Chapter Three. Tracking National Destiny: Prince Sado and the Eighteenth-Century Monarchy

Abstract

After more than three centuries, the Joseon dynasty arrived at a stability and cultural peak in the eighteenth century, with the long-serving monarchs of this era reflecting a relatively peaceful, mature, enlightened, but also stagnant era. As seen in “The Throne” (2015) and “Fatal Encounter” (2014), for example, films set in the eighteenth century, an era of political and social reforms pursued by sagely monarchs and ministers, squarely eye future outcomes in portraying the cause, meaning, and eventual dampening of their efforts at meaningful change. The centring of great kings, and one notable potential king—known posthumously as Prince Sado, who died while confined in a wooden box in the palace courtyard, one of the most shocking events in Korean history—thus signals a search in contemporary South Korea for a venerable political order in modern times. But the filmic dramatisations also project a decidedly traditionalist ideal of monarchical absolutism onto the eighteenth century. These well-known figures thus serve as vessels for tracking national destiny, their successes standing as shining examples for later times, their tragedies reflecting decay in traditional society and polity. In light of the country’s outcome thereafter, in the nineteenth century, their personal stories suggest what might have been, had deeply ingrained structural forces not prevailed.

FormalPara Playbill

“The Throne” (Sado [“Prince Sado”, or “Thoughts of sadness”]); Yi Jun-ik, 2015

“Eternal Empire” (Yeongwonhan jeguk); Bak Jong-won, 1994

“The Fatal Encounter” (Yeongnin [“The Monarch’s wrath”]); Yi Jae-gyu, 2014

“The Grand Heist” (Baram gwa hamkke sarajida [“Gone with the wind”]); Kim Ju-ho, 2012

Near the close of “The Fatal Encounter”, set in 1777, an exhausted and bloodied young King Jeongjo, having just survived an assassination attempt only a year into his reign, reveals why he is a marked man: The political forces conspiring against him are the same ones who had manipulated his royal predecessor and grandfather, King Yeongjo, into killing his own son. In order to protect the next monarch (Jeongjo himself) from the same terrible end, Yeongjo had written a secret message in blood revealing this political conspiracy, according to the film’s storyline. The conspiracy in question referred to the 1862 execution, through confinement in a rice chest on the grounds of the royal palace, of the crown prince posthumously known as “Sado”, who in turn, incredibly, was also the father of Jeongjo himself, Yeongjo’s royal successor and grandson. This extraordinary event has taken on a significance in recent cinematic depictions that reverse the longstanding understanding of Sado’s transgressions and of what led King Yeongjo to force his son to die in such a shocking manner. In so doing the films have also taken Crown Prince Sado, indeed of the entire eighteenth century, as a repository for the country’s destiny, both then and in the many years to come.

After more than three centuries, during which it survived even a calamitous series of foreign invasions (Chap. 2), the Joseon dynasty appears to have arrived at a welcome stability and cultural peak in the eighteenth century, with the long-serving monarchs of this era reflecting a relatively peaceful, mature, enlightened, but also largely stationary dynastic order. Indeed, that this system ultimately did not fundamentally change course, in the larger scheme of things, explains perhaps its durability. But the films set in the eighteenth century, an era of major political and social reforms pursued by authoritative rulers, squarely eye also the powerfully entrenched social structures in implying the cause, meaning, and eventual dampening of such efforts. The focus on great kings, and one notable potential king—Prince Sado—thus reflects a yearning in contemporary South Korea for a venerable political order, a projection of the decidedly traditionalist agency of monarchical absolutism onto contemporary times. In looking back, then, these three figures serve as vessels for tracking the flow of national history, their successes standing as shining examples of progress, their failures or tragedies a reflection of stagnation and decay in Joseon society and polity. In light of the country’s outcome thereafter, their personal stories invariably suggest what might have been, had the country’s fate not been determined by more deeply ingrained traditions.

