Ways of South Korean cinemaThe unsettling distribution is most apparent when the popular culture faces political and
economic challenges. What has become the most observable in the first phase of the block-
buster mode is a narrative strategy of multi-nationalizing women characters. As South Korea is
exposed to a powerful global gaze—such as the IMF—and in turn mimics this gaze in its desire
to be a player in Asia, anxiety and desire explode within the Korean blockbuster in unexpected
ways. Relegating South Korean women to the realm of the invisible, blockbusters underline
male-dominant groups such as the army, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, and organ-
ized crime, to foreground homosocial relations. What the impenetrability and opacity of male
bonding in blockbusters suggest is quite evident. However, the brotherhood of nationalism is
not destined to find a secure space of its own under the global gaze that demands transparency.
This sense of the impossibility of reconstructing a nationalist male space is both a cause and a
consequence of the endless remaking of blockbusters.
The disappearance of images of South Korean women also constitutes a new globalized
national discourse. The orchestration of transparency and impenetrability bitterly resounds in
the global and the national arena and increasingly stages an orchestra without women players—
an unfortunate retreat of gender politics. This departure does not stop, however, at the level of
representation. In addition to the South Korean government’s official declaration of the collapse
of public intellectuals and their replacement with twenty- or thirty-something young venture
capitalists as the “new intellectuals,” feminist intervention in a public sphere attuned to a concept
of a globalized national is doubly denied.
Turning our attention to several instances of the Korean blockbuster, we’ll not only offer
a critical analysis of a society that is rapidly changing but one that also offers “room for play,”
performance, and taking a “gamble” (Hansen 2004) with cinema; in short, a fantasmatic space.
While the first phase of the Korean blockbuster highlights many issues relating to gender pol-
itics, the second phase of Korean blockbusters delves into questions of national identity and
affective labor provided by mothers and domestic helpers. This cluster of films seems to suggest
the social emergence of a new set of problems about gendered and emotional labor, the volatile
corporeality of the female body and, as I shall argue, the miraculous corporeality of the male
body receiving and returning extreme violence. Further, alongside commercial thrillers and
dramas from renowned directors such as Park Chan-wook (Bakjwi [Thirst] 2009), Bong Jung-ho
(Madeo [Mother] 2009) and Im Sang-soo (Hanyeo [The Housemaid] 2010), another direction is
taken by a series of films preoccupied with issues such as immigration, refugees, and diaspora.
In South Korean there are increasing numbers of migrants, particularly those from the Korean
diaspora in China and refugees from North Korea. The representation of the miraculous and
fantasmatic other in Hwanghae (The Yellow Sea, dir. Na Hong-Jin, 2010), is a particularly interest-
ing exposition of issue, wherein “a specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration”
(Hardt and Negri 2001, 213). We are introduced to hit man, Gunam (played by the celebrated
actor Ha Jeong-woo) who follows an illegal trail of migrant workers coming from Yanbian,
in Northeastern China, just north of the North Korean border, an area mostly inhabited by
a Korean–Chinese diaspora. A temporary migrant, Gunam is pursued by the triple threat of a
South Korean gang, a Yanbian gang and the South Korean police. Significant works in this vein
have also been produced by the independent sector, despite the depletion of filmmaking sub-
sidies by the reactionary government of Lee Myung-bak. Independent films in particular have
inscribed North Korean refugees and Bangladeshi migrant labor into the radical platform of
representational politics in South Korea as critical discourse increasingly pays attention to them.
At the same time, in a low-budget independent film produced by Kim Ki-duk, Poongsangae
(Poongsan Dog, dir. Jung Jai-hon, 2010), we find a protagonist who belongs neither to North
Korea nor South Korea. He does not identify his nationality but deliberately chooses to function