Kyung Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Irvine.

THE REMASCULINIZATION OF KOREAN CINEMA

By Kyung Hyun Kim

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3278-7

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….ixIntroduction: Hunting for the Whale……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..11 At the Edge of a Metropolis in A Fine, Windy Day and Green Fish…………………………………………………………………………………..312 Nowhere to Run: Disenfranchised Men on the Road in The Man with Three Coffins, Sopyonje, and Out to the World………………………………………….523 “Is This How the War Is Remembered?”: Violent Sex and the Korean War in Silver Stallion, Spring in My Hometown, and The Taebaek Mountains…………………774 Post-Trauma and Historical Remembrance in A Single Spark and A Petal………………………………………………………………………………1075 Male Crisis in the Early Films of Park Kwang-su…………………………………………………………………………………………………1366 Jang Sun-woo’s Three “F” Words: Familism, Fetishism, and Fascism………………………………………………………………………………….1627 Too Early/Too Late: Temporality and Repetition in Hong Sang-su’s Films…………………………………………………………………………….2038 Lethal Work: Domestic Space and Gender Troubles in Happy End and The Housemaid……………………………………………………………………..2339 “Each Man Kills the Thing He Loves”: Transgressive Agents, National Security, and Blockbuster Aesthetics in Shiri and Joint Security Area…………………259Notes………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..277Select Filmography of Major Directors of the New Korean Cinema……………………………………………………………………………………..313Index………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..321

Chapter One

GENRES OF POST-TRAUMA

Chapters 1 through 4 trace the social and psychic origins of films that deal with historical trauma and post-traumatic recoveries. This section offers textual readings of the select works that best express the transmutations of historical genres that engage this process of recuperation. Not only are these works representative of Korean cinema’s foray into art-house film festivals during the last two decades of the twentieth century, but they are also films that have stimulated local commercial interest. Again, the objective, by way of closely examining the categories of urban dramas, road movies, war films, and finally films of social concerns, is to invoke how even in these representative films of the New Korean Cinema, the narrativization of the society’s transformation hinges on the narcissistic recasting of masculine figures. In these films, male sexual desires brush up against historical and social issues that place men in difficult positions. In all of the film categories explored in this section, there is a sight of horror that invokes the traumatic losses of pastoral communities (urban dramas), homes (road movie), faithful wives and asexual mothers (Korean War films), and memory and sanity (social problem films). Men are constantly threatened by the state, by the law, and by the erasure of their origin. Amalgamated, these stories of disfiguration and even self-immolation (in the case of Chon T’ae-il in A Single Spark) consistently produce inefficacious conditions in which the central protagonists are robbed of their manhood. The post-traumatic recoveries will only be complete once their emasculations are properly reconciled.

The post-traumatic narrative or recovery is intricately tied to the genre conventions of melodrama. All of the films discussed in this section lament the disintegration of the family. Through this loss, which palpably desires some form of reunion at the end of each narrative, the films demonstrate their inability to depart completely from the conventions of genre. “The genre film is a structure,” as Thomas Sobchack remarked, “that is opposed to experimentation, novelty, or tampering with the given order of things.” The New Korean Cinema, while increasingly edgy about traditional forms, values, and themes, also attests to the difficulty of departing from the restrictions of genre altogether in an industry that had no vital government support. Korean filmmakers had to aim for the creation of art cinema without the aid of public subsidy. The New Korean Cinema was born not because of but in spite of the role of the government, which had blacklisted and censored many of the featured filmmakers such as Park Kwang-su and Jang Sun-woo. All of the films discussed in this book are works that had virtually no financial contribution from sources other than for-profit businesses. Although the Korean government since 1999 has provided subsidies that have led to art film production grants, this is only a recent change. The New Korean Cinema had to strictly play within the commercial rules of an open marketplace (which meant competing with Hollywood films distributed freely across the nation) and could not completely abandon the conventions of popular filmmaking. Either with great subtlety or irony, the films had to negotiate with the codes of genre, heightening the tensions and catharsis of familial fragmentation, loss of homes, and alienation of individual subjects. But while the hope for reclamation of home and recovery of individual persisted in these stories, the endings desperately fell short of reunions, love, and overcoming life’s obstacles. The New Korean Cinema engineered a master narrative that engages with trauma-a narrative trajectory where the protagonist is left with a wound so inerasable that even the spectacular and animated endings of melodrama cannot fully recuperate him from his emotional wreckage.