“The Throne” and the Burdens of Dynastic Destiny

As with the relatively sparse coverage of the Japanese invasions, the half-century reign of King Yeongjo (1724–1776) might be too big a topic for individual cinematic treatments. Even with a focus on the Sado saga, only expansive television series appear capable of giving due treatment to his reign’s evolving, complex mix of court intrigue and attendant themes of social hierarchy, cultural identity, and even gender and family. In the hallyu era, only one major theatrical release, “The Throne” (Sado [“Thoughts of sadness” or simply, “Prince Sado”]; Yi Jun-ik, 2016), has ventured into dramatising the Yeongjo era, but this remarkably rich film effectively matches the momentousness of the time in just about every way, even extending the story forward to the end of the eighteenth century, two decades after Yeongjo’s passing. This is because the tragic crown prince could be considered the main character, and indeed the film’s Korean title is “Sado”. Moreover, while the story is centred on the relationship between these two figures, father and son, it is also about the monarchy itself—as suggested by the film’s English title—particularly the kingship’s signification of core characteristics of the nation. As indicated by the prince’s posthumous title, meaning “thoughts [remembrance] of sadness”, his adult life and manner of death, while prompting great sorrow and regret, also seem inescapable. Against the combination of mental illness and debilitating structures in the court and larger society, his fate could not be altered, even by the power of the absolute monarch Yeongjo himself, whose inherited role as the king supersedes his hereditary role as a father. The weight of national customs and history is simply too much to bear.

The buildup to the tragic end of the prince’s life is told through an overlaid doomsday clock countdown of his eight days in rice chest confinement, interspersed with a steady offering of flashback scenes that make up the majority of the film’s running time. They start with the most recent moment, the crown prince’s aborted march to kill (threaten? usurp?) his father while wielding a sword, followed by Yeongjo’s scandalous step of condemning his son to death, but through extraordinary means: withering away while boxed up in the middle of the palace courtyard. Only such a solution could legitimate the ascendance of Sado’s son as the progeny of a non-traitor. The flashbacks then return to Sado as a precocious little boy whose interests develop in directions beyond those of royal expectations, proclivities that irritate his father, who sours on his son. Succeeding scenes of the crown prince as a young man show him already laden with the cumulative effects of this mistreatment, trying to both please and escape his mercurial father/sovereign while exhibiting increasingly erratic behaviours that culminate in deadly violence towards his servants and others. His wife, Lady Hyegyeong, to whom he was betrothed before he even turned ten years old, witnesses all this while realising that the situation will likely victimise her natal family members as well. (In real life, through her memoirs much later, she would prove an indispensable source of information about her husband’s life and death.) Meanwhile, intrigues from one of the factions among the officials constrain the king in his response, even as they fret over later political repercussions with the ascension of the crown grandson (seson), Sado’s son. The film’s last ten minutes, filled with heart-rending imagery, showcase this son, King Jeongjo, in 1795, the 20th year of his reign and 33 years after his father Sado’s death, as he commemorates the 60th birthdays of his parents, one alive and the other long dead.

Death is a dominant theme in the extraordinary symbolism of the film. Many of these motifs actually allude to freedom or escape: Buddhism as a representation of popular religion or spirituality, a haven for the unpretentious crown prince away from the oppression of the palace and family; drawing as a means of expressing creativity and individuality; Sado’s dog, which he receives as a pup, signalling his unencumbered happiness; the arrow, which vaults into the vast open air, as Sado admiringly observes in front of his young son; and the rain and water, which seem to provide a purifying cleansing from all the troubles and burdens of the prince’s life. Most notable in this regard is the folding fan (buchae)—made from Sado’s drawing, on the occasion of his own son’s birth, of a dragon, the traditional mark of the monarchy—which he clutches while scrunched in his death crate. Sado’s unfolding of this folding fan shows him, however belatedly and under increasing hallucination, that he once was free to spread his wings, as it were. Under very different circumstances, this fan is again unfolded by Sado’s son three decades later, the doomed prince springing to life, finally, under the loving care of his son, the monarch who revives his memory and resurrects his honour.

