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The new generation on screen: youth cinema and youth culture in South Korea since the 1990s

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The new generation on screen: youth cinema and youth culture in South Korea since the 1990s

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THE NEW GENERA TION ON SCREEN:
YOUTH CINEMA AND YOUTH CULTURE
IN SOUTH KOREA SINCE THE 1990S

by

Hyong Shin Kim

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Hyong Shin Kim
ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful to many people for their help and support during my Ph.D.
journey over the last few years. Without them, this dissertation would not have been
completed.
First of all, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor, Professor
Akira Lippit. Whenever I needed his help, he was willingly available, and shared his great
knowledge and critical way of thinking. In addition to his help for my Ph.D. dissertation
and his intelligence shown in classes, his support and encouragement enabled me to endure
hardships throughout my Ph.D. years, and made me have confidence to be a scholar. To be
his advisee was one of the greatest aspects of being at USC, for which I was able to shape
an ideal role model of an advisor as well as of a scholar.
Special thanks also go to Professor Youngmin Choe, whose nuanced approaches to
and meticulous readings of visual texts were a great inspiration in my study. Throughout the
process of writing this dissertation, her insightful suggestions and guidance made my vague
ideas much clearer and helped me articulate. In addition to her help in my Ph.D. dissertation,
her professional example has been a great motivation for me to pursue my goal to be in
academia.
I am extremely grateful to Professor David James. Throughout my Ph.D. dissertation
writing, he provided invaluable suggestions and guidance, both through written comments
and during conversations. Also, his Korean cinema course was one of the best classes I have
ever taken. His teachings in Korean cinema, history, and culture broadened my analytical
iii

imagination and contributed to this dissertation a great deal. I also appreciate him for being
always supportive and kindly accommodating of my schedule during the struggling years of
dissertation writing. It has been a great pleasure and honor to learn from him and have him
in my committee.
I owe special gratitude to Professors Sunyoung Park and Anne McKnight, who
provided insightful suggestions at the early stage of my Ph.D. dissertation. For the historical
context of youth study in Korea and Europe, I am particularly indebted to them. In order for
me to complete this study, their interests and suggestions for my dissertation subject were
indispensable. Also, I would like to thank Professors Dominic Cheung and George Hayden
for being very understanding. I was very fortunate to work with them during my Ph.D. years.
In addition to the professors at USC, I would especially like to thank scholars in Korea,
Professors Heup Cho and Hyung-sook Lee, for having been my mentors and friends.
Help from the librarians at USC was absolutely essential in writing this dissertation.
Particularly, I would like to thank Joy Kim, curator of the Korean Heritage Library.
Whenever I needed a book that was hard to access and whenever I had questions about
library searching, she gave me solutions immediately with extreme kindness. I also would
like to show appreciation to Sun-yoon Lee from the Korean Studies Multimedia
Collections for her building up the amazing collection and giving me personal privileges to
access DVDs upon my urgent requests. These people’s kindness and willingness to help
my research enabled me to access all the materials available related to my study.
In this limited space, I cannot name all of my wonderful fellow graduate students at
USC and my friends in Los Angeles who made this dissertation possible in various ways.
iv

Although studying at a graduate school and writing a dissertation are long and lonely
processes, thanks to my colleagues and friends, I was able to manage the stress of the
great amount of research and deal with writer’s block during my dissertation writing.
Their intelligence, sense of humor, and and friendship turned my life as a Ph.D. student
into a blessing.
I would also like to thank the approximate three hundred USC undergraduate students,
with whom I became associated as a teaching assistant. They gave me precious
opportunities to improve myself as a teacher, which will be invaluable for my future career.
Their hard work and belief in me made my graduate school years more delightful.
Now I have become the third person to hold a doctoral degree among my siblings.
As the youngest child with one brother and four sisters, I would like to thank my five elder
siblings for exposing me to the world of art, philosophy, and literature during my early
childhood. My foremost special thanks go to my loving and encouraging parents, who
have filled our home with fascinating books, have influenced my sensibility, and
welcomed and supported my path to becoming a scholar. Thank you.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ii
ABSTRACT vii
INTRODUCTION 1
Cinema as the Core of Popular Culture 3
Previous Studies of Youth Cinema 7
Defining Youth Cinema 11

CHAPTER 1 KOREAN YOUTH CULTURE 15
The Emergence of Youth and Youth Culture 15
The New Generation of the 1990s in South Korea 19
The Seo Taiji Generation 23
Youth and Popular Culture 32
Being Young Is Painful?:
The New Mode of Political Engagement of Youth in the 2000s 35

CHAPTER 2 HISTORY OF YOUTH CINEMA IN KOREA 39
1960s: The Advent of Youth Cinema 39
1970s: High Teen Cinema 45
1980s: The Korean New Wave and High School Film 47

CHAPTER 3 REPRESENTATIONS OF YOUTH IN CINEMA SINCE THE 1990S 49
Youth in Korean Cinema since the 1990s 49
High School Cinema 51
1. Friendship in Torment: Bleak Night 51
2. Girls’ Dreams Come True: Bronze Medalist 57
Juvenile Delinquency 65
1. Adolescence, Adulthood, and Society 65
2. Aimlessness and Social Obligation: Three Friends 73
Coming-of-Age Sexuality 77
1. When a Boy Becomes a Woman: Like a Virgin 77
2. Adolescent Body: Mother 84
Music Cinema 95
1. Punk, Hip Hop, Rock’n Roll,
and the Youth Culture in the Hong Ik University Area 95
2. The Emergence of Rock and Roll Cinema in South Korea: Acoustic 97
3. The K-Pop Industry 101
4. New Media and Fandom Culture 112
5. A Star Is Born: Mr. Idol and White: Melody of Curse 121
6. The Representation of Youth in Music Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s 125
vi

AFTERWORD 127

BIBLIOGRAPHY 132

vii

ABSTRACT

This study constitutes a consideration of the sudden excess of youth culture since the
1990s, which was deeply influenced by both domestic politics and global change. I argue
that popular culture has existed within youth culture from its beginning in South Korea,
and vice versa. This dissertation examines the representation of youth and youth culture in
South Korean cinema in relation to other popular culture, with the following aims.
The first consideration is to elaborate upon the relationship between youth culture and
the popular media. The second is to examine the mechanism of how youth culture,
positioned within popular culture, flourished in South Korea, particularly since the 1990s;
situating youth culture in relation to popular culture requires an analysis of the historical,
political and social contexts. Thirdly, the dissertation aims to theorize South Korean youth
cinema and to elaborate upon both the critical and social aspects of youth cinema. Finally,
by analyzing youth films according to specific themes, this dissertation explains how the
South Korean media represent youth culture and the meaning(s) produced by representing
youth culture through the popular media. This research ultimately aims to explore how
youth consumes and negotiates with popular culture.

１

INTRODUCTION

In every South Korean bookstore, one book, titled It Hurts Because It’ s Youth has
been ranked as the top bestselling book since its publication in December 2010. It is an
unusual phenomenon for a collection of essays written by a relatively unknown university
professor to become a bestseller in Korea. Nando Kim, the author, included in the book the
essays that he felt were the most poignant for the young people of today because, based on
his experiences as a university professor, “these days young people [are] standing alone in
front of life.” Kim, now famous and known as the “mentor of young people,” has more than
20,000 Twitter followers. Although his book assumes a twenty-something audience, it is
popular with all age groups because it touches the emotions not only of readers in their
early twenties but also those who will soon be that age and those who have already
experienced the twenty-something period. The fact that this book is so popular among
readers of all ages shows that the emotional, social, and economic crises of the young
generation living in the 2000s are a collection of complex, unrelated issues that preoccupy
all generations. The popularity of this book suggests that the discourse of young people,
particularly that of the generation in their late teens and twenties, is a symptom of the
conflicts confronting Korean society at the turn of the century and questions why the notion
of youth-as-pain has received so much attention and empathy. Is youth in 21
st
century
Korea something painful? Does the notion of youth-as-pain problematize Korean society
and provide comfort for the young generation, or does it reinforce the status quo that
oppresses the young generation? Although it could be all of these things, the popularity of
２

the book shows that the notion of youth in crisis is pervasive in contemporary Korean
society.
Throughout modern Korean history, discourse that focuses on the younger demographic
has exposed the nation’s social, economic, cultural, and political changes (and the
complexities of those changes). Each of the young generations have been classified according
to their decade and based on a historically crucial event or an economic or cultural issue. For
example, those who spent their late teens and twenties in the (1) 1940s and 1950s were the
Liberation Generation/the Post-war Generation; (2) the 1960s were the 4.19 Generation; (3)
the 1970s were the Yushin Generation; (4) the 1980s were the 386 Generation; (5) the 1990s
were the X Generation; (6) the late 1990s and 2000s were the IMF Generation; followed by (7)
the Candlelight Generation and the 880,000 Won Generation.
1

Thus, it is important to examine Korean society from the perspective of the young
generation of each period because this generation signifies and symbolizes the conflicts and
complexities that Korea faces. I argue that the issues that the young generation raises reflect a
combination of problems resulting from the nation’s government-led modernization, abrupt
economic growth, military dictatorship, education fever, and elitism that have evolved
throughout the country’s recent history.
The deep engagement in Korea of cinema and youth reflects a generation in the margins
and with the way in which this generation negotiates mainstream culture and hegemony. The
proposed study will analyze the following subjects. The first subject involves the relationship

1
The term, “880,000 Won Generation” was coined in 2008 by an economist and is meant to refer to the fact that
the average monthly income of an employee in their twenties is only ₩ 880,000—approximately $700 US—
because most of them are part-time employees. More detailed analysis of each generation will be discussed in my
dissertation.
３

between youth culture and popular media since the 1990s. The second subject explores why
youth culture, positioned within popular culture, has flourished in South Korea, particularly
since the 1990s. This subject will require an analysis of the historical, political, and social
contexts of youth culture. The third subject is an attempt to classify South Korean youth films
and to elaborate upon the critical and social aspects of these films. Finally, through an analysis
of youth films according to specific themes, this study will explore the mechanisms by which
youth and youth culture are represented in the youth cinema of South
Korea.
This dissertation examines the following research questions. (1) How do youth and
youth culture affect contemporary South Korean films? (2) What makes youth cinema since
the 1990s different from the cinema of previous years in South Korea? (3) What differentiates
youth cinema in South Korea from that of other nations? (4) In what ways can the
development of youth cinema be triangulated with the changing youth culture and social
context of South Korea? By addressing youth culture as represented in youth cinema in South
Korea and including both male and female youth cultures and issues of sexual identity during
adolescence, the results of this study may offer theoretical contributions to academic youth
culture studies.

Cinema as the Core of Popular Culture
I suggest cinema as the core of popular culture among youth in South Korea since the
early 1990s. In my study, cinema is used as the convergence of various popular culture,
including not only film itself, but also music and television. In addition to several popular
４

media, in the term cinema, I also include various practices concomitant with popular culture
such as movie going activities, the fandom practices of stars, music concert participations, new
media activities, and so on. That is, I suggest cinema as the core of youth culture to explain
various actives, practices, and popular media among youth generation since the
1990s.
Cinema is the most important medium for explaining youth culture because it is
significantly rooted in the everyday lives of young people in Korea. The young Korean
generation engages cinema—or, more accurately, the culture of cinema—actively and
significantly when compared to the young generations of other nations. In Korea, the young
generation watches movies more frequently than it engages in any other activity. Because the
young generation is not only the most important consumer age group but, in many cases,
members of this generation are also producers, cinema lies at the center of youth culture in
Korea. To examine how the young generation understands and is understood by society, it is
crucial to explore the medium of cinema.
More than any other popular media, cinema has been positioned at the core of popular
culture since its first appearance in Korea in the early 20th century and throughout the
Japanese colonial period and the post-Korean war period. Given the impact of cinema on the
masses, cinema is arguably the most effective hegemonic art/medium, as Antonio Gramsci
suggested, because it employs less threatening devices than other types of media. The
proposed study suggests that cinema is an important medium in late capitalist societies, such as
the society of South Korea, because the mode of production must represent and align with the
needs and desires of consumers. This is particularly true because cinema requires enormous
５

capital for production compared to other popular media, such as literature, music, television,
(with the exception of blockbuster TV shows) or other fine art.
The significance of cinema in South Korea is twofold. First, in the political and national
arena, cinema has been strictly regulated by the government in modern history through
institutional censorship or the voluntary censorship of filmmakers because of the power of
films to effectively present social commentary. The development of the South Korean film
industry has been deeply affected by governmental policies pertinent to the popular culture
industry. Second, in the everyday lives and culture of South Korean citizens, South Korean
cinema has led the most popular trends in lifestyles and fashions while effectively reflecting
contemporary popular trends.
In addition to the importance of cinema in South Korean popular media, cinema is
vitally interesting to youth in South Korea. The popularity of South Korean cinema is clear in
statistics that show how it is consumed by South Korean audiences. Since the 1990s, the
market share of South Korean cinema has been approximately 40% to 80% of all films shown
per year in Korea. With the exception of the United States and India, each of which has a
95% market share of domestic films, this market share is the highest in the world. The high-
level market share of domestic films in South Korea is partly due to the screen quota system
mandated by the government for Korean movie distributors since 1967. Furthermore, statistics
show that Korean cinema is extremely popular among audiences in their twenties
and thirties. According to the 2011 statistics of the KOFIC (Korean Film Council), from 2006
to 2010, 40% to 60% of viewers preferred Korean cinema, whereas 20% to 40% of viewers
６

preferred American cinema. Preferences for European, Japanese, and Chinese cinema were
between 1% and 2%.
2

For male audiences, Korean cinema is preferred more often by those in their twenties
and thirties than by those in other age groups, whereas for female audiences, Korean cinema is
the preferred cinema for all ages according to the KOFIC. Another significant survey
conducted by the KOFIC suggests that the majority of movie audiences are composed of
people in their twenties. For males, the age group that attends movies most frequently is
between the ages of 24 and 29, whereas for females, the age group that attends movies most
frequently is between the ages of 19 and 23 (Korean Film Council 2011). These two age
groups go to movie theaters 17 to 19 times per year. If one adds the number of movies that
these audiences watch through TV (both network and cable channels), DVD, the Internet, and
mobile devices, the number of movies viewed by people in their twenties increases
substantially.
3

In addition to the popularity of cinema, another symptom of the cinephilia of South
Korean youth is the popularity of art house cinema and film festivals among young audiences
since the 1990s. The cinephilic generation emerged in the 1990s and includes those who
regularly visit cinematheques to view films that were banned from circulation or import and

2
KOFIC, Statistics: The Prediction of the Market Size for Korean Cinema (language in Korean),
http://kofic.or.kr/cms/58.do, 2012.
3
According to the statistics, people in their twenties watch approximately one movie every week through the
internet and mobile devices. Further, the survey that KOFIC conducted shows how important movie viewing is
to everyday lives for Koreans. In the survey, the question of how people spend leisure time, for indoor activities,
breaks down as follows: internet was 27%, TV was 26%, and watching movies (through TV, the internet, etc.)
was 20%; for outdoor activities, going to movie theaters was 28%, shopping 21%, and dining and exercise were
16% each.

７

art house films that were not theatrically circulated. To meet the needs of these cinephilic
audiences, art house movie theaters emerged in the early 1990s. Art house film (or Auteur film)
directors from around the world, such as Andrei Tarkovski, Abbas Kiarostami, and Wong Kar-
wai, were the idols of enthusiastic young audiences. The fervor of the cinephilic generation for
esoteric films reached its peak with the establishment of the Pusan International Film Festival,
which opened in 1996. Osgerby suggested, “The characteristics that seemed to set ‘youth’
apart as a distinct cultural group were not their bio-psychological attributes, but their
distinctive patterns of media use and practices of commodity consumption.”
4
The cinephilic
Korean youth of the 1990s have a distinctive mode of popular media consumption that
provides them with a specific peer identity. Thus, leisure activities that focus on the movie-
going experience among youth are unique among Korean youth and differentiate them from
the youth of other nations.

