One ought to know that the world is not a play which marks a reality that tries to exist behind the scenes. It is as it appears. We feel moral outrage when we witness or experience wrongful acts, we feel contempt for the harm-doer, and we feel the desire to see them punished. As a third-party observer, we feel sympathy and compassion for the victim, and we feel relief and satisfaction if the victim is able to retaliate against the harm-doer successfully and manages to redress the injustice. As one views vengeance dramas or movies, one realises how fascinating it is to watch, as it shows the audience precisely how they know that good things will ultimately happen to good people and bad things will ultimately happen to bad people. The audience desires that revenge be done, but is that a desire for revenge or retribution? (Wilson 2001).
With this, I aim to show a connection to a work of fiction that refers to the Korean Drama Series titled Taxi Driver (2021), which is about a secret vigilante group, the Rainbow Taxi Company. This vigilante group operate a hidden service for victims failed by the justice system, taking revenge on their behalf. Each episode of the series is based loosely on real-life crimes and how the legal systems take them up. They work with the motto: ‘Do not Die Seek Revenge,’ which sets a strong precedence on how one who is wronged does not die simply without being avenged. I refer to Episodes 15 and 16 of the series, where the characters Oh Chul Young, a serial killer who murdered Jang Sung Chul’s parents (Owner of Rainbow Taxi Company) and Kim Do-Gi’s mother (Kim Do-Gi is a Member of Rainbow Taxi Company and a taxi driver who takes revenge) and Kim Chul-Jin, was the man who was wrongfully jailed for twenty years for a murder case committed by Oh Chul-young. This episode is loosely based on the real-life Hwaseong serial murder case. Hwaseong is a rural area just south of Seoul, South Korea, where, between 1986 and 1991, Lee Chun Jae murdered ten women. Still, he was not found for almost thirty-three years until he confessed in 2019 to being the serial killer. Lee Chun Jae also admitted to having killed four others, other than the ten he had already murdered. Instead of Lee Chun Jae, Yoon Sung Yeo was falsely accused and sent to jail in 1989. Nevertheless, when Lee confessed his crimes, it allowed Yoon Sung Yeo to demand a re-trial, which allowed him to clear his name in 2020 (Choe 2020).
Knowing the background, both in fiction and reality, brings one to a crucial understanding of the themes which my paper works with as follows: The South Korean Legal System, Revenge, Justice, Retribution, and vigilantism, all together tied to how fiction mirrors reality.
The Episode 15 of Taxi Driver, Kim Chul Jin makes a point when he states how the law could not punish the real culprit who ruined his life for almost twenty years, even after finding out who the real culprit was, as the prosecutors were more concerned about the statute of limitations that has expired rather than the case of the person whose life was ruined by false accusations by getting false confessions out of him. This, in turn, forces him to turn to the Rainbow Taxi company that does the job for him. They seek revenge on his behalf. By the end of Episode 16, the re-trial takes place, where the court proves that Kim Chul Jin was innocent and was falsely accused due to a lack of evidence during the investigation. Now, connecting this to the real situation, in 1989, due to public pressure to find the killer, the police arrested a young welder, Yoon Sung Yeo, who then spent two decades in jail, even after the real killer struck again (Chia 2021). Yoon spent almost twenty years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. The statute of limitations for the serial murder case in Hwaseong expired on April 2, 2006. Despite the effort that the police had made, the culprit had not been captured. The most noticeable reason for this failure was that the number of forensic experts was extremely insufficient. Because of a lack of human resources, the evidence of DNA and fingerprints could not be scrutinised, and a lack of accurate investigation also resulted in some suspects being falsely accused (Han 2013).
To further scrutinise the South Korean Legal System regarding the Hwaseong Murder case, one needs to look at it through ‘The Statute of Limitations.’
‘The Statute of Limitations’ is the law that restricts the time within which legal proceedings may be brought to bear on any given crime. Critics argue that it protects accused criminals and prevents wrongly suspecting innocent people, and saves government funding. However, the statute is morally invalid in most cases as it allows criminals to avoid punishment and, at the same time, also fails to protect the victim's rights properly. The main problems also include the fact that the statute fails to respond to problems with discovering substantive truth, protecting victims, preventing crimes, and defending the order in law. It, in some sense, infringes upon the rights of the victims and encourages more people to commit crimes. An opposition to the statute of limitations is raised on the belief that the criminals should not enjoy unreasonable and unjust benefits, because if they are not punished, then the law is simply wrong to the public. The purpose of any law is to ensure justice by punishing people who commit crimes. The substantive truth should be discovered, and criminals should be punished, but if criminals are made to believe that more crimes may occur because criminals believe that they can easily escape the law by avoiding the police for several years until the statute of limitations expires (Han 2013).