Up until this ending sequence, however, such symbols of life and freedom are balanced by the consistently brooding reminders of death and fate, as represented by the coffin and tomb. The casket encased in a grassy mound, a stalwart landmark for Korea’s royalty since the beginning of its history, is refashioned in “The Throne” to identify Sado as a dead man walking. He prefers, for example, to lie in a box, from which he pops out suddenly in one ghostly scene, within his Buddhist sanctuary, a cave that itself looks like a mounded tomb. Most inescapably representative of this layering of fatalistic confinement is the dreadful rice chest (dwiju) itself, which is covered in clods of grass until it looks like a miniature mounded tomb. Sado is thus shown being buried alive in his grave, as if he were being fitted for his death in a grim rehearsal. Whether as a rice chest or coffin, then, the sarcophagus serves as a sign of life as well, but only insofar as this life is boxed in by fate, indeed from the moment of birth, which for the royal family was the case especially for those in line to the throne.

Each of the three main male characters who fit this category—the grandfather, father, and son—represents a different facet of this particular dynamic, and thus “The Throne” constitutes above all a character study of historical figures in varying circumstances but manifesting the same fatalism. We can begin with the crown prince, Sado, who yearns for freedom and escape from the expectations of his bestowed status, the pressures of which are exponentially greater as the king-in-waiting. He wants to break away from the overbearing ritual and etiquette, but of course most of all he needs to elude his bloodline, as well as the father and royal position that come from it. His ancestry also includes his mother, who, it is noted, was a concubine, a stigma even for a crown prince. In a remarkable scene set in 1762, an intoxicated Sado leads a makeshift parade and ceremony to honour his low-ranking mother’s birthday, a foreshadowing parallel to the famed grand procession for him and his own wife later taken by their son, as king, in 1795. Sado finds a receptive repository for his yearning for liberation in the occult of proscribed religion, represented by Buddhist monks and their hideout cave. This sanctuary, which tellingly lies outside the city walls—as Buddhist sites were prohibited in the capital—is nevertheless a precarious place, as if the cycles of existence and hopes for a better return could not withstand the royal destiny prescribed by the long-established political order. Finally, Sado struggles to escape the imprisonment of his mental illness, which the film, as well as historical judgement, suggests was ascribed in more ways than one, with no factor bigger than the kingship itself.

The grand embodiment and agent of these royal pressures, King Yeongjo, Sado’s father, is a character of contrasts, just as he appears in the historical records.²⁵ At once sagacious and strategic, he also exhibits cruelty, pettiness, and fickleness, especially towards his suffering son. Some of this abuse is clearly borne of self-loathing. Like his son, he shows psychological irregularities, with a range of strange behavioural tics, and he probably harbours a disdain for his son’s hereditary status as a concubine’s child, like he was himself. This mark had endangered his own ascent to the throne in 1724 and continued to trail him with doubts of his political legitimacy,²⁶ as the film depicts in several scenes. Yeongjo even declares his disdain for his position, although he ended up reigning for over half a century, and at one point he gives up his royal duties to Sado, who very reluctantly takes charge of the court as a young regent. But this turns out to be a sick ruse, as his father hovers over his back and picks at Sado’s decisions and utterances. The encapsulation of these cruel ambivalences comes in a memorable flashback scene of Yeongjo taking his teenaged son through the ancestral shrine (Jongmyo) of the Joseon royal line and recalling some of the bloody struggles over succession in the Yi family’s long rule, with plentiful instances of royals killing their own family members to gain power. The tableau of golden curtains that mark previous kings’ ancestral tablets stretches long down the shrine’s corridor, a sign of the kingdom’s glorious durability of three-and-a-half centuries, as well as of its old age and accumulating burdens. The king’s overriding priority is to sustain this dynastic line, even if it means having to order his son’s death to protect his grandson’s advancement to the throne. “This is our fate”, he despondently concedes to his son, in front of the rice chest as Sado struggles for his last breaths. But Yeongjo could have been speaking to his royal ancestors as well as to his successor, the wailing grandson who would become King Jeongjo.

