The film opens with the suicide of the protagonist and uses reverse chronology to depict some of the key events of the past 20 years of his life that led to this point.
After causing general mayhem with his deranged antics, he leaves and climbs atop a nearby train track; one of his friends tries to convince him to abandon suicide, but the others ignore him and dance.
At first glance, Young-ho appears to be a rather successful businessman, but the problems in his life become clear when he confronts his wife, who is having an affair with her driving instructor.
While his fellow police officers wait to catch the man in question, Young-ho fruitlessly searches for Sun-im and instead ends up on a one-night stand with a woman.
He coldly and cruelly dismisses her by feigning interest in Hong-ja and returns the camera to Sun-im as she leaves by train.
While Sun-im is trying to visit Young-ho while he is performing his mandatory military service, his company is ordered to quell the Gwangju Democratization Movement and she doesn't get a chance to be with him.
While waiting for help, a harmless and presumably innocent student approaches him, pleading to be allowed to go home despite violating enforced curfew; standing in the darkness, he initially misconstrues her as Sun-im.
Not wanting his comrades to realize he had let a civilian go, he fires randomly, hoping to fool the soldiers into believing he is doing his duty, but accidentally shoots and kills the girl.
The student demonstrations of the early 1980s leading to the Gwangju massacre are shown, as Yong-ho becomes traumatized by the shooting incident.
[4] The tightening grip on the country by the military government during the 1980s is mirrored by Yong-ho losing his innocence and becoming more and more cynical during his stint as a brutal policeman.
These mnemonic traces include the train, the camera, and the peppermint candy as well as Sun-im and her surrogates throughout the vignettes, which led the psychoanalysis of his life to triumph over historiography.
The relationship between historiography and psychoanalysis can be seen in historicism and progressivism, where Yong-ho chooses to look back on his past instead of looking solely at his future to move forward.
Yong-Ho's masculinity is broken during the Gwangju Massacre scene in which the militarized masculinity enforced by the Korean government — a required 26-month duty in the military, an order to kill innocent civilians, and a need to conform to the standards of the other soldiers around him — ultimately force Yong-Ho to compensate later in life by interrogating the student protesters who inevitably were the reason he was put in that situation.
[7] This theme continues with the way he treats women later on in his life, objectifying and mistreating his wife Hong-ja and ultimately losing his one link back to his innocence, Sun-im.