Help! My tower’s been struck by lightning. ‘The Midnight Romance in Hagwon’
If you’ve ever dabbled in the Tarot then you’ll know that flipping over ‘Death’, ‘The Hanged Man’ or ‘The Devil’ is a tense moment which any decent reader will soothe over with the interpretative flexibility inherent in any divination system. ‘The Tower’ is such a card. What positive fate can come from a man and women falling from a crumbling tower on fire while destructive debris rains down around them? Well, destruction and creativity are closely bonded sisters. In personality terms, sometimes we invest considerable energy in building sturdy psychological structures and habits that end up frustrating our goals by stifling innovation or any possible growth. In the esoteric tradition of the Tarot, the intact tower is a triumph of the intellect and the will over emotion and instinct. An act of God, a movement of fate, a lightning bolt from the blue causes catastrophe and destroys your tower. Do not despair, the wise Tarot reader will counsel, because the space has been cleared on which something new / organic / fit for purpose can be built. To put it another way, you have to break eggs to make an omelette and your tower was built on sand anyway.
In The Midnight Romance in Hagwon, Jung Ryeo-won tweaks her lawyer typecasting (May it Please the Court, War of Prosecutors), to play a high-profile academy teacher. Her character, Seo Hye-jin, is a late-thirties educator badly in need of an omelette. She’s a workaholic people pleaser so dedicated to her career, the kids, and the Academy that gave her work when she was a penniless student, that she’s ended up as The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Unlike Steve Carrol in that movie, she’s been so busy with work, she doesn’t seem to have noticed that she’s never even kissed. Of course, Korean drama is loath to suggest that a professional women needs a man to make her life complete … except in every single case where the woman is older than the man. Don’t worry viewer, The Midnight Romance is trying to be a bit more subtle than that, although gorgeous life-changing sex is coming Seo Hye-jin’s way. In this case, love is not the resolution but a catalyst for the destruction of all kinds of unhealthy edifices in Hye-jin’s life and once her tower goes, a few neighbouring buildings are going to get caught in the aftershock.
As someone who loves stories, there’s aspects of narrative theory that I find simultaneously intriguing and demoralising. Structuralism is reductive; that’s the point. Propp’s seven character types drawn from analysing Russian folk tales, Barthes five narrative codes with their semiotic and literary basis; ‘The Hero’s Journey’ — they’re all a bit ‘meh’. K-drama’s huge output lends itself to these types of structural analysis but its dynamic development as self-reflexive popular culture upsets that particular applecart. It’s more rewarding to consider the codes and conventions of K-drama on their own terms as generated in a hybridised but encultured framework that has complex interactions with the ‘real’ world around it. But that all sounds like hard work. Instead, let’s just steal from another form of popular culture, divination. It turns out Koreans have taken quite a shine to the western-derived Tarot in recent years and K-drama has followed suit. In My Lovely Liar, for example, Kim So-hyun and Park Kyung-hye play business partners who set up a Tarot parlour as a front to conceal the former’s metaphysical ability.
The classic interpretation of ‘The Tower’ card seems to be naturally sympathetic to the rhythms of melodrama, providing the narrative force of many a K-drama, particularly romances. Falling in love often involves an element of an existing structure falling apart. It might be an established relationship gone stale but even if not, the tremors of new passion are bound to disturb friends, family, and even work relations. So many K-romance protagonists have to lose everything before they learn how to love. Son Ye-jin, as Yoon Se-ri, literally falls out of the sky into the DMZ to get an emotional re-set in Crash Landing on You. Kim Ji-won is a regular ‘Tower’ dweller: desire brings her double life crashing down as Lee Eun-o in Lovestruck in the City, while Hong Hae-in, from Queen of Tears, gets a vital demolition job on her stale existence from both a medical diagnosis and a stalker from her childhood. In Welcome to Samdal-ri, a trusty old scandal blows up Cho Sam-dal’s (Shin Hye-sun) life tower so she can retreat to Jeju Island and get right with her family and abandoned soulmate.