Previous Studies of Youth Cinema
A review of the literature revealed an incomplete and unbalanced body of literature
about youth cinema. Studies of youth cinema are extremely rare, not only in the case of
Korean cinema but in cinematic studies in general. As Timothy Shary has contended, it is
perplexing that studies about youth cinema are so scarce in comparison with the abundant
studies on “other film roles whose real-life equivalents are much less common, such as
gangsters, cowboys, monsters, and soldiers.”
5
Although scholarly research on youth cinema

4
Bill Osgerby, Youth Media, New York: Routledge, 2004, P. 9.
5
Timothy Shary and Alexandra Siebel, Eds. Youth Culture in Global Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press,
2007, p. 3.
８

in English academia began only recently, in the 1980s, this research led to the publication of
several books on the subject. These books include The Screen Image of Youth: Movies about
Children and Adolescents by Ruth Goldstein (1980); The Cinema of Adolescence by David
Considine (1985); Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the
1950s by Thomas Doherty (1988); The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth
Culture by Jon Lewis (1992); Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary
American Cinema by Timothy Shary (2002); Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of
Girlhood (2002) and Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (2005), edited
by Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance; and Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female
Adolescence on Film by Sarah Hentges (2005). The focus of these scholarly works, for the
most part, is on American cinema.
On the topics of youth culture and youth cinema both within and outside of the United
States, Youth Culture in Global Cinema, edited by Shary and Alexandra Seibel (2007),
contains an essay on Chinese “youth problem” films in East Asian cinema, but Korean
cinema is not included in the anthology. Regarding works on youth cinema in East Asia, Little
Friends: Children’s Film and Media Culture in China by Stephanie Hemelryk Donald (2005)
examines Chinese films, focusing on pre-adolescent children.
Both within and outside Korea, studies on Korean cinema tend to concentrate on the
following topics either singularly or in combination: globalization, nationalism, political
history, genre (frequently melodrama), gender, and sexuality. These topics are significant in
film criticism for obvious reasons. Additionally, scholarly works on Korean films made during
the Japanese colonial period have begun to flourish in recent years.
９

A review of South Korean youth cinema publications shows that very few studies have been
conducted on youth in Korean cinema. Similarly, only a few essays in Korean cinema history
books have been devoted to youth cinema, and the content of the films discussed has been
limited primarily to high school teen films of the 1970s. Such films (known as Hakwon-mool
in Korean) were popular and prolific in South Korea during that time. One short essay
published in 2005 in the journal Cinema Studies was Soowan Chŏng’s “A Comparative Study
on Youth Films in Korea and Japan in the 1950s and 1960s,” and a master’s thesis, titled A
Study on the Building of the Chungchoon Film Genre in the 1960s, was written by Wooseok
Lee in 2004.
A study of the literature failed to reveal any book or book-length empirical study of
Korean youth cinema published in either Korean or English. However, two essays on South
Korean youth cinema were published in English. The first is David Desser’s “Timeless,
Bottomless Bad Movies: Or, Consuming Youth in New Korean Cinema” in the anthology
Seoul Searching: Culture and Identity in Contemporary Korean Cinema (2007), and the second
is a chapter in The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers, Global Provocateurs by
Jinhee Choi (2010).
6
These two works are limited in their representations of youth cinema not
only because of the lack of depth and range of the work in relation to youth cinema but also
because of the content discussed within the essays.

Desser’s essay presents multiple themes depicting youth in contemporary South Korean
cinema since the mid-1990s. For example, youth are portrayed as members of gangs, as bar
hostesses and prostitutes, or as individuals engaging in crime sprees, whereas class differences

6
Timothy Shary and Alexandra Siebel, Eds. Youth Culture in Global Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press,
2007, p. 3.
１０

or university life may appear as themes in other movies. In his essay, Desser mentions
approximately 30 contemporary films about youth that were made in South Korea after the late
1980s. However, it is not clear what he means by “youth” or “youth film.” For instance, he
includes movies such as My Wife Is a Gangster (directed by Jo Jin Kyu, 2001), Green Fish
(directed by Lee Chang Dong, 1997), and Failan (directed by Hae-sŏng Song, 2001). In
particular, he refers to the film Two Cops (directed by Woo-sŏk Kang, 1993), whose main
characters are middle-aged and do not portray the lifestyle of youths, although he mentions
that the protagonists are “young.” Furthermore, in the subchapter titled “Consuming
Teenagers,” Desser clearly states that he discusses films representing teenagers rather than
films targeting teenagers.
7
Therefore, although he claims that he examines media that
represents the adolescent demographic group, his inclusion of films whose protagonists are
far from being “young” or teenagers is misleading.
In the chapter “Once Upon a Time in High School: Teen Pics” from The South Korean
Film Renaissance, Choi focuses on films set in high school (as the title of the chapter suggests).
She argues that high school is the focus of “oppression and repression” in contemporary South
Korean cinema.
8
Following Timothy Shary’s classification of youth films in American cinema,
Choi divides South Korean high school films into three categories: teenage delinquents, teen
horror films, and high school romance.
9

7
David Desser, “Timeless, Bottomless Bad Movies” in Seoul Searching, ed. Frances Gateward, Albany: New
York State University Press, 2007, p. 77, 81.
8
Jinhee Choi, The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers and Global Provocateurs. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press, 2010, p. 118.
9
In this chapter, Choi uses the terms “Inside and Outside of High School,” “A Cinema of Girlhood,” and
“Impossible Romance of Their Own.”
１１

These three categories are useful and convenient because they enable the scholar to
consider teen films of various genres, such as gangster, comedy, melodrama, and horror genres.
However, despite Choi’s insightful examination of youth-oriented films in contemporary
South Korean cinema, her discussion of each category is limited because the study of youth
film is limited to teenage films. In addition, the discussion of the degree to which the films are
representative of certain themes is rather skeptical. For instance, in her discussion of the
“cinema of girlhood,” Choi deals primarily with horror cinema (mainly the Whispering
Corridors series). In the context of the spectrum of cinema about adolescent girls, Choi
delivers only a partial picture of these young teens. By focusing only on the Whispering
Corridors series in girls’ high school films and by including only horror cinema, Choi ignores
many relevant films and themes in contemporary South Korean youth-oriented films. Further,
because the discussion is limited to only one chapter of the book, Choi’s analysis of youth film
does not attain its full potential.

Defining Youth Cinema
At the beginning of his work on teen films, Jon Lewis pointed out that, since the
definition of youth is “fragmentary and fleeting, transitional and transitory,” research on youth
is “inexact and incomplete.” Therefore, he argues, “with teenagers, we must always be
flexible.” The fact that the concept of youth is fluid means that, to define the term “youth
cinema”—that is, to set the scope of films under that category, to classify those films, and to
１２

define the boundaries of youth culture—will always require a certain taxonomic flexibility.
10

The same is true for this study.
Youth cinema is known in Korean as chŏng chun (youth) yŏnghwa (cinema). chŏng
chun is a Sino-Korean word, where chŏng means blue and chun means spring—that is, the
season when blossoms turn blue. The traditional interpretation of the word chŏng chun, based
on the seasonal metaphor, refers to a demographic group in its late teens and early twenties. As
the composition of the Chinese characters connotes, youth is associated here with the period in
life that focuses on the formation of one’s mental and physical identity—the stage of maturing
into adulthood, and supposedly obtaining a degree of social authority or power. In this sense,
youth is a sensitive phase—a phase of vulnerability, where uncertainty about events can lead
to a future of uncertain possible outcomes—which varies based on a given society’s values,
standards, and norms. Ultimately, the concept of youth is constructed; it is not natural and it
cannot be defined simply as a set of static numbers, such as biological age. It is constructed
socially, culturally and psychologically.
This dissertation will acknowledge certain elements of film genre and will explore its
relation to youth cinema. In addition, it will explore the suggestion that genre study is one of
the most controversial areas in film theory, as demonstrated by scholars such as Thomas
Schatz (Hollywood formulas), Rick Altman (a semantic/syntactic approach), and Linda
Williams (the body genres) This dissertation will not delve into the theories of genre, however,
in part because the question of genre in film theory is not the main subject of the research and
in part because genre theory is another, completely different subject, worthy of dedicated study.

10
Jon Lewis, The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture, New York: Routledge, 1992, p. 1-
2.
１３

To explain his methodology of research into US teen films, Thomas Doherty suggested
that “The critical departure is not without its own problems: it assumes, but does not define,
the shared—and, for most viewers, unquestioned—sense of what a genre is; it appropriates the
referential convenience of genre-like categorizing without observing its standards and
practices; and it makes ready use of the vocabulary of genre.”
11
Traditional methodology for
classifying genres (which is mostly based on Hollywood cinema) includes the categories of
comedy, western, musical, horror, sci-fi, melodrama, gangster, and so on; in addition, sub-
genres exist under each genre, such as screwball comedy, film noir, crime thriller, monster
horror and so on. The genres of Hollywood cinema were established during the studio era, a
time when studios were producing films based on certain formulas and conventions. These
genres have limitations or misrepresentations when discussing contemporary Korean cinema
(or East Asian cinema). An example is the genre of remake films, whether they are cross-
cultural or remade by the same director, or martial arts films, a distinguished genre when
examining East Asian cinema, if they can be called a genre at all.
Generic categories are constantly changing, expanding, evolving and being hybridized.
Ultimately, genre is a vague concept, or, at least, there are several ways to define it. Youth
cinema emerges as neither a genre nor a sub-genre in the application of genres based on the
narrow definition of classical Hollywood cinema. Rather than a full-blown genre, youth
cinema can be classified as a sub-genre of films of a certain genre or genres, or it can be said
that there are all different kinds of genres under the category of youth cinema.

11
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002, p. 12.
１４

Youth cinema can never have a clear-cut definition, even though the term is vague on
the one hand, but has obvious references on the other. This dissertation, uses the term youth
cinema to refer to films that address the issues and culture of young people, which is, again,
flexible in the South Korean context.

１５

CHAPTER 1: KOREAN YOUTH CULTURE

The Emergence of Youth and Youth Culture
Although the age group that corresponds to youth has always existed, youth is a modern
concept. The concept was constructed according to economic, social and historical contexts.
The notion of youth as the distinctive life stage between childhood and adulthood was
embodied in the nineteenth century in Europe after the industrial revolution and the
development of the social-welfare system, resulting in the formation of youth social groups. In
academia, psychologists and sociologists began to theorize the youth generation, for example
in Erik Erikson’s work on psychological development in childhood and Stanley Hall’s
Adolescence in 1904, which coined the famous phrase “storm and stress” to refer to the phase
between childhood and adulthood. Importantly, Talcott Parsons first delineated the concept
“youth culture” in his essay The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States in the
early 1940s.
The concept of youth and its historically and socially contingent invention as
demonstrates that defining youth in a numerical sense is not critically meaningful. The attempt
to define youth as a set biological age is insufficient to fully understand what youth means.
Some scholars, such as Joe Austin and Michael Willard, have even argued that youth is a
“metaphor” for “adult agendas, desires, or anxieties.” In research into youth in the US, they
correctly suggested that youth is a “social identity.” In other words, youth is constructed
１６

through “discourse”: “how older meanings are sustained, transformed, or supplemented, and
how new meanings are produced, circulated, challenged, revised and reproduced.”
12

A survey of the literature reveals that it is not clear when the concept of childhood and
adolescence first emerged in Korea. Based on magazine publications, it may be fair to argue
that the notion of childhood or adolescence as a distinct phase of human life emerged some
time during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Nam-sŏn Choi, one of
the first modern Korean writers, founded magazines called Sonyŏn (Boy) in 1908, the first
modern magazine in Korea, and Chung Chun (Youth) in 1915. These magazines did not target
only young readers . Choi used these specific titles for the magazines as metaphors for the new
nation that needed to gain strength by abandoning the old: the word “boy” represented the
modernized person.
13

Chŏng-hwan Ch’ŏn, in his essay on reading literature in the modern era, argues that the
conflict between the older generation and the younger generation became visible at the
beginning of the twentieth century. Ch’ŏn contended that, during the Chosŏn era, adults and
young people read the same texts and no specific text was circulated for the younger
generation. According to him, the concept of the child emerged in the twentieth century;
however, the concept of the age range of a child was somewhat different from that in the
twenty-first century. For example, the magazine Ŏrin-ee (Child) was circulated from 1924 to

12
Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard ed., Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-
Century America, New York: New York University Press, 1998, p. 2-4.
13
Sejin Yoon, “From Boy to Youth, the Spectacle of Modern Knowledge” in The Window of Boy and Youth: the
Everyday Lives of Early Modern Period in Magazines, Bodrae Kwon et al. Seoul: Ehwa Woman’s University.
2007. P. 26. And Jung-hwan Chun, “Reading of Books and the Change of Culture in the 1920-1930s” in Re-
reading the Modern. Yoon Haedong et al. Seoul: Yeoksa Bipyoung-sa. 2006. P.45.
１７

1927; however, 80% of the readers of the magazine were teenagers (aged 13 to 18), and
readers younger than teenagers made up less than 10% of the audience.
14

Two different youth trends have apparently developed in Korea, a fact that epitomizes
the uniqueness of Korean youth culture: one trend enjoys Western popular culture, and one
aims for a nationalist consciousness. Yet, they are not mutually exclusive; they overlap in the
way that, for instance, one could enjoy Hollywood cinema while participating in the
democracy movement. The two aspects overlap in many cases. From the early twentieth
century to the present, as Korea went through the Japanese occupation period from 1910 to
1945; the political turmoil after liberation and the Korean War from 1950 to 1953; the military
dictatorship that ran from the 1960s to the 1980s; the economic miracle of the 1970s and
1980s; and the IMF economic crisis of the late 1990s, young Korean people had to exist
between newly imported foreign cultures and political and nationalist agendas.
Whereas the period from the 1960s to the 1980s was one of democracy and labor
movements, in which primarily the younger generation participated, the period of the 1990s
saw a remarkable shift in the mode of the political participation of the younger generation of
that time. It is critical to note that the shift of youth culture in this period does not mean that
the young generation from the 1990s is apolitical or ahistorical. It has been commonly said
that in the 1990s, the younger generation became more apolitical, less interested in political
issues, and more engaged in personal issues, mostly focused on getting a job after college
graduation. In other words, it has been said that rather than participating in political protests,
getting a secure job after graduation became the most important issue for people in their

14
Jung-hwan Chun, ibid., p. 51.
１８

twenties, owing to the economic depression of the 1990s and the achievements of the
democratization movement of the 1980s. Yet, this view that the young generation of the
1990s is less political than the previous young generation is misleading.
The young generation since the 1990s possesses the political consciousness no less than
the young generation of previous decades. The meaning of “being political” or politics should
be defined in a more flexible way. The young generation has been always political and their
political activities have been shown through diversified ways. For instance, the young
generation’s involvement in various media practices can be regarded as political activities. For
example, I would argue that, from the early 2000s, the young generation became politically
engaged by participating in issues about the FTA [Free-Trade Agreement], college tuition,
various labor movements and environmental movements. This political engagement is related
to the use of SNS (Social Network Services), such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, and
Cyworld (the Facebook or MySpace equivalent personalized networking site in Korea). The
political engagement of the young generation after the 1990s, which I suggest “politics- as-fun”
or “politics-as-entertainment” will be dealt with in another chapter.
A change in the way in which popular culture was consumed was concomitant with the
change in the economic and political situation from the early 1990s, as well as the global
circulation of popular culture, including cinema, television and popular music. Arjun
Appadurai has concluded that global cultural flows are not unidirectional, and globalization is
not necessarily about the cultural domination of the West over other sectors of the globe. In
１９

the 1990s, Korean youth appropriated Western and Japanese popular cultures into a Korean
context, which was symbolized by the name Seo Taiji generation, a synonym for the shinsedae
(new generation) of the early and mid-1990s.