As a boy of ten in 1762 trying to make sense of the horrific goings on, Jeongjo, too, tries desperately to speak to the caged Sado, his dying father, in a harrowing scene often highlighted in TV dramas. This trauma from childhood could only have been debilitating, but as it turns out, among the three men of the monarchy in “The Throne”, Jeongjo comes across as the most sensible, in line with the general historical assessment forming about him (see below). Famously, as noted above, in 1795, the 60th anniversary years of the births of both his parents, Jeongjo led a lavish procession of thousands down to the city of Suwon, to where he moved his father’s grave. “The Throne” does not recreate this spectacle, but it does show at the end Jeongjo’s visit to his father’s (mounded) tomb, where he expresses his sense of guilt over Sado’s death. The film closes with the filial king paying homage to his long-suffering mother in a delicate dance of extraordinary poignancy. These reminders of Jeongjo’s character parallel his historical standing, as he is generally taken as the last great king and perhaps second only to Sejong (Chap. 1) in the annals of national history. But Jeongjo was overcome in the end by an unexpected early death (age 48), which, according to an account gaining currency, was caused by the constant conspiring against him by entrenched political forces that had also done in his father Sado.

Sado, Jeongjo, and National Regret

The notion of a conspiracy against Crown Prince Sado and indeed against this entire triumvirate of eighteenth-century monarchical figures had circulated since the actual events, but the idea received a huge boost with the publication of a novel, “Eternal Empire” (Yeongwonhan jeguk), in the early 1990s by a young writer, Ryu Cheol-jin, who used the pen name Yi In-hwa. The book achieved explosive popularity and was soon made into a film of the same name (Bak Jong-won, 1995) that, while not as engrossing as the book and not quite on the level in production values of the hallyu films that came thereafter, featured promising actors such as Kim Myeong-gon, Kim Hye-su, Jo Jae-hyeon, Choe Jong-won, and An Seong-gi, who would later appear as fixtures in South Korean cinema, including in historical films.²⁷ Together, the novel and film helped to popularise the conspiracy angle and, more importantly, trigger a mass flowering of interest in King Jeongjo, which spurred more historical novels, academic studies, television series, and films such as “The Throne” and the three works that will be analysed in the present section. In fact, all the movies examined in this chapter subscribe at least partially to this revisionist view, even as actual historical scholarship has found little to support it.²⁸ The appeal of the image of a heroic Jeongjo can be understood as reflecting a popular search for signs that Korea could have pursued an internally driven reform effort resulting in modern changes, had it not been for this monarch’s premature death, which coincidentally took place in 1800 and led to the distressed nineteenth century (Chap. 4), culminating in the tragic twentieth. But re-imagining Jeongjo through an inflation of his significance and potential also fits into a longer-term effort in South Korea to reconsider more forthrightly the structural ailments of the Joseon era, indeed of premodern Korea altogether.

This inertia of corruption and contradiction seems to present an insurmountable obstacle in “Eternal Empire”, the film adaptation of Yi In-hwa’s popular novel. Set in a single day in 1800, shortly before Jeongjo’s passing, it is told as an extended flashback by a fictionalised aide to the monarch recalling the events of three decades earlier. This official, named Yi In-mong (recall that the author of the novel is Yi In-hwa), is charged with investigating, with the help of Vice-Minister of Punishments Jeong Yag-yong—the real historical figure better known as Dasan—the suspiciously sudden death of another young aide who had been conducting a secret project for King Jeongjo. The viewer then follows the labyrinth of a murder mystery that takes Yi through the intricacies of deadly political rivalries mixed with chronic problems—from social discrimination, factionalism, and even Catholicism—but ultimately arising from the Prince Sado scandal. The storyline thus revisits the continuing impact of the previous king, Yeongjo, who supposedly penned, more than a quarter-century earlier, a secret book that details the role of a faction of the “Old Doctrine” (Noron) Party’s manoeuvring to frame Sado and thus force Yeongjo to sentence him to death. This faction’s current leadership is well aware of the dangers of such a revelation, and hence the intricate plot tracks the race between the king and opposing party to procure the book while also unravelling the disturbing connections between this political confrontation and that official’s death. It is no less than a showdown over Korea’s past that would determine its future.

