초록
The LGBT movement in Korea may have a relatively short history dating back to the mid-1990s, yet Korean queer cinema has had a unique role in breaking ground in the LGBT realm well before the onset of social activism. We break down the history of Korean queer cinema into three distinct chronological periods, according to the manner in which queer content is displayed and the reception of the films by both the government authorities and the public: the Invisible Age (1976–1998), the Camouflage Age (1998–2005), the Blockbuster Age (2005–present). The Invisible Age could reach as far back as the earliest days of Korean cinema, but two landmark films deserve attention: Ascetic and Broken Branches. The former in particular characterizes the period when its lesbianism was too invisible in the eyes of the public to create much of an impact. Even with the relaxed ‘ethical standards’ since 1998, homosexuality was still deemed too explosive. In the Age of Camouflage, therefore, such popular films as Memento Mori and Bungee Jumping of Their Own masked their homosexual content with horror and romance fantasies. The mega-success of The King and the Clown has proven that LGBT-themed films can compete in the box office, opening the Blockbuster Age of queer cinema. While the ‘flower boy’ formula of beautiful gay character in The King and the Clown has been widely adopted by the mainstream film and entertainment industries, No Regret exemplifies a genre-bending strategy to express queer sexualities in Korean independent cinema.
키워드
queer cinema, LGBT movement, periodization, flower boy, genre-bending
INTRODUCTION
ㅁ modern South Korea might balk at the idea of having its political leader engaging in an ‘immoral’ act of homosexuality, but this was not always the case throughout Korean history. Several kings, such as Hyegong of the ancient Silla and Kongmin in the Koryŏ period, were known for their homosexual behavior. The Neo-Confucian Chosŏn may not have been as lenient as the previous kingdoms, yet there is plenty of evidence for the continued existence of homosexuality in publicly or semi-publicly acknowledged forms. Even the introduction of sexology and the establishment of modern heterosexual norms under Japanese rule failed to wipe out their persistence at least until the 1940s
The beginning of Korean queer or LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) communities in the modern sense is said to date back to the mid-1970s when the Nagwŏndong area, in the venerable Chongno district of Seoul, emerged as a “Gay Paradise” with a number of bars, bathhouses, and movie theaters attracting predominantly male homosexual clientele. Perhaps there is no better symbol for the deep connection between homosexuality and cinema than the legendary Pagoda Theater at the heart of Nagwŏndong, where Korean gays had secret encounters with one another or their international partners
About two decades later, the LGBT movement sprang out in the aftermath of the democratic breakthrough in South Korea. A few glimpses of the early Korean LGBT movement were captured by
A decade has barely passed since Jooran Lee wrote, “Discussing Korean gay and lesbian films is like drifting in a space without sunlight or oxygen” (2000, 273). We may be still drifting, but now there is much to bask and breathe in thanks to many filmmakers who ventured to fill the dicey space of homosexuality and queerness with their work. What we do here is to take a first stab at periodizing the history of Korean queer cinema in the hopes for more detailed, interpretive research to follow. In terms of visibility of queerness, we divide the history into three periods: the Invisible Age, the Camouflage Age, and the Blockbuster Age. Describing each of the periods, we will try to contextualize some of the representative films in the broader sociocultural milieu.
THE INVISIBLE AGE, 1945–1997
The name ‘Invisible Age’ is garnered from the idea that for many years, those filmmakers who wanted to bring homosexual themes to the forefront of their movies were unable to do so because of societal pressures against it, and instead laid the themes down discretely, invisible to the heterosexual eye; such themes would only be recognizable by members of the audience already familiar with homosexual content and indexicalities. In this sense the Invisible Age might well have begun at the birth of Korean cinema, but there is one problem. As early as in 1931, a film project entitled
If the modern heterosexual norm and homophobia settled in during and after the Pacific War mobilization and the Korean War periods as some of the aforementioned studies indicate, then it might be prudent for our purpose to set the starting point of the Invisible Age in 1945, when Korean ‘national’ cinema formally launched its post-colonial journey. This period runs until 1997, a turning point that will be discussed further on. There were films released in this era that exhibited explicitly homosexual themes, however, they remain elusive and hard to learn too much about beyond discussions of them in a few academic articles.
