Introduction

Abstract

The Introduction begins with a scene from the film, “The Face Reader” (2013), that dramatises the workings of fate and freedom as a metaphor and narrative device. An elaboration of how this theme applies to the entire book is followed by examples from films that demonstrate chapter-specific sub-themes within this overarching framework. Following an overview of the “Hallyu” films (mid-1990s to the present) as key components of the explosive rise, especially in sophistication and social significance, in South Korean popular culture over the past quarter-century, the Introduction closes with a preview of the book’s approach and coverage.

Towards the end of “The Face Reader”, a film set in mid-fifteenth-century Seoul, the character of Prince Suyang, following his bloody usurpation of the throne, shoots an arrow through a young man’s chest and blithely says to no one in particular, “I wonder if he knew that his son would die like that? I myself did not know”. In mocking contempt, though not completely, he was referring to the victim’s father, the “face reader”, who had stood next to the victim and whose pretensions of divining a person’s fate were suddenly pierced by brute force. Suyang, the historical figure who became King Sejo after this coup, embodies in the film this human potency. He had confidently expressed such a belief and even made the soothsayer concede, under torturous desperation, that Suyang did indeed possess the face of a great king and not that of a monstrous thief, as the face reader had warned earlier.

The second part of Suyang’s utterance, however, is just as telling, as it further refines this film’s balancing of fate and freedom, a theme that applies to history as to life itself. By revealing that he, too, did not know beforehand that he would shoot the fortune teller’s son, he appears to confirm the workings of chance and contingency, of unpredictability or the utter whims of fate, as it were. But Suyang’s arrow did not miss its target; he had changed his aim to the face reader’s son at the last second, a decision that seems to have surprised even the prince himself. This element of human agency, although often inexplicable and inconclusive, also supports the film’s posture that Suyang’s actions, however horrible, represent the capacity of individuals—and likewise of communities, societies, and nations—to reshape and redirect the path of destiny, to change fate as it were, not just curse it or cower to its inscrutability. Like death itself, destiny is unavoidable, but the timing, direction, and manner by which one reaches this end are alterable (Image 1).

Image 1

“I wonder if that man knew his son would die in such a manner”. Prince Suyang in “The Face Reader”

The prominence of this motif of fate and freedom in settings from the nation’s past characterises recent South Korean historical films. Released over the hallyu (“Korean wave”) era from the mid-1990s until 2020, they have not only carried a common concern with Korean history but also contributed to historical understanding and debate, even controversy, in South Korean society since democratisation in the late 1980s. As such, the balance of fate and freedom—or structure and agency, as well as cyclical and linear history—works as a universalistic concept and a symbol or plot device for illuminating past events, figures, and issues that, in turn, help in understanding Korea today. The presence of the past in the present (and future), as well as the reverse—the constant projection of contemporary concerns into cinematic depictions of the nation’s history—marks these films in ways large and small, and the best of the works expansively. “The Face Reader” (Gwansang [“Face reading” or “Physiognomy”]; Han Jae-rim, 2013), for example, deploys this theme also to spotlight the injustices suffered by common people, like the eponymous prognosticator or his son, who get entangled in treacherous court politics. Hence, the motivic tension between fate and freedom highlights the inequities of social standing, including the degree to which one’s ancestry or physical traits, such as one’s countenance, determined the division of wealth, status, and power.

