affective states of emergency: States of fantasy in the Korean Wave and film
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Korean cinema began attracting critical attention on the international
film festival circuit. The emergent Korean Wave of film, music, and television dramas further
expanded awareness of Korean popular culture. In 2012, pop star Psy’s hit single “Gangnam
Style” became the ubiquitous marker for the Korean Wave, solidifying it as a global phenomenon.
Today, with more and more films being distributed globally—including Snowpiercer (2013)—
Korean cinema challenges and expands our understanding of the dialectics of national and
transnational cinema. It is incumbent on us to examine South Korean cinema with an attention
to intricate discontinuities, ruptures, and an intermeshing of three constituencies—the layers
and shifts that occur in national, regional (inter-Asian), and transnational contexts. In exploring
a once poor and an unsettling “national” cinema in trans/inter-Asia and global contexts, there
is a certain drive to uncover the possibilities of “cinema otherwise” disclosed by Korean cinema
in its affective and perpetual states of emergency.
On December 10, 2015, the news report on “North Korea’s all-female pop group will per-
form in China” was closely followed by another news item: “K-pop group Oh My Girl are
detained at LAX office for being mistaken for sex workers.” The news captured the clash of the
two Koreas’ popular culture; Korean Wave in South Korea and Moranbong in North Korea, the
latter claiming Psy as its rival. These two incidents tellingly portray the resonance and disso-
nance that the two Koreas have generated with their global audience. North Korea’s all-female
pop group Moranbong was soon reported to return to North Korea without having given a
performance and no explanation was offered in public. They, however, have a considerable pres-
ence on social networking services (SNSs). Their Facebook fan page, “Moranbong” in English,
has attracted 2,327 Likes, and as of December 11, 2015 their YouTube channel had amassed a
significant 3,521,229 subscribers. The simultaneous outbreak of the news concerning two of
Korea’s girl groups is uncanny.
In considering how a modest Korean adventure film, The Himalayas (2015), could topple
the global phenomenon Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens (2015) at the Korean box
office, both experts and laymen would come short of an exhaustive analysis. However, two key