Mr. Sunshine (tvN, 2018).
A few summers ago, I found myself in the Houston airport, steeling myself for a difficult departure. My emotions were running high, and as I prepared to wrangle my shoes and screens and bottled liquids for the TSA line, I confessed to a friend that I was on the verge of messy tears. “I don’t really cry,” my friend remarked, “except when I’m watching Friday Night Lights.” His comment lingered in my mind, a momentary puzzle that I pondered while I sniffled miserably along the security line. I thought of his remark again recently while watching one of my current Netflix go-to’s, a subtitled Korean drama titled Mr. Sunshine, which had to my surprise brought me to tears. Although tears occasionally come to me during life’s ups and downs, I’m not normally one to weep my way through fictional offerings, be they literary or televised, and so my emotional response to this show came as a surprise.
Perhaps it should not, however. Over two thousand years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle proposed, in his aesthetic treatise called Poetics, that good art is efficacious. It has the power not only to move us, but also to spur new ideas, and even to plant the seeds of life changes. Considering an artwork’s characteristic effects, therefore, is crucial to understanding the art itself. In other words, considering what the art does to people who experience it, and how exactly the art accomplishes this, is just as important as considering the artwork in se, as an entity unto itself, whether it be music, painting, dance, drama, or literature. In each of these artistic forms there are certain techniques that are more efficacious than others.
We might need to pause a moment to explore why I’m leaping from my tearful Netflix binge to Aristotle. When Aristotle wrote the Poetics, the art form he was studying was poetry, but what he had in mind was not the short, lyric poems that predominate most poetic offerings published today. Instead, Aristotle had in mind poetic epics, like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Aristotle also explores artistic techniques used in the dramatic works of the ancient Greek theater, tragedies and comedies such as those of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. These were theatrical offerings typically performed in the context of great civic and religious festivals honoring the god Dionysus.
In the Poetics, Aristotle explains that the stuff of successful tragedy is not just any old story—in other words, it ought not be a story simply about the humdrum lives of everyman. Instead, it ought to be the record of an action that is “serious, complete, and of some magnitude.” A successful tragedy also follows a protagonist who is just admirable or heroic enough to be a bit “better than ourselves,” yet still relatable. Such a protagonist ought to be enough like us to engage our interest so that, as we walk the arc of his journey from happiness to misery, we are led to fear that whatever happens to him just might happen to us. Such relatable “misfortune,” says Aristotle, “is the right ending” for any tragedy.
What strikes me as most significant and most profound with regard to Aristotle’s take on tragedy is that even across the span of thousands of years, the basic tendencies of humanity—what we long for, what we’re moved by, what we fear, what draws our interest or our pleasure—remain very much the same.
According to Aristotle, the most crucial rubric for a tragedy’s success, the keystone of tragedy-craft, is the plot (mythos), although he does note that elements such as character, rhetorical style, and setting play a part in contributing to the whole. Aristotle dedicates a significant portion of the Poetics to breaking down what a well-wrought plot ought to do and how it ought to work. The plot’s unity should be so complete that every element of the work must contribute to it; nothing ought to be removable or rearrangeable without detracting from the plot as a whole. Ultimately, the effect of good tragedy—what a tragedy with a well-structured plot does to the viewer—is to awaken fear and pity. This, in turn, allows for a cathartic release of emotion, a release that is just pleasurable, positive, or purgative enough to lead the viewer to an experience of cathartic enjoyment, even though this catharsis comes about from watching things that were “painful to see.”
Though I’m usually watching streamed content on a screen while lounging in a living room, rather than sweating in a sultry Grecian amphitheater, straining to hear the lines of masked actors, what moves me to pity and fear remains remarkably similar to what moved ancient audiences. Mr. Sunshine, originally broadcast in 2018, is one of the Korean shows I’ve enjoyed recently, and one of the highest-rated K-dramas of the past ten years. It is a sageuk, a type of historical drama that has flourished on the Korean silver screen for years, and a genre dedicated to presenting the dramatic highlights of Korean history. The plot of many sageuk feature large-scale dilemmas that would be familiar to ancient Greek audiences of tragic dramas: loyalty to family, elders, or nation is pitted against fidelity to one’s own conscience or personal sense of justice; ill-fated lovers encounter one another across the divides of caste and cultural practices such as arranged marriage; and the ambitions of heroes (and sometimes rogues) are dramatically fulfilled or tragically thwarted.
