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Images of North Korea in Contemporary South Korean Media and Literature
Organizer & Chair: Jeeyoung Shin, Indiana University
Recent years have witnessed a renewed interest in and infatuation with North Korea in diverse media and literary texts in South Korea. This panel examines and compares various contemporary representations of North Korea(ns) in South Korean mainstream films, independent media, and literature to demonstrate the on-going efforts to re-imagine North Korea in South Korean cultural narratives. Focusing on the two earliest examples of re-imagined inter-Korean relations in Swiri and JSA, Jeeyoung Shin explains how the two films offer distinct models for later films with similar themes and how and why they both nevertheless reveal ambiguity in envisioning a national reunion. Jeongsub Nam compares a South Korean film, Welcome to Dongmak-gol (2005) with a Hollywood film, Die Another Day (2002) to examine their contrasting imaginations of North Korea and argue that North Korea is imagined as an America in them. JaeYoon Park looks at Repatriation (2003), a ground-breaking South Korean documentary film on long-term North Korean prisoners of conscience. Park points out that the film shows a South Korean sensibility vis-à-vis North Koreans becoming complicated and negotiated in the director’s own experience along the course of the film’s narrative. Jongkeun Yang analyzes another significant text dealing with national division, Hwang Suk-young’s novel, The Guest (2002). Yang argues that the novel makes a critical analogy of the dark history of divided Korea in which Koreans become guests in their own land.
A Bittersweet Love Story?: Politics of the New Intimacy toward North Korea(ns) in Contemporary South Korean Cinema
Jeeyoung Shin, Indiana University
Enjoying greater freedom of expression, as well as responding to the reconciliatory shift in South Korean policy, a number of South Korean films since the late 1990s have capitalized on the theme of inter-Korean relations with renewed enthusiasm. This paper examines Swiri (1999) and JSA (2000), two early representations of North Korea(ns) in this vein. With each a record-breaking hit, the two films not only signaled a boom in movies with a North Korean theme but also pioneered important, albeit different, revisions of the single-mindedly anti-communist tropes that dominated mainstream South Korean cinema. However, Swiri is more concerned with South Korean heroism based on the contrast between the two Koreas, though without totally disparaging North Korea. In contrast, JSA is marked by its anti-heroism, which is best seen in the contrasting representation of two main male characters, a South Korean soldier named Yi Su-hyok and a North Korean soldier named O Kyong-pil. A significant difference is also found in the portrayal of the central female character. While Yi Bang-Hui/Myong-hyon in Swiri embodies a hybrid identity in a highly sexualized and gendered manner, hybridity in Sophie Jean in JSA is curiously asexual and genderless. Notwithstanding these differences, the two films simultaneously demonstrate growing intimacy between the two states and yet express difficulty in fully envisioning their symbolic reunion. This ambiguous approach is an attempt to negotiate the political reality of the Korean peninsula and the growing popular desire for a nationalist fantasy of reconciliation.
A Korea as a Mirror of an America in Welcome to Dongmakgol and Die Another Day
Jeongsub Nam, State University of New York, Buffalo
This paper provides a comparative analysis of a South Korean imagination of three parties, two Koreas and America in Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) and an American imagination of two Koreas in Die Another Day (2002). A major purpose of this comparison will be highlighting emptiness and destructiveness of Cold War style ideological approach of the American movie in comparison to the South Korean movie’s humanistic and "realistic" approach to the ideologically tainted relationships among the three parties surrounding so-called Korean problems. As film has always been a place for imagining symbolic and real worlds, we can looks through a symbolic world and find what is left out (the real) from the symbolic signification by analyzing filmic imaginations. So my paper’s another purpose will be shedding light on what current brinkmanship rhetoric surrounding so-called Korean problems misses: the real of Korea and Korean people, and what it really needs: North Korea as an absolute antagonist.
Repatriation (Song-Hwan, 2003): North Koreans as Political Others and/or Hopes for Reunification
Jae Yoon Park, University of Kansas
In 1992, a South Korean independent documentary filmmaker, Kim Dong-Won, started documenting the lives of North Korea’s long-term prisoners of conscience in South Korea and their campaigns to return home. While filming for ten years, Kim developed personal relationships with a group of elderly ex-prisoners and became good friends with a few of them. In Repatriation, Kim examines the complex relationships between the South and the North, utilizing diverse footage from the mainstream South Korean media such as news articles and television dramas. Through the first person narration, Kim re-examines his personal knowledge and thoughts on Communist North Korea (ns) and his national identity as a South Korean. This paper will explore the ways in which the relationship between the director and these "unconverted" prisoners evolves over the course of the film, focusing on their friendship developed beyond ideological terrain. While the paper attempts to situate Repatriation within the national, political, and ideological discourses around inter-Korean relations, the intersections of Kim’s personal experiences and the public discourse produced by the mainstream South Korean media will be one of my major concerns.
North Korea a True Guest/Host?
Jongkeun Yang, State University of New York, Buffalo
This paper highlights the importance of real conversations with North Korea and the necessity of respecting North Korea as a true proprietor of Korea, focusing on Suk-young Hwang’s 2002 novel The Guest. Hwang’s novel depicts hatred and massacre among inhabitants of a North Korean town during the Korean War. The three most important points of the novel are as follows: (1) as the title suggests, Guest assets that the North Korean townspeople (possibly representing the whole Korean people) have lived as guests in their own land divided into two groups; (2) each group has been servile to foreign ideologies, namely, Marxism (lower class) and Christianity (upper class); and (3) therefore "guests" (foreign ideologies) have become "host" and perpetuated antagonism and hostility in the life of the Koreans. I will argue that to overcome these tragic historical situations, i.e., to recover their real ethnic identities and live as real subjects, all Koreans should speak and listen to each other’s stories. To revere North Koreans as a partner for frank conversations will be the first and most important step for forgiveness and reconciliation.