Joseph Jonghyun Jeon

Vicious Circuits

Korea's IMF Cinema and the End of the American Century

• Gebundenes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012).

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 12. März 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 160mm x 23mm
• Gewicht: 499g
• ISBN-13: 9781503606692
• ISBN-10: 1503606694
• Artikelnr.: 53535029

Autorenporträt

Joseph Jonghyun Jeon is Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry (2012).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
1Concrete Memories: Historiography, Nostalgia, and Archive in Memories of
Murder
chapter abstract
This chapter examines Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder and its forceful
articulation of post-IMF historical anxiety in Korea. In fictionalizing the
infamously unsolved Hwaseong serial murders in the Korean countryside that
occurred between 1986 and 1991, Memories of Murder employs and then
jettisons detective genre conventions as a way of testing and then
dismissing hermeneutic methods for making sense of the newly disorienting
present. The film's interest is thus methodological, using the failure of
investigation as a way drawing attention away from hermeneutic dead ends in
favor of a materialist orientation in which film apparatus is understood to
be the concrete product of a political economy that invariably indexes the
conditions that determine it. Its historiographic method moves us then from
serial to system, away from recursive killings that no one can explain
toward an understanding that makes sense of larger schema.
2Company Men: Salarymen and Corporate Gangsters in Oldboy and A Bittersweet
Life
chapter abstract
This chapter considers the abrupt social reorganization prompted by the IMF
Crisis, focusing on the figure of the salaryman in Park Chan-wook's revenge
trilogy-particularly in Oldboy (2003)-and its extension in post-IMF
gangster films, what I term kkangp'ae films. One of the most visible
figures in the aftermath of the crisis, the despondent salaryman, having
lost his job, becomes in these films a launch point for a critical effort
to think abstractly about exploitation in the credit relationship in a
period when national debt gave rise to consumer debt. The salaryman in
these films, however, is also a reification that disavows systemic
understandings of debt in favor of individual understandings that are
consistently rendered intelligible as personal rather than structural
pathologies. So although these films intuit the transformative changes
accelerated by the IMF Crisis, they remain constrained by the reification
that both accesses and limits their view.
3Segyehwa Punk: Subsistence Faming and Human Capital in Looking for Bruce
Lee
chapter abstract
This chapter investigates the phenomenon of Korean punk rock as represented
in Lone Kang's independent film Looking for Bruce Lee. Less a misanthropic
youth and more a new kind of worker, the segyehwa punk becomes an ideal
figure for a new labor logic in a globalized Korean marketplace that
privileges human capital over the forms of security implicit in the false
promises of lifetime employment that were once proffered by Korea's
chaeb¿l. Although these figures understand their relationship to the world
already in globalized terms, they also disavow its material realities. The
fantasy of human capital, however, can only partially elide the reality of
a collapsing youth job market. Under the rubric of what I call subsistence
faming, this fantasy, despite itself, reveals itself to be a survival
strategy amid bleak alternatives.
4The Surface of Finance: Digital Touching in Take Care of My Cat
chapter abstract
This chapter centers the depiction of gendered labor in Jeong Jae-eun's
Take Care of My Cat (2001), in which the film's five protagonists, all
young women seeking to enter the workforce, seem to actively participate in
the logics that make their own labor obsolete. The chapter focuses
specifically on the representation of technological remediation that
abounds in the film and is epitomized by a trope in which text messages
among the young women appear on various diegetic surfaces, like windows and
buildings. Such intermedial representations become a way of thinking about
the problem of integrating the young women into a changing economy. The
disparity between the growing technology and infrastructure in the film, on
the one hand, and the limited prospects of the women, on the other,
suggests that despite their fantasies of remediation, a more likely fate is
obsolescence.
5Math Monsters: CGI, Algorithm, and Hegemony in The Host, HERs, and D-War
chapter abstract
Moving from a focus on films that foreground post-IMF social reorganization
to those that seem to engage directly the systemic mechanisms of late US
hegemony, the underlying material infrastructures, and protocols that
facilitate and govern the new economic order in the Republic of Korea, this
chapter traces the overlapping recursive logics of CGI (computer-generated
imagery) cinema, US military technology, and contemporary finance, as
presented explicitly in the blockbuster monster films The Host (2006) and
D-War (2007), and obliquely in the independent diasporic film, HERs (2007).
All of these films self-reflexively index the algorithmic and mathematical
procedures that link contemporary filmmaking to military and financial
technologies. As a result, the surprising interplay of what might initially
seem like three discrete realms of production reveals a deeper systemic
logic that has driven the attempt to reproduce US power past its expiration
date.
6Wire Aesthetics: Tube Entertainment's Flops and Hegemonic Protocols
chapter abstract
This chapter investigates the wire shot, the increasingly clichéd
first-person point-of-view shot of imagined wire traversal in contemporary
action cinema. These reifications index while disavowing the material
history of the massive physical network of subterranean and undersea
cables, first built by the US military, that might serve as a figure for a
desire in late US hegemony to reproduce itself at the moment of decline, in
a manner similar to the British All Red Line system of telegraph cables in
the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a trio of films by the Korean
production company Tube Entertainment, all of which flopped at the box
office, this chapter examines the way in which post-IMF Korean culture
encodes the protocols of US financialization as the culmination of a long
history of imbrication between transportation infrastructure,
communications networks, and capital circulation.
Coda: Hegemonic Pork
chapter abstract
The coda briefly explores the afterlife and relevance of Korea's IMF Cinema
in contemporary Korean cinema, looking specifically at Bong Joon-ho's
second foray into Hollywood coproduction in his 2017 film Okja in relation
to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (TPP) that
same year. Made in conjunction with Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment and
released simultaneously in theaters and on the U.S.-based streaming service
Netflix, Okja is a transnational production explicitly about global
commodity distribution that reflects on its own status in the global
marketplace at the moment it seems about to close. Its choice of topic
(global pork distribution) points to the conspicuous absence in the film,
that is, China, which makes up one-half of the global pork market. Okja is
thus a post-TPP film that thinks about what a world system would look like
without US hegemony to center it.