The force of fate—to be faced, challenged, and overcome—often appears as the grand antagonist in varying forms, depending on the setting and particular plots, characters, themes, and outcomes. Fate, though, always functions as a deeply historical phenomenon, such as the solidification of Korean social practices over the centuries or even its apparent opposite, the sudden intervention of unforeseen but understandable factors. A reversion to fatalism to explain misfortune remains common today in everyday speech, with the use of the word for “fate”, unmyeong (or sometimes in-yeon), allowing room for adjustment and thus something a bit different in nuance from (usually negative) “destiny”, or palja, though the two terms are often interchangeable, as in English. In these films, however, fatalism rarely reigns supreme, at least not without a fight, and resistance appears as the struggle to exert freedom, whether against political oppression, economic exploitation, foreign intrusions, family, patriarchy, elders and traditions, or even the nation itself. The cruelties of the hereditary social hierarchy, for example, function consistently as this fateful power in films set in the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897). In modern settings, such stifling practices often overlap with or reappear as the unjust workings of the Confucian family system, gender and class inequalities, or ethnic tribalism. And representations of fatalistic forces originating from the outside, not surprisingly, reflect the common perception among Koreans that their long collective history has been chronically stricken with foreign invasions and interference. To use an obvious example, in the grandiose dramatisation, “The Admiral” (Chap. 2), of a battle against invaders from Japan in the late sixteenth century, the depicted savagery of the Japanese stands for this structural might—to be repelled, ironically, through the channelling of Korea’s natural elements by human will. And in an indelible scene in the Korean War fantasy “Welcome to Dogmakgol” (Chap. 6), fate materialises out of nature, as a rampaging wild boar. The human dimension is thus crucial, if only as an agent acting upon the heavenly order, and hence accentuates the distinctly modernistic primacy of people’s actions and responsibilities—their freedom to resist, defy, or recast fate—across historical settings. Fate looms over these dramatisations, but so is the awareness that Koreans, for the sake of their selves, families, or communities, have acted to redirect their destinies—though sometimes in conflicting and even immoral ways—by drawing on their individual resolve, national customs, and cultural legacies.

Not surprisingly, Buddhism, the oldest textual and institutionalised religious-philosophical tradition on the peninsula, suffuses the sense and sentiment of many of these films, and with a compelling consistency, given that, otherwise, Buddhism seldom makes an explicit appearance.¹ Furthermore, neither karmic retribution nor even the striving for escape from suffering takes the lead thematically; rather, it is the cyclical, transitory nature of being, and by extension of social identity and national history, that often centres Buddhism in these films’ metaphorical, allegorical, and semiotic frameworks. As expressions of perhaps Korea’s most basic and comprehensive cultural heritage, Buddhist cosmology allows the viewer to readily grasp how flashback sequences connect different temporal settings and render later or current circumstances—whether a person, family, society, or nation—as the product of a prior time. It thus makes sense that Buddhistic motifs are so readily deployed by the filmmakers, even subconsciously, in forwarding cinematic dramatisations as vessels for historical thinking and perceptions.

Even without a major role for reincarnation in the story (as in, for example, “Bungee Jumping on Their Own”, analysed in Chap. 8), the blending or frequent switching of scenes across time makes use of the distinctive advantages of cinematic storytelling, a tool that Korean filmmakers masterfully deploy. Nearly the entire storyline, minus the opening and closing scenes set in a latter or the present day, can take place as an extended flashback narrative that otherwise proceeds chronologically, as in “YMCA Baseball Team” (Chap. 5), “Taegukgi” (Chap. 6), or “Once in a Summer” (Chap. 7). In other films, such as “The Throne” (Chap. 3) or “The Old Garden” (Chap. 8), the sudden transitioning of scenes across time frames appears continuously and hence further accentuates the sense of historical connectivity and even circularity. And this constant affirmation of the ties between the past and present takes place in a range of temporal settings, from a single 24-hour period, as in “Eternal Empire” or “The Fatal Encounter” (both Chap. 3), to a full half-century, as in “Ode to My Father” (Chap. 8). In still other works, such as “Peppermint Candy” (Chap. 8), innovative constructions of chronology are indispensable to the story and equally potent in demonstrating the historicity of the characters and themes. In all these examples, a sense of cyclical time takes a major role, often integrating differing historical settings or varying chronologies within the same setting, and thus highlights the recurring presence of Koreans’ collective past. In such a way, circular notions of time powerfully modify the overarching dynamic of cumulative and linear progression, especially in films set in the modern era. Temporal mixture thus both re-expresses and reinforces the balance between fate and freedom as a negotiation also between the individual and society.

