The Police Incompetence and Widespread Societal Misogyny of The Chaser (2008)

Apart from the loss of lives, one of the saddest parts of any serial killer investigation is often realizing many of the victims were those in society most at risk, whether they were women, children, the elderly, people of colour, or, many times, sex workers. Jack the Ripper preyed on the women who worked the streets of Whitechapel in the late 19th century. Gary Ridgway, also known as the Green River Killer, killed at least forty-nine women in the State of Washington, most of whom were sex workers— it’s possible Ridgway actually killed up to ninety women. Here in Canada, Robert Pickton was able to kill six women, though it’s believed he may have murdered closer to sixty, because his victims were largely women from the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, known for poverty, drug addiction, crime, and sex work. It’s nothing new to see women who engage in sex work targeted by the worst killers in history, in America and also abroad. Yet it’s endlessly maddening to see the justice system, at every level, fail these women time and time again.

The Chaser (2008) tells the tale of South Korean murderer and rapist, Yoo Young-chul, whose body count reached twenty confirmed kills between September 2003 and July 2004. His victims were several elderly bourgeois men and a bunch of young sex workers in Seoul’s Mapo District. The film’s screenplay focuses mostly on the sex workers Young-chul murdered by showing how the police, and South Korean society in general, failed them during their investigation into the killings. It was a small group of people at a massage parlour who took the initiative to alert the police to a strange man – Young-chul – who’d been making strange inquiries at their business following the disappearance of several employees following similar calls. The masseuses literally detained the killer until police arrived. In the end, a whole society allowed a serial killer access to vulnerable victims, and it wasn’t until people in an already maligned industry took control that Seoul began to truly pay attention to what was happening right under their noses.

The less than perfect protagonist of The Chaser is a fictional cop-turned-pimp, Eom Joong-ho (played by a smouldering Kim Yoon-seok). He’s part of the societal problem in South Korea, going from being a repressive arm of the state as a police officer to being part of a capitalist system built on misogyny as a pimp. When Joong-ho discovers one of his escorts has gone missing, he’s initially only concerned about money and how much of it he’s losing. He sets out on a mission to find the young woman, like a boss on a rampage looking for an employee who hasn’t called in sick and never showed up for work. Joong-ho’s misogyny shows in the earliest scenes where his role as pimp entirely defines him. It’s only once he realizes something more sinister has likely happened to the escort that he understands how little these women he pimps out mean to society at large, and, of course, by then it’s too late. The pivotal point for Joong-ho is his realization that the women he pimps are human beings, after he meets the missing escort’s little girl. Although he should have known this before, his understanding is a breakthrough, and representative of possible change even in those who exploit women. Again, however, this realization is too little too late, and the majority of the damage cannot be undone.

The real Young-chul – his fictional counterpart in the film is called Je Yeong-min, played by Ha Jung-woo – took advantage of the anonymous transactions for sex in the illicit South Korean sex market in order to lure his victims. The opening of the film depicts just how easy it was for an anonymous man to come in contact with a marginalized sex worker and make her vanish. In this first scene, a woman gets out of her car with Yeong-min, leaving the vehicle parked down the street from his house, and then after they’re gone, the scene cuts, jumping days, or maybe weeks, and the car is now in the rain with a pile of flyers stuck under its windshield. This one scene illustrates the ease with which Yeong-min is able to casually take women off the streets to kill without anybody batting an eye. The actual Young-chul would usually have sex workers called to his neighbourhood, meeting them on the street and walking back to his home, where they would then have sex and afterwards he would bludgeon them to death. The scene recreates Young-chul’s actual method of luring victims faithfully, other than the fact the fictional Yeong-min gets a ride home with his first victim in the film. The Chaser’s main focus is not to recreate the life of Young-chul faithfully, rather it chooses to explore the two largest reasons for why the serial killer’s crimes were able to go on so long before he was caught: police incompetence and widespread societal misogyny.

