VIRTUAL HALLYU

Korean Cinema of the Global EraBy Kyung Hyun Kim

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5088-0

Contents

FOREWORD BY MARTIN SCORSESE………………………………………………………………..xiPREFACE………………………………………………………………………………….1INTRODUCTION. Hallyu’s Virtuality…………………………………………………………..23ONE. Virtual Landscapes Sopyonje, The Power of Kangwon Province, and The Host……………………55TWO. Viral Colony Spring of Korean Peninsula and Epitaph………………………………………81THREE. Virtual Dictatorship The President’s Barber and The President’s Last Bang…………………101FOUR. Mea Culpa Reading the North Korean as an Ethnic Other……………………………………123FIVE. Hong Sang-soo’s Death, Eroticism, and Virtual Nationalism………………………………..151SIX. Virtual Trauma Lee Chang-dong’s Oasis and Secret Sunshine…………………………………178SEVEN. Park Chan-wook’s “Unknowable” Oldboy………………………………………………….200EIGHT. The End of History, the Historical Films’ Beginning Korea’s New Saguk…………………….213NOTES……………………………………………………………………………………235BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………..243

Chapter One

Virtual Landscapes

Sopyonje, The Power of Kangwon Province, and The Host

The epoch in which man could believe himself to be in harmony with nature has expired. —Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller”

Flowers blossom everywhere,
Spring has definitely come.
Though spring is here,
My life is lonesome.
Yesterday I had my youth
But today my white hair put me to shame.
My youth has deserted me,
Leaving me behind.
What is the purpose, even if
I were to welcome spring that comes and goes?
Spring! If you were to leave, then leave!
Even without you here, when if summer comes,
The forest will turn green; the fragrant plants will bloom.
It has often been told this way.
When summer comes and autumn follows
Wouldn’t there still be scenic beauty?
Though frost and wind annoy,
How about those golden chrysanthemums and
Maple leaves that resist bowing?
After fall when winter comes,
Drop-leaf trees shudder in cold wind,
White snow falls;
Since the moon, the snow, and the earth turn white,
Now everyone is a pal of the white-haired I.
Spring leaves, but surely every year it returns.
And yet my youth, once it leaves,
Knows no path of return.
Listen my friends,
Even if you were to live a hundred years,
Take away the days when you were sick, asleep,
And obsessed with a worried heart,
How many out there can guess that
You are lucky to live till forty?
—Song of Four Seasons (Sach’olga)

I begin this chapter with the “Song of Four Seasons,” featured right before the climax of Sopyonje, Im Kwon-Taek’s 1993 film, as a departure point for a discussion of the importance of landscape in recent Korean cinema. This minyo, or peasant song—which dates back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century, in the Chosun Dynasty—is unusual because of its insistence on the separation of the individual (the “I”) from nature, rather than on the harmony between humans and nature. As Walter Benjamin declares in the epigraph to this chapter, one of the symptoms of modernity is that man can no longer “believe himself to be in harmony with nature.” What intrigues me about the song is that it already shows the irresolvable sense of melancholia that results from humanity’s inability to fulfill its union with nature—something Benjamin understood to be the condition of the alienated modern self only in the twentieth century. The song climaxes in the eleventh line: “Spring! If you were to leave, then leave!” At this point in Sopyonje, Yu- bong, the stubborn protagonist feels that the cyclical nature of the landscape has always betrayed him because, while his “youth has deserted” him, spring always returns as if it has not aged at all. He seems to demand: why is it that you ask me to be a good Confucian and seek harmony with nature when nature has betrayed me, without any promise of eternal life? This scene takes place after Yu- bong has blinded Song-hwa, his adopted daughter, and—as seen in figure 2, which complements the “Song of Four Seasons”—he remains physically bound to her. Song- hwa may have her youth, but she is blind; Yu- bong may have his vision, but his body is frail. In part because they are both incapable of accepting stability, they must become drifters, nomads, and wanderers who must perform on the road and avoid the metropolis. Seoul becomes prominent in Sopyonje only through its absence. Earlier in the film, when Yu- bong is approached by his friends in a regional town after a p’ansori performance and is asked to return to Seoul, ending his exile, he refuses, opting instead to continue wandering through the countryside.

Again Im Kwon-Taek

This theme of the modern self’s explorations remains relevant in Sopyonje when Yu-bong, the film’s patriarchal figure, seeks to demystify and deromanticize the landscape. The detailed depiction of landscape suggests the betrayal the narrator feels at the annual renewal of nature (in contrast with the irreversible aging process of the individual), a betrayal that leads him to become alienated—the prerequisite cognitive position of an arguably Cartesian or Marxist subjecthood, with its potential to revolt. We understand Yu- bong’s song about the betrayal of spring as directed against the nation that has continually renewed itself through Japanese enka, American jazz, and other entertainment forms, while leaving behind the traditional artist like himself. Unable to transform the world around him, he protests, but in a twist on Oedipus’s fate, he makes his beloved daughter blind—out of fear that she would face an even bigger betrayal if she were to see the changes the country is going through as the years pass. Only through this protest can he extend the expiration date on the inevitable vanishing of the p’ansori and minyo, which can no longer be pristinely inscribed onto Korea’s landscape. In other words, the separation of the individual from the cyclical nature of his or her environment allows the narrator to cast a suspicious gaze at nature (and the nation), which is capable of renewing itself every season (unlike humans whose hair turns white as they age), earning for itself an immortal subjectivity and ultimately betraying any kind of lingering gesture toward Confucian principles of unity between humans and their natural environment. Instead, what takes place in this minyo from Cholla Province is what Karatani Kojin called the “discovery of landscape,” which visually addresses one critical aspect of modernity that has reshaped the sensibilities of the new self: the landscape. In his Origins of Japanese Modern Literature, Karatani writes:

I would like to propose that the notion of “landscape” developed in Japan sometime during the third decade of the Meiji period. Of course, there were landscapes long before they were “discovered.” But “landscapes” as such did not exist prior to the 1890s, and it is only when we think it in this way that the layers of meaning entailed in the notion of a “discovery of landscape” become apparent.

The transformation of the very structure of perception from premodern to modern has been identified by Karatani as the discovery of a landscape in literature through successive layers of what he calls tenko (TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), or the “inversion of consciousness.” This requires the revelation of a close link between the literary depiction of landscape and an introverted, solitary situation, which Karatani termed the modern subjecthood of interiority. This unveiling of the new subject draws the reader of modern literature closer to representational truth and proposes a view that is based on “the relentless defamiliarization of the familiar.”

In this chapter, I argue how this “defamiliarization of the familiar” becomes the very site where contemporary audiences produce sensations, affects, and feelings that have very little to do with the actual vanishing of the rural landscape, but instead have to do with the postmodern pleasures induced by nostalgia that stimulates one of the most powerful melodramatic reactions. It is no coincidence that Sopyonje, a low-budget film featuring no stars and having no marketing campaign when it was first released, drove over a million viewers to the theater in 1993. This was perhaps the first instance in the history of Korean cinema where the rural landscape produced an affective nostalgia on the big screen that led to an overwhelming domestic box office sensation. Since then, Korean cinema has been characterized by its virtual landscapes, where realism, modernism, and postmodernism merge in the midst of the rapid democratization and globalization that began around the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Throughout this schizophrenic socioeconomic process, Korea has embraced with open arms the era of technological reproducibility, in which aura has long since dissipated. The country has also witnessed, on the one hand, the decline of the traditional bourgeois subjects of early capitalist formation (Daewoo and many other chaebols during the IMF crisis of 1997, print media like the newspaper Tong-A Ilbo, and even the military junta that formed the powerful ruling bloc for several decades after the Korean War) and, on the other hand, often the increased power of the nontraditional media such as the cinema, Internet companies, and game industry. Such a cultural schematic, a byproduct of the curious function of the unconscious and of desire, moves beyond the socioeconomic paradigm set by Marx as the civilized person’s struggle to “wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life,” while “at the same time, do[ing] so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production.” No more apt example of this can be found than the media products of twenty-first-century Korea. It is still difficult to describe contemporary South Korea as a postcolonial, postmodern, industrialized First World nation even though, at the beginning of 2010, it is impossible to ignore its role in the world economy as a leader of information technology (IT), biomedical sciences, and entertainment. However, such rapid economic and cultural development could not have been achieved without various accidents and derailments. After all, according to Paul Virilio, “rapidity is always a sign of precocious death for the fast species … and the source of many physical traumatisms.” The amazing speed and mechanical overload through which industrialization in Korea was achieved inevitably resulted in crises every several years or so (the “IMF crisis” of 1997, the National Assembly’s attempted impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun in 2003, Hwang Woo-suk’s stem-cell research controversy in 2005, and the global recession and credit market crash of 2008–9). Within each and every crisis, a scale of cultural intensity of an aesthetically rich nation discovers and recovers its own corresponding modern mass sensation. In this chapter, I propose to show how the attention that cinema paid to all forms of landscape—rural (Sopyonje), tourist (Kangwon Province), and ultra-urban (The Host)—allows speed to play an important function as a critique of Korea’s rapid growth.

