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Bourgeois Extreme: Cultural Flows and the Microimport

2022; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cul.2022.a838301

1460-2458

Sangita Gopal,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Bourgeois Extreme:Cultural Flows and the Microimport Sangita Gopal (bio) PART 1: RESONANCE AND THE MICROIMPORT In the spirit of Koichi Iwabuchi's call to study cultural globalization by looking at intra-Asian relations and circuits of circulation and Kyung Hyun Kim and Youngmin Choe's attempts to reengage formal analysis in the study of transnational flows of popular culture, 1 I would like to examine what I am calling the "microimport," by which I refer not to large-scale transfers of cultural products across different national contexts (e.g., adaptations of Japanese manga to Taiwanese television dramas) but rather to the importation of smaller elements of storytelling conventions, narrative construction, mise-en-scène, framing, cinematography, editing, sound, and so on from one cultural form to another that enables existing genres to reorient and refresh themselves in relation to emerging social dynamics. Here, I would like to examine how elements of the Korean "revenge" film is selectively adapted by Bollywood (or Indian popular cinema in the Hindi language) to create a subgenre that I am calling "bourgeois extreme." These elements introduce into Hindi cinema a new problematic of revenge and the figure of the middle-class avenger whose vengeful acts not only blur the line between good and evil but subsume all moral codes under the category of debt. Whether such a character is particular to Korean cinema or not is beyond the scope of this paper; however, my research suggests that Korean cinema's conception of revenge as an act not confined to a particular social stratum (e.g., the gangster)is a very significant element of its reception by Bollywood cinema. Further, the elaborately orchestrated and visually thrilling form that the revenge scenario assumes is also attractive to Bollywood, for it is a commercial film industry always on the quest for cinematic attractions that [End Page 101] will secure audience interest. Moreover Korean cinema's difference from Hollywood, whose conventions it uses, modifies, localizes, and critiques, and its success in creating a domestic film culture and film product that successfully competes with Hollywood in domestic markets and enjoys a reputation internationally make it comparable to the aspirations of what has been called the New Bollywood cinema, which since the 1990s or so has sought to cultivate a more urban and middle-class audience that primarily watches films in the country's many upscale and higher-priced multiplexes. 2 The putative similarity between the political economy of the new Korean cinema and New Bollywood is precisely what makes the microimport both viable and necessary to the reinvention of the Bollywood revenge film. The media-industrial metrics that have mostly organized the study of intra-Asian cultural flows via data-driven and audience- and fan-oriented research, while vitally important, have a hard time computing the more granular exchanges that help assemble a global-popular aesthetic. Yet as I shall try to argue, these more elusive flows do not occur in any manner whatsoever, but rather the political economy and cultural dynamics of what Jinhee Choi (and others) have called the South Korean Film Renaissance 3 finds resonance in the Indian context as New Bollywood cinema crawls out of postcoloniality into globalization. 4 My attempt here will be to work with resonance as a mode through which we might think about how the global-popular comes to be, using the vicissitudes of the Korean revenge thriller in Bollywood cinema as my case study. PART 2: GENRE AND MIMESIS As two film cultures outside of Hollywood that now have substantial domestic markets as well as transnational circulation, Korean and Hindi popular cinemas have somewhat opposing tendencies vis-à-vis Hollywood, especially with regard to genre. 5 Hindi cinema for most of its history never really aspired to generic typologies as defined by Hollywood; it blithely borrowed stories, aspects of plot rather than narrative structure, as well as stylistic and technical elements in fits and starts. These borrowings generated anxieties about the derivative nature of Hindi popular cinema, but this mode of haphazard appropriation could hardly be viewed as copying, since the generic [End Page 102] environment they were incorporated into was particular to Hindi film. More recently, the form-content issue...