The price of privilege in ‘Teach You a Lesson’

None of this means a thing to Hwa-jin. His job, and as we find out over the course of the show, his life’s purpose, is taking bullies down a peg, maybe two, or really as many pegs as necessary to rein in South Korea’s bullying culture (“hakgyo pongnyeok” in Korean). So Jun-hyeong’s dad is a big shot politician; big deal. If children are precious and must be loved and nurtured, out of control teenagers with profound egotism must be slapped upside the head ‘til they learn how to act right. Hwa-jin relishes his work, though Teach You a Lesson’s viewers may relish watching him work even more. The cathartic rush we feel when classroom tyrants receive their comeuppance is hard to top, and the series’ authors—director Hong Jong-chan, and writers Lee Nam-kyu, Kim Da-hee, and Moon Jong-ho—know it. 

So Hwa-jin functions as a de facto superhero in Teach You a Lesson’s context, meting out harsh justice to entitled pricks like Jun-hyeong and others as the episodes progress. He’s a cooler, brooding, slickly dressed version of the Tom Berenger character in Robert Mandel’s The Substitute (1996), in which the former plays a mercenary Vietnam War vet who goes undercover at a Miami high school to tackle its rampant gang problem; the big improvement Teach You a Lesson makes over that film, and frankly over its own source material—the Korean YLab webtoon Get Schooled (2023)—is the sanitization of blatantly racist storytelling choices. The Substitute revels in stereotypes, long outdated even in the 1990s, about Black and Latino Americans; Get Schooled casts multiethnic characters as villains (and casually tosses around gross racial epithets to boot). 

Drawing from that narrative well means that the only way to go is up, at least. Instead of mocking, vilifying, or belittling Afro-Koreans, for instance, Teach You a Lesson roots its conflict in matters of status. Jun-hyeong is a societal elite who abuses his standing as a politician’s child by inflicting daily brutalities and ignominies on kids he considers less than him, solely for his own amusement. Ye-ri (Park Seo-yoon), a popular influencer at a girls’ school, wields her social media reach like a cudgel to accuse a teacher of assaulting her, kicking off a snowball effect of public outrage that ends with the teacher taking his own life. The problem with the youth these days, Teach You a Lesson posits, has nothing to do with either their nationality or skin color. Rather, it has to do with the superiority complex folks tend to develop when they have access to wealth, recognition, and clout, and their habit of victimizing people who don’t.

It also has to do with South Korea’s bullying epidemic, a longstanding crisis that seems to have wildly escalated over the last 10 years and which has occupied the country’s pop culture for ages in films like Bleak Night (2010), Han Gong-ju (2013), and Once Upon a Time in High School (2004). K-dramas have effectively created their own sub-genre of “bullying dramas” in the last decade, too, most likely spurred by that rise in high school bullying; The Glory (2023), The Penthouse (2020), and Weak Hero (2022) each come to mind. Given the relationship South Korean high schools have with such behaviors, that the country’s entertainment industry latches onto stories in which bullying drives plot feels like a matter of course. It’d be more of a surprise if filmmakers and showrunners weren’t making media about the dynamics and effects of bullying. 

Teach You a Lesson reinvents nothing in that regard, other than the text it adapts. Much as we see remakes, reboots, reimaginings, and other such affixations as anathema to art and creativity, every once in a while that kind of recycling is welcome, and perhaps even necessary; Teach You a Lesson has ugly roots, but trims them into a satisfying, sturdier narrative, where folks at the top of social hierarchies get their butts handed to them by Hwa-jin and his immediately trademarked brand of stoic grace. He’s so preternaturally good at beating up obnoxious teenagers as to seem bored when he does it, except Kim primes his performance for delight. However over it Hwa-jin appears, Kim is having the time of his life in the role. Maybe there’s a mismatch between Teach You a Lesson’s text and Kim’s expressive choices—bullying is a serious issue in South Korea, after all—but on the other hand, it really is a victimless crime to cheer as Hwa-jin smacks Jun-hyeong in his awful, hyper-privileged face. Teenagers are stupid; annoying, too, at times. That’s not a reason to throw hands at them, though, no matter how much you might want to on occasion—so let Teach You a Lesson give you a little wish fulfillment.