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Tourist Distractions: Traveling and Feeling in Transnational Hallyu Cinema

2017; Rowman & Littlefield; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/21581665-4226550

2158-1665

Haerin Shin,

Japanese History and Culture

In March of 2017, the Chinese government banned its citizens from booking trips to South Korea through travel agencies as a show of displeasure with the South Korean government’s decision to install THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense). The idle streets of Myŏngdong now bear little trace of the bustling energy they had enjoyed in 2016 when Hallyu tourism was at its peak; just last summer, hundreds of buses filed into Panpo Han Riverside Park, carrying eight thousand Chinese tourists to a city-sponsored samgyet’ang (ginseng chicken soup) feast and a miniconcert featuring original soundtracks from the popular television serial Descendants of the Sun (2016). Meanwhile, the flow of Japanese tourists has palpably thinned over the past decade as Korea-Japan relations have grown sour over territorial disputes and postcolonial reconciliation issues, such as the Japanese Comfort Woman Agreement of 2015. With rumors of FTA and defense-budget renegotiations hanging heavily over the horizon, South Korea-United States relations are also under strain even as North Korea threatens to take its militant isolationist policy to the extreme, the uninhibitedly public nature of Kim Jongnam’s recent assassination being a prime example. Youngmin Choe’s Tourist Distractions arrives at this timely juncture, when South Korea’s tourism industry is suffering a major setback as a result of the roiling vicissitudes of international affairs across Asia proper, addressing the incipient moments of Hallyu in its capacity to mobilize affective networks beyond cultural, historical, and political delineations. The soft-power discourse behind the “third wave” of Hallyu as a state-sponsored branding mechanism has ironically rendered not only the Hallyu market but also its aesthetic integrity vulnerable to nationalist pressures, as seen in the current downturn of Hallyu tourism/export, the casting controversy surrounding Bridal Mask (2012), or recent failures of major television productions―such as Uncontrollably Fond (2016) or Moon Lovers: Scarlet Heart Ryeo (2016)―that naïvely relied on overseas Hallyu celebrity fandom without ensuring diegetic cogency.The spatial and temporal trajectories of Tourist Distractions operate along three vectors, respectively: South Korea’s relationships with Japan, China, and North Korea (three countries), etched across colonial and postwar legacies that lead up to East Asia’s neoliberal present (three temporal indices). With the spatial dynamic directing the course of intercultural mobility and the historical arch providing causal grounds, the three-pronged dual layers undergird the kinetics of affective engagement, situating human travel as “flows of capital, material goods, and cultural productions that epitomize the Hallyu phenomenon, and vice versa” (p. 6). The sense of fluidity Choe emphasizes with the word flow is of particular import not only because it captures the critical focus of Tourist Distractions but also because it enacts the affective nature of the exchanges, developments, and relations Hallyu cinema facilitates in, first, representations and practices of travel, and second, the mode through which they occur: namely, in a state of distraction. Affect is “synonymous with force or forces of encounter” (p. 2), Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg note; force here means movement without the kind of forcefulness we associate with soft power, the manipulative connotation of which belies the modifier soft. Transpiring “within and across the subtlest of shuttling intensities,” affect includes and arises from “all the minuscule or molecular events of the unnoticed” (p. 2).1 The “unnoticed” intensities of shuttling forces map onto the sociopolitical landscape of Hallyu tourism and the human bodies they carry across both physical and conceptual borders, riding the nascent wave of newly forged cultural alliances that snuck up on East Asia around the turn of the millennium. Moreover, the optics of Hallyu tourism is one of distraction via attraction, whereby the actuality of the site elides one’s sight in its referential gesture to virtual narratives and figures that inhabit the locale in their potentiality rather than immediate presence. Inverting this logic of projective appreciation by identifying filmic representations and practices of tourism that destabilize preexisting “images and ideas of society” through their extradiegetic referentiality, Choe captures the vectors of mutual influence and causality that drive South Korea’s evolving ties to Japan, China, and North Korea. Her choice to pair each of these three relational nodes in the larger constellation of transnational politics with the communal affects of intimacy, amity, and remembrance is all the more relevant given the current milieu of political dissonance, for as Patricia Ticineto Clough maintains, the mutual dynamic of affect―affecting others and in turn being affected by them―is largely indebted to accrued layers of causal entanglements: “Affects require us, as the term suggests, to enter the realm of causality, but they offer a complex view of causality because the affects belong simultaneously to both sides of the causal relationship.”2Having laid out the broader strokes of her project in the introduction, in part I, Choe delves into the “intimacy” that began to germinate between South Korea and Japan, first by introducing us to pornographic encounters in the joint film productions of Kazoku Cinema (Park Chul-soo, 1998) and Asako in Ruby Shoes (E J-yong, 2000) in chapter 1, and then taking us to the popular film locations of April Snow (Hur Jin-ho, 2002) in chapter 2. Arriving in the wake of South Korea’s cultural deregulation policy, the two films in chapter 1 signaled newly arisen prospects of collaboration, portending the 2002 Seoul-Osaka World Cup. While the characters’ interactions denote the banality of life entrenched in personal emotions, their mode of representation (documentary/online pornography) connotes the persistent shadow of historical burdens, whether they are postcolonial reconciliation or the reproduction of colonial exploitations. The “ordinary affects” that situate these collaborative ventures at the crossroads of intimacy and unease, “public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation . . . the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of” (p. 2), mirror the emotional entanglement of the two countries that have always stood so near, yet so far from each other.3 Turning to film locations, chapter 2 transposes the site of affective encounter from cinematic simulacrum to physical places that become platforms of reenactment (which Choe calls “affective sites”). Whereas the films in chapter 1 show how the shifting relations between South Korea and Japan catalyzed new connections on diegetic and formal levels, April Snow expands the scope of movement to the physical realm by translating the transnational impulse into bodily travel, positioning Hallyu as a commercial enterprise that actively capitalizes on the circulation of affect.Part 2 examines the South Korean film industry’s collaborative ventures with China and Hong Kong through readings of Musa (Kim Sung-su’s 2001 “making of” documentary [MOD]) and the appropriation of Hwang Sunwon’s postwar novella A Shower in Daisy (Andrew Lau, 2006), focusing on the affect of “amity” that sprung from the production and design process. Musa marks a pivotal moment in Hallyu’s East Asian emergence by reopening channels of exchange between South Korea and China as a pioneering on-location film on mainland China, the first since the Cold War. The large-scale investments and subsidies that supported the venture, along with the challenging conditions that brought the on-site crew and actors together as comrades in battle, not only mirrored the shifting terrains of economic relations between China and South Korea but also gave rise to “provisional feelings”—amplified affects that transform anxiety into mutual appreciation by virtue of conditioned proximity. While seeing the film itself as a metonymic MOD, Choe also takes care to situate the extradiegetic frame in conversation with the formal and narrative dimension of the film. Her point on Musa’s effective use of cinemascope and the reimagined history of Ming-Koryo dynamics responds to Kyung Hyun Kim’s concern that “forms that express the global era’s anxieties are [indeed] imperative in order to assert hallyu’s role in the protonationalist, neoliberal enterprise.”4 Chapter 4’s key term is “affective palimpsest,” a concept Choe devises to explain the migration of affective tropes across cultural contexts to generate new aesthetic registers. Observing how sonagi as a symbol of purity that assuaged the stains of war and colonial rule travels into the era of post–Cold War affluence and becomes the trope of unruly gratification in Kwak Jae-yong’s signature Hallyu film My Sassy Girl (2001), and then a signature of aestheticized violence through Andrew Lau’s neonoir touch in Daisy, Choe expands on her claim that Hallyu cinema is characterized by an aesthetics of distribution, in this case via the process of reinscription that disarticulates affects from their context-specific symbolism.Part 3, “Remembrance,” further complicates the vectors of transnational mobility by returning to the Korean peninsula and tracing the afterlife of its unified past up to the present divide (or alternative imaginaries of futurity). Training her focus on the DMZ in chapter 5, Choe reads its representation in Joint Security Area (Park Chan-wook, 2000), Yesterday (Chŏng Yun-su, 2002), and 2009 Lost Memories (Lee Si-myung, 2002) as a revitalization of suspended history, noting how tourist forays into the forbidden limbo of trauma endow the DMZ with palpitating desires to reconnect. Invoking Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory,” Choe investigates how the spectral remnants of ideological strife become a living legacy to feel, experience, and reimagine. Here, remembrance is more than conjuring up the dead and is instead an act of agential reconstruction that allows for creative maneuvers that speak to unspoken trauma or even the lack thereof (in the case of later generations). Choe’s point that tourist portrayals of the DMZ “help demonstrate how postmemory works in generations increasingly removed from the original event” (p. 145), in this light, reifies the transgenerational phantom of Korea’s postwar fracture through the DMZ as a spatiotemporal cypher while suggesting the possibility of embracing, rather than exorcizing, the phantom back into the realm of lived experience by infusing it with new affective forces. Chapter 6 takes the reader on a tour around the film locations of Kang Je-gyu’s Korean War film Taegukgi (2004). This time, the scope and reach of the tour extends to the commercial projects built around the sets, including theme parks and exhibitions. Recounting her experience of personally visiting these attractions, Choe dubs them “transient monuments”: simulations of formal commemoration sites that facilitate the embodiment of postmemory. The “attraction” factor of these places, while helping history to reassert itself across generational divides, also serves as “distractions,” however; the attractions’ primary objective being entertainment rather than remembrance, they blur the distinction between affect and memory, folding history into consumerist practices. Choe’s critique is a sobering reminder that communal affect―although hailed as an antidote for the logocentric subject―cannot readily supplant conscious engagement.Choe concludes by acknowledging that while the works she examines in the book fall outside the larger umbrella of arthouse or blockbuster films that have gained traction around the world, their formal, diegetic, and production mechanisms offer an alternative understanding of Hallyu as an affective collaboratory of multivectored circulation rather than a promotional engine for the culture market. Veering away from the larger body of scholarship on Hallyu that either reproduces or dismisses the neoliberal enterprise of cultural engineering, and broadening her target of analysis to encompass the roots of Hallyu in mass culture, Choe accomplishes her goal of transforming Hallyu into “a bona fide critical term.” Although hardly the most prominent medium behind the force and momentum of Hallyu in comparison to television serials and popular music, the film medium could be what Choe calls an “affective sensorium” because it provides a condensed platform whereby Hallyu as movement (wave/flow) could coalesce and branch out via the human networks it cultivates. Enriching the oeuvre of Korean film scholarship with its theoretical rigor, Tourist Distractions fills a critical gap in Hallyu studies by placing it in productive dialogue with Korean studies, tourism studies, film studies, cultural studies, and visual/cultural anthropology.