“Eternal Empire” thus presents King Jeongjo, 24 years into his reign, as finally on the verge of his longstanding quest to implement a comprehensive and unending “renovation” (yusin) of his kingdom, which would achieve the “ideal country that we have dreamed of” but required the removal of the entrenched political forces at court. His populist vision of this new society, led by and recognising only the authority of the sagely monarch armed with insights from Catholic science and enlightened advisors like Dasan (who in real life had personal connections to Catholicism—see Chap. 4), tolerates no old resins like hereditary hierarchies. These include of course the parasitic aristocracy and the scourge of slavery, but especially hated by this king is the stifling prejudice against concubines’ sons, a bias that had even hounded his father, Sado, and grandfather, Yeongjo, as noted above. Indeed, the aide whose murder had triggered the day’s events was himself a concubine’s son. The semiotics are stark: The concubine sons and descendants, the legalised bias against whom dated back to the start of the Joseon dynasty,²⁹ constitute the epitome of unjust fate—although slaves and other “low-born” groups [cheonmin] might have disputed this—in a social system based on ascriptive status. The irony of this messaging is also inescapable, as discussed in Chap. 1: a hereditary monarch calling for the abolition of inherited privilege. But the superseding rationale for activist, enlightened royal absolutism seems to appear in a scene when the king articulates his vision, in which he speaks of the recent French Revolution’s murderous end while holding a pair of glasses (with lenses and mirrors also operating as main symbols) imported from the West. He admires the technical innovation but wonders how that same civilisation could have unleashed such mass horror as the killing of the French royalty.

As was made apparent later, the author of the novel “Eternal Empire”, Yi In-hwa, probably envisioned in the Jeongjo character a modern, benignly autocratic leader in the mould of Napoleon, who had claimed to be restoring order in France in line with the revolution’s ideals. Yi, then, was heralding South Korea’s own authoritarian who instituted a “renovation” (yusin), Park Chung Hee, a preference made abundantly self-evident in the author’s subsequent works, even before his arrest for academic fraud in 2017 put an interesting cap on his intellectual career.³⁰ Given the rise of populist strongmen around the world and the ongoing controversies surrounding Park Chung Hee, one could have assumed that the scaffolding of the Sado conspiracy theory would have collapsed in line with the revelation of Yi In-hwa’s political agenda. But the influence of his novel and the film adaptation from the 1990s had taken hold, with the unveiled original motivation behind “Eternal Empire” mostly disregarded.

This now widely accepted view even guides a semi-farce, “The Grand Heist” (Kim Ju-ho, 2012), the original title for which, tellingly, is the parodic Korean rendering of “Gone with the Wind” (Baram gwa hamkke sarajida). It actually is a take on another Hollywood flick, “Ocean’s Eleven”: a comic caper featuring a motley heist team, formed during the transition to the King Jeongjo era in the late eighteenth century, that targets an illegal ice monopoly run by corrupt aristocrats. These are the same officials of course who had framed Sado and are thus plotting also to block Jeongjo’s ascent to the throne, for they fear his reprisals as well as his goals of achieving a classless society. On the other side, each of the 11 members of the righteous thieves squad, in adhering to the parody, offers particular talents that together encompass the emblems of freedom and change that sprinkle the film: science, specialisation, commerce, the West and Catholicism, Qing China, and, somehow, a glowing green orb. Even the great philosopher Dasan joins the group as an eccentric child scientist, the budding genius heralding a new age.

Within this bald mimicry of both a specific foreign film and Korean costume dramas in general, in which every other scene seems to be accompanied by a wink, lie also some historically pertinent themes that craftily cut through the throwaway threading of the film. First is the trope found in some more accomplished dramatisations, from “The Face Reader” (Chap. 1) to “YMCA Baseball Team” (Chap. 5), of social or national unity actualised through the integration of people of various, especially lower, social backgrounds. In “The Grand Heist”, most of the robbery team members come from non-aristocratic, indeed shunned, social status, such as slave or even a courtesan, one of three female team members. The leaders are just as interesting: the historical figures Yi Deung-mu and Yu Deuk-gong, who would later be appointed by King Jeongjo as two of the “Four Librarians” (sageomseo) of concubine descent to staff the monarch’s new state agency, the Royal Library (Gyujanggak).³¹ True to form, Yi Deung-mu, the protagonist in the film, is depicted as a blithe bibliophile who, in duplicating the Jeongjo situation, struggles to overcome his standing as the scion of a convicted criminal framed by corrupt officials. Yu Deuk-gong, meanwhile, works as a constabulary officer, shunted to a lower-ranking military position due to his being a concubine’s son (seoja). Through these two main characters, then, concubine descendants serve as emblems of the injustices of inherited status, a fatalistic mark highlighted by the Sado saga and King Jeongjo’s reform efforts.

