A Film is Often a Mirror, and It Shows Dystopia Engulfs All

Cart/카트 (2014) is, without a doubt, one of the most streamable Korean movies available on YouTube. Well, at least if you are a leftist.

It speaks to the Global South way more than so many others. Right when we are living through a dystopia around the world, it connects even more. Because the worldwide dystopia is blurring the lines between how we used to define the land of the free. 

And except the filthy ultrarich, no one in the world is free anymore. Much like Covid, this global, worldwide unfreedom has been normalised by now. There’s not even any sensational and any shock value left in all this. Compared to this, the story of the film is somewhat of a watchable injustice that probably won’t choke you off.

But as they say, all of this is interconnected. When something goes wrong in Korea’s Samsung or Hyundai HQs, people in Congo have to pay the price. 

Cart is just one big proof that it doesn’t and will not spare Koreans, either. Or for that matter, the so-called first worlders.            

The Mart  

The entire story takes place in a supermarket the scriptwriter decided to name “The Mart”. 

It is somehow reminiscent of the 2019 Spanish film, “The Platform”. Although the two are nowhere related. Cart is based on a true story itself, something already recorded in Korean history. 

But just like the Spanish movie where a concrete slab keeps descending down from the topmost floor of a tower to the lower ones with food, until only the leftovers are left for prisoners stuck at the bottom floors—the supermarket too starts looking like a symbol of global capitalism at some point. Until you no longer feel like an audience. It starts making you feel like a participant. 

You are either buying something or working hard to pay off your bills by the meagre living you earn by scanning everyone-at-the-long-queue’s bills at the counter.   

Sometimes, you will have to apologise on your knees. For reasons that may seem all trivial or unfair to you, but your higher-ups always treat them as serious matters. You will have to let go of your ego, your self-esteem and self-respect, everything. Because the job demands that. 

Why is living in this world a ritual of humiliation for so many of us? Is it because all the ideas about welfare were just hoaxes? 

The Mart in the film, in lots of ways, is a symbol of our planet that we created. And the only thing you know is, there’s no escaping. 

The Colours 

The film’s beauty lies probably in the use of its colours. 

It opens with a cold blue colour. You can almost feel how cold it exactly is inside this supermarket of a story universe. Films don’t yet have the technologies to capture smells or temperatures. But Cart achieves it with its colours. 

The workers start looking like robots at the opening scene. Something less than human, as if they were produced in a factory to simply work and toil away their lives. Almost like they were not properly born. 

For other scenes, mostly and almost always inalterably outside of The Mart, the scenes change to a warm colour. 

So many filmmakers love to use the same color palette to divide the worlds of their stories. Guillermo del Toro used it in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) to separate the world of fantasy from the dark, grey and the same bluish cold world of reality. 

Cart’s director, Boo Ji-young, and the cinematographer cum her husband, Kim Woo-hyung did the same, and very effectively. 

But perhaps, the film contains too many warm colours so many others could never afford in our contemporary dystopia. 

The Korean Protest Culture

South Korea’s protests are spectacular. Just last year, they were called the “kisses protesters” due to the blankets covering their bodies in the snow making them look a lot like the Hershey’s Kisses Chocolates wrapped up in silver foils.

Like so many other civil movements, it too became an occasion of celebrations pushing through all the hardships protesters were forced to endure. 

In the film, the laid off employees start occupying the supermarket and the authorities cut off the electricity at one point. They instantly turn to candlelights. They get busy staging plays on their misfortune, without scripts. And the enforced blackout becomes a heartwarming theatre. 

And when they move outside to build up their own tent and stage, they don’t always turn to protest songs. Instead, they start dancing to way more lively music. They start sounding like rock ‘n roll and K-pops. 

Except, there is one ballad in the film, which is its theme song. It was written by EXO’s Doh Kyung-soo. He was the baby boy of the mama who lost her job and the idol of the film. He plays Tae-young in the movie, with his own subplot of his own protest. And his song, “Crying Out”, (외침/Oe-chim), is almost the only music that sounds mellow.     

Somewhere in it all, all this is way different from the protest cultures of many places in the global South. Elsewhere, it is always loud, often clichésque, overused slogans and at best, some protest songs. And the highly politically charged ones often have way darker, way more grotesque themes for their plays.   

Korean protests, somewhere, look more life-affirming, moving beyond the tired tropes of the same old optics. And that itself signals, and hints towards a very big difference in culture, as well as life standards, somewhere. 

There is a God That Protects Children

So many people around the world never learned how to laugh at their own misfortunes like this.  And even their agonies were hijacked for the thuggish, demagogic and often despotic leaders busy giving them false promises.  

Yet, some things remain the same. There is a dialogue that repeats several times: there is a God that protects the children.

It starts sounding ominous at some point. Until one starts questioning whether the story will claim a child victim or not. 

For people who watched the utmost brutalities happening in our current affairs without shying away from it, it is way too reminiscent. A child victim is what makes the case for a people under siege, to ‘perfectly’ audition for sympathy–as they call it.    

For others who watched colour revolutions and state-sponsored movements and uprisings, it gives a whole different reminder. That a child victim is what makes the case stronger, and so, a fascist state will likely sacrifice some children in the process. 

Cart claimed its own, without a demagogue being present in the scene. It was the same police one sees in the ‘third world’, often bleeding people to death, and these days, in the Global North just as much. When they crushed the tent, the child character became trapped inside in the ensuing chaos. 

Crushed, all the same. In the real world, this God was never found. But in the movie, the boy survives. 

A Woman’s Film, A True Story  

Almost all the protesters in Cart are women. And a woman’s load, especially a single mother with children trying to make her ends meet by working as cashiers, has its differences.

It is based on the 2007 E-Land Retail Strike. The real Mart was known as Homever. Right after a new law took effect in South Korea, requiring companies to hire any temporary workers working for two years, the Korean E-land group laid off hundreds of their temporary workers—right before their employment tenure touched the two years mark. Most of them were women.

The protest that was to follow continued for one and a half years. The news clippings are very much in circulation to this day. And as the film describes, it ended after achieving only ‘half the victory’.

And regardless of who might have wanted to make the best out of it once it started, as politicians always do, it was a much needed moment for Korea.

Boo Ji-young stayed faithful to the history, while fictionalizing the characters. Perhaps she did not plan to make a “Battleship Potemkin”. She was working on something that could not be interpreted entirely as a symbolic story. It was more concrete, more real. 

But Cart belongs to the same genre of leftist films. And often, it is the first film you’d want to pick, when looking for a Korean movie you can watch on-the-go on YouTube.      

The Same Old Question 

The fate of Cart‘s protesters was no different than so many others trapped in less fortunate countries. Especially the police crackdowns, that characterizes the similarities more than all the differences.

One of her characters asks a question: “can drippings really pierce the stone?” Can you really make their hearts move? Does the heart of the mighty and the powerful, so often suffering from the illusion that they are almighties, move for the powerless? Does the elephant feel sorry for the grass it tramples under its feet? 

Well, these are questions as old as time. The film interprets them in its own ways. And it reminds you, that no matter where we stand collectively as a human race today, nothing really has changed. And the same greedy, corrupt savages are still ruling us.  

They might be the same old questions, but we still need to figure out the answers someday. 

Cart is only a reminder, coming from the glamorous South Korea. And if justice is your cup of tea, don’t miss it.