too unrealistic

The place the girl visits is not the same house as where the old man died, its where she first kissed Tae Suk, so she went back there to remember that sweet moment they shared.

"Unrealistic" is a word that sometimes means "I do not understand." In other cases, films use metaphor to convey metaphysical realities. An idea in the mind, an invisible truth such as conscious thought or sub-atomic particles, requires a transformation of sorts in order to become visible on the movie screen. The process is called art.

It is wonderful when intangible realities can be presented with a series of believable, "realistic" events. FIELD OF DREAMS comes to mind. Please stick with me here, because you might say "People do not hear voices", but yes, we all do, we hear the verbalizations of our own minds, if nothing else. That the inner voice provides advice that proves reliable ("they" DID come, after all), that is precisely as probable as success itself, by definition. That a stranger can walk out of a cornfield, this in itself is not an unrealistic incident.

Let's look to 3-IRON, what was going on the prison cell?

K's first hiding was designed to provoke a search, so that K could observe the exact path the guard would use is searching the cell. K then studied the path, and practiced his own relative path that would allow him to always be out of the view of the guard. K's smile at each beating showed that in each case he had carried out one more planned step. I understood every step in the sequence until the last. Even without the guard's explanation, I understood that K had been given away only by his shadow. Again, K smiled at his success, and now he proceeded through a process I did not understand, and have not yet figured out: He drew the disembodied eye on his left palm, and practiced again a new path relative to the guard's search pattern, this time in consideration of where "the eye" is looking. Perhaps he is now factoring in where the guard's ATTENTION will be directed. Perhaps it is distraction, that the physical eyes could see the shadow, but the inner eyes, the mind, would be somehow misdirected to other visual details, or other settings outside the here and now.

Whatever meaning the film conveyed through that progression, I cannot brand it "unrealistic" simply because I dont understand it. Every lesson begins with the things I understand, and combines them to lead me toward the things I do not yet know. Especially when a film portrays meanings that are not yet a part of conventional wisdom, it is a given that the lessons contained are going to be new to everyone who walks into the theatre. Happy are the ones who walk out with something new.

Let me discuss a few of the more hidden elements in the movie, and what they mean to me, in case I can show the truth behind what some of us see as unreal.

We all saw the repairing of appliances in the house as a device to show that K was not an ordinary burglar or squatter, he was more of a Boy Scout, always leaving his campsite in better condition than he found it. (Similarly, he watered the plants, provided a traditional death-dressing of a corpse, etc) These electronics repairs had a double meaning, though. Did he repair a stereo component? (I'm not being smart-ass rhetorical here, I have seen the movie only once [so far!] ) In repairing stereo, he is proving mastery of sound. He suggested mastery of time in repairing the clock.

The bathroom scale, he performed a calibration there. I am interested to review the exact numbers, before and after, but we all noticed that in the closing scene, her feet pointed one direction, his the opposite, and the weight on the scale was 0. There is a clear metaphysical message here, it is a symbol that was so available to me that the ending was beautiful. Here is how I see it:

We wonder, how can "stuff" exist, how can there be matter? If we accept the law of conservation of matter-and-energy (aka "stuff"), then the existence of stuff today leads to the unavoidable conclusion that stuff must have ALWAYS existed. And no person can gain a "realistic" understand of the question "How can there have ALWAYS been something?" The flip of that coin is "How could you make something out of nothing?" Some physicists have hypothesized that there is a procedure by which that exact thing can truly happen, MUST have happened for anything to exist at all. The basic act of creation, the simplest unit, is this: A hydrogen atom appears, where previously there was nothing. The universe is 99% vacuum (absolutely nothing), and 99% of what does exist, is hydrogen. I believe the physicists have a credible and workable body of theory about everything from hydrogen to gold and golf and silicon and shrimp... It is that one basic step, where a slice nothingness is interpolated to a hydrogen atom, that step is the great mystery.

A hydrogen atom, you see, contains a single electron, and a single proton. Their charges are equal, and opposite.

Equal, and opposite. -1 and +1.

At the end, K and his lovely lady step onto the scale, facing opposite directions, as perfect complements to each other. They add up to zero because they have achieved perfect harmony together, all things in balance, a hydrogen atom, an accountant's ledger sheet, or "two fleshes become one" (a religious reference to marriage) must add up to zero.

So K's operation on the scale was more than a repair: It was an upgrade! The scale was no longer displaying weight, it was displaying a person's fully-distinguished and elaborated role in the universe. What upgrades did he do on the other equipments? I could not sleep last night until I realized: He MIGHT have been installing a secret device that would always render him invisible within that house. Absurd? It at least let me sleep ;) (The prosaic tipoff in the boxer's house was the masking tape over the boxer's eyes, in his portait. The film was telling us that K had not made himself invisible, he had rendered the boxer blind (selectively).

Notes:
This message appears as a reply to a writer whose message I really enjoyed, yet I do not address that person. Instead, I speak in agreement with him in countering an observation of "unrealistic".

I used "K" for the male protagonist, I am sorry to not recall (nor to not research just now) his name.

I was speaking loosely when I said "99%". I believe the actual number would be 99 followed by a long string of 9's...