ABSTRACT
In contemporary Korean TV costume drama, the Creator’s miracles yesterday have become the directors’ special effects. The magic of “the cherubim and the flame of the whirling sword” (Genesis 3: 24) can be readily animated by computer-generated images.1 Given the violence inherent in the sword, any creation myth for an apocalyptic new era entails considerable destruction. Eerily, not only is Genesis’ sword without a hand to hold it but a flame enshrouds it mid-air. A flame consists of intense heat and light. Although without mass of their own, their bodiless immateriality transforms materials around them. Moreover, the flaming sword floats in the air, menacing due to its unpredictability. But these unstable tropes intimate the possibility of hallucinatory will-o’-the-wisp; Genesis is the “Once Upon a Time” to open any good story, from bedtime to ghost. The sword guards the way to the Garden of Eden, wherein grows the
companion trees of life and of the knowledge of good and evil. The fallen humanity is forbidden to return to the prelapsarian state, which houses, nonetheless, the twin divine-perhaps human-secrets of collective immortality and individual demise. The Korean Wave professes a similar paradox: heroes in costume dramas create a utopia for the future, which is a reprise of the mythical past. In Freudian terms, the originary wound of the castration complex drives the repetition compulsion of fetishizing, for instance, the sword, and of reenacting the pre-natal oneness in the womb, where self-consciousness is as yet unformed, hence unburdened by pain. Both psychic acrobatics are, nonetheless, futile, since the sword reinscribes rather than eliminates the phobia of castration and infantile regressiveness comes swathed in nationalist, masculinist rhetoric. Seemingly thriving on an essentialized Koreanness and Asianness in con-
cert with modernity and Westernization, the Korean Wave at times suppresses Asian differences in favor of the West, most perverse in celebrities’ and society’s taken-for-granted plastic surgery for the look of youth and Caucasianness and in the fixation on bigger and better, from local to regional to global cinema. If globalization by way of late capitalism is truly emancipatory and egalitarian, as Fredric Jameson theorizes in Postmodernism (1991), then we should be reading in Asian languages Watching Jumong or The Modernity
of Dae Jang Geum penned by mainstream Asian scholars. After all, Ien Ang of Asian descent had written Watching Dallas and Douglas Mao of partial Asian descent had been a leading critic in Western modernism. Instead of Asian scholars of Western extraction building careers in Asian languages, we have the mixed race Daniel Henney, who could barely speak Korean, striking it rich in the Korean entertainment industry, ever since his role in My Name is Kim Sanshun. Needless to say, Henney and other mixed race entertainers are all Caucasian-looking. This lop-sided power dynamic gainsays the theory advanced by Cho Hae-Joang, Shim Doobo, and others that the Korean Wave resists Western hegemony by signaling the rise of Asian regionalism.2 Indeed, revenue figures and statistics of the popularity of the Korean Wave do not a valid argument make. Quite the contrary, celebrating the Korean Wave via external factors of marketability risks commodifying it, defeating the theme of value in sincerity rather than money so many films and dramas cherish in their protagonists, such as Shan Dao (The Tao of Business) in the wake of the 1997 International Monetary Fund crisis. Relying on sales record to the exclusion of content analysis leaves the impression that the products are of such poor quality that it would not stand up under close reading! Whereas textual analysis and cultural history of three costume dramas on Korea’s genesis, the originary source of Koreanness, do expose the problematics of the Korean Wave, self-knowledge, albeit painful, serves to unveil subconscious repression, the first step to enlightenment. The three costume dramas on, overtly or otherwise, Korea’s genesis are
Damo (Joseon Yeohyeongsa Damo), fourteen episodes of TV drama originally run on South Korea’s MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation) from July 28 2003 to September 9 2003; Jumong, eighty-one episodes originally run on MBC from May 15 2006 to March 6 2007; and Tae Wang Sa Shin Gi (The Story of the First King’s Four Gods, henceforth Tae Wang), twenty-four episodes originally run on MBC from September 11 2007 to December 5 2007. In chronological order of their original run from 2003 to 2007, the three TV dramas retreat, progressively, into the mythological time, from the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) to Jumong’s founding of Goguryeo in 37 BC to the legend of Dangun attributed to 2333 BC.3 The trajectory also takes them further away from social realism. Damo is a tragedy of social injustice and a failed revolt, failed in part due to the taboo over incestuous love. Jumong is a long-winded, self-congratulating nationalist project of a legendary founding father. Tae Wang abandons all pretense of history and realism in its special effects-glutted opening and overall structure, interspersed with closeups of the protagonist Bae Yong-jun’s pretty but wooden face. From the pseudo-historical and psychologically transgressive Damo to the jingoistic Jumong to the phantasmogoric Tae Wang, TV costume dramas in South Korea in the first decade of the new millennium have undergone a selfinflation or, rather, self-projection, whereby Damo’s forbidden impulse and man-made injustice are transmogrified into otherworldly phantoms in Tae Wang.
