The Birth of Korean Cool (19 page)

“They have product placements on American TV shows, too,” I said, trying to make him feel better.

Chung shook his head. “It’s not the same thing. On American TV, the product placement is not that obvious.” Whereas on
Iris
, the products are glaring and some of them
don’t make sense within the context of the show. “Kia is one of our biggest sponsors. So all the characters in
Iris
have to drive a Kia. Whether the characters are South
Korean, North Korean, or Europe an. We had to send Kia models K5 and K7 by airplane to Hungary so all the actors there would be shown driving it.”

He continued, “Our second biggest sponsor was Samsung. Everyone uses Samsung phones, even the North Koreans, even as a spy camera. Also, there is no reason in
Iris
why anyone had
to be on a bike, but we had to show a Mando bike—an electric bike—four times over the course of twenty episodes.” The root of the problem, said Chung, is that the national
television networks are still very powerful and don’t invest a lot of money in shows that “don’t fit within their rules.”

In addition to product placements, Chung had to hustle by selling the
Iris 2
rights overseas before the series was even finished. The gamble paid off:
Iris 2
has been sold to
Japan for $6 million, making up over a third of the budget.

To maximize funding, Chung put together a multimedia entertainment extravaganza—typical Korean entertainment company fashion.
Iris
is a video game, as well as a live concert that
toured only in Japan.

The
Iris
concert, which aired in 2010, featured the leads of
Iris
singing a song or two—including Lee Byung-hun, who has made a name for himself as an action star in
Hollywood films like
GI Joe
and
Red 2
. This was followed by the K-pop boy band Big Bang, singing the song it provided for the soundtrack. There were a few pyrotechnics: a
light-and-sound show; a stylized reenactment of a chase scene that evoked
West Side Story
but with some actual, fairly dangerous on-stage stunts; then—perhaps most
important—the
Iris
stars expressed their heartfelt thanks to the fans in a mixture of Korean and Japanese. The concert was a smash.

Chung knows better than most how big a deal Hallyu is. Before he became a television producer, he was a concert promoter: first in Los Angeles, then in Seoul. He was responsible for bringing
acts like Celine Dion, MC Hammer, and Michael Jackson to Korea for the very first time. In those days, it was an uphill battle getting the artists’ agents on board. “People would say,
‘Where is Korea?’ ” Chung recalls.

No one will ever ask him that again.

As Chung demonstrates, Hallyu may be a machine and a national strategy, but history is still made by great men. At the end of the day, the biggest milestones in the export of Korean popular
culture are always brought about by individual artists with talent and vision. In K-dramas, the great men (and women) may be the creators of shows like
Winter Sonata
and the
Iris
series. In film, the great men—in my opinion—are director Park Chan-wook (
Oldboy
,
Stoker
) and a mild-mannered civil servant and professor you’ve never heard of:
Kim Dong-ho.

LIKE MANY WHO GREW UP IN SEOUL DURING MY TIME,
I had no interest in watching Korean movies at the cinema. Until the 1990s, there were only a few
genres: cheap and formulaic cop dramas, doomed romances, and moralistic films about vice and addiction. Even the Korean auteur films were overly artsy and not in a good way: very sparse dialogue,
no plot, and with bleak and dissatisfying endings. One highly celebrated Korean film released in 1993,
Seo Pyun Jae
, was so torturously boring that given the choice, I’d have
preferred to undergo waterboarding, but I couldn’t walk out because my father was making me watch it. It was about a little girl training to be a classical Korean singer, but her father feels
she doesn’t have enough depth of sorrow—specifically, not enough
han
—so he gouges her eyes out. His plan worked; she became a consummate, if blind, singer, so: happy
ending. I fell asleep during the film and got yelled at by my dad, who was constantly frustrated in his attempts to make me appreciate Korean culture. Pointing out to him that my grandmother had
fallen asleep as well did not help matters.