The strong impulse to reclaim home-fragmented because of the violence produced by national history-did not disengage the hegemonic, masculine tradition. The colonial and military occupation by Japan and the United States throughout the twentieth century weakened and besieged both Korean men and women, but, while women are largely left outside the scope of the thematic concerns of films, male trauma emerges as the centerpiece that drives the narratives. The primary motif in all of the ten films highlighted in this section, even in films where the stories pivot on the lives of women (Sopyonje, Silver Stallion, and A Petal), is the frail male whose lack and disenfranchisement must remain as the central concern for both the narratives and the female protagonists. The recovery of the self remains as the objective in these films, but, as argued in each of the chapters, the subjectivity reconstituted or denied in the end is the man’s alone.

The birth of a “new” Korean cinema is stretched over two decades. While some of the most significant films were produced from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the productivity of films with social relevance-despite its decline-continued well into the 1990s. Also, the primary thematic tensions of the New Korean Cinema between masculine agencies and social problems (of class contradiction, rapid urbanization, and military rules) of the postmilitary era could be found in films as early as A Fine, Windy Day, which was produced in the spring of 1980, the brief period before the military government resumed its authoritarian rule. While the direct critique of the government through realistic portrayals of the working class in insufferable conditions was categorically censored in feature films during the 1980s, the masochistic men pictured through the characters Tok-pae (A Fine, Windy Day) and Pyong-t’ae (Whale Hunting) provided an unconscious sense of urgency through their inability to articulate and their ineffectuality that metaphorically was symptomatic of the terror and trauma ushered by the military regimes. These sardonic characters continued to serve as an anchor for all of the major characters in the first films made by the directors representative of the New Korean Cinema (Park Kwang-su, Jang Sunwoo, and Yi Myong-se). It is hardly coincidental that Park Kwang-su’s Chilsu and Mansu (1988), Jang Sun-woo’s Age of Success (1988), and Yi Myong-se’s Gagman (1988) all share comic impulses that bind characters who are socially alienated (An Song-gi humorously plays the main characters in all three films). These films-which are now historically significant for signaling Korea’s “new” cinema-did not completely break away from the characterization of men previously inscribed as frail and anxious, but instead extended it to parlay aesthetics and themes that were more resonant with the frustrations of the then-young audiences.

What is astounding in this cross section of the films discussed in this volume is that the various forms and transgressions of masculinity canvass a wide-ranging spectrum of men. The projected masculinities are hardly stable as they shift between sadism and masochism, between rationality and insanity, and between morality and unspeakable sin. Focusing on cultivating post-traumatic identities that pivot from masculine sensibilities and perspectives, however, clearly leaves behind attention to women. The New Korean Cinema-in plotting its refiguration of a cinema previously disfigured by state and in following a navigation through Korea’s treacherous and conflicting entry into the postmilitary, modern, global era-reconciled with subjects that could potentially legitimate misogyny. This violence ultimately stemmed not only from male narcissism and self-loathing, but also from the neglect of women. In this case, obsessive narcissism of the 1980s already underscores the foundation that lays the basis for sadism, something that becomes more pronounced as Korean cinema becomes more modern, global, and commercially viable.

1

At the Edge of a Metropolis in A Fine, Windy Day and Green Fish

When the camera cuts to an aerial view of the protagonist Mak-tong’s house in Green Fish (Ch’orok mulgogi, Yi Ch’ang-dong, dir., 1997), the satellite city of Ilsan comes into full view in the background. Mak-tong’s underdeveloped house remains in the foreground as a reminder of the past, in sharp contrast with the countless, slender high-rise apartment buildings that fill the modern skyline of Ilsan. The ceramic kimchi jars, the tin slates that unevenly layer the tiled roof, a dusty tractor, a vinyl vegetable house in the yard, an outdoor toilet, and a huge willow tree standing next to an electric pole all render a stalled time that has not kept pace with the rest. The concrete house is the kind commonly seen in the farming villages during the intense industrialization drive of the Park Chung Hee era (1961-79). The rickety blue roofing tiles, instead of the thatched hays, display a marker of postwar rural development that was hurried and now threatened with extinction as the metropolis expands itself into the countryside in the 1990s. Like the concrete waste that sits idly against the wall of Mak-tong’s house, this home is an unneeded appendix to the new city of Ilsan. It will soon be remodeled into a restaurant, catering to the urbanites who will occasionally use it as a rest area along the unpaved road that runs parallel to the house. At the edge of a metropolis stands the house in Green Fish, threatened with disappearance and lurking violence.

