What Is a Work?
What is a work?
There is no fixed answer.
Ask five people and five answers will come back, and picking the best among them is no easy matter. Each is a reply in which the path of a life and the things learned along it have been stirred together.
A work has always been like that. It changes according to who lays hands on it, in what spirit, and in what way. Director Go Taemin, the man they called a meticulous master, was no exception, and for the moment he watched the situation in silence—a noisy scene, and he sunk very deep in thought.
Yes. Where a work was concerned, everyone thought differently.
A look around is enough to make that plain.
To Park Joon, who had made Sword, a work was loyalty. He had taken the person who believed in him most and made that faith his driving force, then shaped a work in order to repay it. So the thing Director Park Joon meant by a work was a kind of loyalty.
Writer Lee Geumsuk and PD Choi Heewon of Special Task Force 808 were different, for their work was something like a stone bridge over a stream. Gather each person's reading of the world inside the piece and set them down one by one, like stones, and in the end they take the form of a bridge. Go Taemin had watched that way of working with his own eyes even recently.
To Kim Jungi, now a criminal, a work was desire.
The bastard thought of it as pottery, more or less.
He kneaded everything however he pleased, and when the shape he wanted failed to emerge he put his strength into it and snapped it at will. Go Taemin had seen that violence more than once—the smashing of a result that did not suit his taste.
And now the last. To himself, to Go Taemin, what was a work?
To me, a work is...
His deliberation was not long.
...a ship.
A ship sailing a wide sea.
Go Taemin thought of his own work as a ship: everyone rowing with one heart and one will, going on that way until, before they knew it, the vessel reached the destination called completion. That very obsession might have been what allowed the present Go Taemin to be called a meticulous master. He held that he could work only when every oar moved in even measure.
And so, perhaps, in this clamorous situation, the weight of being a master was the very thing gripping his ankles.
Things have grown far too complicated. It wasn't like this before.
Go Taemin suddenly traced the past.
Looking back, making a film for the first time had been truly comfortable. His ship had been no larger than a raft to begin with, and the only one rowing was Go Taemin himself. Wherever it drifted, hardly anyone meddled.
After that came a few hits, a few successes. Even when the ship grew a little larger, it was still all right—a small ferry. Most of those who came aboard were his fans or his followers. They remained within his command, and they rowed while striving to grasp what he intended.
But when at last he rose into the ranks of the masters, and the ship had grown altogether too large—
"..."
Go Taemin looked suddenly around him. The master pianist Ham A-yoon; the production staff who had distinguished themselves in their own fields; the outstanding newcomer Lee Sua; Kim Iseo, CEO of Mystic. The meaning was clear.
The ship had grown too big, and the people aboard were of every kind. That was only what the eye could count. Reckon the rest, and the scale had to be called twice as large, for the investors watching from behind with their arms folded had multiplied as well. Where people multiply, conflict multiplies with them. And so the higher Go Taemin climbed, the harder it became to shape the work he pursued. Against a crowd that only kept growing, he had to seek "complete cooperation."
Of course, bringing them to heel might simply be the measure of a director. Go Taemin knew that well enough. Use his station and his power, and he could, to some degree, oppress the people who had boarded the ship. But there was a conviction of his own in refusing to do so.
The moment I do that, complete cooperation becomes impossible.
Force always leaves resentment behind it. Control would be possible, yes. If Go Taemin oppressed them into rowing, the ship would move forward—but in the heart of the oppressed, sediment and doubt would begin to coil. A person who rows while holding doubt and sediment cannot help but be uncooperative, and that, inevitably, becomes the ship's imbalance. Go Taemin hated a result made in such a way.
A destination everyone desired with one heart and one will, and a shape in which everyone advanced with equal strength. Only when cooperation of that kind was bound tight and given form, he believed, could the thing be called a work. In the past, whenever he spoke this way, the people around him would say he was chasing something with no basis in reality. But every time Go Taemin heard those words, he answered in the same unchanging manner. A work, he said, was the making of something that had never existed in reality to begin with, and so it was worth pursuing even what had no reality to it.
