[SPOILER ALERT]
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.
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 