Mostly, we’d watch Hollywood blockbusters, French films, or that year’s Cannes winners. Seoul only had a handful of theaters, mostly enormous but always crammed. Owing to the
disproportionately high ratio of the population to the number of screens, getting tickets to any of them was often an ordeal. Because of a quota limiting the number of foreign films entering the
country, theaters would show one film for months and were slow to bring in new films. Moreover, complicated licensing agreements meant that it sometimes took over a year for foreign movies to hit
Korean theaters.

The biggest hit of my youth was a French film, the Sophie Marceau vehicle
La Boum
, about a twelve-year-old girl who throws a big party to get the attention of her crush, Mathieu. The
film was released in France in 1980 but it took about five years to reach Korea. It was my favorite movie. I loved that the heroine’s grandmother was the one who came up with the scheme for
capturing Mathieu’s heart—something no Korean grandmother would do for her preteen granddaughter—and that a children’s film showed a father who has a mistress and it was
handled comedically. The movie sparked my lifelong Francophilia.

La Boum
is just one example of how movies were a means of escape for Koreans. From the Sandra Dee films of my parents’ day to the French teen flicks of mine, movies for Koreans
were a means of dreaming of a different fantasy life. No wonder we didn’t watch Korean films.

Cinema is yet another area in which government intervention in culture paid off in spades. Korea once again demonstrated its unique magic trick: by passing a few new laws and fertilizing the
right areas with money, it was able to spur explosive creativity and an entire film renaissance.

In the years following Korean democratization in 1987, the nation relaxed the quotas on foreign films. I was delighted, but the immediate aftereffects of the new openness weren’t good for
Korea. The government discovered to its horror that its worst nightmare had come true: western pop culture was taking over the country.

In 1994, an article that ran in the South Korean newspaper
JoongAng Daily
reported that ticket receipts for non-Korean films went up from 53 percent of the total in 1987 to a whopping
87 percent in 1994. The Korean film industry was suffering, producing about half the number of films it had made a decade prior.

South Koreans were at a turning point. They could have reacted by banning foreign films, but the horse was already out of the proverbial barn. How can you get him back once he’s seen the
cyborg policeman turn into liquid metal in
Terminator 2
? Instead, Korea crafted a completely different strategy: beat Hollywood at its own game—or at least try to.

In May 1994, the Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology published a report positing that if
Jurassic Park
could make as much money in a single year as selling 1.5 million
Hyundai cars (twice the annual sales of that car), then South Korea should be making blockbuster movies, too. The government acted swiftly, removing censorship restrictions and creating tax
incentives for companies investing in filmmakers. In 1995, Kim Young-sam issued a presidential decree—
a presidential decree
—to enact the heady-sounding Promotion of the Motion
Pictures Industry Act, which stiffened the penalties for violating the preexisting (but not clearly enforced) quota system. Under the new act, a movie theater that did not show Korean films for at
least 146 days per year would have its business license suspended.
¹

Without these draconian measures, there would probably have been no films like the 2004 Cannes Grand Prix–winning revenge film
Oldboy.

MR. VENGEANCE:
OLDBOY
DIRECTOR PARK CHAN-WOOK

Park Chan-wook is the kind of writer-director who makes me wish there was a better word than “genius” to describe someone. A word that was not so overused as
to be emptied of meaning.

Best known for his so-called vengeance trilogy—
Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
,
Oldboy
, and
Lady Vengeance
, Park is, in the entire history of cinema, the undisputed
master of revenge. He is to revenge what Alfred Hitchcock is to suspense, what Peter Jackson is to fantasy, what Lars von Trier is to anti-American films with shaky camerawork.

Since winning the Cannes Grand Jury Prize for
Oldboy
in 2004, Park has been the most famous director ever to emerge from Korea. Quentin Tarantino, who has often spoken of his admiration
of Korean films, is a huge Park fan. While on the Cannes 2004 jury, Tarantino pushed for
Oldboy
and subsequently played a large part in advocating the film’s North American
release.