The actor and filmmaker Ha Myŏng-jung once claimed that
Kim Su-hyŏng, a specialist in the so-called
Despite winning an award the year it was released,
The chain of invisibility and silence about homosexuality was finally breached within the Korean film community when Pak Chae-ho released
Whether it is an act of defiance, or a gesture of reconciliation in which Chŏng-min “both fulfils his family obligations and simultaneously produces a space for his gay identity within the family”
By the mid-to-late 1990s, the Korean LGBT movement became quite visible in two respects. First, the grass-roots organizers of various LGBT groups coalesced around an umbrella organization called Tong’inhyŏp (Korean Homosexual Human Rights Association) in 1995, which was expanded and renamed as Handonghyŏp three years later. True to its original name, Handonghyŏp put the human rights issue at the front and center, protesting discrimination against sexual minorities and advocating for their equal rights in legal and institutional terms. In so doing, however, the LGBT rights activists tended to downplay the distinctiveness of LGBT identities and cultures. This created a political/ideological tension within the movement, whose more radical members strove to raise fundamental questions about the heterosexual-male dominant social order and practice ‘sexual politics’(
The latter strand of the movement, often personified by the prominent ‘gay intellectual’ Seo Dong-Jin (Sŏ Tong-jin), focused on cinema as an essential vehicle for its cause from the early years of the movement. Thus came the second moment of visibility of the Korean LGBT movement when Seo and his fellow activists attempted to host the first Seoul International Queer Film Festival at Yonsei University in September 1997. One of the main attractions of the festival was the immensely popular Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar Wai’s
THE CAMOUFLAGE AGE, 1998–2004
While the
A Latin term meaning ‘remember you will die,’ Memento Mori refers to a genre of art that serves to remind the viewers of their own mortality. This imagery of mortality paints a dark backdrop for the horror movie to play on. The romance that the horror revolves around is that of a lesbian couple in an all-girls high school. Two of the students, Si-ŭn and Hyo-sin, get involved in a romantic relationship with each other, only to be marginalized by the rest of the school. This causes Si-ŭn to publicly renounce Hyo-sin, leading to Hyo-sin’s suicide. The terror begins when Hyo-sin’s ghost haunts the school and eventually possesses another student who has found and read a shared diary between the two lovers; through this new, possessed girl Min-a, the first romance between Si-ŭn and Hyosin can revive and continue.
The film clearly plays up the homosexuality angle within a safe boundary, showing the two girls kissing on a few occasions and using delicate symbols of lesbianism
Regardless of the filmmakers’ intention, the particular genre selection of schoolgirl horror helps to soften the political edge by locating lesbianism in an all-girls high school setting, where romance between classmates or between upper-and lower-class girls is quite common and largely tolerated as a ‘rite of passage.’ Fantasies inherent in this type of horror film, such as ghosts, possession, and telepathy, also form a buffer zone from the intolerant realities. If the
Equally full of fantasies but not of horror, Kim Tae-sŭng’s
As Anthony Leong points out, the film might have made some viewers “feel a sense of unease watching societal norms being trashed in the name of love, particularly since [Hyŏn-bin] offers a triple-whammy of lines being crossed, as he is (a) a teenage (b) male (c) student of [In-u]’s.” But it stops short of pushing this moral conflict further, and “ends up stumbling on its last step with a disappointingly contrived third act that tries too hard to please everyone”
In a slightly oblique fashion, these two Camouflage Age films reflect the aforementioned political/ideological tension within the LGBT movement. The equal rights advocates, particularly those who worked at the first-ever Korean gay male organization Ch’in’gusai and later at Handonghyŏp as well, stressed the notion that gay men are not so different from heterosexual men. In other words, gays are pretty much ordinary folks except that they are, as the motto of Ch’in’gusai reads, “men who love other men.” This strategy of ‘different but equal’ masculinity did help dispel some of the worst prejudices and homophobia the Korean gay community had faced, even though its detractors argued that it contributed to the “normalization” of queerness and the increasing depoliticization of gay communities by painting sexuality as a “private” matter
If the preceding Invisible Age had only one very visible spot in
Camouflaged or not, the increasing LGBT presence in Korean cinema gave the impression that an openly ‘homosexual movie’ would soon make a splash at the mainstream box office. The most likely candidate to do so at the beginning of the new millennium was
3 “People:
THE BLOCKBUSTER AGE, 2005–PRESENT
The years surrounding 2005 witnessed a small victory for the LGBT rights groups, as the National Human Rights Commission—an independent government agency created to uphold democratic principles and protect constitutional rights for all citizens—drafted a comprehensive anti-discrimination bill (
These are tell-tale signs of how conspicuous the topic of homosexuality has become in public discourse. And if the recent surge of homophobic campaign is any indication, it owes a great deal to the increasing media representation of LGBT cultures. For instance, the Korean TV network SBS ran into trouble when its openly gay-themed drama
The homophobic paranoia that the TV medium is full of HIV-infected homosexuals actually has its roots in a decade-old incident involving an actor-broadcaster named Hong Sŏk-ch’ŏn. His public admission of homosexuality in 2000 was immediately scandalized, prompting his banishment from the broadcasting business. The LGBT movement rallied around Hong’s cause, and he was allowed back to the business three years later albeit in a reduced capacity. It was not only an inspiring human story especially for the LGBT community, but also a stinging exposé of the deep-seated sexual conservatism and hypocrisy in the Korean mass media. Nevertheless, there was a few years’ gap between Hong’s travail and the recent ‘queer drama’ boom, suggesting that something other than TV might have been also at work to bring out a sea change in public perception, more specifically ‘visual’ perception, of homosexuality and queerness.
