My Name Is: Uncovering the Hidden Truth of the Jeju 4.3 Incident Through a Chilling Allegory of School Bullying

The Symbolism of Dancing: Expressing Suppressed Trauma on Screen

Although it is something we rarely encounter in our everyday lives, there is a highly symbolic scene frequently featured in movies and visual media to express the deeply suppressed emotions of characters. It is the sight of people, regardless of age or gender, dancing in a trance-like, almost unhinged state. They are not trying to showcase a grand, technically perfect, or aesthetically pleasing choreography; rather, it is a desperate physical act meant solely to externalize profound inner sorrow and unspoken emotional agony. Ordinarily, people might sing a song or sob heavily to release the heavy knots in their hearts, but given the visual nature of cinema, the physical movement of dancing serves as the ultimate outlet for unleashing that deep-seated resentment. In the recently viewed film My Name Is, the protagonist Choi Jung-soon, passionately played by actress Yeom Hye-ran, features a powerful scene where she dances to vomit out her repressed emotions. On the surface, it seems like the heartbreaking personal history of a middle-aged woman, but as the film unfolds, you realize with aching clarity that this is by no means just her personal story.

A Three-Tiered Timeline: Bypassing Expectations of a Historical Drama

Directed by Chung Ji-young, this cinematic piece progresses in a multi-dimensional structure, divided chronologically into the present, the past, and an even deeper past. The core narrative axis revolves around a series of events that occur in the specific past timeline of 1998. When I first stepped into the theater, I assumed this work would be a straightforward period drama dealing directly and exclusively with the historical tragedy of the Jeju 4.3 Incident. I fully expected it to recreate the gruesome spring of 1949, bringing the horrific massacres and ideological conflicts to the forefront. However, upon opening the lid, the director skillfully subverted my shallow expectations, approaching the narrative from a completely different angle. Until the early-to-mid portions of the film, I even tilted my head in confusion, struggling to grasp how this storyline connected to the Jeju 4.3 Incident at all.

1998 High School Setting: Erased Memories and Shifting Friendships

In fact, until it reaches the midpoint, the film shows almost no direct depictions of the widely known horrors of the 4.3 Incident. Instead, it highlights the conflicts in a 1998 high school setting surrounding the son, Lee Young-ok, played by actor Shin Woo-bin, as the more crucial core of the story. Meanwhile, Choi Jung-soon—a mother who harbors a complex about her old-fashioned name—lives precariously, having completely erased and forgotten all childhood memories before the age of eight. Young-ok had a best friend named Go Min-soo, played by actor Choi Jun-woo, and the two were inseparable. However, as they move up to a new grade, the subtle power dynamics within the classroom begin to reorganize. When Young-ok unexpectedly ascends to the position of class president, a subtle, irreversible crack slowly begins to form in the relationship between the two best friends.

Enter the Bully: A Microcosm of Totalitarian Power

The instigator causing fractures in this once-peaceful Jeju high school classroom is a transfer student from Seoul named Kim Kyung-tae, played by actor Park Ji-bin. Kyung-tae confidently enters the classroom, backed by the solid background of being the son of a wealthy hotel owner in Jeju. He is not merely a rich, sheltered boy; his exceptional fighting skills allow him to instantly overpower the existing "top dog" of the school through sheer physical force. Holding both physical violence and social power in his hands, Kim Kyung-tae completely ruins the class atmosphere. He begins to display a cunning, dictatorial demeanor, thoroughly placing the students under his heel and attempting to control the classroom entirely according to his will. Because of him, the innocent high school classroom in Jeju gradually transforms into a small totalitarian state ruled by oppression and fear.

The Illusion of Fairness: Gaslighting and Justified Violence

To further solidify his newly established absolute power, Kim Kyung-tae intentionally pushes the ordinary Young-ok into the role of class president, turning him into a puppet and a loyal pawn. Kyung-tae engages in despicable extortion and bullying against his classmates, but his methods are bizarrely cunning. Instead of blindly delivering one-sided beatings, he hides behind a hypocritical standard of "fairness" within the school environment. When a conflict arises, he does not just hit them unilaterally; instead, he forces a so-called "slap exchange," acting like a sports rule where they take turns slapping each other's faces. While he pretends to apply a fair rule on the surface, it is ultimately nothing more than a cruel justification for violence and gaslighting, created so that the one with superior power can legally inflict abuse and trample the victims.

