I sit in my bed, not knowing what words to type. What lines to scribble on the page. My ink runs dry.
My heart feels heavy. I’m tense. I want to cry but at the same time I’m feeling hopeful and there’s an underlying sense of peace.
This one is different. It’s about the pain and suffering in the world and everything we put ourselves through.
You would never imagine some of the things people have to go through and yet we’re surviving every day.
I’ve never felt like my life was in danger but I fight a battle too. Internally. These people are fighting an external battle.
I wonder if we could all put our weapons down one day. If we could all surrender. Raise that white flag…
Let’s give up on trying to punish each other. Let’s give up on being judge, jury, and executioner to our fellow man.
I’ve been thinking, and that thinking is that if we do anything important in this life it’s that we love one another.
I know it sounds like something on a Hallmark card but it really is the antidote to the poison that has so infected this world we live in every day.
I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not that I feel so heavily for other people. Maybe it’s a burden and maybe life would be easier if I just didn’t care what happened one way or the other. But I do. I care what happens. Give me the chance to do the right thing and not just for goodness’ sake but because I want to do the right thing.
Allow me to choose between love and hate and I will choose love every time. Allow me to choose the path of animosity or forgiveness and I rather live and let die.
Again, my heart is sore and I don’t quite know where that leaves me. Without love, none of us can keep on living. We may think we’re living but really, we’re dead inside.
A friend of mine told me to write freely tonight so here I am.
I hope my words can carry me farther than my imagination can. I hope that these words are like a song that my trapped cage bird soul sings. This is my gospel and its only mine.
It all started when a friend of mine posted a waltz by Dmitri Shostakovich. I thought it sounded oddly familiar. It reminded me of this track from Oldboy (2003).
I knew that Oldboy used a lot of waltz music for their original soundtrack but it never quite occurred to me why. To understand, we’ll need a little bit more context.
For starters, Oldboy is adapted from a manga for the big screen but it’s also adapted from a greek tragedy called Oedipus Rex. In the story, a king causes a chain of events in the past that regrettably ends up with him fulfilling a prophecy of murdering his father and sleeping with his mother.
We can see direct parallels from this to Oldboy’s story. Oh Dae-su sees Woo-Jin enacting incest with his own sister and that causes a spiraling of events. A cause and effect that was indicative of greek tragedies at the time. Because Oh Dae-su saw them, Woo-Jin’s sister committed suicide. Because of this suicide, Woo-Jin seeks revenge on Oh Dae-su which leads to him being imprisoned for 15 years.
Oh Dae-su is unaware of his captors and in the beginning racks his brain as to who may have imprisoned him and who seeks to do him harm. Woo-Jin warps Oh Dae-su’s mind and when he is released, be it no accident, he searches high and low for his family but he can’t find them. By no accident he meets Mi-Do, who happens to be none other than his daughter (unbeknownst to him). He ends up falling in love and sleeping with her, fulfilling an elaborate plan or a “prophecy” concocted by Woo-Jin.
This is where the part about the waltz comes in. The waltz is a form of traditional classical music that traditionally was meant to be danced to. Later other forms would be birthed but waltz literally means “to turn” in German. Back to the subject of the greek tragedy, it’s almost like Oh Dae-su is dancing with fate. Fate being a common theme in Greek plays.
Waltz music was big during the romantic era and was primarily a couples dance. It was a forbidden dance in the 1800s and was only danced by the few, the bold and the brave in the beginning.
The dance Oh Dae-su is dancing with Mi-Do, his daughter, is incest. Therefore it’s a forbidden dance much like the waltz was in its early days.
Greek tragedies have another theme of “show, don’t tell” and other good directors know this rule is crucial for any good drama. In Oldboy, this is employed a lot.
Mi-Do embracing Oh Dae-su in the ending for Oldboy (2003)
Some scenes in Oldboy are reminiscent of programme music (a form of classical music popular in the romantic era) in the sense that a lot of scenes are carried simply by the music. Programme music was a derivative of classical music where the pieces told of a story or an event. The emotion of the music and the grandiosity of it all was the dialogue. No script needed!
At the end of Oldboy, Oh Dae-su has cut off his own tongue as repentance. He is the only one who knows the secret and has tried a myriad of hypnosis treatments to forget what he has done. Not much is said in this scene and it’s the perfect example of how to do drama right. In the end, nothing is said besides “I love you” as they embrace each other and the track “The Last Waltz” plays tying the whole theme together.
Artistic Apathy 