Police incompetence, both in the film and in the real case, are ultimately what let the killer escape custody, albeit in very different ways. In the actual case, Young-chul was able to literally make an escape while arrested. Young-chul – an epileptic – feigned an epileptic seizure then fled custody after they loosened his restrained, though he would be caught barely twelve hours later. In the film, Yeong-min escapes custody by being let go after police are unable to tie him directly to the crimes, in spite of him admitting to murder. Similar to the real South Korean police’s predicament with Young-chul’s murders, The Chaser’s cops have no physical evidence to use against their suspect. The film cops let the suspect go, allowing him an opportunity to go back out into Seoul and potentially kill again, whereas the real life police were able to use Young-chul’s confessions to the murders as their evidence in his case, which, thankfully, put him in jail— he was actually sentenced to death, however, while the death penalty remains permitted under written law a prisoner execution hasn’t been carried out in South Korea since 1997. Police incompetence factors into the film as a way of confronting the real case and the vulnerability of sex workers in social hierarchy. The screenplay has the police too occupied bumbling over a recent public image SNAFU: the mayor of Seoul, while making a public appearance, has shit thrown in his face. They’re more concerned about the police force’s public image than they are about a serial killer, showing us how little dead women – sex workers specifically – mean on the grander societal scale, not to mention one of the killer’s victims is still alive at this point in the film and the longer it takes the cops to get the answers the less chance there is she’ll survive. In comparison with important men being symbolically disrespected, the dead, and dying, women at the hands of a misogynistic serial killer are low on the justice totem pole.

Something the screenplay does in The Chaser to hone in further on its themes is highlight the misogyny of the killer. The real Young-chul was married until two years prior to his first murder, and he also had a son with his wife before they divorced. He was convicted in 1995 for selling child pornography and again in 2000 on charges of child sexual abuse for rape. He was clearly a violent offender already preying on vulnerable people, and the South Korean legal system only gave him a total of five and a half years in prison altogether for both his hideous crimes. There were clear warning signs of escalation in his behaviour which were ignored, and eventually he graduated to killing women because of a deeply misogynistic worldview. In the film, the killer Yeong-min is presented as a young man who’s unable to fulfil his desire: he’s impotent. The murderous misogyny of Yeong-min comes out because of the rage he feels at his inability to actually have sex with the women he later kills. Young-chul himself was a misogynist of the highest order. He not only killed sex workers, he despised all women. Upon his arrest, one of the things he told the news media, in front of many live television cameras: “Women shouldn’t be sluts.” While the real Young-chul and the fictional Yeong-min differ significantly in terms of the latter’s impotence, their misogyny is the same, and the film tackles it in a different way to reinforce the large part misogyny played in the overall case.

There are moments in The Chaser when Yeong-min physically resembles his real life counterpart Young-chul perfectly, such as how he looks near the finale, reminiscent of him in a famous picture in which he’s wearing a baseball hat, a yellow forensics suit, and sporting a bloodshot eye. There are others moments where Yeong-min acts exactly like Young-chul, both in terms of the way he murders and also in his interactions with sex workers. The film doesn’t try to replicate the serial killer exactly, unlike other biopics that, many times, focus too hard on physical character instead of painting an accurate psychological portrait of its subject. The Chaser’s screenplay makes its aim the revelation of social conditions which allowed these crimes, and others like it, to occur. Many times a story like this comes from the perspective of someone who already understands the vulnerability of marginalized people, like the sex worker victims of various serial killers. Here, the protagonist Joong-ho is the only one looking for a missing woman – a pimp already exploiting their bodies for capital – and through his personal investigation he finally comes around to understanding the error of his own misogynistic ways. While this writer isn’t advocating we rehabilitate the image of sleazy pimps, sometimes seeing the story from an angle such as the fictional Joong-ho’s is important because it reminds us that, occasionally, even those who exploit others can change their world views.