The historic canvas upon which Mr. Sunshine is painted gives it the seriousness and magnitude demanded by Aristotle for any tragedy, and there is enough death, destruction, and dissolution in the final episodes of the series to adequately bathe the ending in tragic Aristotelian misfortune, albeit with rays of hope shining out here and there. Lest any would-be viewers are dissuaded from watching by this description, it is worth noting that like many Korean dramas I have seen, Mr. Sunshine is a visual feast of landscape and symbol. It pays careful attention to the resonance of the large—mountains, rivers, skies—and the small—a music box, a shoe lost in a bomb’s blast, a pinwheel, an herb—on the stage of human life. Although for Aristotle, the setting or backdrop of the tragic action—he calls it “spectacle” or “stage-effect”—is the least relevant element of successful tragedy, it plays a large part in Mr. Sunshine. Given the barebones stage sets of Grecian amphitheaters, Aristotle’s downplaying of the element of setting makes sense for his time. Mr. Sunshine, on the other hand, makes admirable use of the rich visual potential of a show crafted in in the “Ultra-HD” era.
But even more than the lush scenery and attention to detail, what I found the most compelling about Mr. Sunshine were the three particular plot elements that Aristotle considered most central to a successful tragedy: reversals, recognitions, and sufferings. Aristotle asserted that tragedies are most effective when they include all three, and when these occur nearly simultaneously and in surprising ways.
The central character of Mr. Sunshine, Eugene, is an American Marine Corps officer who happens to have been born in Joseon (one of the historic names for Korea) as a slave. In one of the first episodes of the show, he has a flashback to his enslaved parents’ death, a brutal murder at the hands of their aristocratic master. Before her death, his mother makes a sacrificial last-ditch intervention to save him, and he escapes from slavery by running away into a nearby forest, and eventually making his way, via boat, to America. He grows up in an American society where fate is determined more by grit than by birth, and manages, as he makes his way from impoverished immigrant to respected officer, to put flesh on a life-reversal of a particularly American flavor.
But Eugene’s fate flip-flops once again when he is ordered back to Joseon, the land of his parents’ murder, to work in the American legation. He carries with him both the respect of his fellow Americans and those in Joseon he serves, but he is a man conflicted about the secret of his humble social origins. In a society still bound by strict social codes, such origins would scandalize the powerful in Joseon with whom he must now interact. He navigates his way through the dicey political world of Hanseong (modern-day Seoul) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in the complex years just before the Japanese annexation of Korea. During this time he falls in love with Ae-shin, the granddaughter of a powerful aristocrat, who secretly moonlights as a sharpshooter for the Righteous Army, a ragtag band of loyalists dedicated to maintaining the culture and sovereignty of Joseon.
Much of the drama in Mr. Sunshine hinges on the hidden identities of Eugene and Ae-shin, and the ways their identities both fortify and endanger their growing affection for one another. Along with a variety of well-wrought secondary characters, who are also involved in duplicitous endeavors, Eugene and Ae-shin slowly come to realize both their love for one another and their hidden identities. It is a dance of recognition that is tantalizingly gradual yet filled with engaging tension. Finding out the truth about one another will precipitate reversals that are both catastrophic and character-building, as well as bring suffering not only to them, but also to many a valiant and endearing supporting character.
This only scratches the surface of the complicated twists and turns of Mr. Sunshine’s plot. “Many poets,” writes Aristotle, “are skillful in complicating their plots but clumsy in unraveling them; a constant mastery of both techniques is what is required.” The writers and producers of this show deftly manage to unravel the tangled web of this historical drama, with its many reversals, recognitions, and sufferings, in a way that is compelling enough and cathartic enough to entice me through twenty-four subtitled episodes all the way to the end.
What strikes me as most significant and most profound with regard to Aristotle’s take on tragedy is that even across the span of thousands of years, the basic tendencies of humanity—what we long for, what we’re moved by, what we fear, what draws our interest or our pleasure—remain very much the same. This might even be astounding, when it can feel that so much is changing around us all the time; when the earthquakes of the television, internet, or iPhone seem to have struck deep fissures in our personhood and distanced us from ourselves and our own basic human nature.
Yet the big reveal, the sudden sorrow, or the unexpected twist of fate—whether they be in a subtitled K-drama, a TV series about Texas football, or a Greek tragedy—have the power to move audiences both ancient and contemporary. Here, perhaps, is one more evidence of certain universal tendencies in the human soul that arc across time, space, and culture. Why do the plot elements of recognition, reversal and suffering compel such a wide swath of audiences? Buckets of psychoanalytic ink have been spilled in this arena, particularly about how catharsis works within the human psyche; I make no pretense of adding to this specialized sort of study.
Perhaps for a casual reader, however, it might be enough to note that we’re all, by nature, poised for them. Perhaps it’s enough to remember that each of us is made for the greatest reversal of all: for a life that awaits—hidden, mysterious, and large, beyond the impossible barrier of death. Perhaps it’s enough to note that the gateway to this great reversal is the most crucial recognition of all: the discovery that the divine we desire has deigned to descend into history, and to suffer for our sake, in an act of reversal so infinite its consequences will echo until the end of time and beyond. Perhaps it’s enough to say that Aristotle, though he didn’t know exactly how, was on to something.