Nevertheless (2)
The following weekend afternoon, I watched Nevertheless. At first, I honestly couldn't decide what to start with.
Then I reached a neat conclusion.
Watch both at once.
The movie spilled out of my laptop.
— If you leave this house, you’ll be cursed. Don’t you understand what Mother is saying?
— I don’t believe that anymore. Don’t gaslight me! What do you mean, there are no such things as ghosts? Mom has lived her whole life as a shaman, and you’re still saying that?
— ...You really think so?
Yongha now understood. What was truly cursed was not him, but this family—a damn family that had sensed gods for generations. There was a clear word for it.
Genetic mental illness.
As Yongha tried to leave the house, his mother blocked his way. For the first time in his life, he raised his voice at her.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts! It’s all mental illness!”
His mother’s expression turned cold. Like a face carved from stone, she looked at her son with the heaviest certainty in the world and a love that could not be denied, and asked him again,
“You really think so?”
It was an extraordinary work. Both the novel and the film. Yongha, the only son of a family of shamans, did not believe in gods. He thought his shaman mother and the rest of his family were gaslighting him. As if to deny that belief, supernatural things kept happening inside the house. Yongha could not tell whether it was all a family trick or the presence of ghosts threatening him from beyond.
In the middle of that confusion, Yongha made his escape from home. The story drove the reader and viewer forward with relentless urgency, stacking reversal on top of reversal in a structure so sharp it was almost cruel. It was the kind of story that never let you look away. And then came the climax. Yongha, after all manner of chaos and suffering, finally broke out of the house.
But he stopped dead at the front door.
Though his head told him there was no god, his reason could not explain the tug of fate pulling at him.
In the end, he chose to return to the house he had barely escaped...
— Creak... thud.
With the shaman house door closing, the story ended.
Click. I closed the book and turned off the movie at the same time.
The words burst out of me before I could stop them. “Holy shit. This is way too fun.”
The film followed the novel’s narrative almost exactly. The fact that it could generate that much tension without really changing the adaptation meant one thing: the novel’s structure itself was already astonishingly strong. What hit hardest, though, was the psychological description.
The way Yongha’s confusion was rendered as he was forced to seek the truth was almost artistic....
“No. I’m not the kind of person who should just sit here thinking about it.”
I opened a word processor right away.
There was no way I was letting an opportunity like this slip through my fingers. The cursor blinked on the blank page. Under ordinary circumstances, my hands would have moved immediately, but this time I gave myself a moment. The movie and the novel were tangled together in my head, knotted into one heavy mass. That wouldn’t do.
I erased the film Nevertheless—both its images and its sound—and left only the novel Nevertheless behind, clean and untouched. Could that even be done? Of course it could. It was possible, so I did it. Now then, how should I approach it?
I did not spend long thinking.
The keyword that best explained Nevertheless.
Let’s make this a match won through psychological description. Description. What a literary word that was.
Novels were born to express the human mind. Some may point to that and call it a limitation of the form. But this is not a limitation; it is the essence. It is the essence literature must protect to the very end.
Mun Geon-hyeong’s Nevertheless is the horror novel that comes closest to that essence. As the genre of horror itself suggests, the protagonist’s psychology is swept along and hurled forward by the force of the story...
...Then what, in the end, does this raw terror leave us with? It leaves us with anxiety. Human beings are built to grow uneasy when they cannot know the truth. Just as Yongha becomes obsessed with the existence of god to the very end.
What I wrote without stopping was the relationship between truth and anxiety.
But I knew it.
This alone would make the piece too weak.
“Here.”
Turn the curve.
But does anything like “truth” truly exist in our lives? The truths we chase are so often overturned, betrayed, and muddied. Just like Yongha, who can never quite reach certainty about the existence of god.
The real horror of Nevertheless is not the existence of ghosts. It is the confusion of wandering in front of truth. The fact that our lives are nothing but that confusion, stacked layer upon layer. That is what frightens us.
And that was the point.
That was why the horror of Nevertheless was not mere stimulation.
Because it struck at our fundamental anxiety, the novel’s psychological description deserved nothing less than unqualified praise.
The writing was racing toward its conclusion.
And the language was racing along with my fingertips.
I did not let a single thing slip past me. By the time I was done, another review had been completed.
“Phew...”
This review was narrow, but deep.
I had filled ten pages with a single topic: psychological description.
I could have covered it more broadly if I wanted to, of course. But...
“Taking one attractive point and driving it all the way to the limit is a method too.”
I decided to make my move with that.
Hadn’t I said it already? It was a true duel.
“Ah—much better.”
Once I had shaken the language out of my head, it felt refreshing in there.
I flopped backward onto the bed.
“How many reviews have I written so far? Three with Park Jeong-shin, one for Oh Sang-mi, and this one just now. Five.”
The New Spring Literary Contest reviews were piling up, one by one.
A full storehouse makes the heart feel secure.
On the other hand...
“Hmm. What am I supposed to say on Novel N Movie?”
Honestly, I still wasn’t sure.
I understood why the novel Nevertheless was excellent, but the quality that belonged to the novel Nevertheless and to the novel alone—the thing the film did not have—
I still hadn’t pinned that down.
It was obvious enough that my ability worked best with language.
Trying to compare it to a visual medium slowed my thinking down.
I sat up in a flash.
“...”
A strange stubbornness rose in me.
Was I supposed to admit I could only do this because I’d stumbled onto a lucky gift?