Then, from the background of the South Korean Legal systems through both fiction and reality, we enter the themes of Revenge, Justice, and Retribution, which are again as follows:
Teresa Godwin Phelps's book Shattered Voices, where she quotes, ‘If we or our loved ones are harmed, we call the police and thereafter depend upon the state to investigate, judge, and punish for us.’ But if the state does not punish, then who to seek to give us justice? Revenge seems easier. Again, the feeling of any desire for personal revenge is regarded as a character flaw. We say, ‘We do not want revenge; we want justice,’ which indicates a duality in our conviction that a desire for revenge is shameful. When we use ‘justice’ to deny any desire for revenge, we demonstrate our belief that justice is completely distinct from revenge, unrelated in any way. Stories can play a strong part in revenge and retribution, as one is concerned with a reappraisal of the desire for revenge (Phelps 2004).
In the context of transitional democracies, there is a temptation to put the past behind us. As the central authority strengthens, personal crimes become matters of concern for the state as it assumes its duty to punish the wrongdoer, and any idea of personal revenge is outlawed. When states were being developed, and legal codes were being written, the right to private revenge was gradually ceded to officials. Here, the state claims that it must reestablish the natural order that the crime has disrupted. The importance of the victim’s need for some personal balancing becomes virtually insignificant (Phelps 2004).
Humankind has not always been embarrassed by a desire to balance a harm with a comparable harm in an act of revenge. In early conceptions of justice, revenge had a sacrosanct space. The willingness of people to abdicate the right to take personal revenge was contingent upon the strength of the central authority. Revenge is now commonly called retribution, where the state enacts the revenge. For one to get justice meant to punish the wrongdoer, but one must also realise that the arm of the law is not enough to convince people to give up what they had regarded as a sacred, privileged duty. The citizens were made to believe that they could seek justice but not revenge, which severed many nexuses that justice and revenge would have shared (Phelps 2004).
Thomas Hobbes, in this book, Levithan (1985) quotes: “The end of punishing is not revenge, and discharge of choler, but correction, either of the offender or the other, by his example”.
In the early modern period, as expressed in Shakespeare’s Julis Caesar, violent revenge and the unpredictability of commoners were openly recognised as a motivator of political and legal behaviour where the dominant idea was to deny that the state trying to punish wrongdoers is a type of revenge, to assert that the law has others aims namely reparation, restraint and corrections and in due course results into a sort of punishment by the state.
“The state law, in this case, is constructed through the rejection of its ideological opposite, and its perennial dark penumbra is violence without due process where the origins of a liberal state lie in its act of calming the wild injustice and the assuming the right to punish which consenting citizens relinquish” (Wilson 2001, 159).
“Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good” (Romans 12:21).
This quote is used constantly in the drama shows that revenge is a social phenomenon, but at the same time, with also tries to see if there is any difference between justice and revenge. In trying to contemplate the dimensions that one assumes retributive justice is good, while revenge is the incarnation of evil. In an attempt to make revenge evil, sinful, primitive and even animalistic, a claim is often made that if there is no partaking in revenge, then the right to punish the offender is taken away from the victim and granted solely to the state or legal authorities (Gollwitzer 2009).
In the Hwaseong murder case, there was no open attempt at any revenge, but a re-trial, which can be used as a metaphor for revenge, which the Episodes of Taxi Driver tried to show us.
Revenge is commonly regarded as a low and unworthy emotion because the deep hold that it has on people is rarely understood. It does not flourish on its own but thrives when institutionalised forms of retribution by the state, or even informally, are found to be lacking. Revenge became a reaction towards harmful acts, or one could say more precisely, harmful intentions that are considered morally relevant to the victim. The victim has every right to seek revenge, as the hidden message of the act, the disrespect of the victim, and the psychological harm that results from violating the victim’s fundamental entitlement to be treated are not taken into account. This brings out the personal side of harm and revenge, which cannot be settled easily by legal punishment but can be settled if revenge is taken (Wilson 2001).
We come to see that “Just the act of revenge, but also even the feeling of wanting revenge” (Phelps 2004,6), thus making both revenge and justice as aligned themes. However, “Revenge and justice became treated as opposites, and the urge toward revenge was deemed reprehensible and always excessive” (Phelps 2004, 21).
The giving over was tentative and reluctant and was frequently taken back by the individual or family, especially in those instances in which the state failed to take retribution. However, in order to ensure the security of the state against the disorder and destructiveness of private revenge, the state went further in an attempt to convince people that private revenge was not only imprudent but also evil, thus trying to ensure its best interests (Phelps 2004).
