ABSTRACT
Subtexts of the Manchurian Western The Good, The Bad, the Weird/Chounnom nappunnom isanghannom (2008), directed by Kim Jee-woon, is a ‘Manchurian Western’, a genre which appears to be specific to South Korean cinema. The term ‘Manchurian Western’ appears to be synonymous with ‘Korean Western’ as opposed to, say, ‘Chinese Western’. The Manchurian Western form takes on some distinctive characteristics that we will go on to elaborate upon (perhaps the most distinctive aspect is its space which is quite different from the Southeast Asian topography of Tears of the Black Tiger and the set-in-Nevada wilderness of Sukiyaki Western Django). Critics and scholars of the Korean cinema have tended to distinguish between the ‘Manchurian action film’, which is also sometimes referred to as the ‘continental film’ (see Chung 2012, 289), and the ‘Manchurian Western’. The latter has been called a ‘subset of the Manchurian action films’ (Cho 2015, 49), which, according to Jinsoo An appeared later in the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, the Manchurian action film began ‘to don Western garb’ and the ‘genre’s hybrid features were more pronounced’ (see An 2015, 796). In any case, the ‘Manchurian’ term appears to indicate a type of action film set in the vast Chinese northeastern provinces formerly known as Manchuria and which were occupied by Japan from 1931 until the end of the Second World War. ‘Manchuria’ then is a cinematic space composed of ‘barren desert landscape (that) serves as a geographical and cultural parallel to the American West’ (Lee 2011, 135), and this seems to be the condition for which the Manchurian action film becomes a Western.