A road everyone walked with the same heart. His own society, Bareungil—the Right Path—meant exactly that.
And so Go Taemin had tested Sua before everyone's eyes. He had thought that if they saw the quality of her discernment, the production staff would come around, at least to some degree.
But.
...So it really was too much to ask.
There was a problem far too great.
Ham A-yoon is simply too large a figure.
In the end, Go Taemin's persuasion had failed. The mood was that everyone granted Sua's eye for what it was, and still there were many who held Ham A-yoon to be the greater. He could not blame them outright. They were only judging that proven skill at the piano outweighed a proven eye.
Go Taemin kept turning it over. Was there no way to draw them into cooperation without laying compulsion on anyone? The moment sediment settled in someone's heart, a flaw would be left in the finished work—so was there no best move?
It was then.
"You just heard A-yoon play. And you still want to go through with it?"
"Yes. I'm serious about the role of Kim Sohee. I have a passion for the music, too, of course. I'm confident I won't fall short."
The clash between the department head of AWA Entertainment and Sua had properly begun. What startled Go Taemin first was Sua's manner.
Sua's nerve. Nothing like a newcomer.
Or perhaps it was a boldness one could show only because one was new. To raise one's voice toward Ham A-yoon's side was something anyone else would not even contemplate—all the more so now, when so many of the production staff stood with her. And so the thought of heading Sua off beforehand had never even occurred to him. He had not imagined she would step forward so brazenly. Not only he; anyone in the room would have been the same. That most of them wore similar expressions was the proof.
This is maddening. I have to find an answer...
Go Taemin drove his thoughts faster still. It would not do for the two sides to collide. Sua was a newcomer who had caught his interest, and Ham A-yoon was a giant he respected. The very fact of conflict between them was unpleasant.
However.
"Only Miss A-yoon has played. I ought to have a turn as well, if this is going to be fair."
"No.... Whether you get a turn isn't the point right now."
Just as the conflict was sharpening, Go Taemin decided, for the first time, to bend his own conviction.
No. This can't be helped. There has to be mediation.
The value he pursued was Bareungil, everyone bound together as one—but that did not mean he could stand by and let things turn to the worst. He knew how to choose the second best in place of the best. He would have to abandon the ideal picture, but that was better than the ship breaking apart altogether. At this point there was nothing for it but to put a director's authority first. Only oppression and force would lay this situation to rest.
And yet a strange thing happened.
"Fine."
When Ham A-yoon brushed the department head aside and cut in.
"Then we'll do it this way."
From the moment Ham A-yoon's gaze and Sua's struck together in the empty air, and the two of them began, between themselves, to look for a compromise—
"..."
Go Taemin let go, for a moment, of the thought of stepping in.
Lee Sua and Ham A-yoon.... No...?
The two of them had begun to look like something else.
...Kim Sohee and Park Min-seo?
Kim Sohee, of the savant syndrome. Park Min-seo, the elite genius.
Go Taemin's deeply sunken eyes moved like lenses, and already the two roles were overlapping before him: two geniuses, each seated at her own piano, locked in fierce contest.
This.... This isn't bad...
And in the midst of it, Ham A-yoon's proposal was a reasonable one. With a standing like hers, she might well have tried to bear down on Sua with authority. She did not say that.
"It's unreasonable for us to settle this by playing."
Herself, possessed of piano skill and yet not chosen by the director; Sua, chosen by the director and yet utterly without piano skill. A promise that if a Sua such as that merely showed talent, she would step aside.
"..."
Instead of cutting in, Go Taemin quietly folded his arms. It was a master's instinct, and his intuition. Everyone held a different oar; the direction each wished to go was different; the meaning each wished to pour in was different. Now, as the ship called Starting Tomorrow, Crescendo met a squall and wandered, it somehow seemed that if he only watched a little longer, an answer would come.
Nor did it seem it would take long. Three minutes at the outside. It looked as though the matter would be settled within them.