I want a Cyborg

ANDREI MALDONADO

What is it that defines us as human beings? Where is the boundary that separates us from the animals? Is what makes us "men" perhaps something removable? You can choose to stop being what we are, what Nietzsche defined as "the human, too human", to be, say, a cyborg? That is the basic paradigm by which moves the Korean film "I'm a Cyborg".

Park Chan-Wook presents a very funny story, but at the same time reflective, on three equally important vertices: first, the human condition. We assume that the statutes, those restrictive rules that dictate us from small they are natural, they are inherent in man.

Young-Woon is convinced to be a cyborg, as her grandmother was convinced to be a mouse. And the vision of Young-Woon is totally oriented to stay away as much as possible of that carnal, mortal, human condition. It will do its utmost to be a cyborg until the end of his days. And there comes the speech of the seven sins that bind to any terrible punishment of mankind: feel compassion, feeling sadness, feel anxiety, doubt, useless, feel guilty and feel grateful fantasies. Feelings which, in order to account, are nothing more than the repressive acts that they instill from childhood as "values" or "protocolariamente appropriate attitudes".

The other point of analysis in the film lies in the sometimes invisible and thin line between health and madness, and that makes they mislead us several questions as to who sets the parameters of health and disease? What acts are what make these divisions exist? Who really is closer in reality, the sane or the crazy?

Perhaps this is also one of the core points of the reflection of the discontents that reflects the film: as hospitals for the mentally ill are nothing more than another type of prison places made to store away those who depart from "normal" and therefore assault and puts at risk the civilized.

Finally, an essential issue that marks the protagonist of the film: what is our mission, our purpose of life? Perhaps the basic question of every human being, and therefore that is furthest from being answered.