ABSTRACT:

Face Value: The Star as Genre in Contemporary South Korean Cinema
Michelle Cho (University of California, Irvine)

In 2003, the South Korean National Commission on Human Rights organized 6 prominent directors to produce short films about discrimination in South Korea. The resulting omnibus film, If You Were Me, addressed such topics as class and gender discrimination manifested in the pressure to seek plastic surgery (especially eyelid surgery, for a "western" look), the deployment of public shaming and guilt to maintain conformity to social norms, patriarchy, xenophobia and the abuse of migrant laborers, and class distinctions measured by access to English language instruction. While these issues have found coverage in South Korean news media, what was especially interesting about If You Were Me was the fact that each of the film's directors used the popular genre form as the vehicle by which to deliver their anti-discrimination message.

Realist filmmaker Park Kwang-su contributed to the project a film entitled Face Value, a supernatural fable about the tendency to make judgments based on physical appearance. The film details the abusive interaction between a male chauvinist character and woman who happens to have both a lovely visage and a low-status job as a parking lot attendant. The man, who's spent the night in the parking garage after a night of drinking, repeatedly attempts to provoke the woman. Riled by her unresponsiveness to his advances, he accuses her of acting rudely because her physical beauty prevents her from "knowing her place." The ugliness of the man's entitlement and histrionic behavior elicits sympathy, on the part of the viewer, yet the film's anti-discriminatory message about class falters on its unwitting confirmation of the power of physical beauty to confound social hierarchies.

It is perhaps this tacit conclusion that speaks most directly to the social norms and conventions that condition the star system that structures South Korean popular culture today, and that can begin to explain its valorization of physical beauty--and pretty faces, in particular—beyond simple readings of the commodification of aesthetic ideals. Though much ink has been spilled in both popular and scholarly venues on symptomatic readings of beauty ideals and the ubiquity of plastic surgery in South Korea, my essay will discuss the particular generality of the film star as a generic figure. Thus, I bracket the generic faces of surgically sculpted beauty (though they serve as a crucial subtext), and examine instead the function of the star's intertextuality—the plastic, yet structured ways in which celebrities come to signify general types in their absorption of particular affective intensities. I dwell on the example of Bong Joon-Ho's Mother, a film that I argue masterfully deploys the signifying system of the star's generality, in its casting of both Won Bin and Kim Hye-Ja, an actress whose many earlier performances in maternal roles have aggregated to her countenance both an iconicity (a generalized symbolic significance) and an indexicality (a specificity of meaning through her embodied appearance in these roles) as the film's titular Mother.

In contrast to Mother's generic, intertextual mother, I next examine Won Bin's star text, whose re-emergence after his mandatory military service (an interval during which his civic obligation to national defense ironically allowed him a respite from the even more militant ranks of celebrity culture) in the role of Kim Hye-Ja's developmentally retarded yet beautiful son, marked one in a series of attempts to depart from his pretty boy image. I go on to argue that in the recent Man From Nowhere (아저씨), (Lee Jeong-Bum, 2010), a bona fide star vehicle, Won Bin's persistent visibility as himself, in the very attempt to disown this image through his performance as a brooding, hyper-masculine action-star (which the film's title already designates as a generic body), serves as a potent illustration of the parameters of the star as genre. Overall, my essay seeks to better describe the particular workings of celebrity in the context of contemporary Korean pop culture, to better understand the ways in which the convergence of audience's aspirational fantasies and these fantasies' deliberate disappointment condition the particular genre of the South Korean film star.

Michelle Cho is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with emphases in Visual Studies and Critical Theory. Primarily interested in the way the affective register of the geopolitical is expressed via contemporary cultural production, her research concerns genre transformation in the context of contemporary South Korean screen cultures, cultural translation in cinema, transnational East Asian cinema, the affect and temporality of modernization in East Asia, documentary film and video, and phenomenological and psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity.