Learning to Adapt - My Tryst with Song Seo-rae
I still remember the first time I watched Oldboy - it was recommended to me during the lockdown era and I had too much time on my hands. That was the day I became a fan of Park Chan-wook's work and immediately delved into his filmography, binging all his films. There was a point in that period where I felt an Oldboy rewatch was mandatory - it was the only film I had kept downloaded on my phone for a very long time. It was during this rewatch that I noticed something that I still haven't forgotten - in the scene where Oh Dae-su encounters the outside world for the first time since being released from capture, he runs into a gang of street punks who promptly call him "Jjeoppangsae", subtitled as "Dickhead." This is a new word for Oh Dae-su, who has been cut off from the outside world for 16 years and has not been updated about the new words introduced into the Korean language (talk about being a boomer). Apart from the fact that I could relate with him in the sense that I too was forcibly holed up in my room rotting my time away for what seemed to be a frustratingly uncertain length of time, this was something I found fascinating. I too picked up words like this.