Not concubine’s children but young children as a whole carry this allegorical torch in the most intriguing and sophisticated film on Jeongjo, “The Fatal Encounter” (Yeongnin [“The Monarch’s wrath”]; Yi Jae-gyu, 2014), which like “The Throne” is a more revealing title than the Korean original. The film actually features numerous fatal encounters, including some deadly ones, as well as plentiful symbolism—rain, caves, light, and most of the main characters—and a closing fight sequence that amounts to overkill, as does the over-the-top portrayal of the young Jeongjo as a buff action hero. In many ways “The Fatal Encounter” offers an update on “Eternal Empire”, for the main story takes place within a single 24-hour period and seeks resolution through the discovery of a secret book supposedly penned by King Yeongjo.

The film begins with a shot of many dead bodies strewn on palace grounds at the end of this single day, with the remainder of the film showing the day’s buildup but also crucial flashback sequences to earlier settings. Like “Masquerade” (Chap. 2), the story crafts an intricate plot out of a single mystifying entry in the dynastic annals (Sillok)—this time from the summer of 1777, one year after Jeongjo’s ascent to the throne, about possible assassins heard scurrying on the roof.³² The day begins well before dawn, with the young monarch studying and doing push-ups in his quarters while quizzing his doting chief eunuch, Gapsu, on passages in the Confucian classics. The scene establishes a close, near-fraternal relationship between these two figures and contrasts later with another brotherly bond of Gapsu’s, from early childhood, to Eulsu, who turns into a skilled assassin sent to kill Jeongjo but is blocked by Gapsu at the end of the day. In between, the intricate plot features both historical and fictional characters manoeuvring—or being manoeuvred—into position as the assassination attempt builds. They include Queen Dowager Jeongsun, just a few years older than Jeongjo but formally his grandmother,³³ and her primary nemesis, Lady Hyegyeong, Jeongjo’s mother (and Sado’s widow). The Queen Dowager is in league with General Gu Seon-bok, who controls most of the military and wants to get rid of Jeongjo, while on the other side is Hong Gug-yeong, a high military official fiercely loyal to the king who wants to get rid of General Gu before it’s too late. In addition to Gapsu and Eulsu, the fictional characters include a devious personal attendant to the Queen Dowager; a ten-year-old palace servant girl, Bok-bing, put to use by manipulative adults; and a chilling enslaver and child trafficker who seems by himself to embody all the evils of the land. But more importantly, he represents the stifling scaffolding of social destiny. This odious man had trained both Gapsu and Eulsu, as well as a third character, Wol-hye, a palace maid who becomes Eulsu’s love interest, as young children in order to spring them into murderous actions later as adults, like classic Hollywood spies of the Cold War such as the Manchurian candidate.