The New Generation of the 1990s in South Korea
In this section, the following subjects will be elaborated upon: how youth is associated
with popular culture; how youth is formed and negotiated within popular culture and the
discourse about generations; and how popular culture reflects youth and youth culture in a way
different from that of previous decades. In relation to how youth is associated with popular
culture, the turning point of youth culture in South Korea arguably took place in the early
1990s.
In the introduction, the importance of movie-going sub-culture in discussions on youth
culture was emphasized. It is critical to explain when the movie-going sub- culture emerged as
part of youth culture and situate it within a larger context. Cinephile culture, as a distinctive
youth culture, began in the early 1990s. Along with the enthusiastic interest in art-house
cinema among people mostly in their twenties, several cinemathèques began to be established
so people could gather to watch films that were not theatrically circulated, either because it
was illegal to release them or because doing so did not have commercial benefits. In addition
to the establishment of cinemathèques, film groups in universities began to emerge as film-
making groups influential in the history of South Korean cinema. As a result of the popularity
of cinema, film festivals were established in the 1990s, such as the Pusan International Film
Festival in 1996 and the Jeonju International Film Festival in 2000, which received
２０

enthusiastic support from filmgoers. One of the most important venues in terms of the
development of the cinephile culture in the 1990s was the Dongsoong Art Center, a theater
that specialized in screening art-house movies, located in Daehakro (literally meaning
University Street), Jongro-gu. Daehakro, located in the central part of Seoul and by the upper
part of the Han river, is the district famous as the site of contemporary cultural resources, with
many theaters, street-performance spots, galleries, and old-fashioned cafés. The Dongsoong
Art Center, located at the heart of youth street culture, screened films by auteur directors such
as Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos, Abbas Kiarostami, Ingmar Bergman, Krzyszstof
Kieslowski and Leos Carax. These directors were particularly popular among serious
filmgoers at that time. The cinema soon became a Mecca for cinephiles, since it was not (and
still is not) easy to access art-house films in Korea; because these films did not have
commercial value, and the market for art-house movies is small in Korea, they were neither
imported nor circulated widely.
There was a tendency to support and lead the cinephile culture, not only from the private
sector, but also from the public sector. For example, from the governmental side, the former
president, Dae-joong Kim (1998‒ 2003), in particular, effectively deployed the policy for
Korean cinema and popular culture. Kim announced in 1998 that “Cinema is the strategic
product to lead the market of culture of the world.”
15
That year, a significant step in the
governmental policy of popular culture was made. Japanese films were at the time banned
from being imported into South Korea.
16
However, the Ministry of Culture removed the ban in

15
Kim Dae-joong’s Text of a Speech vol.2, Seoul: The Presidential Secretariat, 2000. English translations are
mine.
16
Sok-chun Sohn (reporter), Hankyore Daily Newspaper, Korea, October 21, 1998.
２１

order to allow the importation of Japanese films that had won awards in the four most
renowned international film festivals (that is, Cannes, Berlin, Venice and the Oscars), as well
as Korea-Japan co-production films. The government publicly announced that the Korean
market would open gradually to Japanese popular culture, and the initial opening was limited.
For his efforts on behalf of Korean cinema, in 2006 former president Kim received the lifetime
achievement award at the Choonsa Na Un-kyu Film Festival.
In addition to the enthusiastic support for cinema from the younger generation and the
government, another significant trend in the 1990s was the consumer culture embraced by the
younger generation. One of the most significant symptoms of this phenomenon was the
appearance of new jok (tribes). For instance, the younger Korean generation from the 1990s
began to exercise their power to consume luxury goods, often called myong poom(literally,
good products). To refer to people who obsessively buy luxury brands such as Louis Vuitton,
Gucci, Chanel, and the like, the neologism myong poon jok (meaning good product tribe),
was coined. Another important jok regarding consumer culture is the orange jok. The orange
jok (orange tribe) refers (often pejoratively) to young people with rich parents, who spend a lot
of money (by the standards of the average middle-class Korean), and live or hang out in
Apgujŏng -dong, one of the wealthiest areas in Seoul. The reason they were called orange is
not precisely known, but it was said at the time that, when a boy driving a luxury imported car
stops a girl walking on the street in Apgujŏng -dong, he gives her an orange as an invitation to
her to get into the car; from this, the phrase orange tribe was supposedly coined.
It is reasonable to be skeptical as to whether that kind of incident actually happened.
Another hypothesis is that, since the subway station in Apgujŏng is in the Orange Line and
２２

Apgujŏng-dong is a symbolic space for luxury commercial culture, those young people who
spend lots of money shopping and hanging out with their friends, who are all from a similar
class background, were called the Orange Tribe. Another, less convincing, hypothesis, is that
many of those young people had the experience of studying abroad, mostly in California.
Since California is famous for oranges, they were called the orange tribe. Major newspapers
reported on the phenomenon of the Apgujŏng -dong orange tribe to show how the new
generation was corrupted and problematic.
Overall, the New Generation of the 1990s was considered to be strikingly different to
the previous youth generation. The New Generation was open to Western and Japanese
cultures, which were often regarded as reactionary and therefore to be avoided by the
Undongkwon generation of the 1980s (and 1960s and 1970s before that), an attitude that will
be analyzed in more detail later in this study.
The new generation of the 1990s showed an enthusiastic interest in elements of popular
culture such as cinema and pop music. Their support for popular culture was concomitant with
new governmental policy in support of popular culture and changed the cultural geography of
Korea by establishing art-house cinemas, cinemathèques, and film festivals. The new
generation did not feel ashamed of being a powerful consumer group; they actually expressed
an exhibitionist tendency to show how powerful they were as consumers. South Korean
society in the 1990s witnessed the appearance of the New Generation, known as shin sedae in
Korea, also called the Seo Taiji Generation.

２３

The SeoTaiji Generation
Seo Taiji’s popularity was considered a social phenomenon; it was sometimes called the
Seo Taiji syndrome. In Korea, Seo Taiji was much more popular than, for example, New Kids
On the Block, an American boy band, among teens and people in their early twenties
throughout the 1990s, because Seo Taiji dealt with issues that Korean youth could relate to.
His music, and his fashion style, were extremely popular; the fandom culture began in the
early 1990s with the Seo Taiji syndrome. Along with the popularity of Seo Taiji, Korean youth
started to enjoy American-style rock music and tried to appropriate it into a Korean context.
Richard Dyer argued that stars, although they do not have coercive political power, have
political and “ideological significance,” since they play a major role in representing people in
the mass media, and the representation of people in the mass media can influence “how people
are in society.”
17
Dyer pointed out that a star is created by both production and consumption.
Following the notion of Francesco Alberoni, Dyer suggested that the star system proposes
“candidates” (that is, potential stars) and defines and delimits the choice of “electors” (that is,
consumers) by organizing the election. And, he further argued, both production and
consumption are “shaped by the particular ideological formations of their situation in society.”

18
Following Dyer’s notion that a star has power to shape a consumer’s ideological
consciousness, and a star is the product of both the star system and consumption, it is possible
to argue that Seo Taiji influenced the youth culture of 1990s Korea; at the same time, Seo Taiji
as a star was created by the young generation of that time.

17
Richard Dyer, Stars, London: British Film Institute, 1998, p. 8.
18
Richard Dyer, ibid., p. 19.
２４

With reference to the concept of “charisma,” Dyer explained the mechanism of how a
star, in spite of the fact that the star does not possess any political coercive power, can affect
fans’ modes of behavior, and, perhaps, their conscious and subconscious thinking. The notion
of charisma, defined as “doing things because the leader suggests it,” was initially developed
by Max Weber to explain “how political order is legitimated.” Weber argued for three means
that must function for a society to accept a political order: “tradition,” “bureaucracy,” and
“charisma.” Although Weber suggested “charisma” in relation to a political figure, Dyer
argued that the notion of charisma can also be applied to the stardom or fandom phenomenon,
for example to the American stars Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Elvis
Presley.
One of the most important reasons for the popularity of the musician Seo Taiji among
young audiences in their teens and early twenties were his lyrics—which criticize the
education system of Korea, revealing the rebellious spirit of the music genre in the context of
South Korean society—hip hop/rap lyrics. Seo Teiji appealed to the age group that suffered
from the pressure of the college entrance exam and the generation gap that resulted in conflicts
between their generation and that of their parents and teachers. For example, part of the lyrics
of one of Seo Taiji’s most popular songs, Classroom Idea, are as follows: “Enough, enough,
that kind of teaching is enough. Every morning by 7:30, you put us into a small classroom, to
step on the head of the kid next to me, my life is too precious to be wasted here…” Eun-Yung
Jung, in an essay on Seo Taiji, rightly contended that the popularity of Seo Taiji among
２５

audiences in their teens and early twenties was owing to his lyrics.
19
Seo Taiji appealed to the
teenagers who were suffering from competition for success in the national college entrance
exam and a heavy school workload: in other words, the pressure of education. Seo Taiji
introduced lyrics that criticize the education system. Following the song’s popularity, other K-
pop boy bands produced several songs with similar themes.
In addition to criticizing the education system of Korea, as is shown in many of his
songs, Seo Taiji engages the national consciousness with Western-style popular music, which
is seemingly contradictory, such as his song “Dreaming of Baelhae,”
20
about the unification of
the two Koreas. In his analysis of independent punk groups in Korea, Stephen Epstein argued
that nationalism was embedded in some of the Korean independent punk bands, and their
music and performance in the area of Hong Ik University should not be dismissed simply as
imitation of Western rock music.
21
Historical consciousness, whether or not it is focused on
commercial success in the market of Korean punk, hip hop, and rock-music scenes, was one of
the multiple messages that musicians convey.
The career path of Seo Taiji as a musician shows his significance in the topography of
Korean popular culture. Seo Taiji, whose real name is Hyun-chul Jung,

was born in 1972.
22
He
became a musician when he was a teenager, which is quite unusual, given that the value placed

19
Eun-Young Jung, “Articulating Korean Youth Culture through Global Popular Music Styles: Seo Taiji’s Use of
Rap and Metal” in Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, ed. Keith Howard, Folkestone: Global Oriental Ltd,
2006, p. 113-117.
20
Balhae is the Kingdom from the 7
th
century to the 10
th
century. It was ruled by the people of Koguryo and
located in the northern part of the Korean peninsula while the area of the Korean peninsula was the Shilla period,
which unified the three kingdoms, Koguryo, Paekche, and Shilla. The territory of Balhae has been Chinese
territory since the collapse of the kingdom.
21
Stephen Epstein, “We Are the Punx in Korea” in ibid. p. 194.
22
In Seo Taiji, Seo is his last name and Taiji is his first name. Because he is known as Seo Taiji, I do not change
the order of his name.
２６

on education is extremely high in Korean society, which considers a teenager who
concentrates on things other than study a moonje-a (literally, problem student), who might be
threatening to his/her fellow classmates, and to family, and, by extension, society in general.
He began his professional music career by joining a heavy-metal band called Sinawe,
which initially formed in 1983 and had already been famous in the underground music circuit
by the time Seo Taiji joined in the late 1980s. (The term underground, here refers to the
popular- music circle beyond the mainstream; that is, the music less known to the general
public, but known to people who are interested in that field.) Sinawe is regarded as a
legendary band in the history of Korean rock music. Seo Taiji joined Sinawe as a bassist when
he was only 16. Soon after joining Sinawe, he dropped out of high school. Quitting high
school is the ultimate act of transgression (without engaging in serious juvenile crime) that a
teenager can commit in Korean society, where almost everyone wants to get not only a high-
school diploma, but also a college degree, no matter what else they do. After a few years in
Sinawe, Seo Taiji quit the band, which was disbanded soon after. The reason why Seo Taiji
quit the band is not clearly known, but it was the turning point in his music career.
It seems that Seo Taiji became interested in more contemporary American music, dance,
hip hop and rap music, rather than heavy metal. After quitting Sinawe, he met Hyon- sok Yang
(who later became a music producer and founder of YG Entertainment) and Ju-no Lee, who
was a famous dancer in the clubs in Itewon, the district in Seoul that specialized in business
for foreigners, including American troops.

２７

Figure 1. Seo Taiji and former president, Dae-joong Kim, in 2004.

They formed a band called Seo Taiji and Boys, and made their debut in 1992 as a
rap/dance group. I still remember the days when Seo Taiji and Boys made their first
appearance on TV on April 11th, 1992. Because their music was surprisingly different from
other K-pop music at that time, immediately after the TV show, Seo Taiji and Boys became a
sensation, particularly among teenagers. I was a junior-high student back then, like most of the
fans, who were teenage girls. It was a Saturday afternoon, the time when junior-high students
get home, eat and watch TV. In the early 1990s, before the Internet was invented, watching
TV was the most common leisure activity for people, including the younger generation.
Teukjong! TV Yeonye (Scoop! TV Entertainment) on MBC (one of the major broadcasting
networks in Korea) was one of the most popular TV shows aired on the weekends, which was
a combination of comedy variety, entertainment reports, and a live concert by new
singers/musicians.
23
I was watching that TV show and still remember the segment in which
Seo Taiji and Boys made their first TV performance, because their music and dance

23
The debut of Seo Taji and Boys in the TV show Scoop! TV Entertainment in April, 1992 is available on
youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpz-lN6Lo40.
２８

performance were different from most of Korean pop music then. The segment was about
evaluating new singers or bands, based on points given by four judges: a composer, a lyricist,
an announcer and a singer. Many new musicians who became popular later on performed in
that segment, including Seo Taiji. Although two of the judges of that TV show gave harsh
criticism to “Nan Alayo (I Know)” and its mixture of rap, hip hop, ballad and dance, which
was pretty new in Korean popular music at that time, soon after Seo Taiji and Boys’ first
album and its title song, “Nan Alayo” rocked Korea—with enthusiastic support from a fan
base that consisted mostly of teenage girls.
The song appropriated aspects of the American pop-music style into a Korean popular
music context, emphasizing the melody line. That is, the song has a powerful beat or rhythm
that is borrowed from American pop music and a lyrical melody that is very Korean. For five
years, until Seo Taiji and Boys decided to break up the band in 1996, the band released four
albums and a few live and compilation albums; Seo Taiji composed all of the songs. A
popular- culture journalist living in Korea, Mark Russell, explained:
It would be difficult to exaggerate how huge the Seo Taiji phenomenon that hit Korea
was, bringing a dance/hip-hop hybrid to the screaming masses. It was fresh, exciting, and
different from anything Korea had ever seen before. During the Seo Taiji phenomenon,
hordes of young girls would surround Seo Taiji’s family home in Yeonhui-dong in
western Seoul, scribbling praises to their idol on the outside walls and shouting out, “We
２９

love you, Seo Taiji!” [.…] There were two eras […] Before Seo Taiji and after Seo Taiji.

24

Considering the genealogy of Korean rock music, Seo Taiji’s joining the band Sinawe is
significant, because the leader of Sinawe was the guitarist, Dae-cheol Shin, the son of Joong-
hyon Shin. Joong-hyŏn Shin is called the Godfather of Korean Rock (although the nickname
sounds somewhat patriarchal, it catches how significant Joong-hyon Shin is in the history of
Korean music.). The suppression of the rock-music genre by the Korean government stems
from Joon- hyon Shin. His relationship with the president at that time, Jung-hee Park, was far
from amicable.
25
It has been said that, when Shin Joong-hyun’s fame reached its height in the
early 1970s, he was asked to compose a song for Jung-hee Park’s regime, but refused to do so.
After that, his songs were banned by the government and accused of being offensive to the
nation and people. Finally, in the mid-1970s, he was arrested on the charge of smoking
marijuana, and his career as a musician ended because of that charge. Some of those who
argue that smoking marijuana should be legalized in Korea argue that the banning of
marijuana originated from the military dictatorship, and was used as a tool to suppress the
rebellious aspects of society. Although Shin did not make a public appearance as a musician,

24
Mark James Russell, Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet Culture, Berkeley:
Stone Bridge Press, 2008, P.143-144.
25
It should be noted that the historical evaluation of Jung-hee Park is still controversial.People in the
conservative wing argue that it was due to Park Jung-hee’s leadership and his brilliant economic development
policies that South Korea was able to escape from the poverty that theagricultural nation suffered after being
devastated by the Korean War (1950-1953), whereas those in the liberal wing argue that he was a dictator and
made the Chaebol system—the big corporations run by family members such as Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and SK,
which occupies almost 50% of Korean economic. Scholars, such as those in economics and politics with
progressive tendencies, criticize Jung-hee Park’s regime because business moguls inherit their ownership from
their family members, thus forming royal families of modern Korea., As a result, these companies bankrupt small
businesses and are thus harmful to the Korean economy, not to mention the ethical aspect of it wth regards to the
corrupt relationship between politicians and chaebols.

