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Page 4 of 5
'Run-DMZ' and the axis of vaudeville
By Stephen Epstein
should not escape the viewer's attention: first, the locus of the Korean nation
naturally resides within South Korea and unification thus signifies
re-absorbing territory that belongs with it.
Moreover, in projecting a happy ending for its Northern protagonists, the film
sends them to a third destination because the North is no longer suitable for
them after their taste of Southern pleasures, and the South can not yet
accommodate them, their boat is once more blown off course, and this time they
wash up on a tropical beach. In the film's final moments, Hawaiian-inflected
music plays and two bikini-clad Caucasian women, holding cocktails, walk by and
give them come-hither smiles, at which point the credits roll.
The film pictures life in South Korea, then, as desirable, but desirable for an
open leisure culture that includes the right to relax and admire scantily clad
bodies at the beach, not for political concepts such as freedom and democracy.
Indeed, these films often emphasize oppressive aspects of South Korean society,
and North Korean Guys portrays figures representing both the law (the
police and the military) and the lawless (gangsters) as infringing on the life
of common citizens. Likewise, Spy Girl, as noted, also features
gangsters, and the lead character in North Korean Guys must confront an
overbearing professor.
Additionally, he receives a slapstick roughing-up from his authoritarian
father, who, it turns out, is no less than the director of the National
Intelligence Service. Conversely, in treating the North Korean political system
as endearingly quirky rather than inhuman, this set of films aligns North Korea
more closely with an axis of vaudeville than an axis of evil. The use of humor
thus takes on an implicit political and moral dimension: rejection of
anti-communist rhetoric in these films humanizes North Koreans at one level;
however, in rendering Northerners appealing, the films also entrench them as
other.
The Taepodong troupe
While one might therefore debate whether South Korea's recent delight in
finding the North a source of comedy represents a step forward for inter-Korean
relations, the comic mode itself can be applied in different directions. In
2002, Korea's premier comedy program, KBS2's long-running Kegu k'onsotu (Gag
Concert), ran a set of skits featuring the Kkotbonguri yesuldan (Flower Bud Art
Troupe).
The series involved a group of women in North Korean-style hanbok singing
slightly twisted children's songs, and the segment's affectionate humor
suggested naive but lovable country cousins. By September 2008, however, a new
set of Kegu k'onsotu skits had begun, featuring the Taepodong
yesulguktan (Taepodong Art Theatre Troupe).
Instead of flowers, the name references North Korea's ballistic missiles, and
the show's more mean-spirited jibes come across as a throwback to an earlier
era of virulent anti-communist ideology.
The segment's appearance in 2008 with the election of Lee Myung-bak is unlikely
to be a coincidence, whether we are witnessing a desire to pander to the
current government's essential abandonment of the "Sunshine" policy or a
reflection of a new national mood in dealing with North Korea. Each segment has
members of the troupe performing before a laconic Dear Leader, who gives
commands to the two military figures who flank him.
The troupe's vignettes vary in content each week, but one constant has been a
lesson on North Korean sat'uri (dialect) that has purported natives of
Hamgyong and P'yongan province demonstrating the niceties of expression in
their locales. The show plays on negative stereotypes about Northerners as
dirty, cruel and, despite being socialists, mad for money. The segment also
slights North Korean masculinity. Thus, the "translation" of "I want to sleep
with you" in Hamgyong dialect becomes "I've washed up," while in P'yongan, it
is "Don't move or I'll shoot." Likewise, we're told that, in order to lure a
woman, in Hamgyong one says "We've got a color TV," while in P'yongan it is
simply "tie her up."
The Sopranos in Seoul
If, however, the broad brushstrokes of television comedy can favor a view of
North Korea that is relentlessly stereotypical, literature offers the
possibility for far more sophisticated treatments, by allowing us to share in
the detailed imagining of a North Korean character's thought processes.
As a final case study, let me briefly consider Kim Young-ha's 2006 novel Pitui
Cheguk (Empire of Light), perhaps the most significant South Korean
novel of the new millennium to involve a North Korean character. The extent to
which a Northern identity has become "good to think with" is evident in the
compelling premise of this novel by Kim, widely regarded as the finest literary
light of his generation: the protagonist Ki-yong is a North Korean spy who has
been in the South since the mid-1980s and assumes that he has been forgotten
since he has had no communication from the North in a decade.
