The Beautiful, the Lame, and the Weird: Three Types of Colonial Heroes in Contemporary Korean Films

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, films based on the colonial period have consistently been produced due to two forces generated in the latter half of the ’90s. One is the flow within the humanities to reconstitute the colonial period with a perspective of cultural modernization spreading out to mass culture, and the other comes from the tendency to creatively narrate the national trauma that was evoked by the IMF crisis in Hollywood-style big-budget action blockbuster films. This paper considers the male hero of a colonized Korea in three different ways: as the de-ideologized hero who shares victimhood with the male hero of the Japanese empire in a buddy-double relationship, as an independence activist caricatured anachronistically for rigidly adhering to ideology, and as a superhero who becomes the imaginative winner through the grammar of genre films. In post-authoritarian Korea, where de-ideologization and survivalism is prevalent while the incomplete task of decolonization is still at hand, these characters are meaningful as stilladvancing figures in a state of potentiality, which reflect the public sentiment that recalls the colonial period with an ambivalence that includes both visual pleasure and historical indebtedness.