초록
The global production, distribution, and consumption of SF is difficult to explain on the basis of extant theories linking SF reception and production to industrialization. South Korea offers a striking example of a highly-industrialized society saturated with technosocial change, influenced by foreign SF but without more than marginally successful localization of the SF genre in literary or cinematic form. The Korean film industry’s forays into the “foreign landscape” of SF over the past decade allow for alternative interpretations. Analysis of Lee Si-Myung’s 2009: Lost Memories (2002), Jeong Yun-su’s Yesterday (2002), Jang Sun-woo’s The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2002), Jang Joo-Hwan’s Save the Green Planet (2003), Min Byung-Chun’s Natural City (2003), andBong Joon-Ho’s The Host (2007), among others, reveal specific aspects of Korean culture that problematize the localization of the SF genre to a Korean setting, namely problems of generic fluency on the part of audiences and creators alike, post-colonial nationalist-historiographic concerns, anxieties of influence regarding foreign-originating genre and narrative forms, and more. A study of recent Korean SF films—primarily those which fail as specimens of the SF genre—is followed by a discussion of approaches which have resulted in the successful circumvention of cultural barriers to the localization of SF, suggesting tantalizing possibilities for the continued localization process and development of a native Korean SFnal imaginary.
키워드
SF, cinema, localization, genre, culture
INTRODUCTION
Kingsley Amis reportedly quipped once that science fiction (hereafter SF) “is written by Americans and Britons, not by foreigners and women” (
Many explanations have suggested a link between industrialization and the popularity of SF. Darko Suvin suggestively observed “its popularity in the leading industrial nations (United States, USSR, United Kingdom, Japan)” (
Yet, if industrialization is really the deciding factor for whether, how, and why SF takes root—or fails to do so—in a given culture, why does SF remain absolutely peripheral in South Korea? Despite being bound in China by pedagogical and political controls and the “shackles of utilitarianism” at least until the early 90s
South Korea’s case is especially perplexing: given the pace of industrialization and socio-technical and economic transformation experienced by Korea, Koreans ought overwhelmingly to need or desire what Gunn aptly terms a “literature of change” (17). Indeed, foreign SF—particularly American and Japanese “visual” SF (comics, film, and animation)—has significantly informed the Korean imagination: Korean SF fan websites
Yet the futuristic visions that dominate the popular Korean imagination are patently
It is my contention, specifically, that the “localization” (or “nativization”) of SF, to a greater degree than other cinematic genres (such as the thriller, mystery, romantic comedy, or horror film), involves unique challenges related to culture, particularly in terms of culturally-ingrained attitudes towards SF itself, national and postcolonial identity and (popular) historiography and imaginative orientation towards the past and future, and the negotiation of cultural baggage and anxieties of influence in relation to dominant cultural sources of SF today. This survey, offered from the perspective not of a specialist in Korean studies, but rather a working SF author, cannot investigate the genre as a whole, but may do so by examining films that may open up a potentially interesting form of cross-cultural interrogation.
