[magazine kave=Lee Taerim Reporter]
In the heart of Korea, which has long believed to be the country farthest from guns, gunshots suddenly begin to ring out one day. The drama 'Trigger' is a work that directly pushes this seemingly impossible imagination. Just as a butcher shop suddenly appears in the paradise of vegetarians, unidentified illegal firearms pour into a society where gun possession is legally prohibited, and ordinary citizens find themselves standing in front of the trigger for their own reasons, thus the story begins. At the center are two men. Detective Lee Do (Kim Nam-gil), who exclusively pursues illegal gun cases, and arms broker Moon Baek (Kim Young-kwang), who supplies firearms in the dark underground market and moves the game. One person is trying to stop the guns, while the other is the one who lets them flow, but the drama does not simply divide these two into good and evil, but carries them together until the end. It’s an experiment that implants the relationship of Batman and Joker into Korean society.
The early episodes focus on vividly showing how this world is collapsing. A trivial dispute that ended in a street fight suddenly escalates into a gun rampage, and a worker protesting unfair dismissal at a quiet local factory disappears with a gun in hand. In classrooms, rumors circulate that a bullied student has obtained an unidentified firearm from the internet, and news of guns being found in delivery boxes breaks out one after another. It’s as if we have entered an era where one receives guns as casually as ordering electronics from Amazon. The screen lingers longer on the frozen faces of people after the gunshots ring out rather than on the big explosions or flashy shootouts. It feels like watching the expression of someone realizing, 'This country is no longer the place I knew.' Those faces are closer to confusion than fear. The bewilderment of a world where what was impossible yesterday has become reality today.
Lee Do is a character with a past of performing sniper missions in the military. He claims to be a 'soldier who performed a legitimate mission,' but he cannot easily shake off the memory that every time he pulls the trigger, someone's life is completely erased. Even after becoming a detective, he tries to keep guns as far away as possible, but paradoxically, his desk is always covered with files of gun incidents. It’s a cruel irony, like an alcoholic living next to a bar. Every time an incident occurs, Lee Do looks at people first, not guns. He tries to read the victim's last movements, the gazes of those around, and any left behind notes or messages, obsessively focusing on why they chose guns. For him, guns are not just weapons; they are objects that embody someone's despair.
Moon Baek is a person who has lived with guns in a completely different way. He is cheerful and articulate, appearing to be a man who could fit in anywhere at a glance. It’s like someone who would score full marks on a psychopath test, dressed in a suit and smiling. But whenever his hand moves, a gun is inevitably released somewhere in the city. He balances between criminal organizations and sends 'last resorts' to dissatisfied individuals. For him, guns are merely triggers that unleash the pent-up anger and injustice somewhere, literally just switches. From Moon Baek's perspective, the world is already sufficiently violent and absurd. He seems to adopt an attitude that he is just adding one more operating principle to it. Like Mephistopheles presenting a contract to Faust, he hands metal chunks to the desperate.
How the Ecosystem of Anger Harms Society
The drama brings various aspects of Korean society into each episode and combines them with the device of guns. A student exhausted from school violence holding a gun, a parent facing the reality of no one being held accountable after losing a son to an industrial accident confronting a gun, and those worn out by domestic violence, dating violence, and hate crimes looking at guns as a last choice—all familiar keywords are connected to guns and gain new meanings. It’s like a social experiment that takes today’s morning news headlines and inserts the variable of guns. Some hold guns to protect themselves, some for revenge, and others to prove their anger towards the world. Lee Do discovers one commonality while investigating. Someone has meticulously created an environment for their anger to flow naturally into guns. Like a documentary observing the ecology of wild animals by scattering food in the jungle, Moon Baek scatters guns in society and observes human nature.
In this process, colleagues like Jo Hyun-sik (Kim Won-hae), Oh Kyung-sook (Gil Hae-yeon) who fights on the streets after losing her son, youth Yoo Jeong-tae (Woo Ji-hyun) who is suffocating between employment and survival, and characters like Park Gyu-jin (Park Yoon-ho) and Seo Yong-dong (Son Bo-seung) who are bullied at school take center stage in significant episodes. They are all difficult to call 'monsters,' yet it is also ambiguous to say they are completely pure victims. The process by which they come to hold guns is always connected to the contradictions of reality. Lee Do is placed in a position where he must view them as both criminals and victims, while Moon Baek skillfully exploits their anger to push forward his plans. Like a chess master moving pawns and knights, Moon Baek uses people's despair as the pieces in his game.
As the drama approaches its latter half, it reveals an increasingly larger picture. Why at this point, why in this society, are so many guns coming in? Is it simply a power struggle of smuggling organizations, or is it an experiment by someone trying to overturn the social structure? As Lee Do's military past and Moon Baek's personal history are revealed one by one, the conspiracy surrounding firearms gradually takes on a more concrete face. However, the drama does not kindly explain everything until the end. At a certain point where the puzzle is somewhat assembled, it only shows scenes of Lee Do and Moon Baek preparing their final choices in their own ways. The remaining conclusion is left for each viewer to imagine in their minds. Like the spinning top in Inception, the final scene keeps spinning.
The Power of Forging Material into Narrative
'Trigger' is significant in that it does not simply treat its setting as a mere material but pushes it to the end. In most Korean genre works, guns often appear as the domain of foreign gangsters, special agents, or unrealistic villains. They are treated like props detached from reality, akin to a magic wand in a fantasy novel. However, this drama makes 'people who seem unlikely to hold guns' hold guns and shows how much people waver in front of them. In the moment standing in front of the trigger, people tell themselves all sorts of things. "I have something to say too," "The world should experience this at least once," "This is self-defense," and such self-justifications and anger mix together. The drama gazes at that time quite long, uncomfortably long. It dissects the moment when humans cross the line, frame by frame, like a traffic accident video played in slow motion.