３０

he was influential on the musicians of the next generation and has been regarded as the
musician who introduced rock music to Korea.
Another significant example among his songs that shows why Seo Taiji appealed to
teenagers is “Come Back Home,” a song about teenagers who have left home. This song
clearly showed that Seo Taiji was conscious of the issues surrounding teenagers, and that he
cared about teenagers in Korea, which was a great virtue in the eyes of his fans. Because of
this song, many teenagers who had left home returned to their families.
Although he started his pop career by playing rap/dance music, during the course of his
career, Seo Taiji changed his musical style to one closer to that of his early music career, when
he was a member of the heavy-metal band, Sinawe. His later songs, such as “Hayŏka,” “Come
Back Home,” and “Classroom Idea,” combine dance, gangster rap, hip hop, heavy metal and
alternative rock, obviously influenced by US bands such as Korn and Rage Against the
Machine.
Several incidents show how influential Seo Taiji was in Korean society. Firstly, Seo
Taiji was nicknamed Moonhwa Daetongryoung (Culture President). His unprecedented
influence on youth culture, even affecting the way that young people perceive a popular music
star, was surprising to Korean society. Also, in 1997, when the Samsung Economy Research
Institution published its list of the biggest hit products in Korea from the 1950s through to the
1990s, Seo Taiji ranked at the top of the list.
26

The idol fandom culture began in the early 1990s with the Seo Taiji syndrome. Along
with the popularity of Seo Taiji, Korean youth started to consume American-style rock music

26
And the second ranked in the list was the computer Word Process program, Hangul. Maeil Economy
Newspaper, Korea, August 21, 1997.
３１

more actively compared to the previous generations. In this regard, Seo Taiji epitomizes the
renaissance, or the beginning of the new era of popular culture in Korea in the 1990s, when the
generation in their teens and twenties were relieved of the burden of democratization (although
they still had a lot of different burdens, such as job competition and building up prospects. As
Jae-won Lee has pointed out, “If those who were born during the 1960s democratized politics,
those who were born in the 1970s democratized culture.”
27
Seo Taiji contributed to that
paradigm shift in the production and consumption of popular culture in the 1990s in Korea.

Youth and Popular Culture
The popularity of Seo Taiji and his particular style of 1990s pop music should be viewed
in relation to the music/performance genre that had been primarily used in the democratization
movement until the 1980s and in line with the binary Western-versus-traditional culture. To
understand youth culture during the military dictatorships—that is, the regimes of the two
former presidents, Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo-hwan from the 1960s to the 1980s, the
minjung culture and movement led by the young should be examined, given that the
demographic in its early twenties, whether they were college students or factory workers,
played a more important role than any other age group in the labor and democracy movements.
Whereas youth entertainment and the youth culture in Korea of the 1990s is associated mostly
with Western culture, in the minjung movement Western culture was regarded as reactionary
because it symbolized Western imperialism and capitalism.

27
Jae-won Lee, “Regret of the Era, When They Rule the World in 1996: New Generation, Seo Taji, and the X
Generation” in Moonhwa Kwahak Journal, 2010, Summer, Vol. 62. Seoul: Moonhwa Kwahak-sa, p. 110.
published in Korean. Translations are mine.
３２

Namhee Lee has suggested, in her book, The Making of Minjung, that Korean
traditional arts performed by college students, especially the performance of madanggeuk,
which is the combination of Korean traditional drama set in the yard (madang), and Western
theater drama, functioned as a radical critique of the military government. The “post-
performance-event” of gathering with food, drinks, and songs was a Bakhtinian moment of
carnival in the 1970s and the 1980s, which functioned as a critique of the oppressive regime.
28

Playing Western-style music on a college campus, until the period when the democracy
protests prevailed, was regarded as ideologically off-beat. Music critic, Hyunjoon Shin, has
asserted that, because American rock music, which is Western and foreign, was considered to
be against the political consciousness of college students and was therefore against the
appropriate identity of a college student, it was not until the mid-1990s that American punk
and rock music were played on the university festival circuit.
Along with the revival of traditional popular culture among young people who were
involved with the minjung movement, there was a trend for young people to enjoy Western
culture, which could be regarded as a youth sub-culture. For example, in the 1970s, Western-
style youth trends included fashion statements—blue jeans and mini-skirts were very
popular—American pop music, Western-style dances, such as the twist and disco, and food
and drinks, especially beer. Beer, guitar music, and blue jeans were the key icons that
symbolized Korean youth in the 1970s, while the music café with a DJ, which disappeared in
the early 1980s, was a popular place for young people and became the symbolic site for youth-

28
Namhee Lee, The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea,
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007, p. 210-211.
３３

entertainment activities, often recalled with nostalgia in the popular memory.
29
Two dyads
regarding youth culture existed during the democratization movement era from the 1960s to
the 1980s: the traditional culture was rejuvenated as youth culture, and the globalization of
Western popular culture could not be avoided during the same period. The new generation of
the 1990s was open to Western culture, but, at the same time, also encompassed a historical
and political consciousness.
Myŏngjin Lee discussed the new generations in Korea and their social identities since
the early 1990s by using several terminologies that referred to the new generations that had
emerged, such as the X generation (as the equivalent of Generation X in the US), the N
generation (N for “net”, from Internet), and the P generation (P for “participation”). The P
generation was the generation of young Koreans that arose in the period from the late 1990s to
the 2000s.
30
The P generation referred to the generation aged between the late teens and the
thirties (by the standards of the 2000s), who participated in social issues through
demonstrations, such as the candlelight gathering that was popular following the Hyonsŏn and
Misŏn incident (wherein two teenage girls were killed by American tanks in 2002). Also
included in this is the generation that supported Moohyŏn Noh (regarded by some as the
Barack Obama of South Korea) and helped him to become president in 2005. This generation
believed that they could change society and its paradigm.

29
Hyun-joon Shin, “The Song Movement and Rock Music, or the Analysis of the Connection between the
Political Correctness and Cultural Cool-ness” in Popular Music, the Music Movement, and Youth Culture. ed.
Changnam Kim, Seoul: Hanul Academy, 2004, p. 71-93. Translations are mine.
30
Myungjin Lee, The Consciousness and Social Identity of the 2030 New Generation in Korea, Seoul: Samsung
Economy Research Center, 2005. Translations are mine.

３４

To conclude his research about the young generations since the 1990s, Lee argued that
the new generation had a more radical perspective toward family relations than their parents’
generation, although they were still conservative regarding family values when compared to
Western youth. They accepted individual differences more willingly than previous generations.
Although they seemed to be less interested in political issues than previous generations, they
were still anti-American politically, despite the fact that they accepted and enjoyed American
popular culture. In addition, they were conscious of wars around the world and had a sensitive
national identity, owing to Korean modern history, which experienced a colonial occupation
and civil war that differentiated this generation from the younger generations of Western
societies. Ultimately, Lee argued, the new generation of the 1990s and 2000s were more
optimistic than the previous younger generations, as the new younger generation grew up in
economic abundance and with higher living standards than youth in previous times.
The young generation of the 1990s and onward were more willing to accept Western
popular culture and, more importantly, Japanese popular culture, compared to the previous
youth generations. As Korea entered the era of relative democracy following the Tae-woo Noh
regime
31
(1988‒ 1993, after the Doo-hwan Chŏn regime), protests for democratization were
limited. By the late 1990s, the democracy movement of the 1980s had become nostalgia in the
collective memory of Koreans, and the culture of university had experienced a watershed
change from the minjung movement to the pursuit of more individualistic needs and
indifference to state politics. This kind of shift in cultural focus—from the state to the

31
Taewoo Noh was the first president elected democratically. However, his presidency as a true democratization
had a limit in that he had a military background and was from the same party of the previous president, Doohwan
Chun, who imposed a military dictatorship and inaugurated presidency through a military coup d’etat.
３５

individual—was owing in part to the economic depression that prevailed from the late 1990s,
often characterized as the 1997 IMF crisis, as well as the trend of globalization, both economic
and cultural.

Being Young Is Painful?: The Political Engagement of Youth in the 2000s
Throughout the democratization process, university students played a very important
role as leaders of various democratic movements, including the April 19th Protest in 1960,
which led to the resignation of the president, Seung-man Lee; the May 18th Kwangju uprising
in 1980; the June Protest in 1987, which led to the declaration of direct presidential election;
the candlelight gatherings in the 2000s; and the labor movements from the 1960s to the present.

32
Of course, during most of the democracy movements, not only university students, but also
many civilians participated and sacrificed their lives. Particularly during the 4.19 movement,
high-school students in their late teens were an important part of the movement, as much as the
university students were, and during the Kwangju massacre, civilians from all of the
generations fought against the army. However, university students have always been at the
center of these movements.
By its very definition, the umbrella term undongkwon refers to either an individual or a
group participating in democratic movements; yet, in many cases, the term is associated with
university students. In analyzing student democratic movements in South Korea, Namhee Lee
explained, “The student movement was perceived by society at large as a temporary and

32
For a more detailed history of democracy movements of the 1960s and 1970s, see Namhee Lee’s The Making
of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation in South Korea, Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 2007, p. 25-55.
３６

idealistic outburst that would soon dissipate when the students assumed more adult
responsibilities.
33
Yet many continued into their twenties and thirties in varying aspects and
degrees of involvement.” What “varying aspects and varying degrees” could mean is unclear,
as is how Lee would differentiate “students” from “adults.” However, in Korean society, there
seems to be a tendency to think that political consciousness or progressiveness becomes dulled
as one gets older and seeks a more stabilized situation. The 4.19 generation of the 1960s
became people in their 70s in the 2010s and the undongkwon generation of the 1970s and
1980s are in their 50s and 60s in the 2010s. As various surveys of political issues show, these
age groups—people in their fifties and older—have been known to possess conservative
political tendencies, which conflict with the political tendencies and preferences of many of
the younger age groups.
While, from the 1960s to the 1990s, political activism was concomitant with extremely
oppressive violence from the government, including arrest and torture, and therefore requiring
the sacrifice of life. Following the decade of political indifference among young people in the
1990s, from the 2000s political activism became perceived as something fun, enjoyable and
cool. By using new media such as the SNS, politics becomes an entertainment for the youth
generation of the 2000s, entertainment in which they participated not only for fun, but also for
issues that mattered to their lives.
The election of the mayor of Seoul that took place in 2011 was significant in several
ways. Firstly, it showed that many people in their twenties, thirties and forties actively
participated in voting. This voting rate was surprising, given that those age groups had been

33
Namhee Lee, ibid., p. 149.
３７

perceived as being indifferent to politics. Secondly, the election showed that people were
extremely skeptical about the two major parties in Korea: Saenuri-dang (the conservative party,
formerly, Hannara-dang) and Minjoo (the progressive party). As a result of the election, Won-
soon Park, the representative for civilians who did not belong to any political party, won the
election against Kyŏng-won Na, the candidate from the Saenuri-dang, the conservative party.
Saenuri-dang has been the most powerful party throughout the history of South Korea (the
name of the party has been changed several times, but, insofar as they represent conservative
politics, they are regarded as the same party). Therefore, losing the election to the candidate
who represented the civilians was regarded as a big defeat for the Saenuri-dang, on the one
hand, and a victory for the civilians against the conservative and corrupt politicians on the
other hand, showing how powerful the vote of the 20-40 age groups can be. Thirdly, the
election saw the emergence of new media, which could be effectively used throughout an
election campaign and affected the opinions of the people and therefore the result of the
election.
The debates between the two candidates, the political careers of the two candidates in
the past few decades, and the important differences between the policies of each candidate
were widely circulated by various Internet sites and, most importantly, Twitter. Interestingly,
during the election campaign, the biggest scandal that affected the election results was
candidate Na’s visit to a skin-care clinic, whose annual membership fee is approximately
US$100,000. This scandal was initially revealed by a journalist, Chin-u Chu, of a progressive
journal, Sisa-in, who is one of the producers of the I’m Kkomsu podcast. A podcast is an
Internet-based broadcasting venue, and therefore does not require a network broadcasting
３８

system. The popularity of the I’m Kkomsu podcast among young people who use the Internet
is greater than among other generations, reflecting the fact that many young people are aware
that the official broadcasting networks are partial and implicitly censored by the government,
and that young people are willing to use an alternative channel to become informed about
political issues. The young generation perceives that news that shows the opposition (that is,
non-governmental) view is not transmitted through the official network broadcasting system,
but is widely circulated via the Internet, especially Twitter.

Figure 2. Four members shown in the kitschy logo of the ŏ-choon Kim (I’m Kkomsu) podcast:
from left, Ŏ-choon Kim, Bong-chu Chŏng, Yong-min Kim, Chin-u Chu.

During the 2011 election, South Koreans witnessed the emergence of the Social
Network Site (SNS) era in politics. Considering that most of the users of SNS are people in
their twenties and thirties, the sudden widespread use of SNS in political campaigns indicates
the emergence of the new generation (in their twenties and thirties) as active participants in
politics and the most important voting group. After this election, Saenuri-dang were panicked
３９

because their supporter base was mostly people in their fifties and over, the age groups that
had traditionally been participating in voting more actively than the younger generations.
Therefore, Saenuri-dang declared that they were to reform their party from scratch.
Moreover, interestingly, they started to try to gain popularity among the younger
generation by using Twitter. The representatives and senators of Saenuri-dang publicly
announced that they lost the election because they did not use Twitter as effectively as the
opposition, and therefore failed to communicate with the younger generation. It seems that
they think, or pretend to think, that they can communicate with the younger generation and
gain popularity among the younger age groups if they hire SNS experts and use Internet media
as effectively as the opposition party does.
From the perspective of the other political parties, the attempt to use SNS by the
conservative party has been met with skepticism, as it is obvious that the conservative party
will not be able to gain popularity among a certain age or social group unless the party changes
their political ideology and policies, no matter which media they use for their political
campaigns. For the representatives of civilians and the opposition/progressive party, the SNS
was effective, because, from the beginning, the younger voters, in their twenties and thirties,
were the strongest supporters of the progressive side, so that the progressive side did not have
to use the SNS or the Internet deliberately to gain popularity among the younger voters. The
new media became part of the election for the young generation naturally and voluntarily.
In addition to SNS and the Internet, another new medium that recently started to affect
South Korean politics is the smartphone. In addition to checking emails, websites, and SNS,
４０

anytime and anywhere, one of the important functions that a smartphone offers is the system
of applications (apps).
Politics becoming entertainment was concomitant with the dawn of SNS. Along with the
popularity of SNS, taking a picture and uploading it online has become a common activity
among young people. It has been said that one of the major reasons why politicians of the
conservative party get elected is because the younger generation does not vote. During the
election of the mayor of Seoul, the opposition party led the movement to encourage young
people to vote. As a result of this movement, the activity of taking pictures in front of the
voting booths and uploading the pictures on an SNS, mostly Twitter, became a fun and
meaningful mode of expression for young people.
In sum, from the 1960s to the 1980s, for the younger generation, university students in
particular, participating in the democratic movement was something for which sacrifices
should be made: that sacrifice could be one’s education (as students who participated in any
kind of democratic movement were expelled from school in the 1970s, under the Jung-hee
Park regime), or even one’s life (as clearly shown in the May 18th Kwangju uprising).
Although this kind of sacrifice for the democracy and labor movements still exists, politics has
become entertainment: serious entertainment, using political parodies. Politics is the subject of
heated debate on Internet discussion sites, but is also a subject that people can giggle about via
parodies of the corrupt and, at times, silly behavior of politicians that is circulated through the
Internet, or via something fun and enjoyable, such as the candlelight gatherings. That is not to
argue that violence by the government against groups of people that stage political protests
does not exist anymore; not only psychological, but also physical violence is still used against
４１

political protesters. Compared to the earlier decades of the democratization movement,
however, politicians politics have become another form of entertainment among the youth, and
the method used to approach political discourse for people in their twenties and thirties has
become much more media- and technology-savvy. Owing to new media and the Internet, the
time necessary for opinions to circulate can be less than a second, and the number of people
that one’s opinion can reach in this time beyond belief.