Over the years he has become assimilated into South Korean life as an indie
film distributor, with a former student activist wife and a daughter now
attending junior high school. Suddenly, however, he is summoned to return
within 24 hours, an order that has no possibility of being contravened. Aside
from the thought-provoking existential implications of the novel (how does one
confront the knowledge that in twenty-four hours one's life will essentially
come to an end?), the text presents Kim's intriguing meditations on the process
of identity formation and re-formation for a North Korean embedded in South
Korean society.
Not only do these meditations offer penetrating insights into the meaning the
North holds for contemporary Korean society, but the North itself becomes a
vehicle through which to explore the changes that the South has undergone over
the last generation.
Kim brings an urbane, ironic sensibility to his writing. Indeed, given the
almost obsessive namedropping of cosmopolitan pop culture touchstones in his
work, one suspects that he may have been influenced by the acclaimed HBO TV
series The Sopranos, which, with cool detachment, portrays the family of
a Mafia don as a suburban New Jersey family. Similarly, Kim tries to envision a
North Korean spy as part of a typical Seoul nuclear unit, but he brings with
him a fin-de-siecle, or perhaps better, debut-de-millenaire, take on South
Korean society.
Kim, shunning moralization, instead clinically portrays South Korean decadence:
Ki-yong's wife takes part in an explicit threesome with her university student
lover and one of his male friends; his co-worker is addicted to internet
pornography, and his daughter's best friend is known around school for having
flashed her breasts to a boy via a webcam.
While the various case studies I discussed above use North Korea as a simple
mirror to reflect the attractions and excesses of contemporary South Korean
consumer culture, Kim offers a more thoughtful and incisive view of the role
that consumer choice plays in establishing contemporary Southern identities.
Ki-yong has, in fact, managed to adapt successfully enough that his first
impulse upon receiving the order to return are to select a few books and his
iPod. Likewise, a former lover attempts to dissuade him from obeying the order
to return to the North by denying that he can still have allegiance to the
Party and the Dear Leader. For her, Ki-yong's Southern identity is proven
because he is an individual who can be defined in terms of consumption choices: I
know you. You like fugu-infused sake, sushi, and Heineken. Sam Peckinpah and
Wim Wenders movies. You love Camus' novel where Meursault kills an Arab. You
underline elegant passages in the writing of the gay reactionary Mishima Yukio.
You have seafood pasta for Sunday brunch, and on Friday nights, you drink
scotch at bars near Hongik University. Right? However, Ki-yong
remains an eternal immigrant and an outsider. While he does not experience
crippling angst, he cannot escape a quotidian anomie that results from the
additional Northern identity that he brings with him. Having lived now over
twenty years in the South has neither allowed him to re-establish a coherent
sense of self, nor to bridge the chasm of difference that yawns between the
North Korea he grew up in and contemporary South Korean society. This
alienation is likewise figured in pop culture terms: Gi-yong didn't
have the cultural experiences they took for granted from childhood. He grew up
without knowing about King Kong and Mazinger Z, Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan,
Donald Duck and Woody Woodpecker, Superman and Spiderman. Steve McQueen's Papillon
and The Great Escape were on TV every holiday in the South, but he only
studied them much later on video. He had no choice but to watch Gone With The
Wind and Ben-Hur on cable. He didn't recall when Cha Bum-gun
dominated the Bundesliga or the huge sensation caused by pop stars Kim Chu-ja
and Na Hoon-Ah. At Liaison Office 130, he memorized facts week after week and
was quizzed on them, but he only learned these items with his head. He could
give the right answers but couldn't feel their meaning in his heart. It made
him think of himself as a cyborg composed of circuits and microchips. He knew
more about Cho Yong-pil and Aster and Seo Tae-ji than anyone, and he could
rattle off the history of pro baseball and the student movement in the 1980s,
but that knowledge didn't fill his emptiness. In the world of
South Korea in the new millennium, with its
Continued 1 2 3 4
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