Hallyu History

It is difficult to overstate the scope and scale of change in South Korean cinema, and indeed South Korean popular culture as a whole, since the 1990s. These developments accompanied and further drove the political liberalisation begun in 1987, the loosening of censorship laws, and the general spirit of open inquiry and expression that blossomed in line with the explosive growth of the moviegoing audience and the rapid improvement of artistic and technical sophistication.² One notices especially the precipitous rise in production values, narrative, and acting, and not surprisingly both historical and non-historical feature films resonated with mass audiences at a much higher level than before. South Korean cinema, in sum, helped facilitate popular culture’s emergence as a cornerstone to democratisation, which resulted in compelling depictions of past events and characters with greater equanimity and complexity, warts and all. The mid-1990s witnessed the first such expressions of historical consciousness in the new era, though in befitting a transitory phase they also exuded a somewhat traditional feel: The Taebaek Mountains (1994, Chap. 6) and Eternal Empire (1995, Chap. 3). These works, while epochal in scope and sophisticated in visual symbolism, retained vestiges of the somewhat stilted acting of old and could not yet fully utilise the advances in cinematography and sound that would soon accompany the industry’s dramatic development. Starting in the early 2000s, however, historical films, which by then had matured comprehensively in thematic treatments and production values, led the way in accounting for record-setting box office hits in the 2000s³ and even more so in the 2010s.⁴ This book does not contend that the motive of fate and freedom was responsible for such popularity and artistic flowering, but this theme applies to just about all the major historical films released since the turn of the twenty-first century. Timing, in any case, seems to have been key.⁵

For historical films made before the hallyu era, it has been difficult to discern a particular thematic trait. In analysing a select sampling of postwar (1953–) historical films set in the colonial and Korean War periods, Hyangjin Lee suggested in 2000 that they had in common the overriding search for a reckoning between, on the one hand, national political division—a product of recent history—and, on the other hand, cultural unity, a legacy built over a millennium; in any case, the resolution to this dilemma, she found, was usually expressed as familism.⁶ This might be the case, but the pre-hallyu films also included many with premodern settings as well, however formulaic such movies may have been. Published just a few years later, in 2003, Korean Film: History, Resistance, and Democratic Imagination, while not analysing historical films separately, offered a firmly historical dynamic—nation-building in the form of democratic resistance—as an indispensable framework for the development of South Korean cinema, especially in the late twentieth century.⁷ If so, such an impulse could have lain the thematic groundwork for historical films’ ensuing concern with fate and freedom. In other words, the democratisation movement writ large across South Korea’s short but turbulent history, expressed as a determined struggle against dictatorship as well as other forms of traditional domination, would manifest prominently in film culture and cinematic works. Such an understanding can also account for other commonly identified thematic orientations in pre-hallyu era movies, such as the predominance of the sentiment of han, an aggrieved sadness that could readily be transposed to the level of national history; the quest for independence from foreign influences and interventions; and of course the overriding concern with people’s everyday struggles against oppression, which reflected the search for and triumph of democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s through the framework of the minjung or the “masses” (“the people”).⁸

These strands appear to have coalesced into a sophisticated combination of streamlined storytelling, realistic characterisation, and ever-increasing production values backed by large corporate studios in the late 1990s and early 2000s, in tandem with blockbusters that helped drive South Korean movie culture as a whole. For historical films, a further notable change came in the frank and iconoclastic revisiting of even the most recent past, whether the Korean War period or the just-ended era of military dictatorship. Hence, this flourishing of the hallyu cinema’s engagement with national history coincided with the growth of a main target of critical concern: the so-called Park Chung Hee syndrome, or the nostalgia in some social sectors for the former strongman of the 1960s and 1970s that shaded much of politics, or so it seemed. Younger directors of the “democracy generation” (“x86”), who had fought against authoritarian rule, appear to have made it their mission to express through cinema the progressive understanding of South Korea’s past,⁹ which eventually became the national historical orthodoxy itself. Just as only a fraction of theatrical films and blockbusters were historical treatments, however, only a portion of the historical films in the new century depicted the most recent eras. The other works took the spirit of more open engagement with the past to offer imaginative retellings of older events and figures, from the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) and even earlier, or, most interestingly, from the period of Japanese colonial rule (1910–1945). These films drew meticulously from scholarly findings and documentary sources, sometimes filtered through public understanding, and adhered to the ethos of verisimilitude. Such was demanded by the very high production standards set by hallyu films in general, which led to South Korea’s movie market becoming one of the few that overturned the domination of Hollywood. Nevertheless, historical accuracy per se was almost never the main objective of these films, and hence, it will not be an overriding concern for this study.