４２

CHAPTER 2: HISTORY OF YOUTH CINEMA IN KOREA

1960s: The Advent of Youth Cinema
Cinema in South Korea since the 1990s is the focus of this dissertation. Yet, to begin the
study, it was first necessary briefly to examine the history of youth cinema (chung chun
younghwa) in South Korea. In current South Korean academia, A Young Look (dir. Lee
Seong-Ku), made in 1960, is considered to be the first South Korean youth film.
34
It seems fair
to say that youth cinema in South Korea began around the late 1950s as a fully developed
sub-genre, influenced by the sun-tribe films of Japan. However, even during the colonial
period, youth films were made and were popular. For example, Arirang, made by the
legendary filmmaker, Un-kyu Na, in 1926, was a commercially successful and symbolic film
that aroused anti-colonial sentiments during the colonial period. In addition, recently
discovered films of the late colonial period—the 1940s, in particular—deal with colonial
subjects in their twenties, or children, such as Volunteer (dir. Sŏk-yŏng Ahn, 1941), Angels on
the Streets (dir. In-kyu Choi, 1941), Chosun Strait (dir. Ki-chae Park, 1943), and Spring of
Korean Peninsula (dir. Byŏng-il Lee, 1991). However, films during that period are hard to
consider as youth cinema, given that their themes or characterizations have little to do with
youth.
Youth cinema of the 1960s in Korea was deeply influenced by Japanese youth cinema—
specifically, the sun-tribe films—in terms of characterization and story. The term sun tribe
(taiyozoku in Japanese) film refers to films of the late 1950s depicting young people, often

34
Hyo-in Yi, A History of Korean Cinema: From Liberation through the 1960s. Seoul: KOFA. 2005. p. 132.
Translations are mine.
４３

with a nihilistic ambience, and capturing the sensibility of post-war Japanese society. The term
sun tribe came from Shintaro Ishihara’s 1956 Akutagawa Prize-winning novel, Taiyo no
Kisetsu (Season of the Sun). His brother, Yujiro Ishihara, an extremely popular movie star at
that time, acted in several sun tribe films, such as Season of the Sun and Crazed Fruit in 1956.
Korean film scholar, Su-wan Chŏng, analyzed the influence of the sun tribe films on
1960s Korean youth cinema; she argued that, in the modernization process of Korea and Japan,
nation was the main subject, and the influence of nation makes youth cinema in both nations a
cinema of sex, violence and male-centeredness, which differentiates the youth cinema of
Korea and Japan from that of Western nations, for example, the French New Wave, New
German Cinema and the New American Cinema of the period. Chŏng also contended that the
modernization project was led by the government/nation, and, in that regard, modernity played
an important role in both Korean and Japanese youth cinemas. But, the difference between
Korean youth cinema of the 1960s and Japanese youth cinema of the 1950s and 1960s is that
protagonists of Korean youth cinema cannot enjoy fully the modern urban space, whereas
protagonists of Japanese youth cinema enjoy modern culture as the subject of the modern
space.
35

It is important to compare 1960s Korean cinema to Japanese cinema during that period.
In his analysis of Kon Ichikawa’s films of the 1950s, Dennis Washburn pointed out that,
although during the 1950s Japan’s economic growth was very rapid, which is often described
as a “miracle,” many Japanese were not able to consume goods such as televisions, (unlike
America’s consumer culture, which made a huge impact on the mode of movie going at the

35
Su-wan Chŏng, Comparative Research between Korean Youth Cinema and Japanese Youth Cinema of the
1950s-1960s. Younghwa Yeonkoo, Vol. 26. p. 324-340. 2002. Seoul. Translations are mine.
４４

time). Therefore, sun-tribe film characters, “amoral” and “hedonistic” privileged young people
enjoying new consumer goods in resort areas, are “decadently Americanized” and “essentially
foreign” to Japan. Further, Washburn explained, “The problem of youth culture and the
dislocations suffered by the younger generation around the world in the postwar era was a
popular subject of novels and films.”
36
Washburn’s notion that films about the younger
generation of the 1950s and the 1960s were a universal (which is an umbrella term that
neglects many parts of the world) trend at the time is correct, up to a point.
However, in the 1960s South Korean filmmakers were not making youth cinema as
enthusiastically as Japanese filmmakers. While Japanese cinema made youth genre films,
Korean films about youth were not considered influential enough to be set as a (sub-) genre of
cinema. In the 1960s, melodrama and comedy for all generations were much more popular in
Korean cinema. To produce youth cinema, filmmakers needed to have concluded that there
was a market for youth films. However, Korea’s economy was not yet sufficiently developed
to have a market for youth cinema. The market of youth cinema is deeply related to the
country’s economic conditions and cultural infrastructure. In the 1960s (and also 1970s),
Korea did not have enough of a cultural infrastructure, affecting the popularity of movie-
going among the young generation, not to mention the fact that the South Korean economy
was underdeveloped.
Overall, the 1960s marked an important point in the history of Korean cinema, because
it was the beginning of South Korean youth cinema, just as the new mode of consumption of
popular culture in Korea began in the 1960s. The stardom of Sung-il Shin, a Korean actor who

36
Dennis Washburn “A Story of Cruel Youth: Kon Ichikawa’s Enjo and the Art of Adapting in 1950s Japan” in
Kon Ichikawa, ed. James Quandt, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001, p. 156-157.
４５

played the rebellious working-class youth in many youth films in the 1960s (and is equivalent
to Ishihara Yujiro of Japanese youth cinema in terms of popularity and youth persona), and the
stardom of Ang-lan Eom, who became popular earlier than Sung-il Shin and played his
romantic partner in many films, arguably began with the emergence of youth cinema. Eom and
Shin were married in 1964, with a celebration in front of a huge crowd, similar in scale to
weddings of the British royal family, and their marriage was termed “the wedding of the
century.” Their popularity should be considered as the first notable fandom phenomenon in
Korean popular culture.

1970s: High Teen Cinema
With regard to the history of cinema, 1970s high-school films attained particular
significance since they established the sub-genre and gained much popularity among young
moviegoers. During this time, members of the baby-boomer generation—those born between
the post-Korean War (1950‒ 1953) period and the early 1960s—emerged as the majority of
moviegoers. Films depicting high-school students, often called ha-i-tin younghwa (high-teen
films) in Korean), enjoyed popularity at the box office. This popularity was not only a result
of the government policy that was regulating the film industry—a policy that limited the
production of hwal keuk (martial arts/swordplay/action films) in the early 1970s, a genre that
had been popular up to that time—but also owing to an economic surge and the influx and
wide circulation of Western youth culture in the 1970s.
To explain 1970s youth films, Ho-gol Lee has suggested that, despite the fact that there
were no common elements among youth films in terms of narrative structure or style at that
４６

time, youth films were mostly made by young directors and focused on the sentimentality and
culture of youth. In 1974, as Heavenly Homecoming to Stars (dir. Jang-ho Lee), broke the box-
office record of Korean cinema at that time, and as Heydays of Youngja (dir. Ho-son
Kim, 1975) and the March of Fools (dir. Kil-jong Ha, 1975) also became greatly successful at
the box office, youth cinema became one of the most important film trends of the 1970s. The
films’ directors, including Jang-ho Lee, Kil-jong Ha and Ho-son Kim, were not merely
commercial directors. They organized a group called youngsang shidae (The Age of Film) for
the cinema movement of young filmmakers (probably to resist censorship of the government
and for the sake of cinema as art). However, it did not last long and was disbanded in 1978.
37

One of the most significant trends of the 1970s was the birth of teen films in Korean
cinema. Teen films set in high school were very popular. There were two popular series of
high-school teen films of the 1970s: the Girl’s High School series, first released in 1972, and
the Yalkae series, set in a boy’s high school (Yalkae, A Joker in High School, was first released
in 1977). Although made on relatively low budgets, producers liked to make teen films
because they were successful at the box office. In 1977, the popularity of high-school teen
films declined, as those films showed narrative repetitiveness—more than the usual level of a
genre convention—and depended on the same actors for their popularity. This trend of high-
school teen films of the 1970s shows that teenagers became an important age group, not only
as a movie audience, but also as a theme and consumer of popular culture, as the result of the
government-led economic development from the early 1960s and, by extension, the
modernization process throughout the decade.

37
Ho-kŏl Lee, “Korean Cinema of the 1970s” in The History of Korean Cinema: 1960-1979. Hyo-in I et al.
Seoul: Korea. 2004. P. 111-114. Translations are mine.
４７

1980s: The Korean New Wave and High-School Film
In the 1980s, films about high-school students suffering from the intense pressures of
college entrance exams, as well as from differences resulting in the generation gap between
them and their teachers and parents, were produced in large numbers. Although the 1970s and
1980s were a dark age in Korean cinema (in part because of governmental regulations,
censorship and the domination of the industry by Hollywood), youth films—and teen films
pecifically—emerged as a significant genre, both in reference to the number of films that were
made, as well as to the subject matter of teenaged culture, which had not been previously
manifest in Korean cinema.
The Korean New Wave, which emerged in the 1980s, refers to films with a political
consciousness depicted in a realistic style. Therefore, they are often regarded as socialist-
realism films that went along with the democratic movement of the 1980s. These films dealt
mostly with marginalized people in their twenties or thirties, such as manual laborers with low
incomes, urban dwellers with no secure job, immigrants from the poor countryside, or
wanderers. Such films included A Fine Windy Day (dir. Jang-ho Lee, 1980), The Ball Shot by
a Midget (dir. Won-sae Lee, 1981), Declaration of Fools (dir. Jang-ho Lee, 1983), Whale
Hunting (dir. Chang-ho Bae, 1984) and Chilsu and Mansu (dir. Kwang-su Park, 1988). By
presenting working-class youth, including factory workers, beggars, or vagabonds, these films
depicted modern Korean society with a strong political critique.
Like the Korean New Wave films, which presented the dark side of Korean society
under the country’s rapid modernization and urbanization, the teen films of the 1980s started
to touch on the darker side of teenagers. This kind of subject matter, teenager-as-trouble (this
４８

expression follows the notion of Dick Hebdige’s “youth-as-trouble”) continued into the 1990s
youth films. Whereas the 1970s high-school films were mostly romantic comedies set in high
school, the teen films of the 1980s dealt with the issues of the college-entrance- centered high-
school education and the difficulties of coming-of-age, including conflicts with parents and
teachers. These films include Happiness Does not Come in Grades (dir. Woo-sŏk Kang, 1989),
I’m Looking for My Classmates from the Bottom to the Top (dir. Kyu-dŏk Hwang, 1990) and
Let’s Look at the Sky Sometimes (dir. Sŏng-hong Kim, 1990).
As mentioned above, in spite of the fact that South Korean cinema went through a dark
age during the 1970s and 1980s, teen films (or high-school films) emerged in the 1970s, and
teen films in the 1980s reflected the social issues affecting teenagers in the Korean context;
whereas the representations of teenagers in the teen films of the 1970s were romanticized, teen
films of the 1980s were more like the representations of the teenager-as- trouble.

４９

CHAPTER 3: REPRESENTATIONS OF YOUTH IN CINEMA SINCE THE 1990s

Youth in Korean Cinema since the 1990s
As mentioned above, from the early 1990s, South Korean cinema began to witness its
second golden age,
38
not only because the Korean cinema industry began to gain popularity
over Hollywood films among Korean domestic audiences, but also because Korean film
criticism and journalism became more serious and sophisticated. The new abundance of film
journalism was concomitant with the popularity of film magazines, such as weekly magazine
Cine 21, the most popular film magazine. Another important film magazine of the 1990s was
Kino, published from 1995 to 2003, a monthly magazine whose chief editor was the film critic,
Song-il Chong; it published relatively academic film criticism and was considered the Cahiers
du Cinema of Korea. The publication of Kino was a reflection of the emergence of the young
generation of cinephiles of the 1990s. Overall, from the 1990s, with the beginning of the film-
production system led by professional movie producers, such as Jae-myong Shim of Myong
Film and Seung-jae Cha of Uno Film, who discovered many talented new directors, the
commercial and artistic values of Korean films improved unprecedentedly. The popularity of
cinema as a cultural practice was epitomized by the launch of the Busan International Film
Festival (BIFF) in 1996.
For example, we can examine Ki-duk Kim’s earlier films (the films before he made
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring in 2003). It is a commonly accepted notion that

38
Because 1960s Korean cinema has been regarded as the golden age of Korean cinema, to explain 1990s Korean
cinema, I suggest the term, “the second golden age,” although the term is not officially used to refer to Korean
cinema of the 1990s.
５０

Kim’s oeuvre should be divided into two different periods: from his debut film, Crocodile
(1996), to The Coast Guard (2002) is the first period; and from Spring, Summer, Autumn,
Winter, and Spring (2003) to his last narrative film, Bimong (2008), is the second period. The
beginning of the second period is regarded as the time when his aesthetics became more
introverted and meditative, and he came to be known more widely in the international film-
festival circuit through films such as Address Unknown (2001), The Isle (2000) and Bad Guy
(2001). These earlier films were the subject of heated debate among feminist critics because of
their depiction of violence toward women (that is, sadistic, physical violence inflicted on the
female body) and their masochistic depiction of female identity. Among South Korean film
critics during the late 1990s and early 2000s, those who took part in the debate included Kim’s
best-known supporter, Song-il Chong, and Chong’s opponent in the discussion of Kim’s films,
the psychologist/film critic, Yong-sob Shim.
39

This chapter concentrates on films from the 1990s, the themes of which will be
classified as follows: high-school, delinquency, sexuality and coming-of-age and youth
subculture. In an attempt to theorize about South Korean youth cinema specifically, these four
themes can most accurately represent and categorize youth cinema in a South Korean context.
Creating a genealogy of every film about youth is far from the purpose of this study. Rather,
the focus will be on films whose themes are significant and representative of contemporary
Korean society and youth, either through the text or context of the film.

39
At the same time, regarding a tendency of criticism about Kim’s films outside Korea, Hyong-sook Lee, a South
Korean film scholar, argues that non-Korean (or Western) scholars’ feminist approaches toward Kim’s film is
less keen compared to their feminist criticism of the films of their nations, which shows the existence of
Orientalism in film criticism in Western scholars toward non-Western cinema.
５１

High School Cinema
High-school cinema is one of the most important sub-categories of youth cinema. To
refer to the same film, it is often found that the terms Teen Film (or Teen Pic) and High-school
film are used interchangeably. However, it is worth noting that the Teen-film category should
be differentiated from that of the high-school film. Obviously, teen films are films that deal
with the common issues of teenagers, and high-school films are films set in high school. Not
every teen film is set in a high school, and not every teenager is a high-school student. In this
regard, it is reasonable to classify high-school films as a sub-genre of teen films. However, it is
worth pointing out that many of the teen films of South Korea are set in high school and are
about high-school students. In this dissertation, it is argued that high-school cinema is an
important subcategory of teen films, and two films that hold a specific interest are analyzed:
Bleak Night, which is about male high-school students, and Bronze Medalist, which is set in a
girls’ high school.
In the South Korean context, among films representing the younger generation, teen
films, or, more precisely, high-school films, have critical social implications. That is, the
concept of high school holds particular significance as a social and cultural institution, in
addition to its role as an educational institution. The conflicts that are presented in films set in
high school signify the most hotly debated issues that South Korea faces: education, elitism
and authoritarianism. These issues have simmered within Korean society throughout modern
history. Moreover, the world of high school can be read as an allegory for Korean society in
general in many films, as Choi pointed out in her previously mentioned book. Films that
５２

address and represent teenagers who go through those abovementioned social issues specific to
South Korea will be analyzed.