It was far too early to accept that.
“I’m not done lying around yet.”
I climbed off the bed and went back to the laptop.
I played the movie from the beginning again.
The eerie shaman house filled the screen.
I opened my eyes wide and watched.
“Ba-bam, bam!”
I jolted awake to the sudden burst of intense music.
I was curled up on the floor.
“Ah, what...? Did I fall asleep?”
I dragged my heavy body upright.
The room was dim with the light of dawn.
The movie was still playing from the laptop on the low desk.
The coffee I had set beside it had long since gone cold.
I had watched Nevertheless all day.
Even before I fell asleep, I had seen it at least three times.
Since I’d set it to repeat, it must have gone around twice more after that. The film had reached the climactic point so many times it was almost tiringly familiar by then.
Yongha, having escaped the house, standing rigidly in front of it.
Yongha, looking pitifully confused for one long moment, would eventually turn back with a blank expression and return home.
“Yeah. I know all that.”
I knew it, but I still didn’t understand it.
What, exactly, was the essential difference between this film and the novel?
Anyway, I should sleep. I had work tomorrow. I was about to shut the movie off when Yongha’s face happened to be caught in close-up.
“...!”
I was instantly awake.
That expression I couldn’t explain.
People had looked at this scene and said, “The god of acting possessed him.”
That was how complex and strange his face was.
A single scenario unfolded in my mind.
The scene I had just seen became one shot, and the shot became language.
S# ???. In front of the shaman house.
Yongha runs out of the house—then stops.
Yongha: (...)
He slowly turns around and goes back inside.
What filled the stage direction inside those parentheses—I thought I finally understood it.
“That’s it.”
I thought I had found the answer.
A few days later, our Editorial Team 1 headed to the publicity department on the third floor of Gyeongseong Publishing.
We didn’t actually need to go as a whole group, but apparently it was better to have more allies on hand.
The Gyeongseong Bukbuk set was at the far end of the third floor.
When I stepped inside, I saw the lights, the cameras, and even a proper staff zone.
It was obvious they had spent some money on this.
Senior Editor Yoon tugged on my shoulder from behind and whispered, “Mok. Don’t you dare lose today. Put the pride of Editorial Team 1 on the line. Got it?”
Senior Editor Yang snorted. “Pride, my ass. You lose so much there isn’t any pride left in our team.”
“Hey, then you do it. That pig is going to—”
“Shh.”
Kim senior cut him off.
Film critic Kim Bong-woon had just walked onto the set.
Senior Editor Yoon muttered under his breath, looking disgusted. “He even came with makeup on today. I want to rip that bow tie off him.”
“It’s yellow today. I think it was blue in the last video.”
“He probably has every color of the rainbow. What a freak.”
The connection between a rainbow bow tie and being a freak was, honestly, difficult to pin down.
I decided to give the seniors a warning, even if it was barely a warning at all.
“Please don’t pick a fight for no reason. If you provoke him, he seems like the kind of person who enjoys it even more.”
“Okay.”
“...Fine.”
Sure enough, Kim Bong-woon strolled over to us with a slimy smile. “You must be editor Mok Hyunsun. It’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m Kim Bong-woon.”
“Likewise, Critic Kim. I’m Mok Hyunsun.”
For the moment, we both smiled and shook hands.
Why did his hand feel so puffy and soft? It was disgusting.
“Well, well. Editor Yoon Seo-hoon is here too. I was so disappointed we couldn’t work together this time. You can’t watch horror films, is that true?”
“Ah... yes. I’m a little... ”
“Oh? So it’s not that other things scare you?”
As in, your own country?
He delivered that last line with his eyes.
As Senior Yoon bristled, I stepped in front of him.
“Your makeup is smearing.”
“Pardon?”
“The lipstick. It’s smeared. You should check it once.”
“Ah... yes, right. Then I’ll see you later.”
He hurried off to his assistant.
And then he was busy borrowing the assistant’s mirror to inspect his own face.
“Phew... thanks, Mok. I almost snapped.”
There was nothing to thank me for.
I just didn’t want to get dragged into his mess from the very start.
“Hyunsun?”
“Ah, yes. Hello, Team Leader Jang.”
Before I knew it, Team Leader Jang had come over to stand beside me.
He was with Yoo An-mo, the producer in charge of the shoot.
Yoo PD, with his warm and easygoing face, said, “Don’t put too much pressure on yourself during filming. On YouTube, editing matters more than shooting anyway. Hmm—let’s check the look of the video first. Why don’t you sit down wherever feels comfortable?”
The set was bathed in bright lights.
There was a monitor for reference in the middle, and chairs angled on both sides.
“I think this side is good.”
I casually took the seat on the left.
The filming preparations were all finished.
Mok Hyunsun and Kim Bong-woon sat facing each other, and the prepared video clips on both sides were ready to go as well.
Yoo PD let out a quiet laugh. “Somehow, this content’s visual difference keeps getting more obvious.”
“Still, the one who keeps winning is that critic. That’s why he’s so popular. He speaks well,” the writer said, glancing over the script.
“Hmm. So that’s why,” Yoo PD said, his eyes brightening. “I can feel the war clouds already.”
No matter how well publisher content is made, it’s hard to shake off that educational documentary feel.
But looking at that two-shot, I could feel dopamine starting to leak out of nowhere.
Yoo PD called out brightly, “All right then, let’s begin!”