Angels Mirror vs. Devils Mirror

By Kim Ja-young

A few days ago I watched a Dutch film, ``Blind (2007)'' written and directed by Tamar van den Dop. This film tells about the relationship and love between a fierce, blind young man Ruben and a calm but strong-willed albino woman, Marie.

Ruben takes his anger about disability out on women hired to read books for him until he meets Marie. Marie, scarred on her face and body by the glass of a mirror, suffered verbal abuse about her appearance from her mother causing her psychological and physical trauma. She became a woman afraid of being seen and touched by others and couldn't even look at herself in the mirror.

Ruben gets interested in Marie who is neither scared of him nor treats him as disabled. He becomes soothed by her reading voice, her smell and motion. Ruben can know and feel her only by touching, smelling and hearing, but for him she is a beautiful woman who really loves books and makes him feel wanted in winter. Ruben's sincere love makes Marie open her scarred heart, letting him touch her. His physical blindness matches her psychological blindness, allowing the two to break each other's boundaries and learn to see what they didn't before.

The reason this film was impressive for me is because I work at a diet clinic. It's summer and a lot of women become sensitive to their weight and figure. Many kinds of patients, ranging in age from 20s to 50s, visit my clinic. Almost all are women. Half really do need consultation about their obesity as well as some medical subscription along with diet and exercise.

But the other half visit the clinic just because they themselves are not satisfied with their appearance. Many girls want to get skinny. Even though they are slender, they think their thighs are too thick, their forearms too big and so forth. And sometimes I see really skinny girls, who don't perceive themselves as such and are afraid of gaining an additional gram of weight.

Korean women tend to be more self-conscious than their foreign counterparts. They just want to be perfect. Unless they have slender arms, they are reluctant to wear sleeveless shirts or dresses. Only when they don't have big tummies will they wear short shirts to show their navels.

Only when they have perfect bodies do they dare to wear skinny jeans, as they don't want to be judged by others. Only really skinny people are considered perfect, having the kind of figure that deserves to wear these clothes.

Since I am live in Jongno-gu, downtown Seoul, I see many foreign women on weekends in Insa-dong and Samcheong-dong. Usually they wear sleeveless tops or dresses to show their shoulders and tank tops to show their navels and skinny jeans regardless of their figures. They are freer to express themselves.

My colleague doctor told me about her experience. She had one such skinny patient. The skinny girl was restless if she gained half a kilogram. She had visited a diet clinic for more than a year. Suddenly, she stopped visiting my colleague's clinic, and when she showed up again after a year or so, she had gained about 5 kilograms.

But her face was peaceful and there was no obsession about her weight. So my friend asked what had happened to her. She said she met a boyfriend who loved her just as she was. That was why she became more tolerable of herself. I have also met women who became stressed about their weight because their boyfriends or husbands put pressure on them about their figures. In some cases, however, the women have to eat more and feel guilty about that. This is a vicious cycle.

Watching the film "Blind," I focused more on the heroin, Marie. Whenever Marie tried to look at herself in the mirror her mother's voice followed her, ``You are too ugly, you are the ugliest girl that I have ever seen." The film is based on the book "Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen. Marie reads this story to Ruben. The devil made a magical mirror, which fails to reflect all the good and beautiful aspects of people and things while magnifying all of their bad and ugly aspects. The more beautiful one is, the more invisible and distorted he or she appears. But in the new mirror of Ruben, Marie's reflection becomes a new feature. Her scars became like flowers with frost on the window for him. The devil's mirror couldn't work on Ruben.

Then how can we Korean girls be free from other's eyes? Just because we judge others by their looks, we are afraid of other's judgment about our appearance. Rather than our characters, thoughts, hidden merits and real competence, we judge each other by appearance, or through the devil's mirror. And we are not judged and loved by Ruben's mirror.

It's as if some splinters of the devil's magic mirror have entered our eyes and hearts. We are blind to other people's real beauty as well as our own. Then like Ruben, in the most shocking last scene of the film, should we pierce our eyes and become blind in an attempt to see an unseen reality?

This summer I hope many Korean women, myself included, will fall in blindly in love to see unseen beauty, as Ruben and Marie did, and take the splinters of the devil's mirror from our eyes.

The writer is a physician working in Nowon-gu, Seoul. She can be reached at hontas0809@hotmail.com.