1. Friendship in Torment: Bleak Night
Bleak Night (dir. Songhyon Yoon, 2011) is a story of three high-school boys. It is a story
of friendship and the collapse of friendship. A father traces the reason why his son committed
suicide, and the film gradually reveals what happened between his son and his son’s two best
friends. The reason for the teenaged boy’s suicide stems from a small, but very significant
moment. It was the result of a misunderstanding among high-school friends and their inability
to communicate with each other.
In the center of the emotional tension is Ki-t’ae, who is the head of the bullying group of
the school and who commits suicide. The story of the film unfolds as his father searches for
the reason for Ki-t’ae’s suicide. The father meets Ki-t’ae’s closest friends, Dong-yun and
Paek-hee (his name is Heejoon Paek in the film, but he is called Paek-hee as a nickname by his
classmates throughout most of the film), and through the memories of these two (as flashbacks)
the film traverses the past of the three friends and the present of the father, Dong- yun and
Paek-hee. Ki-t’ae’s friends, Dong-yun and Paek-hee, do not tell Ki-t’ae’s father what
happened before Ki-t’ae’s suicide; it is too painful for the friends to tell him why the tragedy
happened. The father, at the end, finds no clue. The film is full of despair and loneliness.
Among friends and family members, almost everyone shows an inability to communicate.
The main plot element of the film is the relationship between the three friends, which is
shown through Paek-hee’s and Dong-yun’s memories. To put the story of the film in
５３

chronological order, the film is divided into three different parts: the relationship of all three;
the relationship between Ki-t’ae and Paek-hee; and the relationship between Ki-t’ae and Dong-
yun. Overall, the story of the film is an examination of the ordinary everyday lives of high-
school students. The moment when their friendship becomes miserable occurs during a trivial
chat among classmates at school, just like one of the usual days. Ki-t’ae does not have a
mother, and has developed a complex about this. He thinks that Paek-hee has exchanged a
look with other friends during a chat about their mothers. After this subtle moment, Ki-t’ae
begins to bully Paek-hee. He projects his sadness/anger at not having a mother onto Paek-hee
through violence. Dong-yun, without having any clue as to what is happening, tries to stop Ki-
t’ae from harassing Paek-hee, which only results in his falling out with Ki-t’ae. When Ki- t’ae
realizes how horrible he has been and tries to reconcile with Paek-hee, Paek-hee tells him, “I
never thought of you as my true friend, and because of you, I’m going to transfer to another
school.” The film does not designate who is to blame for the collapse of their friendship. The
audience is kept uneasy as they witness the friends’ emotional changes in a style that switches
between narrative cinema and documentary.
Following the story between Ki-t’ae and Paek-hee through Dong-yun’s memories, the
film shows what happened between Ki-t’ae and Dong-yun. After Paek-hee transfers to another
high school, Dong-yun tries to “talk” with Ki-t’ae to find out what happened between Ki-t’ae
and Paek-hee, but Ki-t’ae refuses to talk about it, and instead tells Dong-yun the bad rumors
about Dong-yun’s girlfriend and Paek-hee causing her suicide attempt. Dong-yun, feeling
betrayed by Ki-t’ae, drops out of high school. Again full of regret, Ki-t’ae visits Dong-yun’s
house. Hearing Dong-yun’s declaration that Ki-t’ae is not his friend anymore, Ki-t’ae asks him,
５４

“From which point did things go wrong?” and Dong-yun calmly answers, “Nothing would
have been wrong, if you had not been here from the beginning.” That became their last
conversation, as Ki-t’ae commits suicide soon afterward. Near the end of the film, after Paek-
hee visits Dong-yun to tell him to meet Ki-t’ae’s father, Dong-yun cries that night because he
recalls the conversation that they had long ago, when the three friends had a good relationship,
when Ki-t’ae tells Dong-yun that, no matter what happens, Dong-yun will remain his friend,
for that is enough for Ki-t’ae. Although Dong-yun meets with Ki- ta’e’s father, he cannot tell
him anything about his best friend’s death, as his feelings of guilt are indescribable.

Figure 3. The three friends walking on the railroad tracks in Bleak Night. From left: Paek-hee

(Jŏng-min Park), Ki-t’ae (Je-hun Lee) and Dong-yun (Jun-yŏng Sŏ).

One of the most distinctive features of this film is its narrative structure. Its manner of
storytelling is far from the stereotype of a genre film. Dramatic events do not take place, no
one in the film finds an answer to the questions they seek throughout the film, and the film has
５５

an open ending. The timeline of the film is not in chronological order, and the memories of
Dong-yun and Paek-hee are shown in a fragmented, rather than coherent, structure. Ki-t’ae’s
father’s search functions as the device to show the three friends’ complicated emotional
upheavals in the past. In addition to the loss of a close friend and feeling guilty over the death
on the parts of Paek-hee and Dong-yun, another tragedy takes place at the point where Ki-
t’ae’s father cannot figure out the reason for his son’s suicide, since the father did not know
how vulnerable his son was.
Another notable aspect of this film is its realistic ambience, which makes it look like a
documentary. Most of the shots are hand-held and eye-level; the camera is positioned as if it
were the gaze of another classmate, bringing the audience into the action of the film (this
technique is known as diegesis). Also, the film frequently uses close-up shots of faces to
capture not only extremely subtle facial expressions, but also the actors’ breathing. Some of
the bullying sequences are shot as one scene, one cut (plant sequence) in a hand-held shot.
Without the interference of editing, the camera follows and catches the tension between the
friends with great intensity. In addition to the cinematography, the realistic, natural acting of
the high-school boys and the use of lots of high-school male slang add to the ambience of the
documentary-like narrative film, depicting high-school boys’ everyday life.
The film starts with a scene in which a group of high-school boys (wearing their school
uniforms) walk on an empty street, smoking cigarettes. One of the boys, Ki-t’ae, starts to beat
up another boy in the group. After the ruthless-beating scene, the film shows a male- only
high-school classroom, where Ki-t’ae and Dong-yun play cheerfully with other classmates.
However, Paek-hee does not join them, even though Dong-yun asks him to. At this moment,
５６

the film does not tell the spectator what is going on between Ki-t’ae and Paek- hee, but
tensions between the two are palpable. In this classroom scene, the contrast between school
bullying and cheerful, amicable relationships among classmates, or the combination of the
bright and desirable relationship among high-school friends and the implicit tension among
them, within one sequence, epitomizes the overall tone of the film. By juxtaposing the happy
moments with classmates and the moments of intense emotional conflict in the non -
chronological narrative structure, Bleak Night complicates teenaged boys’ sensitive emotional
transitions throughout the film.
The film does not explain why such violence—to put it in a more concrete sense, ijime
(the term borrowed from Japanese and used in Korea, meaning bullying)—occurs among the
high-school students. Like the reason for violence among those high-school students, the film
does not explicitly depict the reason for the suicide (of Ki-t’ae). However, one may infer that
the feelings of being deserted by a close friend and of not being approved among one’s cohorts,
as depicted in this film, are enough to explain the despair of the high-school boys. In fact, this
ambiguity of motivation for violent acts is what distinguishes the film from the stereotypical
coming-of-age cinema with the obvious growing-up narrative. Yet, the ambiguity in this film
is different from that of nihilistic anti-social characters in other films, such as Shohei
Imamura’s 1974 film, Vengeance is Mine. The violence—both emotional and physical—
among classmates in Bleak Night has a universal resonance regardless of age and nationality,
as this film examines relationships in a way to which anyone can relate.
This film, which shows three friends’ vulnerability and the difficulties of building a
relationship with anyone, goes beyond the stereotypical coming-of-age film based on boyhood
５７

male bonding. Notably, the boys in this film fail to grow up, whereas many teen films
conclude by depicting teenagers who have grown up through the lessons and hardships
experienced in the film. Yoon made his feature-film debut with this film, which is considered
by many to be the most original debut film made in recent years.

2. Girl’s Dreams Come True: Bronze Medallist
The majority of girlhood films produced in Korea are horror films. Horror films set in a
girls’ high school became an important sub-genre in terms of both the commercial and
aesthetic aspects (although many of these teenaged-girl horror films received a poor evaluation
by the critics and were commercially unsuccessful) in Korea, since the success of the
Whispering Corridor series, which started in 1998. It would be fair to argue that the teenaged-
girl horror cinema tradition began with the film series called High School Girl’s Ghost Story.
Since the release of Whispering Corridors, directed by Ki-hyŏng Park, in 1998, five films have
been made in the series. Whispering Corridors was a big hit at the box office, and is still
regarded among critics as one of the best horror films made in Korea. Because of its
commercial success, it has engendered teenager horror films every summer since then.
Whispering Corridors was the first horror film set in a high school in South Korean film
history, and was the first cinematic representation of high-school ghost stories, which are one
of the most popular narratives circulated among teenaged high-school girls in South Korea.
While the first film of the series, Whispering Corridors, depicts violence by teachers and
classmates taking place in a high school, the second film, Memento Mori (dir. Tae-yong Kim
and Kyu- dong Min, 1999), sensitively depicts the (homo-) sexuality of teenage girls. Since the
５８

commercial success of Whispering Corridors and the critic’s acclaim for Memento Mori,
horror films set in a girls’ high school have become one of the most popular trends in summer
movies.
Although teenaged-girl films are not a commercially potent sub-genre, films about
teenage girls have been made from time to time. Perhaps the first girlhood film made in Korea
was College Female Students Born in the Year of the Horse. Directed by Hyŏng-pyo Lee, this
film was released in 1963 and considered to be the first planned film targeting a youth
audience and starring the top movie stars at that time, Song-il Shin and Aeng-ran Eom, who
played a couple (and later got married in real life) in much youth cinema of the 1960s.
This film is about female university students who were born in 1942 and entered
university in 1961, the year of the horse among the 12 animals, one of which is assigned to
each year based on the traditional calendar. In Korea, a superstitious belief based on a gender
norm existed at that time: women who were born in the year of the horse have a bad temper,
like a tomboy, and will have a lot of ups and downs in their lives, meaning they are not
obedient enough or are against traditional female values. However, this superstitious belief and
the misogynous logic hidden under the idea were called into question by the feminist
movement, which began (influenced by the feminist movement of the West) in Korea around
that time. In the early 1960s, most women were not expected to enter university; even for men,
college education was beyond the usual. Yet, throughout the 1960s, it was considered more
appropriate that male members of a family should receive a higher education than should
female members. In this regard, this comedy film depicts female university students living
against gendered social prejudices. At the same time, the characters of the female college
５９

students are a reflection of a fantasy for both female audiences, desiring to become like them,
and for male audiences, desiring them. This film, although it features female college students
who are intelligent and have their own free will, while not being submissive, fails to challenge
patriarchal social norms.
Korean films about women, whether about teenage girls or adults, tend not to convey
strong social commentaries. This tendency in Korean cinema is similar to American girlhood
cinema. In her analysis of coming-of-age narratives of 1960s American films, Sarah Hentges
argued that “The girls in 1960s films are all fighting for a transition into the adult world on
their own terms and each faces different forms of social control,” such as Judy in Rebel
Without a Cause; Maria in West Side Story; and Merritt in Where the Boys Are. According to
Hentges, these female characters are “challenging the social controls (formal and informal)
that bind girls, but none of them can come to a satisfactory answer.” However, more
importantly, “These girls were not just fighting for a rite of passage, they were fighting to be
let into the ranks of adult culture, even as they question this culture.”
40
Like Hentges’
argument, although the girls in Korean teen films challenge social norms, at the same time
they struggle to be a successful member of the world they are questioning.
Girlhood films in Korea do not have a strong tradition in terms of the numbers produced
and in terms of the impact the films have had on the industry and culture. One of the
differences between American and Korean cinema is the fact that, in Korean cinema, and, by
extension, Korean popular culture in general, depicting girlhood is less common than depicting
boyhood. Particularly because of the popularity of gangster films in the 1990s, teen films were

40
Sarah Hentges, Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film, Jefferson: McFarland & Company,
Inc., 2006, p. 60-61.
６０

mostly about male bonding among expressly masculine male characters, such as Friend (dir.
Kyŏng-taek Kwak, 2001) and Spirit of Jeet Keun Do (dir. Ha Yu, 2004). A girlhood film is a
film about women—growing up (both physically and emotionally, but focusing more on the
latter) and female bonding. The term “female bonding” here refers to the linkage or
consciousness that can be shared within the specific age group (mostly from the mid-teens to
the early twenties) and gender, female in this case. Perhaps one of the most significant films
that deal with girlhood is Take Care of My Cat (2001), the debut film of a female director, Jae-
eun Jŏng. Not only films about teenage girls, but also films about the bond between female
characters, are extremely rare in Korean cinema. However, in 2011 one of the biggest hits in
Korean films was Sunny (dir. Hyŏng-chŏl Kang, 2011), a film about seven high-school girls,
set in the late 1980s, when disco music and the Walkman were popular among teenagers. In
terms of the age classification, Sunny presents both womanhood and girlhood, depicting the
story of seven middle-aged women in the present and their high- school years of the 1980s by
using flashbacks and flashforwards. Both Take Care of My Cat and Sunny are dramas. Among
the few drama films that address teenage girlhood, it is worthwhile analyzing Bronze Medallist
(dir. Kon-yong Park, 2009) in depth.
Partly based on the true story of a weightlifting teacher, Bronze Medallist (aka. Lifting
King Kong) is another important work about youth—teenage girls, to be precise. This film is
set in a girls’ high school in a small town in the Korean countryside. A male teacher, who is a
former Olympic bronze medalist in weightlifting, establishes a weightlifting group. However,
as weightlifting is not a popular sport among girls, there is a lack of interest. Only girls from
poor families join the group, since the school provides food and lodging for the team members.
６１

In addition to the hardships involved in becoming weightlifters, while growing up and dealing
with not-so-helpful adults, including unsympathetic and uninterested parents, family members
and school teachers, this film shows the struggles of girls from working—class family
backgrounds—a girlhood perspective that is rarely presented in the popular media—and the
friendships between the girls and the coach of the team that are created as a result of
overcoming these difficulties together.
The film’s Korean title captures the essence of the film better than its international title.
The Korean title is King Kong-eul Deul Da whose literal translation is Lifting King
Kong. The title comes from the nickname of the coach of the weightlifting team, Ji-bong Lee.
Because he has a heart problem (which leads to his tragic death of a heart attack near the end
of the film), he sometimes beats his heart with his hand, and the girls—the members of the
weightlifting team—thinking that it looks like King Kong beating his chest, give him the
nickname “King Kong.” In the middle and around the end of the film, the girls of the
weightlifting team lift up their teacher. In the context of the story of the film, this act
symbolically visualizes the bond (or affection) among them.
Simply put, this film is about six girls in a weightlifting team in a girls’ middle school in
a small city, Bosong, in Jolla province. In Korea, Bosong is famous for its vast green-tea fields.
The spatial background, that is, the fact that the small middle school is located in the
countryside, has significant functions. First of all, the girls’ use of the local accent of the
Cholla province gives a comic effect to the film; but, more importantly, their local accent and
local dialect give them the characterization of innocence and pureness. In addition, because the
spatial setting of the film is a small town, where tall buildings, sophisticated places and decent
６２

cars are not visible, it gives a nostalgic effect—the nostalgia that anyone could have in relation
to their own childhood. Although the film specifies its temporal background by adding
subtitles, such as “year 2008” or “year 1998,” because of the bucolic space, the film has an
ambience that does not belong to a specific age and gives a setting to which the viewer can
relate to easily on a personal level.
On the other hand, the film is about nostalgia and memories of childhood. It begins at an
airport in the present, 2008, when Young-ja, a weightlifter, is about to leave for the Beijing
Olympics as a member of the national team. Among the crowds at the airport, Young-ja’s
middle-school friends give a bag to her. Inside the airplane, Young-ja opens the bag and finds
the pictures that make her recall her middle-school days with her friends in the weightlifting
team and their coach. The main plot of the film, the story of the weightlifting team of a small
middle school in the late 1980s, begins to be told.

Figure 4. Six girls in the weightlifting team in countryside high school in the Korean
countryside. Young-ja (Ahn Cho) is on the far right of the photo.