“The revenge balanced the natural order and put the world back on the right track” (Phelps 2004,16). The act of revenge does not correct an imbalance and restore order with the even exchange of an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, making revenge seem in itself an act of excess. The punishment given to the criminal was seen as an honour, making the criminal almost a rational being so that he is not seen as a harmful animal (Phelps 2004). Thus, one needs “To hallow revenge under the name of justice” (Phelps 2004,29).
Over time, we also come to see how retribution slowly became a polite name for revenge, where the backwards-looking retributive theories of punishment were replaced by forward-looking utilitarian rationales that justified punishment largely as rehabilitation and perhaps to deter those who, in the absence of state retribution, would enact private revenge (Phelps 2004).
“Revenge and retribution arise from the same ignoble emotions of ‘getting even’ and making the wrongdoer ‘pay his dues’ and are therefore deemed morally unacceptable” (Wilson 2001,161). Retributive justice cannot exist without emotions, nor does the emotional satisfaction that accompanies a ‘successful’ act of revenge solely consist of the pleasure of seeing the offender suffer (Wilson 2001).
Then we enter our final theme, vigilantism, which is as follows,
We see that contemporary headlines are replete with accounts of global vigilantism. The stories that these headlines try to report capture a range of incidents and processes in which ordinary folk have taken the law into their own hands to prevent multiple crimes that have occurred (Pratten and Sen 2007). This act by ordinary folk lies very closely to the themes discussed earlier because when the legal system denies justice, they get “unparalleled opportunities and motives for citizens to take the law into their own hands” (Pratten and Sen 2007, 2). Taxi Driver also follows the same motive, taking the law into their own hands because the Rainbow Taxi company’s work is visible when Kim Chul Jin engages in seeking help from them, which in turn shows how instead of being passive consumers of police or legal services the ordinary folk seeks help from a vigilante group to be engaged in service of getting a variety of security services which also includes revenge (Pratten and Sen 2007).
In the end, vengeful inclinations are fascinating to watch. This is only possible when we are able to attribute them to a species different from one's own, in a time or a place different from one’s own. The drama does this job. The drama tries to establish a strong correlation between reality and the fictional narrative by replicating key elements such as the location, violence, and police involvement, trying to bring out the similarities with the actual cases, thus trying to mirror the social reality, trying to make visible a profound social critique of the phenomenon in the South Korean society (Khairunnisa and Ginting 2024).
Thus, to conclude, Taxi Driver plays a crucial role not only as a source that provides us with entertainment but also as a source that allows the audience to come to a deep understanding of how relevant social reflection is being provided. Repeatedly, at the very end of the denial of justice, revenge emerges, showing how it is a human impulse which tries to form a narrative between justice and revenge when legal institutions fail to free victims of their injustices. By dramatising the gap between legal and moral justice, Taxi Driver critiques systemic failure while offering viewers a sense of catharsis, showing how it is more than action- it is a bold call for accountability. Though both reality and fiction arrive at an end, what happens to the suffering of those who are gone and those who have to live on is still a question proving how, time and again, fiction offers a stage to seek justice, as fiction is nothing but something that mirrors reality.
Bibliography
Chia, Lianne. 2021.Channel News Asia Insider
Choe, Sang Hun. 2020. New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/world/asia/korea-murder-acquittal-hwaseong.html
Gollwitzer, Mario. 2009. Justice and Revenge in Social Psychology of Punishment of Crime, edited by Margit E. Oswald, Steffen Bieneck and Jörg Hupfeld-Heinemann. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Pp.137-156
Han, Elizabeth. 2013. Is the Law Always Right? A Study of the Statute of Limitations and the Police System Through “The Three Unresolved Criminal Cases.” The People, Ideas, and Things Journal Social Sciences, Cycle 4.
Holy Bible, New Living Translation, by Tyndale House Foundation. 12:21
Khairunnisa, Siti, and Reza Pahlevi Ginting. 2024. “Mimetic Analysis of ‘Black Sun’ in the Korean Drama ‘Taxi Driver 2’ With the Burning Sun Case.” Electronic Journal of Education, Social Economics and Technology 5 (2): Pp.22–27. https://doi.org/10.33122/ejeset.v5i2.163
Phelps, Teresa Godwin. 2004.Shattered Voices: Language, Violence, and the Work of Truth Commissions. University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp.1-37
Pratten, David, and Atreyee Sen. 2007. Introduction in Global Vigilantes: Perspectives on Justice and Violence. Hurst & Company. London. Pp.1-21
Wilson, Richard. 2001. The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Legitimizing the Post-Apartheid State. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 158–187.
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