The Futility of Punishment
Thoughts about Kim Ki-Duk's movie “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring”
by Barbara Rogers, author of “screams from childhood", http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com

Exquisite images of breathtakingly beautiful nature are the backdrop to a haunting story of human suffering and failed lives. On the surface, it seems that we are watching the initiation of a monk and an idyllic, pure way of life. But behind this deceiving surface, tragedy unfolds. In the beginning, during springtime, we see a child growing up on a small, extremely isolated island in the custody of an old man. There is no other human contact. One day, the young boy catches a fish, ties a stone around him, and throws him back into the water. The man he calls master watches him, from a hidden position, but does not interfere. The boy does the same with a frog and then a snake, which he leaves lying on a rock.
Watching this, I thought that the boy’s unconscious was sharing his suffering—being tied to this tiny island and house, floating on the lake, and tied to the old man he cannot escape. Throughout the movie I wondered, why is the boy in this place? How did he get there? A boy this young cannot be in such a predicament out of his own, free will. I asked myself, why does this boy have to grow up in such isolation?
While the boy sleeps, the master ties a rock to his back. When the boy awakens, he is instructed that he can only get rid of the stone when he has liberated the three animals. He is also told, "if one of them has died, you'll carry the stone in your heart for the rest of your life."
I was stunned at that point. First, the master did not interfere, when the animals were endangered, which I found cruel. Earlier, he had explained to the boy an herb, which could have killed the boy. Now, it was the master's duty to protect the animals and to be a guide for the boy, informing him of the nature and possible consequences of his actions. Why did the master not teach the boy in that situation too?
Next, he burdened the boy with heavy guilt for the master's own neglect, which enraged me. It was the master who had let the animals die. It was the master who did not interfere to protect them. It was the master who did not enlighten the boy about either his innocent mistake or what I perceived in truth as a scream from his soul. I felt the most shocking sadness, when I realized that the master did not try to understand this outpouring of the boy's suffering, which he reenacted with these animals. I saw the boy's actions as his attempt to express what it felt like to be tied to a man and a way of life, where his blossoming life opportunities were taken away.
In the summer, the boy has grown into a young man. A mother brings her very ill daughter to the master. The girl spellbinds the young man, who has been without female contact. The master "discovers", after obviously looking away for a while, that they have fallen in love. In that moment, he declares the young woman "healed" and sends her away.
When the young man, crying from the pain over loosing his new-found love and connection with life, sets out to follow her, his master burdens him with a curse: ''Lust awakens the desire to possess, which ends in the intent to murder.'' This sentence is pronounced with authority from a man without meaningful experiences with love.
The young man, raised in complete isolation from other human beings, receives no guidance or loving understanding when he leaves his master and tries to follow the woman he loves into a world he has never been allowed to know. It is the master himself who possesses his disciple and his mind, and who uses his power over him to keep control over him.
The curse becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and brings the disciple back twice to the tiny monastery, the second time for good.
In the fall, a hunted man, in his prime years, returns because he has become a murderer. To cope with the angry chaos inside, he must engrave written symbols, painted by his master, into the wooden deck around the house. No word is spoken about what he has been through. He cannot share his emotions, his pain, his anger, his despair. Again he is not guided to self-understanding. The police arrive and he is arrested. When they take him away, the master burns himself on the little boat on the lake. As I watched him burn, I wondered why. He had the symbol "shut" written on white paper, glued over his eyes and mouth. Had he come to see his life and his guidance of the boy entrusted to him as a failure?
In the winter, a middle age man returns to the isolated house on the lake. A woman whose face is covered with a purple veil visits him. And my early question, how did this child get there, is answered. She brings a child of maybe two or three years to leave him behind with a man she does not know and has never talked to. Her motives are not revealed.
After the woman has left, the man drags a millstone up the surrounding mountains, leaving the child, who was brought to him, alone in the little house. While he was on his quest, my indignant thoughts were more and more with the abandoned little child in the house, whose mother did not want him and had left him, and whose master was not worried about his safety and well-being.
When spring returns, we see, like we did in the beginning, a young boy with his master—and now I kept asking myself, how this movie was meant. Was its purpose really to show us the wisdom and beauty of an isolated life in nature, combined with prayer, submission, and obedience?
What I saw was different. I saw a child, taken away from his parents, put into stark isolation, who must become a monk. I saw a tragic circle of life portrayed in this movie. It starts with a child's loss of his parents and his abduction into an environment completely removed from all human contact. I witnessed a child betrayed of his freedom. His master seemed to me not wise but very lost and cruel.
If an adult man wants to live as a monk in isolation and in harmony with nature, it is his choice and his life. When a child is entrusted to him, a truly wise man will find out what the child feels and what is going on in his soul.
The movie served as a demonstration of the futility of punishment. Punishments play an important role in the movie, at first toward the boy, and later as self-punishment. But the end of the movie makes the point that nothing has changed or has been learned. The same cycle of life will repeat itself all over again, which is even strengthened by using the same boy acting again as the new apprentice of the new master.
In the end, it became clear that the masters had been removed from their own feelings and needs as children. So they could not be open for the feelings and suffering of a child living by their side. In the end, the gorgeous images of nature only stressed for me the isolation, loneliness, and tragedy of unfulfilled lives.