Aside from his Cannes bona fides, Park made the world’s first film shot entirely on the iPhone (
Night Fishing
, 2011).

Park did not set out to become a filmmaker—that was not really a viable childhood dream for any Korean from his generation—he was born in 1963. As an undergraduate at Seoul’s
respected Seogang University, he studied philosophy but his heart wasn’t in it once he realized the Catholic-run university’s philosophy department offered more courses in Thomas
Aquinas than in aesthetics, where his true interest lay. So he started a university cinema club and, upon graduation, wrote film reviews for a living, worked on the occasional film crew, and made a
few small films that got little attention.

His big filmmaking breakthrough came in 2000, with the timely and deeply moving feature film
Joint Security Area
—a movie whose tear-jerking political moral would surprise fans who
only know Park for his vengeance films. The film tells the fictional story of North and South Korean soldiers serving on either side of the demilitarized zone who accidentally become fast friends,
even though the friendship could cost them their lives. At the time, it was the highest-grossing film in Korean cinema history.

Shortly afterward, Park embarked on the vengeance trilogy that made him famous. Park’s intensity—the pureness and one-mindedness of the avengers—cut through decades of
pretentious Korean films and hypnotized audiences as no Korean film had before. In Park’s films, revenge is beautiful. The avengers become invincibly strong, their senses are sharpened, and
they have laser-sharp focus on their target. They are beyond good and evil. Never before had a Korean director so clearly defined what it meant to be an antihero or brought such immediate emotional
engagement from audiences.

I asked Park what his fascination with revenge was. He said, “Vengeance is comprised of the most extreme human emotions, when you set out to explore the human condition, it becomes a very
interesting experimental environment.” Clearly, his philosophy studies continue to inform his work.

In Park’s film universe, revenge is not base; it’s highly evolved. Park believes that vengeance actually goes against animal instinct; animals try to preserve themselves, whereas
humans do not: “Through an act of vengeance, you can’t ever actually hope to achieve anything effective or gain any benefit. Because it is very human to be able to invest yourself in
something without having any real benefit, without expecting to gain anything.”

Oldboy
, which Park wrote and directed, is a prime example of this. Based on a Japanese manga and loosely on Alexandre Dumas’ novel
The Count of Monte Cristo
,
Oldboy
tells the lurid tale of a slovenly everyman, Oh Dae-soo, who is abducted and placed in a highly illegal private prison where rich people hold people they don’t like. Oh
remains there for fifteen years, where he is served nothing but dumplings.

When Oh is finally released, for reasons as mysterious as his imprisonment, he is importuned by a smelly homeless man who hands him a cell phone and a wallet stuffed with cash. The cell phone
rings. Oh answers it. It is his captor, daring Oh to find out what he was being imprisoned for. What ensues is a glorious duet of mutual vengeance between two men, each of whom is simultaneously
captor and prey. The violence is gory but also wildly imaginative. No one really dies of gunshot wounds in a Park film. Each act of violence is a ballet. Park not so much frightens you as he
captures your own nightmares. You have no idea how chilling a close-up of teeth can be until you have seen a Park film.

Unlike the mainstream vigilante genre, Park’s films are not for escape. They are meant as philosophical confrontations, engaging the audience in a debate over honor, loyalty, violence, and
the fundamental question of what it means to be human. They force you to confront yourself when, for example, you see a man cutting off his own tongue with a blunt pair of scissors and you catch
yourself thinking, “That’s exactly what I would have done.”

Cathartic though they might be, Park’s films offer very little in the way of redemption. When I asked him what he thinks happened to the avenging protagonists after the events of the
movie, Park said, “I imagine they would feel quite empty because they have lost their goals and their reason for existence.”

Part of the global appeal of the vengeance trilogy is that the audience projects themselves onto the screen and into the avenger’s shoes. Park said, “It’s no different from a
romance film, for example, in that every audience member—and the filmmaker—would like to do something similar to the story portrayed on the screen. In the same way, a revenge story is
one that audience members deep down would like to feel themselves.”