Have you read Naomi Alderman’s The Power? If not, you should (before you watch the Amazon Prime version….) It imagines a world where women hold the power because, via a genetic mutation, they become physically superior to men. Spoiler alert: It’s not utopia. But still there’s something enticing about a politics based on consensus and empathy rather than dominance and wealth. And that’s the central thought experiment that Queenmaker (Netflix) undertakes, very successfully overall.
Ironically, the avatar of dominance and wealth in Queenmaker is a woman and not a man: Chairwoman Son (Seo Yi-Sook), who has taken the reins of her late, philandering husband’s chaebol and rules it, and everyone in her family, with an iron fist (or, more literally, and in one of the best early scenes, an iron shotgun). Her loyal “hunting dog” and political fixer, Hwang Do-Hee (Kim Hee-Ae), does whatever it takes to ensure the family’s dominance without batting a well-plucked eyebrow, until her habitual tactics result in the death of one of the company’s young female employees, who dared to blow the whistle on the sexual predations of Chairwoman Son’s son-in-law and ended up indenting the roof of a car 30 stories below her office window. In the resulting cover-up, the family hangs Hwang Do-hee out to dry. And in an act of spiteful revenge, she offers her services to the primary thorn in the family’s side—Oh Kyung-Sook (Moon So-Ri), a civil-rights lawyer who represented a group of female employees abused by the family and who now is running against the son-in-law for Mayor of Seoul. But as Hwang gets to know Oh, she learns another way of doing politics that is completely foreign to her—one based on kept promises, sacrifice, and solidarity—and she finds to her surprise that not only does it beat out dominance and wealth, it provides a moral center she’s been missing, one that heals past traumas and restores broken relationships in her life.
The primary draw of the series is the phenomenal acting by the female leads—not to mention the fact that all of them are women in the first place, which is really notable for a heavy-hitting political K-drama. Naturally, the redemptive arc of Hwang’s journey is compelling, too, but Queenmaker earns it. The show is too clear-eyed about the nature of Korean (or really, any) politics to settle for easy wins. The Son family fights diiiiiirty, and so in the final days of the campaign, Oh finds herself having to sacrifice her high ideals and rely on Hwang’s old bag of equally dirty tricks, if she doesn’t want to give up her dream of an ultimately fairer future Seoul. Without spoiling anything, however, I can say that the series refuses to justify those tricks, or sweep them under the rug. If there’s one thing Queenmaker is really honest and smart about, it’s the human cost of any victory, no matter how noble. Which explains why victory is always bittersweet.
The Rookery 