Photo by Alex Ugolkov on Unsplash

Is There Another Way?

Perhaps

Today I’ll take my cue from “No Other Choice,” a film I watched on Mubi. The title is a verdict; I want to turn that verdict back into a question.

The first ten minutes of any film usually bore me; then my mind changes. Once a film begins to pull, my curiosity grows, and if it keeps surprising me, a moment arrives when it occurs to me to pause it and ask an AI how it ends. I don’t. I didn’t. It took me a while to see that this small act of resistance had everything to do with the film itself: the shortcut was right there, one sentence away, and I chose to wait, the film’s hero did not. That is the entire difference between us, and it is far thinner than it looks.

I tend to approach Korean cinema with prejudice. I gave this film a chance, and I’m glad I did.

“Suffering always points the way.” — Rumi

I won’t recount the film’s patterns here. It moves along plainly, simply, and I never guessed that nothing could flow the way I expected. What chills is not the moment an unthinkable idea takes on flesh; it’s how short the road to that idea turns out to be. A person reaches the far edge not by a long fall but by a single step. Everything that follows is the justification of that step.

Desperation, or expedience? Everyone’s call to make, but the two are not the same: desperation is a condition; expedience is a choice. The system excels at making them resemble each other. We learn to narrate our choices as necessities, and that is how conscience is most cleanly silenced. “There was no other way” is, more often than not, the made-up face of “I never looked for one.”

Did he do it for the money, or for his family? We can’t know; perhaps he doesn’t either. But “for my family” is the most potent story a person can tell himself. Evil committed in the name of love is more resolute than evil committed in the name of greed, because the perpetrator never sees himself as a perpetrator. He sees a victim and a hero at once. Had he been alone, could he have turned this monstrous for that job? I doubt it. What grows the monster is not loneliness; it’s having something worth becoming a monster for.

If we said that everyone in today’s working life is a monster, we wouldn’t be lying but we’d be saying too little. No one is born a monster; monstrosity is not a flaw of character but a job description. Every résumé sent is a silent elimination: one person hired means several unseen people turned away. We never see our rivals’ faces, so conscience never reports for duty. All the film does is close that distance: it gives the invisible rival a face, a kitchen, a family. What unsettles the viewer is not the violence, it’s the familiarity.

The story itself isn’t new, either. The same tale has crossed three continents in thirty years: a novel in America, a film in France, now again in Korea. Which means the question it’s capitalist. The geography changes, the termination letter doesn’t.

“Suffering always points the way.” True, but suffering points to a road, not a direction. The same suffering drives one person to labor, another to patience, another to murder. We are not obliged to take every road we are shown; the first door our suffering points to is usually just the nearest one.

I finished the film, and I asked no one how it ends. Perhaps the matter is not settled in great trials with great decisions; perhaps we test whether another way exists every single day, standing in front of small shortcuts. Whoever says “there was no other way” has usually not reached the end of the road, has not, in most cases, even reached the beginning of the search. However the film ends, the question of whether it was worth all that was destroyed lingers on the screen long after the last frame.

Is there another way? There is. It’s just longer.

选择 (xuǎnzé) — choice

每个人都有选择。(Měi gè rén dōu yǒu xuǎnzé.)

Everyone has a choice.

The act of selecting between options; a decision made when multiple paths exist.