The Midnight Romance in Hagwon is an intricate workplace romance so Seo Hye-jin’s house of straw was never going to be blown away by movements of the heart alone. If your understanding of South Korea’s extra education sector extends no further than that little bit of dubious tutoring in Parasite then prepare yourself. Along with the other East Asian cultures (China, Taiwan, and Japan), the Korean prioritising of education manifests in a superstructure of private provision which surrounds, supports and preys on the state education system, i.e., schools. Private tutoring is a massive multi-trillion Won industry. In nearby China, for example, its distorting impact became so overwhelming that in July 2021 the Chinese Government banned private tuition providers from providing for-profit classes in core curriculum subjects. K-drama Extraordinary Attorney Woo features a case in which children aged ten are routinely subjected to a schedule that sees school lessons run from 8 am to 4 pm and academy classes from 4 pm to 10 pm every day, with a short break to grab a Samgak-gimbap (triangular rice ball wrapped in seaweed) in a convenience store. Attorney Woo is defending an academy teacher punitively charged with kidnap for absconding with the kids to let them play in a park for the day.
2023’s Crash Course in Romance is also set in this ferocious ecosystem and once again love striking an older woman facilitates the cracking and crumbling of metaphorical towers left, right and centre. The pressures of educational standards harming children’s wellbeing is a regular theme in K-dramas from Black Dog to Doctor Slump. In that sense, both Crash Course and The Midnight Romance are throwing shade at the Academy system itself, and the competitive educational standards’ hysteria that sustains it, as the Tower that Korea really needs to strike with lightening. Although a structure that endlessly pits student against student, parent against parent and teachers against teachers, as well as combinations of those agents, is great for drama, it’s not so good for society.
For a melodrama, bricks and mortar crashing to the ground needs to get personal. In this area, Midnight Romance is slicker than Crash Course. The latter sees Jung Kyung-ho (Hospital Playlist), as celebrity maths tutor Choi Chi-yeol, so tightly wound that he’s practically cruising the lightning field carrying an iron pole. Jung Ryeo-won’s Seo Hye-jin, in contrast, is introduced to us at the top of her game; calm, fulfilled, committed, highly skilled and highly regarded. Although the tower comes down fast in the end (don’t they always?), the Drama’s first 12 episodes gorgeously lay out the slow, inevitable undermining of the foundations. It’s not really love and desire between a teacher and a former pupil that’s the problem, it’s tall poppy syndrome. Seo Hye-jin is surrounded by too many enemies frustrated by their own mediocrity. Some of her friends and allies aren’t that reliable either.
Another difference between Crash and Midnight that works in the latter’s favour is the choice of subject. Instead of maths, Seo Hye-jin teaches Korean. Crash attempts to draw links by naming episodes after mathematical concepts and rules, but there’s not really much metaphorical grease to squeeze from numbers into the emotional subtext of the drama. Korean as a subject, on the other hand, allows a substantial debate to run throughout Midnight on the nature and purpose of education. The Academy’s star pupil is perplexed: ‘I get good grades in Korean but I don’t understand the questions’. It becomes a performance versus capacity battle that questions whether the dark arts of exam technique, as practiced by academies, should give way to upskilling in critical thinking. Of course it should, but, uh oh … money … driven by parental goals for top college places. SKY Castle is a revenge-y, class ridden, makjang, bitch-fest whose eponymous apartment building is a literal tower waiting for metaphorical lightning. To ram that home, the letters S K Y are the initials of the three most prestigious universities in Korea, their kids’ entry to which forms the battle ground for the parents who should know better.
In the end, that larger debate is thoroughly aired in Midnight but not resolved and that feels like an authentic impasse. The dramatic focus is an up-close examination of the tower crumbling and so exposition and fallout get short shrift. This does mean that Seo Hye-jin’s post-tower reconstruction project is dealt with rather abruptly in the final half hour of the last episode. The writer’s (Park Kyung-hwa) desire to avoid the trope-ish need to tie up every lose end with a bow is laudable but the array of ‘blink and you miss them’ visual clues and verbal hints is strangely unsatisfying. Only the love match in Seo Hye-jin’s new life feels secure, and while that maturely reflects the uncertainty of any substantial life change, it does feel a little old fashioned to leave a resourceful, talented woman in her late thirties holding only a couple ring and hope.
Available to stream in the UK: The Midnight Romance in Hagwon (Viki Pass); May it Please the Court (Disney+); War of Prosecutors (Viki, Netflix — Diary of a Prosecutor); My Lovely Liar (Viki Pass); Crash Landing on You (Netflix); Lovestruck in the City (Netflix); Queen of Tears (Netflix); Welcome to Samdal-ri (Netflix); Extraordinary Attorney Woo (Netflix); Crash Course in Romance (Netflix); Black Dog (Viki); Doctor Slump (Netflix); SKY Castle (Netflix). Subscriptions required: Netflix, Viki Pass, Disney+.
