The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema

In one of the first English-language studies of Korean cinema to date, Kyung Hyun Kim shows how the New Korean Cinema of the past two decades has used the trope of masculinity to mirror the profound socio-political changes underway in Korea. Since 1980, the country has transformed from an insular, authoritarian culture into a democratic and cosmopolitan society. The transition has fueled anxiety about male identity and, as Kim shows, amid this tension, empowerment has been imagined as remasculinization. He argues that the brutality and violence ubiquitous in many Korean films is symptomatic of Korea's ongoing quest for modernity and a post-authoritarian identity.Kim offers in-depth examinations of more than a dozen of the most representative films produced in Korea between roughly 1980 and 2001. In the process, he draws on the theories of Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, Gilles Deleuze, Rey Chow, and Kaja Silverman to follow the historical trajectory of screen representations of Korean men from self-loathing beings who desire to be controlled to self-sufficient subjects capable of destroying others. He discusses a range of movies from arthouse films includingTo the Starry Island(1993) andThe Day a Pig Fell into the Well(1996) to higher-grossing, popular films likeWhale Hunting(1984) andShiri(1999). He considers the work of several Koreanauteurs-Park Kwang-su, Jung Sun-woo, and Hong Sang-su. Kim argues that Korean cinema must begin to imagine gender relations that defy the contradictions of sexual repression in order to move beyond such binary struggles as those between the traditional and the modern or the traumatic and the post-traumatic.

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