The contrast between Lee Do and Moon Baek is also interesting. Lee Do is someone who wants to leave guns as evidence only, while Moon Baek is someone who wants to use guns as messages. Lee Do tries to resolve everything within the law and system until the end, but the more he continues his investigation, the more he confronts how many people the law and system have neglected. Conversely, Moon Baek is closer to a person who has already pushed his distrust of the system to the limit. His logic is simple. "It’s just individuals returning the violence the world has inflicted." The conflict between the two ultimately leads to the question of 'who can be responsible for violence, and to what extent?' If Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were to brawl in a bar, would it look like this? One side believes in the power of the state, while the other declares that the state has already broken the contract.
The Aesthetics of Light and Shadow
The direction visually clearly separates these two characters. Lee Do's space is filled with police stations illuminated by fluorescent lights, buttons of uniforms, and the cold lighting of crime scenes. It’s a world where everything is recorded, classified, and reported. Moon Baek's world consists of spaces filled with shadows and darkness, like neon signs, underground clubs, warehouses, and ports. A world made up of CCTV blind spots, cash transactions, and anonymous contacts. Instead of the screen shaking loudly every time a gunshot rings out, it impressively lingers on the smoke left in the air and the faces of people after the sound has died down. As a result, viewers take a breath rather than feel catharsis in the shooting scenes. Instead of romanticizing gunfire like John Woo's Hong Kong noir, it gazes at the consequences of violence with Stanley Kubrick's cold eye.
The episode structure is also solid. Each episode chooses different backgrounds such as schools, labor sites, homes, and online communities to unravel incidents while showing the common structure of anger within them. While sufficiently placing puzzle-solving and chases for the fun of genre works, it always returns to the faces of people in the end. After the incidents are resolved, the bereaved families return to empty homes and stare blankly at the refrigerator door, or the air felt when a student walks down the school hallway again remains heavy. Instead of neatly wrapping up the incidents like in the CSI series, it leaves the lingering sadness of unresolved grief.
The Gunshot of a Gunless Society
The social questions posed by 'Trigger' are not simple. Several episodes repeatedly remind us that this society was already sufficiently violent even before guns appeared. Collective bullying occurring casually in school hallways, companies that see people as mere numbers in labor sites, systems that do not move properly even when reports are made, and the amplification of hate and mockery online. The process of these violences piling up and eventually exploding through the medium of guns is convincingly depicted. Incidents that would have simply passed as another article or another newspaper headline become catastrophic when they meet guns, no longer able to be covered up. Watching that connection makes one ponder much deeper than the simple question of whether gun control is the answer. Like a drama dealing with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, this work dissects the structural flaws that had already piled up 'before the trigger was pulled.'
However, this work does not maintain perfect balance. As it progresses, the scale of the worldview expands, and the proportion of stories unraveling the past and conspiracies increases, causing the detailed psychological portrayal of the early stages to gradually diminish. Some subplots are wrapped up without leaving enough lingering time, and some characters feel like their emotional lines are abruptly cut off. It’s like a chess game entering the endgame stage, where pieces are quickly organized. In terms of realism, there are indeed setups that raise the question, 'Could guns really be distributed this way?' As it tries to hold both genre pleasure and the message it wants to convey, there are moments where the weight shifts slightly. However, this is also a natural cost of an ambitious attempt. To travel safely, one can just drive on paved roads, but to forge a new path, one must endure the bumps of unpaved roads.
Who Should Pull This Trigger?
I think of viewers looking for genre works that leave lingering thoughts rather than just stimulating action. There is certainly tension in the shooting scenes and the investigation drama, but the real fun of this drama lies in the process of listening to why people picked up guns and what they lost afterward. After watching one episode, it’s easy to hit play on the next, but it’s also a drama that requires pauses to catch one’s breath in between. Like drinking water while eating spicy food, it needs moments to stop and think in the middle of viewing.
For those interested in social issues in reality, this work will allow them to view various incidents from different angles. Watching the screen that rearranges familiar words seen in articles or reports combined with the device of guns, the news that was usually overlooked comes to mind a little differently. School violence, labor, gender conflict and hate, online culture, and stories happening right around us make one imagine what catastrophes might ensue if 'violence could be more easily grasped.' If Black Mirror depicted the future as a dystopia through technology, Trigger looks at the present as a dystopia through the object of guns.
Also, for viewers who value the joy of watching good performances, the tension created by Kim Nam-gil and Kim Young-kwang alone is enough to satisfy. On one side is a person holding onto a crumbled sense of justice, while on the other is someone declaring that the world is already broken and trying to shake it even harder. Following the moments when their gazes collide feels less like a simple fight between police and villains, but rather an endless debate over how to define and prevent violence. Like the scene where Al Pacino and Robert De Niro face each other in a café in Heat, the game has already begun before the gun is fired.
Conversely, if the subject of guns and violence is emotionally too burdensome, this drama can be quite a consuming experience. In every episode, someone’s life stands at the crossroads of extreme choices. However, if one has a desire to deeply question what people believe in and what they hold onto when the world is on the brink, 'Trigger' is a work that keeps that contemplation alive for a long time. After watching, the sounds of incidents heard in the news may sound a little different. And in that moment, we realize that countless triggers had already been activated before the trigger was pulled. This drama is precisely the work of visualizing those invisible triggers. And that is the most powerful message this work leaves behind.