This compelling connection between adulthood and childhood forwards the film’s central motif on the workings of fate, as though spotlighting the popular debate about the balance of nurture and nature in childrearing. The adolescents in the film, likewise, serve not as deterministic figures but rather as vessels for the potential impact of individual agency on the stout structures of social status, political power, and national customs. Two of the enslaved children strategically positioned as adult assassins in the royal palace—Gapsu and Wol-hye—turn against their foreordained task, though in different ways. Even the third formerly captured child, the hardened killer Eulsu, is overcome by personal feelings and appears ready to abandon his assignment. The children also serve as stand-ins for the mass of the exploited and manipulated underclass. As Wol-hye indignantly states, she has observed the powerful in the court do terrible things to common people like her. And the cherubic palace girl in training, Bok-bing, gets manipulated by both sides of the growing confrontation and even turned into an unwitting assassin, just like the three young adults who had begun life trapped in subterranean caves and literally marked as fatal objects. Later in adulthood, however, as they pass each other unknowingly in brief shots, they show how the contingencies of personal encounters can redirect predetermined paths, and among such relationships no one exerts as much impact as the Jeongjo character himself. Critically, though, “The Fatal Encounter” does not present the sage king as only the source of such destiny-defying influence. In one flashback scene the child Jeongjo, in hiding from the commotion of palace life three years after his father’s death, is comforted by his personal eunuch, who is none other than the teenaged, slightly older Gapsu. The mutuality of this long relationship, sturdy in its strength and symbolism, remains the core human dynamic from the film’s beginning to its end.³⁴

Still, notwithstanding such fruitful layering, unquestionably it is the sage king, early in his reign, who remains the focus of the film, indeed excessively so—not through the character’s domination of the storyline but rather through the iconic mythologising of this figure. Whether set in dark interiors or out in broad daylight, in numerous scenes a bright light shines upon and behind Jeongjo, as if he were the great leader in Orwellian propaganda. While probably not done in self-parody, the only plausible explanation for this cinematic heavy-handedness—Jeongjo even appears on a white horse while bathed in sunlight—is to forward the character as approaching religious status, someone whose significance connotes cosmic overtones. Unlike in “Eternal Empire”, Catholicism is absent in the storyline, but Jeongjo definitely presents as a Christ figure. Aside perhaps from a wandering eye for potential concubines, he seems to have no flaws, and (as in real life) he is extremely studious, to the point of correcting his assigned teachers during the royal lectures. Indeed, he appears as the purveyor of a new testament to the decrepit original creed of Confucianism, represented by the old, corrupt, stubborn officials mouthing in droning repetition their received understandings. Other signals abound as well. At several moments, Jeongjo’s royal robe, shown hanging in a cross configuration, acts as an altar to bowing rows of worshipful palace servants (Image 1), and indeed Wol-hye’s specific duty is to look after the king’s wardrobe. Also making a major semiotic splash is blood, whether on the sword (in assigning justice) or in the letter (hyeolseo) left by King Yeongjo, but most notably as splattered on Jeongjo’s white robe at the end of this turbulent day (Image 2). In this scene, Jeongjo appears like a figure in a medieval European painting, fatigued and bloodstained while offering himself in self-abnegation. More to the point, he is the redeemer. At the end of the film, he calmly but firmly informs his grandmother, who had plotted to kill him, that he is willing to grant her forgiveness, just as he had offered redemption to General Gu earlier. But this resuscitation is available only on the intimidating condition, under the threat of a horrible outcome, that they submit to him, presumably also in obedience to his revolutionary vision for the country.

Image 1

Palace servants bowing before the gown of King Yeongjo in “The Fatal Encounter”

Image 2

An exhausted and bloodied King Jeongjo at the close of “The Fatal Encounter”

Jeongjo actually would not be sacrificed for another quarter-century after this moment, so in maintaining this analogy of trinities, perhaps his father Sado, falsely accused and killed in his early thirties, more aptly fits into the Christ role, with his grandfather Yeongjo acting as a mercurial and demanding Old Testament Yahweh, at least in the way he is portrayed in “The Throne”. Knowing how the Joseon governing system functioned as a thicket of longstanding social and political interests, few historians would assign such comprehensive influence to even these long-serving and powerful monarchs, and far less to the tragic crown prince, Sado, whose manner of death admittedly cast a long shadow. These royal figures’ cinematic portrayals, then, reflect a general search for indications from Koreans’ collective past that suggest a forward-looking, corrective historical path out of the country’s debilitating traditions. Given the encrusted social and political structures of this legacy, which functioned as a trapping destiny, the more viable potential outcomes would have come from singularly powerful monarchs. They could have fought to break free from cumulative historical burdens at a time, the eighteenth century, when the country might have taken a turn towards something other than what it would become in the nineteenth century.