Probably nothing had a bigger impact in this respect than
The movie plot revolves around the
To a certain extent,
While the film’s visual pleasure is hardly limited to Kong-gil’s
The ‘flower boy’ phenomenon in the film and TV drama business has been heavily criticized for the fantasized, unrealistic representation of homosexuality that in effect alienates the LGBT community and their real-life issues; homosexual characters are often portrayed as oversexed, immature, or mentally unstable
Even in the Blockbuster Age, therefore, queer films from LGBT perspectives are mostly found in the independent film circuit.
Together, Yi-Song and Kim-Cho made their mark in Korean queer cinema with
Obviously the two films are very different, not just in absolute numbers but in homosexual content as well. Whereas
The first layer of queer strategy in
As a precursor and later subgenre of the aforementioned
The film is full of genre clichés that highlight the class divide within the hostess romance narrative. For example, Su-min rebukes Chae-min’s indecisiveness, saying “A rich man like you may have many places to hide, but I have none.” It does not, however, follow the genre convention to the end, where the life of the lower-class female prostitute is destroyed over the remorseful tears of her upper-class male ex-lover. As the movie title suggests, there appears to be no regret on either side as Chae-min and Su-min go through the final tumult together. While this ending may look like another cliché from a romance drama, it actually completes the subversion of the hostess, and furthermore the
4
5 “King and the Clown,” last updated on November 15, 2008,
6
7 “A Problematic Queer Film, No Regret,” Cine21, November 14, 2006.
8
CONCLUSION
It has been a long time coming both for Korean queer cinema and the LGBT community since the obscure, highly experimental films and the dark theater rooms of Nagwŏndong in the 1970s. From the mid-1990s on, the solidaristic alliance between the independent film and the LGBT communities started removing the veil of invisibility by fighting against the censorship and promoting LGBT-themed films. For the next ten years or so, the mainstream movie industry took some baby steps, forward and backward, testing the marketability of ‘homosexual films’ in various disguises. When it finally concocted the right formula in the ‘beautification’ of queerness, the floodgate was open; now we suddenly find ourselves in a rush of big box office movies and serial TV dramas starring ‘flower boys,’ no matter how vaguely gay they are in fiction or in reality. Meanwhile, the indie circuit’s steady production of LGBT films did reap some benefit from the public attention generated by the mainstream blockbusters. Its cutting-edge work attempts to combine LGBT equal rights and challenges toward heteronormativity, which looks like a noble yet daunting task.
This is a brief synopsis of Korean queer cinema thus far, and we put down our markers to divide it into three periods: the Invisible Age, the Camouflage Age, and the Blockbuster Age. We also tried to show how some of the representative works followed or bent the genre conventions of
Figure1.. The movie poster of
Figure2.. The kiss (and the reaction) in
Figure3.. Kong-gil in the royal bedroom in
Figure4.. Su-min whispering to Chong-min in
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1 To be sure, this kind of ‘first ever’ claim is almost always disputable at some level. The film magazineCine21 argued that Kim Su-yong’s Starting Point (Sibaljŏm, 1969) could qualify as the first Korean film depicting homosexuality (Mun 2003). But in fact Sin Sang-ok’s Eunuch (Naesi, 1968) had already done just that a year earlier.
2 TheHousemaid trilogy refers to the original Housemaid (Hanyŏ, 1960), and the two versions of Woman of Fire (Hwanyŏ, 1971, 1982).