The refiguration of the urban space reconstitutes the familial relations that in turn destabilize the premodern values and ethics. Modernity not only impacts the integrity of a family but also threatens its patriarchal order. The frail men pictured in these postwar “urban drama” films employ the narrative pattern that reinscribes a very specific discourse of remasculinization. There are two issues at disposal when the “urban drama” of the 1980s and the 1990s is considered. First, what had fallen out of the public’s favor already by the 1980s was the genre of family melodrama that for decades had dominated the box office during the Golden Age of Korean Cinema (from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s). Women’s “weepies,” which centrally frame a tragic heroine who is betrayed by men, were no longer popular with audiences. Some of the most memorable protagonists of the Golden Age were women. Han Hyong-mo’s Madame Freedom (Chayu puin, 1956), Shin Sang-ok’s Flower of Hell (Chiokhwa, 1958), Kim Ki-yong’s The Housemaid (Hanyo, 1960), and Chong So-yong’s Bitter, but Once Again (Miwodo tasihanbon, 1968) all centrally framed the dilemma of a woman through whom the changing moral landscape between modern and traditional values was depicted. The choice between a good woman and a desire-driven vamp posited the two radically splitting versions of femininity in Korea. The woman’s failure to remain virtuous therefore directly elicited images of a crying child who is hungry and uncared for (Madame Freedom), a brother who decides to rob a bank to stop his sister from soliciting her clients in the street (A Stray Bullet), and a father who suffers a psychological breakdown after developing an illicit relationship with his housemaid (The Housemaid). The domestic melodrama was the genre that swept the box office during the 1960s. In the 1980s, however, as movie-going audiences dwindled, the conventions of melodrama became stale and hackneyed even for an audience that had long tolerated formulaic stories.

Second, the role of men was given much more weight in these contemporary, urban dramas than in those of the Golden Age. In the classic films, the featured heroines fell into traps either of their own misguided trust in men or of the luring circumstances of a pleasurable, consumerist society. The stories centered on femme fatales who cannot repress their consumerist desire and/or on victimized women who are injured by patriarchal discourses. Somewhere between the image of women in glittery polka-dot dresses dancing to a jazz rhythm in the U.S. military camps and that of chaste motherhood prescribed by the dominant social mores floundered the postwar female identity. They were forced to splinter into the paths of either yanggongju (military prostitutes) or virtuous mothers. The films of the 1980s and the 1990s did very little to divert the characterization of women from these stereotypical roles, despite the intense modernization that made Seoul one of the major centers of global business. As the debacle of domestic melodramas continued in the 1980s, it was the men whose stories demanded attention more than the women’s.

The recuperation of masculinity in these urban films hinges not on the concealment of male lack through fetishized bodies and excessive virility, but through its exposure. The fermentation of masculine identity is historically precipitated by the dramatically changing urban landscape where territorial control is being violently contested. Violence necessarily engenders trauma when the ownership of land changes hands overnight, when proud farmers become migrant workers in the urban service sector, and when families suffer internal fragmentations. The “dominant fiction,” as described by Kaja Silverman, seeks to neutralize the shock of trauma by channeling the individual experience of disruption and disorientation into a collectivized sense of fraternal identity. Silverman, through her analysis of Hollywood films that were released just after World War II, such as The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, dir., 1946) and It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, dir., 1946), enumerates how the male protagonists in these films strive to normalize the paternal function that had previously failed. She attributes this particular crisis of male subjectivity to the “cataclysmic events of the 1940s,” and explores the narrative pattern that seeks to reaffirm the communal support to reintegrate the male subject back into the “dominant fiction.” Likewise, in the Korean cinema the community symbolically functions to supplant the vanishing family and disavow the male protagonists’ “lack” as they reestablish their social identities as workers, friends, or cells in gangster organizations. The external danger, in the midst of rapid changes, is at least temporarily subdued. Instead an ego that must compensate for the psychic injury or the phallic lack flares up. However, what is interesting in Korean films is that even after correctly identifying the origin of their troubles, male characters are unable to fully acquire an authorial, post-traumatic subjectivity. In other words, they must learn to live with their “lack.” Miserable conditions impose limitations on their dreams, even in cinema, a medium that cannot authenticate reality despite its tireless tries through realism.

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