Oldboy

This is modern Jacobean Revenge Tragedy. Aristotle would be so proud. Oldboy is perfect tragedy.  Dae-su’s hamartia are myopia, complacency, and hubris - strengths in his imprisonment, but fatal flaws in freedom. In some ways Park Chan-wook subverts the Aristotelian structure: he does without the peripeteia. Dae-su was never in the favour of fortune, he only thought he was - his hamartia. And that is what is so smart about the anagnorisis, it comes simultaneously with the realisation that there could never be a peripeteia. What is fate in a modern context but orchestration by the Machiavellian villain? It is what makes it so haunting both to Dae-su and the audience. And it all comes together in the bloodbath at the end.  But Dae-su’s tragic death is not physical. The ‘monster’ dies, and myopic, complacent Dae-su is left behind, a monster of amorality in his own right.  And so, at the end, the audience experiences both catharsis and disquietude: the monster of revenge has died but the monster of sin has been born.  God I love tragedy.