Still, this volume will forego art films that disregarded commercial gain or a mass audience. As such, no works are examined from major directors, Hong Sang-su or Kim Gi-deok, for example, that, while distinctively Korean, are not films set specifically in Korean history. Neither does Fate and Freedom consider “period pieces” or “costume dramas” set in a generalised past; instead, the films in this book mean to place the story in a particular historical setting and hence address specific concerns and issues arising therefrom. Most esteemed directors of this hallyu period since the mid-1990s, as if undergoing a rite of passage, have made at least one such foray into historical film. These include Park Chan-wook’s (Bak Chan-uk) “The Handmaiden” (Chap. 5), set lavishly in the colonial period of the early twentieth century, and Bong Joon-ho’s (Jun-ho) “Memories of Murder” (Chap. 7), his second feature, depicting the unsettling juncture of mid-1980s South Korea on the eve of democratisation. On the other hand, a small number of major directors has actually specialised in historical films, notably Kim Han-min and Yi Jun-ik, the former responsible for the biggest box office hit in South Korean movie history, “The Admiral” (Chap. 2), and the latter for probably the greatest oeuvre of historical works, including one of the towering achievements in the genre, “The Throne” (Chap. 3).

Notwithstanding particular patterns and proclivities in these directors’ creations, however, this book is not about auteurship. Nor is it technically a cinema study—for this, there are many accomplished works by professional film scholars, just as there are plentiful online sources of helpful film reviews and other information.¹⁰ Rather, this book seeks to offer an idiosyncratic perspective into both Korean history and Korean movies through a combination of the two. Put another way, Fate and Freedom is not an examination of cinema through its historical depictions, but rather a study of historical understanding depicted in cinema, with an emphasis on seeing how films can affect perceptions of history as much as the other way around. Through its thematic structure and chronological ordering (in film settings) of the chapters, the book’s narrative forwards particular points of analysis—articulated in the paragraphs, sections, and chapters—that, taken together, all strive to demonstrate the overriding theme of Fate and Freedom. Such interpretive framing also requires that some facets of the films that do not advance the analysis or involve historical issues, including main points of the plot if necessary, are given less attention. And in order to facilitate further viewings, very few endings of storylines are revealed in the following pages.

As much as anything, then, the aim is to aid in understanding and appreciating these works’ craftsmanship and contributions to perceptions of Korea’s past. For this purpose, the book will consistently offer background historical context for its discussion of the films and forward arguments regarding the dramatised portrayals of each major era covered in the individual chapters.¹¹ In this sense, this is a scholarly book, but its intended audience is not necessarily academia, whether in history or cinema studies, but rather a more general readership whose familiarity with Korean history or film is not necessarily expected. Historical films’ scholarly legitimacy and value as representations of the past have been the subject of many studies, often by scholars who are arguing for acceptance of both historical film and its academic consideration to professional colleagues.¹² In order to avoid being distracted by such issues, this book takes for granted that these films in fact can make key contributions, even interventions, in historical discourse and understanding. Fate and Freedom also sidesteps consideration of the panoply of production factors and other “behind the scenes” matters, however important they may be, in order to maintain its focus on the filmic text. It thus accepts and indeed celebrates these cinematic treatments, first and foremost, as dramatisations—designed to entertain, to be sure, but also to raise questions, establish historical meaning, and fire up the imagination about what did or could have happened. Even while informed by commercial considerations such as ticket sales, advertising and product placements, and the draw of movie stars, these works purposefully add to the comprehension, perception, and reconsideration of the past. And in catering to the strong historical consciousness of South Korean moviegoers, the approaches and messaging remain varied while upholding the very high standards of artistic craftsmanship that have characterised recent South Korean popular culture as a whole. This book thus comes from a historian’s joining—upon being drawn into—the cresting wave of serious treatment of this cultural space, a sign of intellectual wonderment at Korean cinema’s capacity to illuminate, reflect, and shape understandings of the past.