The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (Asia-Pacific)

Rating:
Summary: Testosterone Plaza!
Review: After the testosterone-fueled rebirth of (South) Korean cinema in the '80s and '90s, only in the last few years have serious, critically rigorous books on the subject begun to appear in English in dribs and drabs. Kim Kyung-hyun's The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema is the most theoretically sophisticated to appear so far, and is must reading for all crit-theory heads wondering what the hell has been going on in South Korean society in the past few decades--especially on the big screen, which has been dominated by brooding, raging men for quite some time now.

Kim's focus is on the works of directors of the New Korean Cinema such as Park Kwang-su, Jang Sun-woo, Hong Sang-soo, Lee Chang-dong and Im Kwon-taek. The book's central argument is that the "master narrative" of the New Korean Cinema as it evolved from the start of the 1980s to the new millennium has been to trace a shift from portrayals of ineffectual males defined by phallic lack and a penchant for masochism to "post-traumatic males" struggling to recuperate a resplendent, emerging subjectivity who are often violent and sadistic. In layman's terms, I guess this means that if you're a Kim Ki-dok protagonist, beating the crap out of your woman is a way of finding or own inner Iron John, or whatever.

Overall, I liked this book and found it provocative. It is something of a cliche by now to complain about the misogyny of Korean cinema; it's almost like complaining that the sky is blue. This book offers a close and quite sympathetic examination of WHY so many of these men are misogynistic in the first place, which is a productive, positive approach to a very unproductive, negative problem.

Kim often deploys psychoanalytic theory and concepts in tackling these issues, which I have no problem with, except to say that I wonder if the Western concepts developed by Freud, Lacan et al are so universal, and so neatly applied to Eastern societies; this is not a question that Kim cares to ask, nor one that I can answer myself, either.

My problem with Kim's approach is that the use of psychoanalytic terms and concepts is often rushed and cursory. Too many times, statements like "this is an example of fetishistic disavowal" or "this is an instance of a desire for a return to the preoedipal stage" are made, without saying more clearly WHY or HOW it is an example of fetishistic disavowal, etc. One wants more lucid clarification and application of the theory, lest the text begin to appear gratuitous in its use of jargon and complex terminology. Not everyone reading this book will have completed graduate seminars on Lacan, and even if they have there is no excuse for laziness here.

I also have to question Kim's overly selective approach in presenting and analyzing the "master narrative" of the New Korean Cinema. It often seems that films were left out that might undermine the overarching thesis. According to Kim, there is no space in New Korean Cinema for female subjectivity to explore and represent itself outside of a subsidiary relation to males, but this is just not true. A film like Girls' Night Out (1999), for instance, explores the sexual subjectivity of three modern Korean women from their own perspectives. I also found a certain high-brow disdain for popular or overly commercial films in the book, which is also limiting. A film like My Wife is a Gangster (2001), while indeed "crassly commercial," offered a fresh, original way of presenting one modern, independent woman's struggle to balance life in the public world of work with the demands of the private world of home. Indeed, most of the films discussed in this book are art-house auterurist works; a more complex analysis of the state of Korean film in the '80s and '90s might have been less condescending towards and dismissive of such "low-brow" fare.

Then there are the more curious omissions, like the films of Kim Ki-dok or Jang Sun-woo's Lies, which offer rich material for the subject at hand. On closer reflection, though, Jang's Lies perhaps undermines Kim's overall argument. After all, if the male protagonist in the film displays overt masochistic tendencies, is this a regression to the male masochism of the early '80s that supposedly had been overcome by the late '90s, or is Jang offering an alternate view: liberating the male protagonist from his own domineering male subjectivity entirely--at the hands of an 18-year-old woman, no less?

The exclusion of the films of Kim Ki-dok and others is explained by the fact that they were made too recently to be included. How can crucial films made in 1999 or 2001 not be included in a book published in 2004? Is academia really that slow? I might also note that a book that complains about the lack of female directors in South Korea has no right to do so when it ignores a film like Yim Soon-rye's Three Friends (1996), an early notable exception to the rule of male directors in the New Korean Cinema. But again, a closer look at Three Friends may have undermined the book's argument further, since the three male protagonists are also quite ineffectual and reminiscent of the "weak" male characters of the early '80s. Yet in Three Friends, this is viewed as positive and liberating, rather than a denial of full male subjectivity; indeed, one of the characters enters a gay relationship at the end, which offers a subversive contrast to the dominant (and male-dominated) heterosexuality of the extremely patriarchal New Korean Cinema.

In others words, this is a heady book that falls just short by complaining of a lack of sexual and gendered diversity in Korean cinema, yet is guilty of suppressing such diversity somewhat itself. Even now, Korean cinema is undergoing profound, radical changes in its representations of gender and sexuality. I look forward to a sequel to The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema that examines all these current diverse changes as provocatively and intensely as it has done here.