The film focuses on the relationship between the teacher, Ji-bong, and the girls on the
weightlifting team. Ji-bong is an Olympic bronze medalist . He sustained a serious injury
６３

during the Olympics and had to retire. Then, he became the athletics teacher in a middle
school in the small city in Cholla province. He is initially reluctant to lead the weightlifting
team, because he thinks that becoming a weightlifter is not beneficial for the teenaged girls’
futures. Telling everyone that weightlifting is not a popular sport, that a weightlifter can get
injured very easily, and that, once they retire, they do not have many options, he tries to
convince the schoolgirls not to be on the weightlifting team. In spite of this, a few girls
volunteer. After finding out that those girls are in need of help—they have their own issues,
including financial and self-esteem issues—Ji-bong makes up his mind to teach them
weightlifting.
Like many other sports dramas, the narrative of this film follows the stereotypical
narrative convention: their training process; taking part in matches with a rival school, and
their initial failures; and winning the final match to overcome all the hardships at the end. The
narrative does not go beyond the generic convention of a sports drama. What makes this film
important is that it is about friendships between girls (which are much less visible in Korean
cinema than friendships between boys). Moreover, from the perspective of gender,
this film shows a unique aspect of femininity, in that the girls are weightlifters ; weightlifting
is not usually considered a girls’ sports and the bodies of the teenage girls are far different
from the skinny, pretty female protagonists that are found in most mainstream Korean films.
Along with the fact that this film gives a unique gender description, it is worth noting
that the film is also about lower-class female characters and the characterization of each
character is vivid, rather than focusing on only one protagonist. This film gives a sentimental
touch by depicting the accomplishments of girls from lower-class families. As mentioned
６４

above, each character has her own issue. Firstly, the reason why the protagonist, Young-ja,
joins the weightlifting team at the school is because she needs food and a place to stay. Young-
ja is an orphan. Her grandmother adopts her and raises her, but later passes away. Young-ja
has no place to live because the grandmother’s heartless sons take the house. Before she joins
the weightlifting team, Young-ja was a member of the shooting team. However, she always
had to borrow a gun from another girl because she cannot afford her own. One day, the teacher
of the shooting team scolds her by saying that, in a battle, a soldier should have his or her own
gun and cannot borrow a gun from another soldier. Ji-bong happens to see Young-ja drinking
milk from the leftover milk boxes at school, and invites her to lunch at his place. Ji-bong tells
Young-ja that a soldier needs a gun in a battle, but the soldier does not buy the gun. It is the
nation who buys the soldier a gun. Young-ja is pleased that she does not need to buy barbells
and that the weightlifting team will provide food and a place where she can stay. This becomes
a resting place for six girls who will study and play together. Another girl, Ye-soon, lives with
a disabled mother, who cannot walk (or work). Ye- soon is the head of her family and lives as
the recipient of a livelihood program, because her father passed away when she was small. A
girl nicknamed Pangsoon-ee (meaning “Bread Girl”) is bullied by other (pretty and rich) girls
at school because she is fat. Having low self- esteem, whenever she gets bullied, she eats
sweets and cries alone. But her secret crush on a boy at church, who is a brother of Min-hee,
another member of the weightlifting team, is fulfilled as she becomes famous as a weightlifter,
with the help of Min-hee.

６５

Juvenile Delinquency
1. Adolescence, Adulthood and Society
In the category of juvenile delinquency cinema, the representation of the relationship
between adolescence, adulthood and society in South Korea will be analyzed. The films of
juvenile delinquency represent the sentimentality of youth, which includes feelings of isolation,
solitude, and despair, within the themes of social norms, social acceptance or rejection,
conflict with authority and lack of communication. The South Korean films in this category
corresponds to significant issues that are specific to contemporary South Korean society,
including the obligation to do military service, college-centered high-school education, and
youth unemployment.
In approaching the juvenile delinquency cinema of Korea, it is useful to situate the
theme of juvenile delinquency in relation to the social context. It is interesting that teenaged
crimes, which must be the most important theme of juvenile-delinquency cinema in the case of
American cinema, for instance, are rarely presented in Korean cinema, although teenaged
crimes have been a serious issue in Korea, particularly since the 2000s. In recent years, the
number of teenagers committing suicide because of school bullying or schoolwork pressure
has increased dramatically. In addition to the issue of suicide is the fact that teenaged crime
has become more and more violent, including rape and homicide. In spite of the fact that
serious teenaged crime takes place in reality, in Korean cinema, such serious crimes have not
been depicted, which is in stark contrast to the films made about teenagers killing their
teachers and/or classmates in, for example, the US, the UK and Japan—films such as Elephant
(dir. Gus Van Sant, 2003) in the US, If… (dir. Lindsay Anderson, 1968) in the UK and Battle
６６

Royale (dir. Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) and Confessions (dir. Tetsuya Nakashima, 2010) in Japan.
The reason teenaged crime has not been depicted (or is rarely depicted) is probably because
censorship in Korean cinema is comparatively strict, and the subject of teenagers committing
serious crimes is considered too radical to appeal to the market. Unlike what actually happens
in Korean society, juvenile-delinquency films tend to depict juvenile crime as fantasy, without
realistic sentiments.
Juvenile-delinquency films began to emerge in the mid-1990s. Although the high teen
(hai-teen, meaning late teens in Korean) cinema of the 1970s, which was explained in the
previous chapter, depicts teenagers who are not able to or refuse to follow the expectations and
desires of their parents and teachers, the teen cinema of the 1970s was more about teenagers’
cute romances in a comedy genre, presenting the lives and sensibility of teenagers as a
superficial and exaggerated drama. However, in 1990s teen films, juvenile delinquency came
to be narrativitized in a more genuine manner, and some of the films came to use juvenile
delinquency as their main theme. As Thomas Doherty has argued, the juvenilization of
American cinema—that is, the emergence of teen pics as a genre—took place in the mid-1950s,
along with the invention and widespread distribution of cars, television and rock-and-roll
music. However, the teen films of Korean cinema that are equivalent to American teen pics
representing rebellious teenagers—that is, juvenile delinquency—began to emerge in the
1990s.
The question, then, is why Korean juvenile-delinquency films emerged almost 40 years
later than in the US. There are several reasons for this discrepancy. To begin with, it is
necessary to consider the economic and social conditions that distinguish Korea from the US.
６７

In Korea, cars became pervasively used by middle-class households between the late 1980s
and the early 1990s. However, it should be noted that in Korea the use of a car is less
significant than in the US. Koreans tend to prefer public transportation, regardless of car
ownership, because the public-transportation system is far better than private/automobile
transportation and the system for private cars is not as effective as that of the US. There is
therefore no great difference between those who possess a car and those who do not in terms
of mobility. Television sets became a fixture in almost every household in Korea from the late
1970s.
Why, then, did juvenile-delinquency films, an equivalent to James Dean’s films, for
example, not emerge in the early 1980s? There are several related factors. Firstly, unlike the
consumption of television and usage of cars, rock-and-roll music was not a popular-music
genre in Korea until the early 1990s. The governmental censorship of popular culture during
the Jung-hee Park government restricted the freedom of expression and artistic possibilities of
cultural products. Rock-and-roll music, which will be discussed in more detail in a later
chapter on rock-and-roll music cinema, was considered anti-governmental and non- conformist
by the dictatorship-based government, as rock-and-roll music, obviously, symbolizes a
rebellious attitude. In addition to the governmental suppression of rock-and-roll music, in the
university undongkwon culture, which refers to the democratic and nationalist movements
among university students, rock-and-roll music was regarded as something anti- nationalistic
or reactionary, in that the genre is the product of the Western power bloc, with the US and the
UK at its center. For these reasons, rock-and-roll (or heavy-metal) music had to remain as
underground music until the 1990s, when Seo Taiji appeared.
６８

Secondly, the political situation during the Jung-hee Park regime (from the early 1960s
to 1979) and the Doo-hwan Chon regime (from 1980 to 1988)—in other words, during the
military dictatorship period from the early 1960s to the 1980s—led to the dark age of Korean
cinema. Here, the meaning of the term military dictatorship refers to the administrations of the
former presidents, Park and Chon, both with military backgrounds. They became presidents
through a coup d’état and suppressed the politicians of the opposition party, such as Dae-joong
Kim, who later became president (from 1998 to 2003) and deployed policies to invest in,
develop, and promote Korean popular culture. (Although South Korea’s next president, Tae-
woo Noh, also had a military background and is considered the political successor of Chon,
Noh became a president by election.) In 1962, President Park’s government established the
first law of cinema since the foundation of the Republic of Korea in 1948. From 1962 to 1989,
the Korean government changed the law of Korean cinema seven times. The regulations in the
law of cinema do not explicitly restrict freedom of expression. Rather, the government
included several regulations to protect and improve the Korean cinema industry, such as the
screen-quota system, begun in 1967, to meet the demands of film makers, expressed through
several demonstrations against governmental policies that it was felt could harm the Korean
cinema industry. Ji-Yŏn Park, a researcher of Korean cinema law and policies, has argued that
the reason why Korean cinema went through the dark ages in the 1970s was because the
regulations to protect the industry made it uncompetitive.
41
However, it should be noted that
all films (even including trailers) had to be censored by the government after the cinema law

41
Ji-yeon Park, “The Policy of Cinema from the Establishment of the Law of Cinema to the Fourth Revision,
1961-1984,” [Yonghwa Bop Kaejong Eso Je 4 Cha Kaejong Ki Kkaji Eui Younghwa Jongchaek (1961-
1984nyon)], in The History of Korean Cinema Policy, edited by Dong-ho Kim, Seoul: Nanam, 2005, p. 189-267.
Translations are mine.
６９

was revised in 1973.
42
In spite of the fact that the laws governing Korean cinema do not
explicitly restrict freedom of artistic creation, it is obvious that, during the dictatorship period,
the regulations regarding content harmful to the public could be applied broadly and
irrationally by the censorship board of the government, similar to the Motion Picture
Production Code of the Hays Office in American cinema that was in effect from the 1930s to
the 1960s.
Yet, it is worth pointing out that, during the early period of the Jung-hee Park regime,
that is, in the 1960s, Korean cinema experienced a golden age in terms of both the quantity of
production and popularity among domestic audiences. During this period, many important
first-generation Korean directors appeared, including Song-il Shin, Chang-hwa Chong, Sung-
ki Hong and Kwon-taek Im. In this golden age of Korean cinema, melodrama and comedy
were the most popular genres. Because the 1960s was before the film laws were established by
the Jung-hee Park government, it might be fair to argue that, until 1972, when President Park
declared the Yushin law, through which he began a harsher military dictatorship, Korean film
makers had relative freedom in their artistry. From the 1970s, when Yushin policy began,
Korean cinema lost its artistic value and Korean film makers had to hide behind sex films, or,
at best, erotic hostess films—films depicting young working women who are characterized as
bar hostesses or housekeepers.
In the 1980s, President Chon unofficially promoted the “3S Policy” (“Sex, Sports, and
Screen”). However, the Korean cinema of the 1980s was regarded as boring and not artistic by
most of the domestic audience and critics, in part because it was regulated by the strict

42
Ji-hye Ahn, ibid., p. 279.
７０

censorship board and in part because they were not commercially competitive with Hollywood
films. However, the commercial value (and perhaps artistic value) of Korean cinema became
enhanced from the 1990s.
The third reason why juvenile-delinquency films emerged after the 1990s is that, from
the early 1990s, the commercial value and artistic quality of Korean cinema became
effectively improved through the producer system with the emergence of Shin Cine, Myong
Film and Bom Studio, to name a few. The producer-led movie-making system enabled a more
systematized production system, including the stages of planning, scriptwriting, hiring
directors and crews, casting and publicity. Along with the systematized production developed
by talented professional producers, and the appearance of talented directors with commercial
power, such as Woo-sŏk Kang, Chan-wook Park and Joon-ho Bong, Korean cinema came to
win greater popularity over Hollywood films from the 1990s. Of course, directors such as
Sang-soo Hong and Ki-duk Kim also played an enormous role in improving the artistic quality
of Korean cinema and came to be known internationally, rather than just inside Korea
(although their films have not been commercially successful) and contributed to the
renaissance of Korean cinema in the 1990s.
Arguably, the films worth mentioning in the category of juvenile delinquency are the
following: Three Friends (dir. Soon-rye Im, 1996), Beat (dir. Sŏng-soo Kim, 1997), Bye June
(dir. Ho Choi, 1998), Plum Blossom (dir. Ji-kyun Kwak,
43
2000), Timeless, Bottomless (dir.
Sun-woo Jang, 1997) and Tears (Sang-soo Im, 2000). Among those films, Timeless,
Bottomless and Tears share similar themes and the depiction of teenaged crimes such as

43
It is tragic but notable that, like many of the young characters in his films, director Kwak Jikyoon committed
suicide in May 2010 after suffering from longtime depression.
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underage sex, rape, theft, bullying and drug use.
In addition, two well-known film directors, Sun-woo Jang and Sang-soo Im, made films
on the theme of teenaged crime, which had not been a popular or common subject in Korean
cinema up to that point. The realistic style of these two films was an issue among film makers
and critics during the preproduction and production, especially Timeless, Bottomless. Timeless,
Bottomless is almost a fake documentary, in that the film uses hand-held camera, low-key
lighting, and non-professional actors: overall, the intentional use of B-movie aesthetics. In
terms of the shocking effect of violent crime and the realistic style used to depict outlaw
teenagers on the street, these two films are similar to US bad boys films such as Kids (dir.
Larry Clark, 1995) and The Doom Generation (dir. Gregg Araki, 1996).
Whereas Three Friends, Beat, Bye June and Plum Blossom could be interpreted as films
that question social norms and criticize hypocrisy as represented by adult society through
narrativitizing aimless youth, Timeless, Bottomless and Tears serve as teenaged pornography
for the male heterosexual gaze and/or a voyeuristic gaze on the world of outlaw teenagers for
an adult curiosity, rather than an investigation of social contexts or a representation of
rebellious, but sympathetic, juvenile-delinquent characters, for which many juvenile-
delinquency films aim. In his analysis of juvenile-delinquency films in American cinema,
Timothy Shary suggested that early juvenile-delinquency films, of the 1930s and 1940s,
examined not only “domestic surroundings fostered by inadequate parents,” but also “more
complex operations of social conditions, such as class status.” After World War II, with the
rise of “moral panic” and “American ephebiphobia,” (fear of youth) Hollywood too made an
archetype of the juvenile-delinquent figure, the “tough-but-tender young man of the time,”
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such as those depicted by Marlon Brando and James Dean.
44
The male protagonists in Beat,
Bye June, and Plum Blossom (but not those in Three Friends), fit into this archetype, which
represents the aimless, nihilistic young people in Korea of the early 1990s.
The juvenile-delinquency films, including those mentioned above, present characters in
their teens or early twenties who try desperately to avoid military service, are addicted to sex
or drugs, have difficulties with relationships that lead to pain or heartbreak, are unemployed,
do not know what to do with their lives, commit suicide and/or wander through society as
degenerates, as they are unable to attain any conclusions in their lives or relationships. To
some extent, these films can be viewed as political, in that they question social values, the
legitimacy of authority and the issue of social class in contemporary Korean society. Among
these films, this dissertation examines Three Friends, directed by Soon- rye Im in 1996,
because it is significant in that the film depicts three high-school graduates as subalterns, who
are not articulate in Korean society, in a realistic manner and show candidly the chronic,
irrational contradictions within society, despite the fact that the film contains several weak
points in directing, acting and cinematography.

