A rural class president, and two very different teachers

The notes open on the film Our Twisted Hero, from Yi Mun-yol’s 1987 original. In a rural school, they write, the class president lives as a dark kind of hero: a model student in front of a homeroom teacher who only wanted an easy, irresponsible comfort, and, toward his classmates, a figure who lords it over them like a gang boss. When a new teacher, full of a sense of justice, takes the post, that mask comes off, and he runs away.

Eom Seok-dae, they say, treats the children from a position like a teacher’s, and the children, for their part, see him as something more absolute than a classmate. The former teacher looked the other way because the arrangement did him no harm, and because it was comfortable. The new teacher is young, able, and diligent, and does not let small matters pass; where the former teacher had shared, unseen, a division of roles with the student, the new one tries to take back every duty Seok-dae had been holding.

Five lines the notes copy out, and the moment the class turns

The notes copy five lines that struck them in the film, and they leave the wording as they heard it. In the period when freedom was most dangerous — that is, through the long history of the world, in times when freedom was under threat — most generations failed to keep it and had it taken from them, one line begins, and then breaks off. Another says, simply, “I was thoroughly drunk on the sweet taste of the power he had bestowed.” A third scolds the class: they had their rightful share taken and did not even know to be angry; they yielded before injustice and did not even know to be ashamed; the world such people will make when they grow up is dreadful even to imagine.

Two further lines belong to the new teacher, after exam cheating comes to light. If the children keep their mouths shut again and defend Seok-dae, he says, he will leave the matter there; the punishment for the cheating is already over, so he will have no choice but to leave the class to Seok-dae once more. And then: with this, the price for their past cowardice has been paid; it was the teacher who struck them, but he hopes they will not think of it that way — this beating is the voice of each of their own consciences. The notes add that Seok-dae had used the power he built to harass the children sexually, to take money or goods as tribute, and to cheat on exams. At first the class speaks only because the new teacher presses them; later they raise their voices, and even use curses they would not once have dared to put in their mouths. Once he is sure of the cheating, the new teacher, they write, brings that power down at a stroke, by violence — a defensive instinct, in their reading, to break the shared standing he had been forced to grant, and to take back a teacher’s original authority.

Ideology, from de Tracy in 1794 to a classroom order

Before they return to the class, the notes pause on the word ideology. In a general sense, they write, it is a real and ideal form of consciousness by which a person lays down rules about people, nature, and society. The term, they say, was first used in 1794 by the French thinker de Tracy, in the years of the French revolutionary government. Napoleon, then emperor, scorned a group of thinkers who fiercely opposed his becoming emperor of France, and abused them as “ideologues”; from that point, in this telling, a meaning close to the one used now was born. Marx, they add, later generalized the term, and attacked bourgeois ideology as a false consciousness that can distort and disguise social and political reality. Mannheim, in a similar way, defined ideology as the ideas of a ruling group that defends an existing order.

Seok-dae’s class, they write, built from early on a distinctive system of ideas and beliefs — an ideology of its own — and that may have been what kept the class in so strong a place. Han Byeong-tae, who stands in their reading for the crowd, once challenged Seok-dae’s absolute authority, yet compromised with the situation in order to survive. The other children first complied with a double rule of power and knowledge; when a still greater power appeared, they turned and resisted. The film, they conclude, makes one think again of forms of power that, in modern society, can be cunningly covered over. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes’ account of the film Our Twisted Hero, from Yi Mun-yol’s 1987 original, including five copied lines and the name Eom Seok-dae

Last updated: 14 November 2026