During the mid-1980s, serial killers were already a staple of American media— everybody knew the names Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Richard Ramirez and others, while murderers like Jeffrey Dahmer, the as of then unknown BTK, and the Green River Killer were just entering the true crime pop culture lexicon. America wasn’t the only country with serial killers, though because of how the media operated on human tragedy – how it continues to operate today in the Western world – it was the country on which the spotlight most often fell. But in September 1986, South Korea began experiencing their first identifiable string of serial murders.
Bong dives headfirst into all the ways South Korean police were ill prepared to deal with modern crimes when they were stuck in a somewhat pre-modern iteration of investigation, sometimes by choice. The screenplay uses the character of Inspector Park Doo-man (played by Song Kang-ho) as a way of showing how the country wasn’t used to sophisticated crimes, resulting in decidedly unsophisticated policemen. For instance, Park insists he’s able to suss out a suspect’s true nature through eye contact, and during several scenes he employs this method hoping to somehow identify the serial killer he seeks with an impromptu staring contest. He’s symbolic of an old way of thinking, not unlike the same attitudes we see from Canadian Conservatives and American Republicans: criminals look like criminals. He tells one of his fellow policemen: “But my eyes can’t be fooled.”The screenplay also juxtaposes Inspector Seo Tae-yoon (played by Kim Sang-kyung), a cop from Seoul, with Park’s stale policing as representative of a more modern style. Seoul’s population is a few hundred thousand people shy of a population around 10 million, whereas Hwaseong, though a city, has only three quarters of a million citizens.
It’s like an American movie where a detective from New York City travels to a small Southern city to investigate a crime, situating Seo as a sophisticated modern inspector versus Park’s backwoods-type cop. Seo is less inclined to take suspects at face value, using cerebral methods to narrow the suspect pool. He pays attention to the modus operandi of the killings instead of seeking out the weirdest looking person who’s easiest to pin with the crimes. One hilarious subplot has Park following his own modern instincts by insisting that, due to a lack of pubic hairs found at the crime scenes, the culprit must be a “total baldie.” This prompts him to go undercover at the local bathhouses, where he scans the room casually hoping to find a man with no pubic hair.
Later, he resorts to a psychic in his desperation, as well. He does come to an understanding that his methods are ineffective, only it arrives too late. The film’s closing moments show Park recognising his eyes were fooled all along. He speaks with a little girl who may have seen the suspect return years later to one of the crime scenes, and she tells him the man looked “ordinary” and “plain.” He finally sees there was no way to pick the right suspect out of a crowd, then breaks the fourth wall silently by staring directly into the camera while the screen fades to black. This gesture is an acknowledgement, by Bong as director, that the suspect could be somebody out there watching the film in real life, and simultaneously Park searches the audience, lost in an endless sea of potential suspects.
Although the incompetence of South Korean authorities is on full display, the screenplay makes significant connections between American and South Korean police, as well as the media in both countries. Bong’s film does a great job of presenting the real Hwaseong case in a familiar way to American films about police investigations. He shows how police work can be inherently corrupt— it isn’t only an American thing. Early in the film, Inspector Park and his partner Inspector Cho Yong-koo (played by Kim Roi-ha) beat a mentally challenged, disfigured man they believe responsible for the crimes, simply because Park’s wife says the man followed one of the victims before she was killed. They confine him to the basement and lead him with questions into confessing to one of the murders. Initially, the suspect is charged, and Bong perfectly depicts the hubris of police after falsely obtaining a confession when Cho and Park happily have their picture taken with their sergeant for a newspaper— all three men stand in single file on the stairs with big smiles, holding up their fists in victory.After the first suspect is proved innocent, another man is beaten into confession by Park and Cho. In this scene, the boiler man comes and goes checking the furnace as the two detectives conduct light torture on their suspect. This seemingly innocuous moment is indicative of police corruption as an everyday, common occurrence, not something that rarely happens. Nowadays, after the Paradise Lost (1996-2011) documentaries, as well as most recently Making a Murderer (2015) and other true crime exposés, the forced confession often has a specifically American face. Bong’s film shows how the nature of police work, especially concerning difficult and disturbing cases such as the Hwaseong murders, can lead those meant to uphold the law to break it under the dangerously misguided notion they’re putting an immoral killer behind bars.
Normal crime scenes are presented as chaotic in South Korea. After the first murder, Park is trying to gather evidence and must contend with the media snapping pictures, children walking through the scene, and a tractor that runs over a footprint left in nearby mud. It doesn’t help Park keeps a pair of shoes – possible evidence – in the front seat of his car where there exists no official chain of custody, nor any preventative measures to keep DNA or trace evidence found on the shoes intact until they were examined in a lab. As if a regular crime scene with its many problems weren’t enough, sometimes murders in South Korea are reenacted: the accused is trotted through the location where they dumped a corpse in order for police to get a sense of what their suspect actually knows, or possibly what they don’t know which could, ideally, lead them towards a more viable suspect. What can, and does happen, is the police use reenactments to make a suspect look guilty when there’s otherwise a lack of evidence. This further belies the inexperience of South Korea police in dealing with sensitive cases, because media are present and photographs of a suspect roleplaying the crime wind up on the news. As is shown during a reenactment in the film, these crime scenes are open to the media and usually the public. When the first suspected killer is taken to reenact the crime in a field, his father rushes in and causes a commotion while police fight off reporters, and the only thing holding anyone back from the scene itself are a number of people linked arm in arm as if they’re playing a game of Red Rover. Herein lies a glaring problem with these reenactments— although mostly done with good intentions, they make a serious crime such as murder appear like a game.
Memories of Murder explores how South Korean cops weren’t only finding it difficult to adjust their ways of thinking to modern murder cases, they were hindered by a lack of technology. A telling moment in the screenplay about the limits of South Korean murder investigations at the time of the murders involves DNA. When the police are excited to finally have a DNA sample from a crime scene they can compare against samples taken from possible suspects, they’re quickly disappointed to learn their country doesn’t have the capabilities to analyze the samples themselves.They’re forced to send the samples to America— not only can they not do the tests themselves, they have to wait weeks or more for the results. Most of the investigation was troubled by the police and their fallible methods, yet Bong’s screenplay doesn’t stray from making the audience wonder what could have been were the appropriate technology available to police at the time. A climactic scene sees Seo on the precipice of becoming the same kind of cop as Park or Cho, allowing the case to skew his own morality. Park arrives at the same moment with the DNA analysis received from America. The results dash Seo’s last hopes of confirming the murderer, and he decides to believe solely in what instinct tells him. Seo tries to shoot the suspect, and Park stops him. Regardless of all the scenes depicting police incompetence, this one tragically illustrates the limitations South Korean inspectors faced, and the extent to which they were pushed when faced with their own inability to solve the murders.