts of electronic gadgets, the North is a Stalinist State
that has been run by the third generation of the same family. It’s famously impoverished
and its sources of revenue include nuclear blackmail and weapon sales. While South
Korea is vibrant democracy that impeaches presidents and throws strongmen in
jail, North Korea lives in fear of whenever the State Security decides to move
in.
While no North Korean Actors were involved in Crash Landing
On You nor were any scenes actually shot in North Korea, it used North Korean defectors
as consultants and apparently the show has gotten around 60 percent of what
life in North Korea is actually like. The most touching scenes in the entire
series focus on how the main characters adjust to life in the different Koreas.
I suspect the show would be just another Korean drama were it for the
differences between North and South.
One of the more interesting points about the show is that
North Korea is an exceedingly unequal society. It turns out that the male lead
is the son of North Korea’s Director of the General Political Bureau. While he’s
a mere captain in the army trying to live a low-profile life, people’s
reactions change the moment they discover who is father is. There’s a lovely
scene where the hospital director discovers who he is and starts sucking up and
begs him to use the hospital as his own.
This is not to say that hierarchy is unimportant in less
authoritarian states. The South Korean father is clearly head of his home. The
heiress is used to getting her way because she’s the boss of her company and
has plenty of money but “Who you are” and “Who you are related to,” don’t seem
to matter in Seoul as much as they do in Pyongyang.
North Korea does not have the cash that South Korea has.
Throughout the show, you see the shock that the North Koreans whenever they see
the prices in South Korea. However, in the totalitarian North, the real
currency is not so much money but power or proximity to it. There’s a lovely
scene when the lady who owns the major department stores in Pyongyang complains
that although she soaks up the dollars in Pyongyang, she is still lower on the hierarchy
that the Director of the General Political Bureau. She has money but he has
power.
While having money often goes hand in hand with having
power, the two are actually different and throughout the show, there are
example of how power and desire for power trumps everything including money. We
often associate money as being a corrupting influence and forget that power corruption
exists too. The male lead is endearing because he tries to get on with life
without using Daddy’s influence and only uses it when he’s trying to do
something for the female lead and to get out of a gulag (a case of needing his
boss to know who his father is).
The beauty of power corruption, particularly the variety in
totalitarian states where power is everything, is that you don’t need to do
anything. As mentioned, the male lead never says, “You know who my father is,” –
people merely have to see his father with him and in the one case he uses his
father’s influence, he does it through rumors.
The other take away from the show is that blood is not
thicker than water, particularly when money and influence get involved. While
the heiress has a more comfortable life than her newly found North Korean friends,
she’s psychologically scared by her families infighting. Her mother neglects
her and her brothers and their spouses are constantly plotting against her. Her
second brother even goes as far as to instruct a group of thugs to ensure she
never returns to South Korea. When she talks about how her brothers are
probably glad, she’s stranded in South Korea, her North Korean love interest
says, “They’re family, you’re their sister, no matter how much siblings squabble,
they’ll still look out for you.”
The other great scenes all come from the shock the North
Koreans have of seeing the plenty in the South. They go crazy eating fried chicken
on a regular basis and one of the seniors tells his juniors that he’s not to
get distracted by all the cars on the streets.
The best scene comes when the North Koreans are captured by South
Korea’s National Intelligence Services (“NIS” or the “KCIA”). They try to
psyche themselves up from being tortured and one of the main scenes comes when one
of the North Korean troops holds out, shouting he won’t break under torture
only to realise that the NIS have attached a lie detector to him rather than an
electro prod.
The North Koreans have been programmed into thinking that
the South will torture them and the show plays up their shock when they
discover that the what they were told all their lives is not true. Conventional
wisdom as they say, can be proven wrong.
Perhaps the most enduring part of the show is that it is
based on as impossible a relationship as it gets. It’s a heart-warming message
that as different as things may be, we are at the end more similar than we are
different. The South Korean Heiress finds love and friendship with North
Koreans, who knew her and stood by her at personal risk. Her brothers by
contrast couldn’t be happier to get rid of her fast enough. As they say, don’t
look for the skin-deep differences but for the similarities of the heart.
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