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As dusk becomes night and the sun slowly wanes between the mountain ridges, this is the time when you cannot tell whether the silhouette that approaches slowly is your faithful dog or a dangerous wolf, the time when friend and foe are indistinguishable. This is the moment when both righteous and errant paths all become crimson. — Comment from a character in the 2007 South Korean television drama series, Time between Dog and Wolf (Gae-wa Neukdae-ui Shigan) Before [I started watching recent South Korean films], my knowledge about Korea was very limited. One is M*A*S*H, in which the Korean War seems to never end. Then, some photos of [South] Korean students protesting during the 80s ... [and] of North Korean people in extreme poverty ... [but] Dae-Soo is totally cool ... totally savage but cool ... like Alex from A Clockwork Orange. — Gu, 39, an Australian fan of South Korean films from Melbourne In 2006, the South Korean action thriller, Oldboy, was ranked 118th in IMDb.com’s top 250 films (G. C. Yoon 2006). This high ranking is significant when considering the fact that most users of IMDb.com are English-speaking Westerners. Indeed, Oldboy’s high ranking on the website reflects the popularity of South Korean genre films overseas and, in particular, in Western countries since the early 2000s. Around that time, South Korean genre films were becoming known on the international film festival circuit and were acknowledged by Western fans on online film-related websites.1 For instance, since Oldboy won the Grand Prix in 2004 at the Cannes International Film Festival with the accompanying praise of Quentin Tarantino, the Cannes jury president, the film has gained a new cult status among genre film fans. This cult fandom is evident on many discussion boards on Western film-related websites where film site users often hail the film’s graphic violence and its transgressive themes of abduction and incest. In this chapter, I use the term “Western” to describe the users and film reviewers of the English-language-based film websites that are 4 Oldboy, Postmodern Masculinity, and Western Fandom on Film Review Websites: Time between Dog and Wolf 120 Korean Masculinities and Transcultural Consumption analyzed here. Even though these websites are mostly established by Americans, many of the users and film reviewers of these websites are native English speakers such as Canadians, Britons, and Australians. Also, I use “web forum,” “message board,” and “discussion board” interchangeably in this chapter, because each website employs different terms to describe its user forums. The fans’ acclaim for the violent and transgressive content of the film is further evident in their obsessive affection for the main male character, Oh Dae-Soo (Choi Min-Shik). As the quotation from the Australian fan at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates, some viewers clearly express their ambivalent attraction to the South Korean male character, Dae-Soo, who is perceived as “totally savage but cool.” This fan explains that he “found a whole new world” through the experience of watching a “strange” South Korean genre film, and in particular, through embracing this “savage but cool” South Korean male character, Dae-Soo. I suggest that this Western affection for Dae-Soo, particularly in response to Dae-Soo’s savageness, can be understood within the conceptual framework of the commodification of Otherness, which is explained by bell hooks in Black Looks (1992). She argues that the consumption of Otherness offers intense enjoyment that mainstream white cultures often taboo: Cultural taboos around sexuality and desire are transgressed and made explicit as the media bombards folks with a message of difference no longer based on the white supremacist assumption that “blondes have more fun.” The “real fun” is to be had by bringing to the surface all those “nasty” unconscious fantasies and longings about contact with the Other embedded in the secret (not so secret) deep structure of white supremacy. (1992: 21–22) White mainstream Westerners desire the taboo-breaking cultural practices that are involved with consuming ethnic difference, hooks explains, as transgressive Otherness can provide sources of unknown pleasures.This desire, according to hooks, is nothing but “a contemporary revival of [Orientalist] interest in the “primitive” with a distinctly postmodern slant” (1992: 21–22). The recent cult fandom of Oldboy can be partly explained within this same framework of Orientalist Western longings for primitive Otherness. In particular, the favoring of the transgressive themes and the portrayal of Dae-Soo as savage in Oldboy by fans clearly support...

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