Mike had me made an announcement on Facebook that he would terminate his Facebook account. I didn't like it because I didn't like the inconsistency in his words and actions. Not long ago he cared a lot about accepting a friend request on Facebook and pestered me about my delay in helping him with it. Now, he told me his executive decision to have it closed. He said he was afraid of identity theft. Why now? Why not earlier?
We had our fourth class on New Chinese Documentary in Angela's house. I think we had a good discussion, and I know I spoke up a lot more times than any of my classmates. I was the presenter.
Isabella Tianzi Cai
H72.1134: Contemporary Korean Cinema
Professor Jung-Bong Choi
Week 7 (10/21/2010): Korean Blockbuster
A paradox has been twirling in my head since yesterday’s class on Korean blockbuster. Obviously not all American films have a market in South Korea because of the fact that they are culturally specific. The screen quota that South Korea eventually lifted in 2006 would be redundant even if it were kept in place. There is no doubt that Hollywood films target at the largest number of audience possible by churning out de-contextualized narratives that offend as few as they can. But American films do not equate Hollywood films. Left unrestricted by the quota, they may still not guarantee a good return unless it is arguable that South Koreans have a penchant for American films for some other reasons.
Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000) are both considered the mainstay of the first phase of Korean blockbuster, which exploits nationalistic sentiment above all. Both films tell stories of a divided Korea and hearken back to the Korean War. They set box-office records along with unprecedented popularity for two consecutive years respectively. For a few years after them, big-budgeted films using the same themes continued to reap box-office receipts in Korea. For examples, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War (2004) and Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005). The war fever only seems to have subsided as the second wave of Korean blockbuster caught on. With more developed technology, experienced management, mature venture capital, as well as an admired ambition to take on an even greater regional market, the second phase of Korean blockbuster is rid of cultural and political odor to resemble Hollywood even more.
In Sung Kyung Kim’s paper “’Renaissance of Korean National Cinema’ as a Terrain of Negotiation and Contention between the Global and the Local: Analyzing Two Korean Blockbusters, Shiri (1999) and JSA (2000),” Sung systematically explores the success of the two films according to the economic and industrial background at the time of their releases, audience’s expectations, and the mass-appeal characteristics of the films. While his methodology can be repeatedly applied to analyze all successful large-scale movies made in and for the domestic market, his findings are historically specific to South Korea. The 1997 financial crisis, which Sung suggests has made Korean nationalistic sentiment reach a new height, also affected countries and regions like Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Though the film industries in these different places were not developed uniformly, anti-Hollywood campaigns did not sweep these other places and nationalistic sentiments were also kept at bay. Sung enumerates relevant government policies that helped vitalize Korean cinema, for examples, the Film Promotion Fund, the Cultural Promotion Fund, and tax incentives for private investors. However, the key factor that set off the ‘renaissance’ is arguably not monetary. The freedom to touch tabooed subjects in unconventional ways is the blessing of the Korean New Wave directors. This freedom was not just felt and enjoyed by Korean artists. Korean people in general felt the need to stop ostracizing their Northern neighbors. According an archived article by the Federation of American Scientists, “[i]n a public opinion survey conducted on the February 25 inauguration day, an overwhelming majority of 93.8 percent supported the Government's North Korea policies. Even in a survey done after the North Korean submarine incursion in June, 62.4 percent of the people supported the Sunshine Policy.”[1] Sung makes a point that “it is important to avoid dogmatic and suppressive nationalistic ideas and attitudes, and to dehumanize and demonize minority groups within the nation” (Sung 10). This may just be an accurate appraisal of South Koreans’ mentality in 1999 if the survey is correct and credible.
In “’Military Enlightenment’ for the Masses: Genre and Cultural Intermixing in South Korea’s Golden Age War Films,” David Scott Diffrient offers his view on 1960s Korean auteur Lee Manhee’s films about the Korean War. He gives extensive textual analysis of two of Lee’s films, The Men of YMS 504 (1963) and The Marines who Never Returned (1963), in order to prove that they give a fair cinematic representation of the war. One interesting observation that he makes is a similar question asked in both films. In The Marines who Never Returned, the question is “Why should I die?” In The Men of YMS 504, the question is “Why did my father die?” Apparently both questions are self-reflexive, but Diffrient posits that they exhibit characters’ consciousness that “personal survival could take precedence over heroism and national or political agendas” (Diffrient 45). This is a perfect example whereby the meaning of a text is created by the reader, the idea of which Roland Barthes argues in his famous essay “The Death of the Author.” Lee’s films were officially labeled as “military enlightenment” and “anti-Communist” by censors who worked for the Park Junghee regime because they read the films totally differently from Diffrient. These politically charged questions obviously did not manifest themselves as being politically subversive in their minds. More likely than not, they regarded these questions as rhetorical questions that were meant to elicit voluntary anti-Communist thoughts and sentiments. Under the Cold War atmosphere, majority of South Koreans must have complied with that line of thinking.
Kim Kyunghyun takes a similar approach as Sung in explaining the success of Shiri and JSA, but what is unique about his analysis, other than socio-economic reasons that he lies out, is the psychoanalytic component. These psychoanalytic arguments are very sophisticated at places, but they are worth reexamination. At the most superficial level, and to put it very bluntly, both Shiri and JSA ostracize females. In Shiri, Lee Myunghyun the female sniper is gunned down by her lover despite the fact that her military excellence surpasses that of many men. In JSA, Major Sophie Jean desperately tries to probe but at last remains at the peripheral of the male universe despite her excellent investigation skills. Kim associates the superior-yet-inferior status of these two female protagonists with the myth in psychoanalysis that film is a medium born of male fantasy. To digress here a little, most American screenwriting classes teach students that for narratives to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, they have to be charged with actions, without which stories only move forward sluggishly. If we grant pro-action as having more resonance with the male rather than the female gender, then Lee Myunghyun and Major Sophie Jean will ultimately embody the male fantasy of female failure when women try to emulate men physically and rationally. Kim takes a step further. He writes,
The Korean War and the postwar authoritarianism had unleashed political terror that eventually led to the characterization of trauma through male masochism . . . genre films vied for remasculinization, transposing its historical pains and gentrifying it into pleasurable elements of gender relations ready for commercial consumption. (Kim 274)
The necessary assumption of Kim’s arguments is that Korean males are largely, if not solely, responsible for the vicissitudes of Korean people in the twentieth century. Despaired Korean males, who have indeed also suffered a great deal as soldiers and militants, find solace when they can finally confer the commonly agreed and admired male characteristics – such as the power to fight and the power to probe – to women. Through fantasies of “male masochism,” which I take to mean the loss of their lover or friends in Shiri and JSA respectively, “male subjectivities are born” (Kim 275). These subjectivities must be self-reflexive because they reveal the contradictions in males themselves. They are made aware of their own failures by the very male values that they uphold. After all, “male masochism” produces pleasures perhaps just like female masochism. Using psychoanalysis as the lens to read Shiri and JSA, Kim certainly enriches the textual analysis. Whether to agree with him is however another matter.
[1] Federation of American Scientists, “The Government of People’s Sunshine Policy toward North Korea and Plans for Implementation,” 1999 South Korea Special Weapons Nuclear, Biological, Chemical and Missile Proliferation News, April 12, 1999. http://www.fas.org/news/skorea/1999/990412-sunshine.htm (accessed October 22, 2010).
