An Untimely Controversy
The Me Too movement spread across society as a whole in the wake of the 2016 cultural sphere sexual scandal exposés.
The film industry was no exception. Countless revelations led to formal complaints, prosecutorial investigations, and arrests, and some suspects vanished, fled abroad, or even ended their own lives by suicide.
They were shameless perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault before they were ever artists, so of course they had to pay the price — but there were no small number of victims of false accusations, either.
The atmosphere was such that anyone could be attacked on the basis of nothing more than an anonymous exposé posted on social media. The moment something went up, verified or not, mobs would descend en masse to pile on and torment the accused.
Throwing out a jab first and shrugging later — "well, if it's not true, never mind" — had become everyday life.
Seizing the moment, there were troublemakers who dragged actors and directors they disliked into vague, murky controversies through direct or indirect association. 'Dewey' was one of the agitators raising hell across social media and film communities.
What set Dewey apart from other rabble-rousers was that she was a public figure who had run a film review site for over twenty years, and an influencer on social media with hundreds of thousands of followers.
An internet celebrity, yes — but her language was so foul that she routinely demeaned and personally attacked anyone who simply disagreed with her, which earned her as many enemies as followers.
Under the banner of the Me Too movement, she manufactured victims out of entirely unverified controversies, and when things got uncomfortable, she hid behind her anonymity and stuck to "if it's not true, prove me wrong," drawing public fury.
Troublemakers like her usually get their tails caught eventually, and in severe cases are even formally charged — but Dewey was clever. She'd skillfully deflect responsibility with "I heard it from somewhere," and rigorously buried anything that might count as evidence, managing to stir up trouble 'safely' for years on end.
'Director Kim Si-woon really went through the wringer.'
She despised Kim Si-woon's films so intensely that she not only savaged them with bad reviews but repeatedly tried to tie him to fabricated scandals — and failed every single time.
Beyond him, she had a fixed list of directors who made masculine films, cooking up controversy at every opportunity and grinding the industry's teeth with frustration.
And the true identity of this troublemaker, 'Dewey,' was none other than the film critic Jin So-hee.
Before I regressed, there had been an incident in which the server of the community where Dewey was most active was hacked.
A considerable amount of personal data was leaked, and mixed up in it were clues pointing to Dewey's identity.
Several issue-focused YouTubers got hold of it, tracked her down, and finally exposed who Dewey really was.
When the news broke, the film industry was thrown into an uproar. Old controversies and cases of false accusation from years past were dredged back up, and Jin So-hee was driven into a corner.
She was ultimately sued for defamation and other charges, but I regressed midway through, so I never got to see how it ended.
'Come to think of it, though, she's persistent. She's been fighting Director Kim Si-woon for twenty years already.'
Dewey earned her infamy as a rabble-rouser about fifteen years from now, but her bitter feud with Director Kim Si-woon had already begun.
The moment that thought crossed my mind, another followed on its heels: could the child abuse controversy that would erupt soon also be Dewey's doing?
My Future Sight had told me that a film café was where the controversy began.
If Dewey was active there, it was entirely plausible.
'The problem is I have no proof.'
What if, a few days from now, I announced: "The user 'Dewey' is about to start a child abuse controversy, and her real identity is Jin So-hee, so we should strike first"? Who would believe that?
Nothing had happened yet. If she denied everything with a straight face, there would be nothing I could do.
'Which means I have no choice but to clean up the mess after it blows over.'
Let the controversy break, contain it fast, and then counterattack. At the very least, that would sever the feud with Director Kim Si-woon before it ever took root.
As for her rabble-rousing fifteen years down the line — that would destroy itself on its own, so there was no need to worry about it now.
"Um, Director?"
I held out the videotape to Director Kim Si-woon, who was clicking his tongue as he read one of Jin So-hee's reviews.
"What's this?"
"Footage of Go Eun-hye senior talking with the kids on set..."
The tape also included her volunteer work at the orphanage.
I'd asked for it to be edited down into short clips: the conversation scenes that showed just how much Go Eun-hye adored children, the scenes of her playing with the kids at the orphanage.
"I'm going to talk about her during my interview. I need B-roll footage to run at that point."
Word would spread — a rumor that she'd treated a child harshly on set in order to draw out a performance of desperate, raw emotion.
Go Eun-hye's startlingly convincing performance, so real it looked like genuine abuse, would be put on the chopping block, and the tabloids would magnify and reproduce it a hundredfold.
