Pay No Attention To That Man Behind the Curtain: The Veil's Mysterious Main Character

Image of the drama’s promotional poster was taken from the drama’s official website (MBC) and reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

In 2021, Korean broadcaster MBC celebrated its 60th anniversary with the 12-episode drama The Veil (검은 태양), a special project starring Namkoong Min in an excellent performance that received much praise. He plays top National Intelligence Service agent Han Ji-hyuk, who was believed to be killed in action during a mission in China, but who resurfaces a year later with no memory of the intervening time. Ji-hyuk is determined to figure out who betrayed him and his team, so he gets reinstated and starts investigating secretly. What follows is a thrilling spy tale with a fast-paced and twisty plot, shocking cliffhangers, and amazing action sequences.

 

 

 

When Ji-hyuk is found and brought home to Korea, the last thing he can remember is being deployed to Shenyang with his team. It turns out that he has been missing and presumed KIA for a year. Photo from the drama’s official website (MBC), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

We can cheer when Ji-hyuk almost superhumanly manages to keep moving forward until he completes his mission to root out the traitors inside his agency, but his victory doesn’t have quite the sense of triumph that it could have had if we had seen how it affected him on a personal level. His life is devoid of personal relationships and he doesn’t even seem to indulge in basic human pleasures. With the other characters (even the villains!), we at least get glimpses of their ordinary lives, outside of the periods where they are completely focused on their missions. For Ji-hyuk, there is nothing outside the mission and there is nothing after the mission is finally over. Nothing but the next mission. Ultimately, I have mixed feelings about a drama that spends so much time showing how the people in power brutally use the main character until they break him, without ever showing us what motivates him to keep putting himself back together or why we should be optimistic that things will be better for him next time.

 

Ji-hyuk seems closest to his former colleague, now his superior, Seo Soo-yeon (played by Park Ha-sun), even though he suspects her of being a traitor. But her significance in his life mostly revolves around a promise she asked him to make before the failed Shenyang mission. She asked him to protect his colleagues, instead of just seeing them as disposable tools to help him achieve his mission. Photo from the drama’s official website (MBC), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The drama’s visuals also made me somewhat uneasy. Ji-hyuk has built himself to be the best field agent ever, physically fit to the extreme and skilled in combat and marksmanship. As we see through numerous thrilling action sequences that never seem to end, he doesn’t stop chasing bad guys until his body literally cannot keep going and he collapses. Actor Namkoong Min completed an impressive transformation for the role, gaining a significant amount of muscle to build a physique that he thought was most coherent for the character. But every time I noticed the character’s ultra-fit physique, I felt sorry for Ji-hyuk, who had honed himself into a failproof instrument to be wielded against his country’s enemies, but who had no control over how his body would be used.

 

Just another day at the office for Ji-hyuk. Photo from the drama’s official website (MBC), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

It’s not only physically that Ji-hyuk suffers; the story also dumps layers of mental trauma on him, which are revealed little by little. When we first meet him, he has amnesia. Then we learn that he spent the missing year (during which he still had his memories) in torment, trying to figure out what went wrong on the mission that ended up killing his entire team. It is revealed that he was receiving treatment for serious physical and mental health issues before going missing. And then we learn that as a child, he experienced horrific trauma when his parents were violently murdered in front of him (it is specified that they were his adoptive parents, which suggests the possibility of pre-adoption early childhood trauma as well). Later we find out that even though they knew that he blamed himself for his parents’ deaths, his bosses at the NIS hid information about his parents’ case from him to keep him in an unstable mental state where they could take advantage of him. The way these different aspects of Ji-hyuk’s character are revealed makes the drama exciting to watch, but the character development is completely one-sided. We see what breaks him, but we never see what makes him whole. Perhaps he never was whole. Perhaps he never can be. We don’t know, because the drama doesn’t show us.


The alienation that Ji-hyuk feels without his memories is strongly mirrored in the atmosphere the drama creates with its settings of dimly lit and often windowless offices and board rooms, indistinguishable corridors, and a series of prison cells, interrogation rooms, parking garages, warehouses and hideouts. Ji-hyuk’s apartment–which always seems to be there unchanged for him to return to after years-long absences–is a bare room that evokes a safehouse rather than a home. Next to the bed is a board he uses to tease out the links between suspects, his closet is full of identical generic black suits and white shirts, and his one personal memento has an empty compartment that holds work-related secrets. Even before he lost his memory, Ji-hyuk’s world was completely depersonalized and subordinated to his work.


