Virtual Hallyu

by Kim, Kyung Hyun; Scorsese, Martin

• ISBN13: 9780822351016
• ISBN10: 0822351013
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-10-10
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

In the late 1990s, South Korean film and other cultural products, broadly known as hallyu(Korean wave), gained unprecedented international popularity. Korean films earned an all-time high of $60.3 million in Japan in 2005, and they outperformed their Hollywood competitors at Korean box offices. In Virtual Hallyu, Kyung Hyun Kim reflects on the precariousness of Korean cinema's success over the past decade. Arguing that state film policies and socioeconomic factors cannot fully explain cinema's true potentiality, Kim draws on Deleuze's concept of the virtual, according to which past and present and truth and falsehood co-exist, to analyze the temporal anxieties and cinematic ironies embedded in screen figures such as a made-in-the USA aquatic monster ( The Host), a postmodern Chosun-era wizard ( Woochi), a schizo man-child ( Oasis), a weepy North Korean terrorist ( Typhoon), a salary man-turned-vengeful fighting machine ( Oldboy), and a repatriated colonial-era nationalist ( Spring of Korean Peninsula). Kim maintains that the full significance of hallyucan only be understood by exposing the implicit and explicit ideologies of protonationalism and capitalism that, along with Korea's ambiguous post-democratization and neoliberalism, are etched against the celluloid surfaces.

Author Biography

Kyung Hyun Kim is Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema, also published by Duke University Press, and a co-producer of the award-winning feature films The Housemaid and Never Forever.

Table of Contents

Foreword	p. ix
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Hallyu's Virtuality
Virtual Landscapes	p. 23
Sopyonje, The Power of Kangwon Province, and The Host
Viral Colony	p. 55
Spring of Korean Peninsula and Epitaph
Virtual Dictatorship	p. 81
The President's Barber and The President's Last Bang
Mea Culpa	p. 101
Reading the North Korean as an Ethnic Other
Hong Sang-soo's Death, Eroticism, and Virtual Nationalism	p. 123
Virtual Trauma	p. 151
Lee Chang-dong's Oasis and Secret Sunshine
Park Chan-wook's "Unknowable" Oldboy	p. 178
The End of History, the Historical Films' Beginning	p. 200
Korea's New Sagŭk
Notes	p. 213
Bibliography	p. 235
Index	p. 243
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