'To flip that atmosphere around, this footage was absolutely essential.'
But Director Kim and the distributor's staff were flustered.
They couldn't understand why, in a situation where they were already scrambling to keep up with promotional footage for the film itself, anyone would need a video celebrating an individual actor.
"I'll promote the film as hard as I can during the interview, so please edit this for me. If nothing happens that calls for it before the interview, I'll never ask you to play it. Promise."
"That sounds like you're expecting something to happen."
"Hypothetically. Purely hypothetical."
I might end up sweating buckets explaining myself if it actually came to that, but I couldn't think of a better excuse at the moment.
The film opened as scheduled in late June.
Following Best Friends — the adults-only film of 2001 that set a staggering box office record — it claimed second place in first-week attendance rankings.
With the full summer season not even underway yet, the sudden emergence of such a hit sent the press scrambling to report on it.
Analyses of the film poured in from every angle, along with predictions that it would become Kim Si-woon's biggest commercial success yet.
"Eight million, baby~ Kwahahaha!"
The production and distribution staff, of course, wore grins from ear to ear.
Eight million was the attendance record of Best Friends, the highest-grossing Korean film of all time — a colossal benchmark that seemed untouchable until Silmido, releasing next year, ascended as the first ten-million-viewer film.
That the early box office was tracking at a historic, all-time-great pace was clear from how casually numbers like those were being tossed around.
But as the second week began, this surge ran aground on a reef.
It was the child abuse controversy I had seen in my Future Sight.
The post by Dewey that ignited the whole controversy was, surprisingly, nothing much.
She opened by remarking that the child actor's performance was no joke, then proceeded to staple on examples of past child exploitation rampant in Hollywood.
They were old cases, yes — but shoots that bordered on actual abuse really had happened on this set, so people began falling for Dewey's cunning wordplay.
A perfectionist in her craft, Go Eun-hye never let an actor who phoned in a performance on her set simply slide.
An idol-turned-actor with no passion for acting, a lead who coasted on experience and acted on autopilot, a rookie so eager they ignored the fundamentals — delivering a sharp, stinging reprimand was simply her role on set.
The one exception was the child actors. She guided the kids whose acting fell short, but she never once dressed them down the way she did the adults.
But Dewey excised exactly that part of the picture, unleashing a post engineered to make Go Eun-hye look like the tyrant of the set.
She never engaged in emotional rhetoric. Posing as coolly neutral — just delivering the facts, nothing more — she let the truth blur into a lie.
As Dewey's post passed from person to person, it put on ugly new weight.
Go Eun-hye had tormented the child actor for the sake of her own flawless performance; the director had looked the other way; the poor child actor had filmed in sheer terror, and that terror had been captured on screen, untouched, in the finished film. That was the shape the story took as it spread.
The film's message, the actors' performances, the direction — all of it was shoved into the background, and nothing but the question of whether or not this was child abuse surfaced to the top.
Dewey, having confirmed the controversy spreading to every corner of the boards, deleted the original post with meticulous care.
Of course, I had been checking that film café every single day, monitoring whether anything new from Dewey went up — and the moment the post appeared, I'd screenshotted the entire body text and every comment.
.
.
.
"What the hell? Where does an abuse problem nobody committed even come from? So now performing convincingly is a crime too?"
Director Kim was going out of his mind — and so, of course, was the distributor.
Because the box office graph, which had been shooting skyward without a care in the world, had taken a nosedive from this controversy onward.
"It's an absolutely absurd situation, but it seems the people who found it unpleasant are picking at every thread they can find to vent their anger."
"I do tend to make a lot of enemies."
Director Kim Si-woon's self-deprecating remark said everything about the state of things.
"Director, what about my interview?"
"The moment I said you'd do it, KBC said yes right away. But I'm not sure you should be going out there in a climate like this."
"That's exactly why I have to go. People have gotten the completely wrong idea about Go Eun-hye senior, and I'm the only one who worked opposite her who can clear it up."
It was the obvious truth no matter who heard it, so nobody raised an objection.
"By the way, Ha-jin. That video you asked us to edit a while back... Don't tell me you prepared that because you knew something like this was coming?"
"How could I possibly have? Senior was doing something genuinely wonderful and nobody knew about it, so I just wanted people to know. What am I, a prophet?"
It wasn't as if I could say I'd seen the future, so I improvised.
And so my appearance on KBC's flagship film program, Movie is Good, was confirmed.
Now — time to strike back.