That is no way to live, but the drama doesn’t give enough insight into why Ji-hyuk lived that way for so many years and seems content to continue doing so. Does he think he doesn’t need any human connection in his life? Does he think he doesn’t deserve it? Is he afraid that if he lets someone in, they will end up getting hurt because of him? Maybe we’re supposed to think that he’s devoted his life to the NIS to make up for his role in his parents’ death, to prove to himself that he’s not a monster, or at least to make sure the monster attacks bad people instead of innocent ones.

 

On one occasion when he is injured and on the run, Ji-hyuk goes to his new partner Yoo Je-yi (played by Kim Ji-eun) for help. The scene no doubt evokes the usual kind of first aid scene that K-drama viewers have seen a million times, where one character takes care of the other by blowing on a tiny scratch, dabbing ointment on it, gently applying a band-aid and calling it all better–but not before the two gaze deeply into each other’s eyes and feel something for each other. But in The Veil, Je-yi actually performs field surgery on Ji-hyuk, suturing a bloody gash on his abdomen as he tries not to pass out on her couch. Photo from the drama’s official website (MBC), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The scene where Je-yi treats Ji-hyuk’s injury is the only time in the entire drama that Ji-hyuk receives a caring touch from another person. The two other times that we see him take himself out of commission to recover, he does so strictly alone. And the time that he goes to Je-yi, he only allows himself to accept the minimum care that he needs to survive and get back into the field, i.e. the basic procedure to treat his wound. After she has finished stitching him up and he is resting, Je-yi leans over to wipe the sweat from his face; he reacts by opening his eyes and grabbing her arm to stop her. Then, deliriously, he says, “Soo-yeon, I still remember my promise (수연아, 기억하고 있어, 그때 그 약속).” The promise was to protect his colleagues, not to protect himself. The promise was to understand that others are not simply tools to be used on a mission, that they have partners, children, parents and friends that they love and need to live for. Ji-hyuk eventually understands that about others; indeed, he shows it later when he wants to finish the mission without Je-yi because it has become too dangerous and she or the people close to her could get hurt or killed. But I don’t know if he ever understands that about himself. Even in the final sequence, which shows him getting ready to return to being an agent after a time jump, it is not clear whether he will actually let himself have anything personal in his life this time, or whether he will still live as though he were nothing more than a tool to be used to complete missions.

Ji-hyuk is delirious from injury, so nothing happens between him Je-yi while she is administering first aid. Nothing happens between them later, either. I resent when a romance is shoved into a story where it doesn’t belong, but in The Veil, I would have been happy if Ji-hyuk had found not necessarily true love but at least some measure of human companionship after giving himself up to his job for so long, and if the person to give him that were Je-yi, I would not have objected. Just before the final battle, Ji-hyuk told his superior that he would no longer take orders and would act according to his own judgement. It was a triumphant moment for him to finally take some control of the violence his body does and receives. But I wanted to see him be cared for after taking so much abuse. Sadly, the story did not let him have that even for a moment. The night before the battle, after all their allies were taken out and they had only themselves to rely on, Je-yi went to church and talked to her priest for comfort, but Ji-hyuk was pictured keeping vigil alone in his bare apartment with only his service weapon and a box of ammunition for company. Photo from the drama’s official website (MBC), reproduced under Fair Dealing for educational purposes.

The drama’s English title is The Veil, which I think must refer to Ji-hyuk’s goal of lifting the veil on the corruption inside his organization and revealing all the traitors who masquerade as heroic agents who keep the country safe but who are really villains out for themselves. But I believe it also refers to lifting the memory block that keeps Ji-hyuk from fully knowing what he has done, which will allow him–and the viewers–to understand who he is. The problem is that when Ji-hyuk’s memories are finally revealed, the drama gives us facts but no heart. It doesn’t pay enough attention to showing us who Han Ji-hyuk really is as a person. The drama is an action thriller, and as such, it stands on its merits, but I, for one, would have liked to get a better look at that man behind the curtain.