Nov 11, 2026 · 19 min
Possible Love turns unemployment into a crisis of identity
Possible Love
The discussion shows how class inequality, shame, and gendered power shape both intimate relationships and the ethics of observing them.
- 1The film links unemployment to shame, physical distress, marriage strain, and unstable ideas of personal worth.
- 2Its documentary framework exposes power imbalances between wealthy subjects, working-class women, and the filmmaker observing them.
- 3The panel distinguishes love from coveting while questioning whether activism and generosity can escape performance or self-interest.
Don't miss
The panel’s reading of the coastal-estate scenes reveals how performative modesty turns class contact into a threat of resentment or violence.
The brief
Glen welcomes Aisha Harris and Jeff Yang to discuss Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love, a Korean drama where two couples collide across sharp class and economic divides.
The panel finds the film’s slow, literary structure less immediately gripping than Burning, but argues that its scattered scenes accumulate into a portrait of social injury.
Jeff uses han—remembered injustice and accumulated resentment—to illuminate the characters’ rage, shame, and physical distress, while noting why that context may feel opaque abroad.
Aisha reads the handbag and expensive-shirt scenes as layered documentary ethics: filmmaker and subject, wealthy and working-class women, each negotiating unequal power.
At the coastal estate, performative modesty exposes the threat beneath contact between privilege and insecurity; the discussion then separates coveting from love.
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