Notes from the Last Row: Inside Netflix's New Korean Class Drama

🏝️ Become a Islander!    / @hanafromkorea   What does the boy in the last row grow up to become? And when someone has already lived that answer, what does the person who hasn't lived it yet feel, standing in front of him? Netflix's new series "Notes from the Last Row" asks both questions at once, and refuses to give either one a clean answer. I look closely at "Notes from the Last Row," the six episode Netflix series directed by Kim Kyu-tae and based on the play by Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga. Choi Min-sik plays Heo Mun-oh, a literature professor who has not written a novel in twenty years. Choi Hyun-wook plays Lee Kang, a student who sits in the same seat Mun-oh once did, and who slowly takes his professor apart through a piece of writing. I trace how the series turns a story about one person watching another into a story about class and educational pedigree in Korea, how the two actors use restraint for opposite purposes, why the destruction of a powerful man does not hand his position to the one who destroyed him, and why Heo Mun-oh's wife may be the person the story asks us to see most clearly of all. 📌 Chapters 00:00 Netflix Notes from the Last Row 01:55 Same Seat, Different Times 05:11 Observation as Armor 07:39 The Prison and the Display Case 09:22 Restraint as a Weapon 10:57 You Can Tear Down, But 14:01 And Yet He’s Drawn Back 16:48 The Price of Watching 20:25 Jazz and the Intruding Sound 21:46 Crying, Laughing, and Then 24:09 To be continued 26:22 Hana's island 🎞️ For more stories    • The Stories Korea Tells Itself   Talking about art and life. An island that reads the world, Hana's Island 📩 [email protected] #HanafromKorea #NotesFromTheLastRow #ChoiMinsik #KoreanClass #KDramaEssay