Unlocking the Past: A Mother’s Journey with a Psychiatrist

While this suffocating and deformed cycle of violence continues inside the school, the other axis of the film portrays the mother, Choi Jung-soon, embarking on a quest to uncover her sealed past, triggered by her son's abnormal symptoms. When Young-ok collapses at school, Jung-soon takes him to the hospital, where she meets Yeo Hee-ra, a psychiatrist from Seoul played by actress Kim Gyu-ri. Yeo Hee-ra highly professionally and kindly helps Jung-soon piece together the completely erased fragments of her childhood memories from 1949. Through Hee-ra's dedicated counseling and hypnotherapy sessions, Jung-soon physically visits the painful places of memory scattered across Jeju Island, wearing pink sunglasses and driving a white car. Slowly, she begins to open the door to the devastating truth she had so desperately wanted to avoid.

Framing and Fake News: The True Nature of the Classroom Tyranny

Returning to the 1998 classroom, it is thoroughly revealed that the true core of the horrific violent incidents happening at school lies in "framing" and "false instigation." As mentioned earlier, the perpetrator Kim Kyung-tae constantly emphasizes "fairness" as a catchphrase, taking control of the situation by pretending to be generous and telling the other person to hit first when violence occurs. However, the reality is that in order to crush the children who oppose him, he meticulously fabricates things they never did as if they were facts, and threatens surrounding friends to give false testimonies. In other words, going far beyond physical violence, he thoroughly manipulated all situations to his advantage, generating fake news to cruelly punish innocent victims within the boundaries of a seemingly legitimate system. This chilling classroom mechanism goes well beyond simply depicting juvenile delinquency.

A Brilliant Metaphor: Connecting School Bullying to the Jeju 4.3 Massacre

As this oppressive classroom situation and false framing escalate towards a catastrophe in the second half of the film, the horrific truth of Choi Jung-soon's tightly sealed memories of the 4.3 Incident is finally brought completely out into the open. Only then do the audiences let out a deep sigh, realizing that the series of events in the 1998 high school classroom was not just a teen drama, but a perfect metaphor and a painful allegory for the 4.3 Incident, where state power unjustly framed innocent Jeju islanders as rioters and brutally massacred them. The film does not offer a lengthy, textbook-like explanation of exactly why or how the 4.3 Incident occurred. Instead, by juxtaposing two events separated by half a century—the state violence of 1949 and the school violence of 1998—director Chung Ji-young utilizes a highly clever and sophisticated cinematic structure that allows the audience to heavily deduce for themselves how collective violence is born and inherited across generations.

The Tragic Reality of Jeju: Uncovering Hidden Family Traumas

The true, hidden meaning behind the film's somewhat metaphorical title, My Name Is, is only heartbreakingly understood as the two narratives converge near the movie's climax. In real-life Jeju Island, it is remarkably common to find entire villages where many households hold ancestral memorial services on the exact same day. This is because, during the 4.3 Incident in the past, a tragic massacre occurred where countless innocent villagers were wrongfully slaughtered by state authorities at the same time and in the same place. The film depicts the agony of having to inform on one another just to survive amidst this terrifying madness of the era. It even features a shocking and sorrowful incident where a husband's biological father drove his wife's father-in-law to death, leaving the audience's hearts completely shattered.

A Shocking Twist: The Meaning Behind "My Name Is"

The line explaining that they were too young to know anything at the time, and only learned the truth of this tragic family history long after becoming adults and getting married, maximizes the devastation of ordinary citizens crushed under the wheels of history. Furthermore, a massive plot twist awaits the audience in the 1998 narrative: the psychiatrist Yeo Hee-ra, who warmly helped Jung-soon recover her memories, is shockingly revealed to be the biological mother of Kim Kyung-tae, the ringleader of the classroom violence. As if pointing out the harsh reality that the identities of countless victims who died unjustly without even leaving their names behind during the 4.3 Incident remain unverified, the film's title, My Name Is, symbolically connects the boy's old-fashioned name he wanted to discard, the mother's stolen true name she had to sacrifice everything to protect, and the true names of the victims that history must inevitably reclaim and remember, leaving a profound lingering resonance.

A Masterpiece of 2026: Remembering the Forgotten History

Ultimately, the reason the protagonist Choi Jung-soon lost her childhood memories was not due to simple forgetfulness or pathological amnesia. It was a desperate survival mechanism, an instinctual sealing of her own mind to forcibly protect herself from the overwhelmingly horrific trauma and survive in a harsh world. Because the 4.3 Incident was a tragedy that took place on the isolated island of Jeju, far from the mainland, it has long been trapped in ideological frames, remaining relatively unknown and historically distorted. I, too, vividly remember shedding tears in the theater about ten years ago while watching the sad, heavy, black-and-white film Jiseul, which dealt with the same subject. This new work by the master of Korean cinema, Chung Ji-young, has been born as a heavy yet refined, multi-dimensional, well-made film that completely transcends the simple dichotomy of victim and perpetrator, making for a highly meaningful viewing experience. I strongly recommend it as a must-watch film in the theaters of 2026, one that renews our pledge to never forget and always remember this painful history.