After the Korean War ended in 1953, the government in Seoul cultivated a culture of military preparedness second to none in the world. Military training became so rigorous that many died before completing the required three-year stint; daily beatings of various body parts have been reported by recruits. Even male children have, until very recently, been subjected to similar corporal assaults in school. Korean wives, rather than suffering abusive outbursts, have been generally submissive to their husband’s orders. Accordingly, we might expect that rough sex would occur throughout the country. When Jang Jung Il wrote Tell Me a Lie, a novel dealing with sadomasochistic sex, he was imprisoned, his book was banned, and copies of the book were destroyed by the government. Now director Jang Sun Woo has brought the story to the screen in the film Lies (Gojitmal), which is also banned in Korea but was released with some cuts by the censors after being selected for screening in the film festival circuit. The story of Lies is punctuated by interviews with the two lead actors, who profess not to relish their first-time screen roles, and by numerous screen titles that appear to be chapter titles. J (played by Lee Sang Hyun, a sculptor in real life) is a thin, bespectacled 38-year-old sculptor married to an artist G (played by Hyun Joo Choi), who fled to Paris to escape J’s sexual brutality. Y (played by Kim Tae Yeon) is an attractive, shapely 18-year-old high school girl whose older sisters were raped at a young age; one sister committed suicide after the rape, the other married her rapist and moved to Brazil. Fearing inevitable rape, Y wanted to choose her sexual partner rather than be chosen. One day Y called J, in answer to J’s sex ad in a newspaper, found his telephone voice sexy, and begged to have sex with him. J then consented to a sex date. After the two met at a train station, they went to a hotel room, and the two enjoyed a very complete sexual experience in which he inserted into all three of her orifices, and she pretended to be raped. No brutality emerged until the third or fourth such hotel encounter, when he began to slap her posterior. Since Y welcomed the kinky initiative, J continued, and the one-night-stand sex dates escalated gradually into more extreme flagellation, leaving permanent scars. One day Y began to cry, and J realized that she could not continue to take any more abuse, so he begged for her to whip him. Having learned her lessons well, Y then became the dominant person in the relationship. Soon, she entered college, and they were not able to see each other for three months, so he flew to join his wife in Paris. When J begged his wife to whip him, she protested that he was a pervert, so he returned to Seoul in order to rekindle his relationship as a thoroughly obsessed sex slave to Y. However, Y’s macho motorcylist brother (played by Kwon Taek Han), suspicious that Y was having illicit sex, confronted her former Lesbian roommate Woori (played by Hye Jin Jeon), who earlier beat Y for infidelity and then relished vicariously the retelling of each sexual experience. Woori told her brother about the sadomasochistic love affair, so he tried to track J down to stop the affair, presumably by killing him. At one point he burned J’s house, so J then began moving from hotel to hotel, running up credit card debts and borrowing from friends. However, Y decided to reveal the location of her hotel trysts to her brother, whom she knew would race one step behind them until an inevitable fatal crash that would at last liberate Y from control by anyone. Meanwhile, the sexual experiences escalated, even to a point where J ate a portion of Y’s feces. Since the next step appeared to be that Y would beat J so hard that he might die, they backed down. J then returned to his wife in Paris, lying about a tattoo that Y gave him, while Y moved to join her sister in Brazil. The lies that both J and Y had to tell others in order to cover up their relationship would doubtless continue, both in Brazil and in Paris. But the truth of the film is that a succession of Korean military dictatorships has nurtured a culture, not unlike the Paris of the Marquis de Sade depicted in Quills (2000). That the current democratic government censors in Korea want us to believe otherwise is yet another lie. Clearly destined to be a sexual cult film, not pornographic because the two partners are devoted and willing, Lies makes the on-screen statement that the true sadist is unable to consummate sex, whereas J and Y use kinky beatings as foreplay to express passionate love. Yet J becomes trapped in his obsessions, whereas Y liberates herself from her fears. Given the backgrounds of the two, one fearful of rape and the other so thin that he must have feared beatings during army training, we can understand why kinky sex was the appropriate psychological response. In an effort to explain why Germans accepted Nazism, Theodore Reik observed in Masochism in Modern Man (1941) that brutal violence can become less fearful either by becoming the aggressor, by identifying with the aggressor, or by transforming the brutality into an act of intense sexuality. Lies deliberately seeks to outrage the Korean government by exposing how decades of military rule have warped many interpersonal relationships, driving many Koreans on occasion to extreme ways to cope psychologically. Yet the Korean public is content to resort to lies about how the political has polluted the personal. MH