GENERIC FLUENCY AND SF AS A “FOREIGN LANGUAGE”
Despite SF having arrived in Korea decades ago, even today foreign—largely Anglophone and Japanese—SF in translation dominates the literary and cinematic options for Korean consumers. Whether we trace the origins of SF to Mary Wollstonecraft-Shelley’s
The status of the genre in China is worth consideration:
A second, more exacting conception of SF is offered by Darko Suvin, wherein the genre centered on the experience of “
Doubtless this relatively easier generic transplantability exists because horror and fantasy narratives—both in Hollywood and in Korean cinema—draw upon more universal elements of mythic narrative and of ghost stories, unlike the particularly modern or postmodern technological and philosophical underpinnings of SF. For example, many of the most common of popular SF tropes are strongly rooted in the specific circumstances, viewpoint, and language of European colonial and naval history and literature—the
It seems therefore that SF is (at least) a doubly “acquired language”: its foreign tropes and mode of
4 According to the magazine’s website. These numbers dwarf the combined circulation of theworld’s three most popular English-language SF print magazines, which in 2007 totaled (approximately) 60,000 or fewer copies monthly
5 Or as Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. puts it, SF is “a mode of awareness, a complex hesitation about the relationship between imaginary conceptions and historical reality unfolding into the future”
“KID STUFF”: FANTASY, TROPE SALAD SYNDROME, AND SUVIN’S COGNITIVE MODE
One common dismissive response to SF—noted by SF fans and scholars worldwide—is to see it as either
There is a variety of results. Some would-be creators treat SF not as a genre of rigorously-explored ideas, but instead as a grab-bag of random narrative ingredients or tropes. Occasionally, as in films like
Elsewhere, as in the indie films of Nam Gi-woong, such as
Yet the two films differ immensely. For example, despite being unabashedly “pulp” on a deep level—a film as much about spectacle as about substance—
In contrast with the aggressively philosophical and literary—indeed,
This calls to mind SF author Neal Stephenson’s astute observation that one of the singular characteristics of (good) SF literature and film is not only a bristling aura of an almost feral “intelligence” or intellect
6 If not necessarily of a recent vintage: after all, cinematic SF tends (as SF authors like to observe) to lag a number of decades “behind” literary SF. Little of the conceptual inquiry in
7 Consider the cognitive uses of silliness in Douglas Adams’
ANXIETIES OF HISTORY, POSTCOLONIALITY, AND IDENTITY
The acclaimed SF author Neal Stephenson has argued that it is less useful to talk about SF as a genre than to talk about SF-people (consumers of SF) and their modes of consumption, as compared to everyone else, whom he playfully terms “the Mundanes”
Stephenson’s more Deweyan model grants a different perspective on Suvin’s (Collingwood-like)
While
Consider the time travel narrative. Regardless of whether the narrative is comedic (as in the
Korean cinema’s handling of this simple, fundamental concept of SF—that a radical change in the past would result in an unrecognizable future, and that alternate, unrecognizable presents and futures are in and of themselves inherently worth exploring and imagining—leaves much to be desired. Consider the (unsuccessful) 2002 blockbuster titled
The film is cognitively estranging in its presentation of an uncanny vision of a modern Korea under Japanese rule, through which we watch a Korean policeman and his Japanese partner pursue a group of Korean terrorists/freedom-fighters. There is ample opportunity to take this bizarre-yet-plausible (i.e., cognitively estranging) world on its own terms, as was done in the alternate-history text that very obviously inspired the film, Bok Geo-il’s
In other words, in
Worse, the film avoids the unsettling question of what might happen if
But
This film demonstrates that what Henry H. Em asserts—“minjok, by itself, can no longer serve as a democratic imaginary” (
8 Hence the widely celebrated status of Tom Godwin’s ferociously unsentimental story,
9 But as any SF fan will point out, multiple worlds are likely to mean multiple would-be colonists,and multiple sets of would-be colonial subjects—some Japanese, some Korean, some Japanese-Korean, some Ugandan, some bright purple with seven arms, and so forth. Nationalist historiography and political correctness both go straight out the window in the cognitive mode. Meanwhile, for a real Japanese take on militaristic time-traveling, see Hanmura Ryō’s
10 The film
OF INFLUENCE AND OTHER ANXIETIES
The late Thomas Disch claimed that “most sci fi [
... non-Anglophone SF writers have a more ambiguous, more ambivalent take on this; it goes deeper, it is more serious, the stakes (our own sense of identity ...) are higher: not only do we write with and against a whole corpus of texts ... but also with and against a whole culture—history, ideologies, phantasms, places—that is not our own native culture. (in
Besides the aforementioned historical and cultural baggage of SF—“space
This challenge clearly manifests in
Yet curious absences haunt
Of course, it is also crucial to remember that the Asian presence in Scott’s LA is symbolic of another “alien” or “other” presence: that of the “replicants” who are both deceptively
Indeed, even the radical alternity of mere female agency in romance seems impossible in
The lesser offender, by far, is Kwak’s film, which features a young man who finds himself suddenly under the protection of a cyborg woman sent from the future to ensure his safety. Despite being relatively pedestrian (it could easily have been a
11 See “Defining the Literary Genre of Utopia: Some Historical Semantics, Some Genology, aProposal, and a Plea” (
12 In fact, a fascinating trace of Japanese presences remains throughout
13 The quip that the film’s title could be, “Yŏpkijŏgin kŭ saibogŭ” (or, in English, “My Sassy Droid”) was one I heard more than once: many expected Kwak’s venture into SF would be nothing more than a SFnalized retread of his 2001 smash hit
THE PLEASURES OF POLITICO-HISTORICAL COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT: WHEN SF “GOES NATIVE” IN KOREA
The purpose of the preceding discussion was to illuminate the fact that the distribution of SF production and consumption worldwide cannot simply be linked causally to industrialization, but that cultural factors come into play, especially in how they may problematize the localization of SF. That said, the focus mainly on failures thus far may suggest—falsely—that these problems are insurmountable.
Happily, this is not the case. A few more successful examples remain for discussion, however brief. The positive examples of
Besides Korean-language titles—near-anomalous among Korean SF movies— the two films share many features. Firstly, both films are set not in the future (or past), but instead in familiar, present-day Korea. Second, many SFnal tropes are handled ironically or playfully: the monster in
Most strikingly, both films articulate, metaphorically, narratives about recent history, specifically the tribulations of the underprivileged during the Korean dictatorships, especially during the 1980s, with a river monster and a threatening alien used to represent the forces of authoritarian, corporate, and social power that abused and exploited Korea’s poorer classes very recently. While both films are about history, it becomes difficult not to see the film in radical political/historical terms—specifically, those of Sin Ch’aeho’s concept of “
The temptation to attempt to replicate the success of
These and other examples demonstrate what a number of Korean literary SF authors have established already: that the various apparent cultural barriers to the successful Koreanization of SF are far from insurmountable, if creators are willing to (a) set aside prejudices about the genre and take it seriously enough to familiarize themselves with its workings; (b) open their imaginations (and trust the imaginations of their audiences) to explore radical alternatives thoughtfully and experimentally for the sake of the pleasure of such exploration (without emphatically reasserting the primacy of the “real world”); (c) playfully engage as diverse a palette of influences as they please—perhaps drawing on other national traditions of SF (Chinese, Indian, French, and otherwise)—and creatively work to find ways to Koreanize SF authentically; and (d) to move beyond the stifling “minjok historiography” towards other models, such as the “minjung” model that seems to have underpinned Korea’s most successful SF films to date, while also moving forward to a range of thematic preoccupations (and treatments of these thematic preoccupations) that actually
14 A focus on the downtrodden class of society does not guarantee a successful SF film, or asuccessful narrative:
15 “Widely,” in terms of independent films in Korea, that is. This does not necessarily reflect audience size. According to Hancinema.net, fewer than two thousand tickets were sold during the (approximately) first month of the film’s release. (“The Uninvited-2010.”)
16 DCInside, originally a web board where digital cameras were discussed (hence the use of DC inthe site’s name) is a webpage of profound importance in Korean popular and netizen culture, and has played important roles in Korean popular culture, most profoundly in the mobilization of protesters during the anti-US beef protests that took place in Seoul during summer 2008. A place of grassroots organization; a core site of macho netizen culture and sexism; a major popularizer of all things digital; a collective Korean that fills the role played in the English-language Internet by a number of influential and popular trendsetting blogs like BoingBoing and discussion/netizen web-boards like 4chan, DCInside is deserving of far more sustained and careful attention by academics seeking better to understand Korean netizen and youth culture.
17 Indeed, in Korean SF, amateur and independent filmmakers are becoming a major force in thedevelopment of a native form of the genre. Films such as Ch’oe Min-gi’s
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1 Most prominently, the websites for Korea’s biggest SF fanclubs are JoySF, at <http://www.joysf.com/ > and Mirror <http://mirror.pe.kr/ >, as well as numerous Korean SF fan-blogs.
2 Especially since the unfortunate demise of the Korean-language SF magazineFantastique in 2010.
3 For example, according to Hong Insu, the ongoing experimental adaptation of Western literarySF texts to webtoon format, in the hope of reaching a larger audience and cultivating interest inSF (Hong 2011) .