Park Chan-wook's use of Ants in Oldboy

Throughout the 2003 film "Oldboy" there are several symbolic hidden messages that the director attempts to use to foreshadow future events in the film without giving too much away to the audience. Most people who attempt to analyze Park Chan-wook's motifs generally tend to focus on his major topics of vengeance, incest, and the beastly state of human nature, but I'd like to dig a little deeper and analyze a couple of his scenes in Oldboy that for the most part, seem to diverge from the grand narrative. Here, I will analyze and raise questions regarding his use of ants to highlight larger ideas portrayed throughout the film.

The first time we see ants appear in this film is when Oh-Dae-Su is describing to the audience his conditions within his prison, and more specifically, when he's speaking about the gas that comes every night to make him unconscious. The first time I saw the ants swarm all over his body, I thought that the gas had an effect on his mind and was therefore causing him to "hallucinate" the ants. Initially, I assumed that the ants represented how the drugs affected his behavior, and how it led to his mental unraveling.

Besides ants themselves, "bugs" are brought up within the film to shed a double meaning on Oh-Dae-Su's psyche. Although the fictitious ants do depict loneliness among other traits, Oh-Dae-Su later in the film, does in fact have a bug inside of him. One could interpret Park's scene mentioned above as bugs exciting Oh-Dae-Su's body, but as the audience learns later, Oh-Dae-Su is bugged and tracked by his captor. Maybe his minds hallucinations of bugs are a subconscious warning that he is being spied on.

The second time ants are brought up is by his lover/daughter Mido. After she reads his notes from his prison, Mido brings up how ants are used as a coping mechanism for the lonely. She states, "People I have met who are very alone have all hallucinated about ants. I once tried to work out why. Ants move around in large groups, you know. So I suppose very lonely people keep thinking about ants. Though I have never done that." Looking at this on a surface level, Mido's words attempt to show that ants must be a part of Oh-Dae-Su's psyche to return to society. Yet, shortly after Mido's commentary, we are shown a scene of a beaten-down Mido riding on the Metro alone, with a giant ant across the train. Yes, this could be a face-value symbol of how Park Chan-wook attempts to depict loneliness through multiple characters, but upon further analysis there could be a deeper meaning.

As we learn at the conclusion of the film, both Mido and Oh-Dae-Su have undergone hypnosis to set a series of events in place. One could say that the ants both Mido and Oh-Dae-Su hallucinated are a sign that they both have something wrong going on in their brains. It could, in fact be a side effect from the hypnosis, therefore hinting to the audience that Oh-Dae-Su and Mido have more in common than they think. Moving away from the ants being a possible side effect of hypnosis, one could argue that their shared imagery of ants and loneliness could be somewhat of a genetic trait, therefore foreshadowing their unfortunate blood relation.