As noted in the introduction, Korea boasts the best rate among advanced nations (excluding the United States) of local consumption of domestic film products—a rate far better than that of any European country or Japan. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that one of the greatest anomalies in film history from the past hundred years was projected within the confined space of South Korea, where the coevalness of emergent and late capitalism, global and local forces, and cultural oscillation between modernist affectation of the sublime and its postmodern invalidation produced a desire to magnify the cultural significance of authentic cultural uniqueness and realistic representation—while continuing to disqualify and debunk the austere qualities of modernist and realist aesthetic principles for the purpose of maximizing the entertainment values of various simulacra that originated from Hollywood and other pop industries of the West. What I am arguing is that the cinemas of the realist Im Kwon-Taek, the modernist Hong Sang-soo, and the postmodernist Bong Joon-ho—who made their marks over the past two decades—could exist only in a mixture that represents Korea’s unique crisis at the height of its transition to a late capitalist economy. The three films I will discuss—Sopyonje, Hong Sang-soo’s The Power of Kangwon Province (Kangwondo ui him, 1998), and Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (Koemul, 2006)—further expand this condition of possibility through figurations of visual elements that are beyond the field of representation in literature. I want to emphasize that in all three films, the landscape serves as a key chronotope, or spatiotemporal matrix, through which new cinematic subjecthood is both discovered and demystified, setting up a prerequisite for a new paradigm of modern subjectivity. This subjectivity also includes a virtual representation of both an essentially unrepresentable space, a fictive landscape set during the colonial and postcolonial 1950s and 1960s of Korea, and, as I will soon explain, the transformation of Korea’s pristine landscape into a cinematic tour for contemporary urban audiences. It is in this process of discovery and rediscovery that I find the potential to read Korean landscape rendered in recent cinema as a virtual subject that satisfies the double meaning of virtual: that which is endowed by the modernist discourse of the virtuous, or full of potential, and that which is suggested by the postmodern term “virtual reality,” which is hardly real. This to me is the site of “virtual hallyu.”

I have long been fascinated by the new industrial wastelands—barren rice paddies and endless rows of apartment buildings—not as literary concepts, but as postmodern cinematic concepts. “Nature” and “societies” account for what Bruno Latour calls the “Premodern Overlap,” which, for instance, underscores the irrevocable grief of the itinerant p’ansori musicians who forever wander through rural Korea in Sopyonje. But melancholia may not even be that genuine or authentic in the world of simulacral cinematic images in a melodramatic musical like Sopyonje. As David E. James notes in “Im Kwon-Taek: Korean Cinema and Buddhism,” the “idealization of the Korean landscape is for the domestic spectator overdetermined by the industrialization and urbanization that (as at the inception of industrialization and modern landscape art in Eng land at the end of the eighteenth century) cause the rural world to appear as the location not of agrarian labor or deprivation but of recreation and spiritual renewal [my emphasis].” There was, as early as 1993 when Sopyonje took the domestic box office by storm, the formation of a mass audience that caused “the rural world to appear as the location … of recreation and spiritual renewal.” This process is not dissimilar to what Youngmin Choe classifies as the “cinematic affect” that is complicit in drawing film texts—such as the immensely successful pan- Asian film April Snow, starring Bae Yong-jun, in tandem with the tourist site of Kangwondo’s Samch’ok. The intense sensation that produces grief about the vanishing landscape in a realist film by the 1990s generated a postmodern audience response that cannot be separated from what James calls the “imbrication of the cultural tourism of cinema with the global politics of the tourist industry, a prostitution of its spectacular natural landscape in which South Korea has conspicuously engaged in its attempt to attract international attention [my emphasis].” Sopyonje‘s “prostitution” of Korea’s natural landscape and national art, I might add here, was an attempt to attract not only international audiences, but also domestic ones. Hong Sang-soo’s films also try to reference their own processes of “prostituting” the rural landscape—not only for foreign tourists, but for domestic urban tourists as well—but Hong’s subtle resistance against this very postmodern praxis of reducing landscapes into domestic tours and other forms of leisure and recreation cannot reverse the dominant trend. I will argue below that the varying perspectives of, for instance, landscapes drawn from such films as The Power of Kangwon Province and The Host stake out modernist and postmodernist aesthetic positions, without necessarily being trapped within these preexisting boundaries.

Because it was invented at the end of the nineteenth century, when a new traveling leisure class and an aesthetic appreciation of new exotic locations also emerged, cinema gave a new meaning to landscape. According to Sergei Eisenstein, cinematic landscape became a “complex bearer of the possibilities of a plastic interpretation of emotions.” According to Martin Lefebvre, Eisenstein wanted to imply that in narrative films, landscape distinguishes itself from a mere background that subordinates itself to the primacy of plotlines in narrative cinema; landscape invokes its own system of meanings and representations that build “something like the tension between it and narrative.” Even filmmakers—like Im Kwon-Taek—who are best known for their excellent command of storytelling, almost always exploit this tension between landscape and narrative to advance their art. Some of Im’s most accomplished works, such as Mandala (1981), Sopyonje, and Painted Fire (Chw’ihwason, 2002) will be remembered chiefly for their exquisite photography of the curves of Korea’s snowy mountains, paddies, streams, and shorelines. Humans and their stories sometimes pale in comparison to these images of landscapes, only to emerge on top of them by the end. Im’s landscapes render familiar spaces of Korea slightly uncanny, as they inspire feelings of melancholia and loss because of the devastating impact that industrialization has had on nature. What contemporary audiences find engaging in realist films is the fact that the real (the contaminated landscape) and the unreal (pristine nature that survives only in Im Kwon-Taek’s immaculately photographed films) constantly switch places with each other, invoking the power of the virtual-actual. In other words, Korea’s actual modern humans continually allow themselves in the space of a movie theater to be affected by the virtual site of the cinematic premodern landscape after designing the movie sets and shooting them (not unlike the two-way traffic of virtual-actual in James Cameron’s Avatar).

(Continues…)

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