In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Gender in "Korean Reality":Bong Joon-ho's Films and the Birth of "Snob Film"
  • Sohn Hee-jeong (bio)
    Translated by Jung Yijung (bio)

1. "Korean Reality" by the Allegory Auteur Bong Joon-ho

In 2019, Parasite became the first Korean film to receive the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in France. South Korean President Moon Jae-in congratulated this milestone as "an outstanding gift to celebrate a hundred years history of Korean films." Parasite's prize-winning spree at overseas film festivals and events culminated in four awards at the 92nd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. Since the late twentieth century, the Korean film industry had long wished to be recognized as "universal," referring to Korean films as "Korean blockbusters" or "well-made" movies.1 With Parasite, the Korean film industry had finally earned the coveted title. Interestingly, until the early [End Page 289] 2010s, Korean films that were able to obtain exchange-related values, such as drawing attention or winning awards in the global film market, were walking a fine line between being universal and distinctive. On the other hand, in Parasite, the cinematic representation of specificities such as violence or primitive male bodies, which are typical of traditional Korean films, was not prominent. Rather, the film tactfully criticized capitalism as a universal structure while adding flavor of Korean specificities through various details.

This reminds us of Moon Byoung-Gon's short film, Safe (2013), the recipient of the "Short Films" Palme d'Or at the 66th Cannes Film Festival. Safe criticizes modern credit capitalism by depicting a woman trapped in an isolated space, specifically a currency exchange in an illegal game room. She steals money from customers. The cinematic space is confined to this small currency exchange in an underground parking lot, and the outside rarely appears. The film ends as the protagonist gets trapped in a tiny safe, deprived of all means to seek help from outside. The only thing that continues throughout the ending sequence is protagonist's empty cry. She constantly struggles to escape from the enclosed space symbolized as the currency exchange, but the more she tries, the deeper she is driven down to narrow space. The film was said to "have received great reviews from the judges for its keen portrayal of the dark reality of the capitalist society where individuals are driven into a corner with seemingly no way out whereas other contestants focus on delicately expressing human relations and emotions."2 Such evaluation is a disparate reflection of Fredric Jameson's discussion on national allegories.

While the incommensurability of the Freudian and Marxist realms makes national allegories impossible in the first-world literature, Jameson argues, national allegories are possible as a touchpoint between individuals and peoples in the third-world [End Page 290] literature where the experience of colonialism still persists and a split between the private and the public is unclear.3 Rey Chow criticizes that Jameson grants the homogeneous representation of symbol to the third world signifier whereas he means by allegory discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemy of the dream in discussing the third world literature.4 And, the third world, as an object seen in this otherization, performs national allegories based on the assumption of readers/audience in the first world. Therefore, national allegories, and the ethnicity that comes through in the allegories, are the sign of a cross-cultural commodity fetishism.5 This held true for Korean films. Korean films distributed in the global film market dominated by the Western film market and festivals were mainly works on "ethnic allegory." This way, national cultural commodities infused with the perspective of the first world audience continued to be produced. However, after the late 2000s, national allegories in which the connection between individuals and nation is culturally materialized gradually disappeared, and new political allegories with strengthened connection between individuals and capital began to appear in the Korean film industry.

Political allegories of Korean cinema in the 21st century are new allegorical forms that emerged in an era of stalemate when imagination on alternative system and the energy of revolution was...

pdf