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Teen Vogue Excerpt – Why Queer Characters in LGBTQ Movies and BL Dramas Find Solace at the Beach

BY K-CI WILLIAMS JUNE 29, 2023

The Eighth Sense, a BL drama from South Korea, lives and dies by the beach. Oh Jun-taek plays Jihyun, a college student from a small town who struggles to acclimatize to metropolitan Seoul. When Jihyun joins the surfing club, he bonds with his senior, Jaewon, played by Im Ji-sub. As they fall in love, the beach becomes their spot for sleeping under the stars and even kissing in the ocean. “The beach is kind of like a tool that connects us,” Ji-sub tells Teen Vogue over Zoom, in his native Korean. Jun-taek adds that the “beach is very wide but Jihyun has been living in a world that has been very small,” and although “the ocean itself is very cold, the ocean was actually very warm for Jihyun.” It’s a site of transformation for them both, just as water metamorphoses between its forms.

Ji-sub names the beach as a “special spot” for Jaewon, “where he can relax and heal mentally as well.” Jaewon’s younger brother tragically passed away a number of years before we meet him in the series, and the trauma still sits with him. “I didn't realize how broad a range of emotions can be felt when you love someone until I played the character Jaewon, because it's something that I personally didn't experience,” Ji-sub says. Jaewon welcomes Jihyun into his place of significance, illuminating his dark spaces and ultimately bringing the pair together.

Jun-taek alludes to the title of the series, recalling our senses as human beings. Interoception, often called the eighth sense, is the brain’s perception of the body’s state, thanks to signals transmitted from our internal organs. Understanding these signals can help us regulate our physical and emotional state, though at the same time, trauma can inhibit those pathways. “The beach kiss scene was the sequence [in which] someone with pain and bad memories, PTSD in the past, turns into love and being healed by Jihyun,” Jun-taek says. “Although you have bad memories or trauma…you can be healed. Do not remain, do not stay with the pain.”

Inu Baek, one half of The Eighth Sense’s writer/director duo, attributes the beach to a specific cultural symbolism. He refers to the United Nations Human Rights Committee’s 2015 advice for South Korea to adopt comprehensive protections for all citizens, which would prohibit discrimination against the queer community. “We have not been able to enact the anti-discrimination law in Korea yet,” Inu tells Teen Vogue. He wanted to “give the Korean audience a message because Korea has experienced lots of disasters in the ocean” that are still ever-present traumas for citizens, such as the Sewol ferry tragedy — the show even pays tribute to those lost with a covertly placed yellow ribbon. “The beach symbolizes the hope of the harmony of this country,” Inu says.

A still from The Eighth Sense. COURTESY OF THE EIGHTH SENSE

The show’s other writer/director is Werner du Plessis, who offers the beach as a representation of “the ebb and flow of relationships, the way that they move, the way that they’re never consistent,” but also a “space that is simultaneously peaceful, while being extremely dangerous, like the ocean is such an unknown.” And also, quicksand exists. Intrinsic to our genesis as queer people is navigating identity, from day dot. As the intersection of two worlds, toeing the line between who society expects us to be and who we truly are inside, the beach is “such a beautiful metaphor for queer people,” Werner says, “because it’s exactly the way that we’re designed.”

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T8S people keep on giving 😳

@lurkingshan look!

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Deleted Scene | EP 10 ★ 1

bonus:

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The eighth sense Channel on yt just posted a deleted scene, and its so stinking cute do u see the nose kisses 🥺

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Lim Jisub as Jaewon | The Eighth Sense

{ for @heesulovebot }

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The Eighth Sense Episode 9

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Jae Won, getting jealous

Good times for a change See, the luck I've had Can make a good man Turn bad So please, please, please Let me, let me, let me Let me get what I want This time

"Please, Please, Please, Let Me Get What I Want" by The Smiths

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The bts of episode 6 is so soft 🤧🤧

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1x08 vs 1x10 THE EIGHTH SENSE (2023)

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THE EIGHTH SENSE episode 10

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THE EIGHTH SENSE episode 10

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After finale ramble.

The Eighth Sense and its visual storytelling, the artfulness and the sheer effect with which they make the stories visible, highlighted, in colors, in light and dark, in acting, in movement. Like, of course they use sound, too, they appeal to all the senses that film medium can, visual, auditory, even associations of scent and smell and touch just by the heightening of the audio-visual experience, through filters, distortions, manipulations, framing, score, lyrics, leading the eye and the expierence. Artful and so well-made that it stands out in its emotional impact.

The editing, the extreme close ups, the alteration between movement and stillness, hand camera, aerial drone views, reverse, above water under water upside down mirror views too close too make up what you’re looking at for a moment…  it all makes you almost dizzy at times, as even your vestibular sense is appealed to by these very physical visual techniques and effects, too, right next to all the themes and metaphors about balance throughout the text.

I do love the theories about the series title I’ve seen around, about the seventh sense being proprioceptive (movement and how you place, orient yourself) and the eighth one being interoceptive (internal, your physical needs, maybe in extension emotional needs, as it is a story about listening to those and healing/growing/moving).

I dare say this series comments on and appeals to all of them, through the technical use of medium, its metaphors and its art and messages about the human experience, and life being the use of all those senses, exitsting through and inside them, life being all of those experiences and the changes inbetween, the stillness, the stagnation, the getting moving again, the waves, the being tossed by waves, the watching of a tamed ocean inside a fish tank, the just dipping your toes in water. The salt-water tears you cry.

I came here to say. Just having watched the last two eps, and there’s just so much there, so many things, layers, so many artful things, but boy did I feel a visceral reaction when Jaewon started moving again, walking with that skip in his step to school, down the stairs. 

Because what does depression do to you, it makes you stuck and stagnant, holding yourself still, frozen, preserving energy, paralyzing you. It reads all over your body, its immobility and rigidness. The acting on this is impeccable and had a visceral effect on me.

And then? When that animation comes back to you, to Jaewon, in that skip in his step, the animation of his face, elasticity and livelyness, the sheer movement of it all, that means feeling alive? How yes, there’s work and growth and healing that brought him there but sometimes it just happens, suddenly, just so? To make that point visible through these short scenes of walking, and the relief I felt, the energy?

Even the flow of meandering through the city feels like progress made visible, but when he walks again, with purpose, the acting out of that walk towards Jihyun, arms swinging, hands engaged, whole body motion walking with purpose?

That scene hit hard, will stay with me, because everything about those last two eps made that story visible, the getting back into movement, movement as what makes this life, the rush of it after stillness, that leaves you reeling. They took me along on that journey with those last eps, reminded me.

The evocativeness of this series and how it’s made, of taking you along on that ride, put you through it, all senses engaged, remind you of life… a very cathartic one, this one. No I’m not crying. I am actually so elated.

I do love those shows the best, that put you through the story’s experience as a viewer, by the means of the medium and publishing, too. Shows that guide and engage your emotional journey in a way that adds deeper layers of meaning to the messages, and is a very potent message in itself, I feel. Especially if you end on a positive hopeful note, much needed in these times.

Catharsis, yes. Connection through art, too.

Wow and thank you.

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Hyung do you think we'll be okay? All we can do is try, even if its scary we have to try and find out.

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THE EIGHTH SENSE 여덟 번째 감각 (2023) dir. Baek Inu and Werner Du Plessis

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from their twitter