Mask Girl: Is Being Ugly a Sin?

Premised on heated social issues, Korean dramas are able to reach a wide audience. Squid Game(2021), for example, uses the narrative of "battle royale" to provide a way of "emotional aftertreatment" for people who survived Covid-19 in the post-epidemic era. Similarly, the theme of "counterviolence” in The Glory(2022) kind of fits the inner pleasure that resides within all mankind but has always been kept silent.

And there is Mask Girl(2023), which was launched on Netflix in August. This drama presents Korea's unique plastic surgery culture against the backdrop of increasing importance attached to physical appearance in today's society. It tells the story of Kim Mo-mi, a white-collar worker who feels inferior about her appearance and does thirst trap live streaming wearing a mask. After accidentally killing someone, she restarts her life through plastic surgery.

Interestingly, this drama is feels like a representation of the common psychological response when people face anomalies or “others”: they first question and seek to understand them before internalizing their impact.

Questioning Beauty: Is Ugliness a Sin?

It all starts with questioning. As do Kim Mo-mi and this drama.

If there is a chain of contempt of looks from beauty to ugliness (which, in fact, does exist), then no one will know better than Kim Mo-mi as someone at the bottom of it. The visible shame goes without saying - even her own mother can cast a disdainful glance at her: "Wake up! Look at you! How can you possibly be a star?" Even more intolerable are what’s hidden beneath the surface - the invisible discrimination and silent violence prevalent in schools, workplaces, and the society. You may not even "deserve" to be sexually harassed because of your ugliness.

Is being ugly an original sin? No one is more qualified to ask the question than the "ugly woman" herself. The question, the biggest selling point of the drama, is exactly the starting point of everything that unfolds.

Understanding Beauty: Ugliness Itself is Not a Sin, It is the Male Gaze Behind Ugliness.

Through three typical male images, it becomes clear that Kim’s sufferings have nothing to do with being ugly or not. One of them is Kim Mo-mi's boss, a hypocritical pseudo-gentleman. The other two are the fan of her live streaming, and her best friend's boyfriend, one of them a two-faced person with some remaining shame and the other an unapologetic taker.

They are perfect illustrations of the fact that the so-called mainstream aesthetic is actually shaped by hegemony under the male gaze and it works out as follows:

1) if you are ugly, then your work ability must be as disappointing, yet if you are beautiful, you don't even need to work (you know what I mean)!

2) now that we are both marginalized (even if for different reasons), we should stick together and you accept all my love obediently.

3) since you love me and you are so beautiful, it is only natural for you to trade your beauty to support me.

Becoming a Beauty: Fighting Violence with Violence

The influence of the male gaze in society is so deep that women themselves take it as a standard to evaluate themselves and one another unconsciously. As John Berger suggested in "Ways of Seeing", a woman's own sense of being is dictated by her male observer and by what she feels that male observer thinks of her.

Therefore, even if she understands the logic of mainstream aesthetics, it does not mean that she can avoid its harm. On the contrary, she still easily fall into its trap though holding opposite stance against it.

How Kim Mo-mi's rebels against the male gaze is to climb to the top of the beauty chain of contempt. After undergoing plastic surgery, she continues to kill several men and a masculine woman, though not intentionally. However, her beauty makes her killings change from "shock" to "surprise". On the one hand, she completes the "disenchantment" of male-dominated aesthetics by killing specific men one by one; on the other hand, the audience reinforce the "enchantment" of the aesthetics by admiring the beauty of blood splashing on her pretty face during each killing.

The audience's appreciation for Kim Mo-mi’s face is a manifestation of the inertia of social aesthetics.

Beyond Beauty: ?

In fact, after questioning, understanding, and probably unconsciously internalizing conventional aesthetic standard, there should be one last step. That is to transcend and explore an innovative aesthetic paradigm.

Unfortunately, the drama does not intend to delve into the loophole of counterviolence. Instead, it serves only as a cathartic experience with the conventional narrative of “ugly girl transforms into beauty”. So it is no surprise that this 7-episode series has a "rushed ending", completely turning into a farce cycle of killing and revenge. It doesn’t make any sense why it ends on "motherly love." This is certainly a topic worthy of discussion, but it seems to have completely left its starting point behind: reflection on aesthetics.

Compared to Squid Game that attempts to explore the game between money and humanity, and The Glory that exposes the injustice behind the violence system, Mask Girl only has a simple and crude sense of pleasure. Although Mask Girl has topped Netflix's Top 5, judging from its popularity and discussion in the past ten days since its release, it is likely that this is as far as it will go. Obviously, it will not parallel Squid Game and The Glory.

It exemplifies the common problem of streaming media represented by Netflix. When a certain business model proves successful, mass replication without thinking begins. As a supplement to the Hollywood cultural discourse, Korean dramas have found a path to expand by simply submitting and cleverly adapting to traditional American elite culture. That’s how Mask Girl is made.