2. Aimlessness and Social Obligation: Three Friends
Before beginning the analysis of Three Friends, the film Beat, made a year after Three
Friends, is worth noting for the characterization of the male protagonist, in comparison to the
male characters in Three Friends. The rebellious image from youth cinema is often called

44
Timothy Shary, “Bad Boys and Hollywood Hype: Gendered Conflict in Juvenile Delinquency Films”
in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, edited by Murray Pomerance and Frances
Gateward, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005, p. 26-27.
７３

cliché, the spirit of the era, and becomes the iconic image that represents the whole young
generation (for example, James Dean). After Beat, Woo-sŏng Jŏng, still one of the most
popular actors in South Korea, became the representative persona of the young demographic
of the late 1990s, embodying failed romantic relationships, disappointment in adults and
society, and anxiety about the future during the economic depression that led to the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis in 1997. The image of the main character riding a
motorcycle without using his hands, as if flying through the night-time streets of Seoul, with
Jŏng’s voiceover narration, “I don’t have a dream,” gained so much popularity among young
people that Jŏng, the actor who played the male protagonist in the film, became the top-rated
movie celebrity at that time. Based on a popular manga of the same title by Youngman Huh,
this action/crime teen film deals with the themes of juvenile delinquency, male bonding and
romance. Jŏng became an iconic figure, symbolizing the rebellious, but attractive male
character who is not so well adapted to mainstream society.
Unlike the popular image of an attractive male character in Beat, the three male
protagonists in Three Friends are far from the James Dean–type of iconic male image—tough
outside, but vulnerable inside. It is interesting that this feature-length debut film from the
female director, Soon-rye Im, deals with issues that men (not women) would confront in
Korean society, as this film is about three male characters, all around 20 years old, who
desperately try to avoid mandatory military service. Im had already become famous in the low-
budget cinema arena after she received first prize in the Seoul Short Film Festival. This low-
budget film, Three Friends, was also invited to many international film festivals in 1997,
including the Cannes Film Festival and the Berlin Film Festival, and received a New Currents
７４

Award at the Busan Film Festival. Although this film was far from a commercial success at the
box office (and it is obvious that it did not have a commercial purpose), Three Friends was
one of the most interesting of debut films, and Im became regarded as a new director who had
the potential to lead the Korean film industry. By depicting the issues that Korean men face,
this film criticizes society, which oppresses people in the margins and enforces patriarchal and
totalitarian social norms.
When the film begins, it is the graduation day of the three friends, Musosok (meaning
belonging nowhere), Somse (meaning sensitive), and Samgyop (literally meaning three layers,
that is, being fat). On their high-school graduation day, they do not look excited or happy,
because they do not have any plans for their lives. They do not plan to go to a college and do
not have a job. The only good thing about graduation for them is the fact that they do not need
to confront their violent teacher anymore: the one who made Musosok lose his hearing in one
ear, when the teacher hit him because he caught Musosok drawing a cartoon while he, the
teacher, was bragging about his military experience during class. Here, the military experience
symbolizes machismo, and this machismo in the film symbolizes violence upon individuals
within Korean society. When teachers beat Musosok without apparent reason, he does not
resist. Musosok, Somse and Samgyop are not rebellious kids; rather, they are somewhat
submissive (regardless of their intentions) and seem reluctant about everything. It seems that
they do not have any other options.
The film shows the three friends’ pursuing their dreams and not pursuing their dreams at
the same time. For instance, Musosok wants to be a cartoonist. However, cartoon publishers
exploit him without teaching him how to be a professional cartoonist. Moreover, a cartoon
７５

publisher steals Musosok’s work and publishes it. Musosok does not have any means to sue
the publishers; the only thing that he has is a father who is insanely obsessed with badook
(Korean chess).
This film depicts the lack of or the impossibility of communication between the three
young males and their parents. Musosok and his father do not talk to each other, although
Musosok makes several attempts to initiate dialogue. The mother is absent in Musosok’s
family. The film does not reveal anything about his mother. Musosok’s friend, Somse, has a
father worse than anyone. His father is alcoholic and, whenever he is drunk, beats his mother,
who runs a small hair salon. Somse, although he has a dream to be a hair stylist, cannot reveal
it to his parents. For his parents, becoming a hair stylist is an effeminate ambition, and they
want him to go to college. In addition to wanting to become a hair stylist, Somse has another
issue: he wants to be a woman. His friends, Musosok and Samgyop, do not discuss this
gender-identity issue, but they naturally respect their friend’s wish. While Musosok is beaten
by a teacher while drawing a cartoon in class, Somse is bullied by a gangster when he is
caught wearing female clothes. Whereas Musosok’s father is indifferent to his son and
Somse’s parents harass their son, Samgyop’s parents are not so bad. Yet Samgyop has his own
issue: he cannot control his appetite. Whenever he is stressed out, he has to eat. He does not
have any dream for his future. What he wants to do is watch videos all day long.
This film depicts one of the most sensitive issues in Korean society: the military
obligation. Because the three friends are not college students, they receive notice to serve in
the army, as every Korean man around 20 is obliged to serve for two years. It is a well-known
fact that, during military service, soldiers are beaten badly by their senior officers, and military
７６

training is so hard that fatal accidents often happen. To avoid military service, Samgyop
succeeds in raising his weight above the limit to serve in the army, so he is exempted from
mandatory military service. Musosok asks the other two friends to break his arm, but they fail,
so he goes to the army. Somse wants to go to the army, hoping that he may become more
masculine, but he is refused because of his mental illness. Around the end of the film,
Musosok, after being beaten by a senior officer, loses his hearing in his good ear. He is
released from the army because of deafness. The last scene of the film is a shot of Musosok
walking in a street market, but he cannot hear the sound of another man carrying cargo behind
him, and is almost hit by the cargo.
In Korea, it is a common notion that sons of the privileged class should not serve in the
military. Serving in the military therefore indicates that your parents are not powerful enough
or do not have powerful enough connections to get you exemption from military service. In
this regard, military service represents the irrationality and injustice of Korean society. The
three friends being forced to serve in the military shows the vicious cycle that they cannot
escape. They have to serve in the military at that early age because they do not go to a college
and they do not have powerful parents. They do not have any of the capital that Pierre
Bourdieu identified—economic capital, social capital and symbolic capital—as important in
Korean society.
The film shows multi-layered violence: violence in the family, violence at school,
violence by gangsters on the street and violence in the military. The film does not suggest any
answer or hope for resolving the violence. When the heterosexual patriarchal order
suppresses them, they cannot do anything to change the condition. They do not even attempt to
７７

change it. All they can do is roam the streets and the filthy corners in the slum area where they
reside, or just sit and cry in their small rooms.

Coming-of-Age Sexuality
The term coming-of-age is connotative of the physical, mental, cultural and social
growth of an individual within the context of South Korea. In terms of the theme of sexuality
and coming-of-age, films will be analyzed in terms of how they approach the adolescent body
and the way those films represent the institutionalized gaze toward the adolescent body. In
analyzing the sexuality of coming-of-age films, the homosexual identity of teenagers and
heterosexual comedy of the college campus will mainly be discussed.

1. When a Boy Becomes a Woman: Like a Virgin
Like a Virgin (dir. Hae-young Lee and Hae-joon Lee, 2006) is one of the most important
films in the proposed study. This film fuses facets of films like Sumo Do, Sumo Don’t (dir.
Masayuki Suo, 1992, Japan), Ma Vie En Rose (aka My Life in Pink, dir. Alain Berliner, 1997,
Belgium), and Billy Elliot (dir. Stephen Daldry, 2000, UK). Like a Virgin is about a high-
school boy who likes Madonna and wants to become a female singer. As a boy living in a poor
family, there is no money for him to have sex-change surgery, so he joins his high school
ssireum (Korean traditional wrestling) group, in an attempt to win a high school ssireum
tournament and its monetary prize. Ssireum club members who are impressed by Dong-ku’s
singing and dancing, teach him ssireum, and Dong-ku practices very hard to win the
tournament. Throughout his training, he turns out to be a genius ssireum player. This
７８

comedy/drama depicts the camaraderie among teenage boys in the group and the protagonist’s
conflict with his father owing to his sexual identity.
Films with homosexual content have rarely been made in Korea. The first Korean film
to deal with homosexuality was Broken Branches (dir. Jae-ho Park, 1996), which was a low-
budget independent film that highlighted the issues experienced by homosexuals through the
story of a young man in a patriarchal system and homophobic society. The second film to deal
with homosexual relationships was Memento Mori, produced in 1999. Since 2000, queer
cinema has been produced more frequently and by mainstream production companies as well.
Bungee Jumping of Their Own (dir. Dae-seung Kim, 2001), a tragic love story about a high-
school teacher and his student, who is a reincarnation of the teacher’s dead ex- girlfriend, was
the first homosexual-themed film that was successful at the box office, starring well-known
movie stars. Road Movie (dir. In-shik Kim, 2002), which is a gay buddy/road movie, uses
homosexuality as the primary subject of the film. Homosexual films made after these have
tended to be more trendy and commercial, featuring top celebrity actors. Examples of these are
The King and the Clown (dir. Joon-ik Lee, 2005), Antique (dir. Kyu-dong Min, 2008), and A
Frozen Flower (dir. Ha Yoo, 2009). Among several films with homosexual themes, Like a
Virgin is unique in that it deals with the homosexual identity of an adolescent boy.
Ssireum is a male-dominated sport; traditionally, it is only played by males (although
there are some women who play ssireum these days). The initial joke of the movie is that a shy
boy with a feminine voice, who wants to be a female dancer and singer like Madonna, plays
the most masculine and traditional sport. The coach of the ssireum club explains to Dong-ku
that the satba, the cloth that is tied around ssireum players’ legs and the genital area,
７９

symbolizes the force of men, and, therefore, was traditionally worn as underwear by women
who wanted to bear a son (because, in the traditional, patriarchal Korean society, it was
important for a woman to have a son). However, this film intentionally and comically blurs
the distinction between masculinity and femininity. For example, there is a scene where the
robust, masculine-looking ssireum club members eat spicy rice cakes, which are known to be a
favorite food of teenage girls, as if it is their after-school routine. It is symbolic that the color
of the satba of the ssireum club, which should be either red or blue, becomes purple
after Dong-ku washes one satba of each color together—purple is a color that is normally
associated with gay rights.

Figure 5. The shy Dong-ku (Dŏk-hwan Ryu) in ssireum uniform.

In this film, Dong-ku’s most threatening opponent is his father. The first appearance of
his father is shown from a low angle, from the point-of-view of Dong-ku. In this scene, where
Dong-ku runs into his father in front of their house at night, the two are shown in contrast: his
father, a construction worker, drives a gigantic crane, with a big excavator on its front,
whereas Dong-ku carries a cute, small bicycle, with a basket on its front. In addition, the two
８０

are positioned in the frame as if they are having a David-and-Goliath-style fight. The father
inside his crane symbolizes his aggressive masculinity throughout the film, and this scene sets
the tone of the father-son relationship in the movie because of the size of the crane and its
headlight, while dreamy Dong-ku merely falls down in the street.
Dong-ku’s father represents the world that Dong-ku has to struggle against for the rest
of his life because of his gay identity, a world with patriarchal authority and where
heterosexuality is the norm. Dong- ku’s father stubbornly opposes Dong-ku’s participating in
ssireum, because he, a former boxer who had to quit owing to injury, knows that only a
champion is remembered in the arena of sports. The father, the prototypical conservative
authoritative figure, is shocked to discover his son’s gay identity. Dong-ku refuses to conform
to his father’s attitudes (or if psychoanalytic criticism is used, his father’s law: the law that
Dong-ku has to obey to enter the world of a heterosexual/non-perversive order).
Near the end of the film, the two have a real fight. Dong-ku’s father punches Dong-ku
(who is wearing his mother’s dress and makeup) hard, but after several severe punches from
his father, Dong-ku literally throws down his father, using the most forceful and most difficult
ssireum technique, the turn-over. The turn-over technique, which Dong-ku tried to learn
throughout his ssireum training, is finally mastered at the moment when he defeats his father.
Symbolically, it is as if he turns over the relation of power between him and his father and the
rules he was forced to follow.

８１

Figure 6. The masculine look of Dong-ku’s father (Yun-shik Kim) as in the final dual scene.

Like a Virgin is not only about sexuality, but also about class. As Cordula Quint pointed
out, Ma Vie en Rose “disturbs…the socially conservative equilibrium of middle-class suburban
life.” Ludovic, who wants to be a girl, becomes the “shame” of his middle-class family and his
suburban neighbors stigmatize him as being abnormal.
45
Unlike the social background of Ma
Vie en Rose, Dong-ku is a working-class youth. A few social minorities from Korean society
also appear in this film. In addition to Dong-ku, who is a sexual minority, his mother is a high-
school drop-out and makes her living through working at a theme park as a mascot girl. His
father is a manual laborer, who is fired from his construction work by his hypocritical boss.
The unemployed father struggles to feed his two sons, Dong- ku and his somewhat rebellious
younger brother. Because of his unemployed status, Dong- ku’s father shows unreasonable
aggression toward the immigrant workers from South Asia, another social minority group in
Korea. Like Take Care of My Cat, this film is set in Incheon, a port city near Seoul. This film
shows the locality of the city, such as its ocean-side factories, the exotic Chinatown, and the

45
Cordula Quint, “Boys Won’t Be Boys: Cross-Gender Masquerade and Queer Agency in Ma Vie en Rose” in
Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, eds. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2005, p 43.
８２

rather barren cityscape, which contrasts with Seoul, the very modern and urbanized space seen
in many trendy Korean television dramas and films.
The narrative of coming-of-age films tends to show protagonists who, no matter how
rebellious they are, accomplish tasks and resolve conflicts to enter safely into heterosexual
male/female adulthood—that is, by growing-up. The conflicts that Dong-ku has to resolve in
Like a Virgin are neither keeping boyhood friendships nor figuring out a future career. His
agony is more existential; Dong-ku has to change his body, his entire corporeality, only to
“survive,” as he says to his best friend in the film. This film does not attempt to criticize the
heterosexual norm of Korean society, the clichéd narrative of political correctness. This film
does not explicitly depict the hardships of a boy with a homosexual identity. The only
exception is when he gets his heart broken, because the Japanese teacher (played by Kusanagi
Tsuyoshi, a member of the Japanese-idol boy group, SMAP), on whom he had a secret crush,
gets married; however, the episode that deals with Dong-ku’s heartbreak is presented
humorously. Most of the people surrounding him, the members of the ssireum group, his coach,
his best friend, and his mother, accept and respect his gay identity (except his father). The
most touching scene is when he has dinner with his mother in her small room. His mother,
who ran away from Dong-ku’s father because of his alcoholism and depression, says to Dong-
ku, with tears in her eyes, “It is not important what others say. You should do what you want,
although the way you want to go might make you a lot lonelier than now. I respect your
choice.” Finally, Dong-ku wins the high-school ssireum championship and becomes a female
singer-cum-dancer performer—although it is not clear whether he has undergone sex-
reassignment surgery, or whether he is just performing his female identity—at a club where
８３

everyone (except his father) sings and dances to his rendition of the Madonna song, Like a
Virgin.
While Like a Virgin deals with the story of teenage boys, Memento Mori (dir. Taeyong
Kim and Kyudong Min, 1998), meaning “remember death,” is the story of teenage girls,
specifically of friendship and jealousy among teenage girls and their ambiguous sexual
identity. This horror film shows the sophisticated narrative structure moving between present
and past, and the use of flashbacks and first-person points of view to give a mysterious effect.
Memento Mori can be considered an art-house horror film. Although this film was not
successful at the box office, it has a cult following, and its fans regard it as the most beautiful
horror in Korean cinema. Along with the fantastic elements of the horror genre, this film’s
presentation of the particular sensibilities of late-teenage girls is embedded in the depiction of
everyday school life in a girls’ high school.
In stark contrast to the two abovementioned films, which sincerely depict the pain,
anxiety and agony of teenagers, without much box-office success, Sex is Zero (dir. Je-kyoon
Yoon, 2003), the Korean equivalent of the American film, American Pie (1999), was
positioned as a commercially successful, mainstream, college sex comedy. Because of its
commercial success, Sex is Zero 2 came out in 2007; while the sequel was not a flop, it was
not as successful as the first film of the series. Although Sex is Zero is significant in that it
introduced films with explicit sexual elements into mainstream commercial cinema, from the
feminist point of view, it is limited in that it focuses on male heterosexual desire, excludes the
female point of view, and gives a moral lesson by victimizing a female character. Despite the
fact that its depiction of corporeality reaches the level of abjection (which the majority of the
８４

Korean audience is not used to in mainstream films), the reason why this film was
commercially successful was that its characterization of college students is realistic. It explores
college students’ sexuality in a way that many college students or twenty-somethings can
relate to, and it depicts sexual content blatantly and to a point that had not been seen
previously in a commercial feature film.

2. Adolescent Body: Mother
Along with Sang-soo Hong and Chan-wook Park, one of the most talented contemporary
Korean directors is Joon-ho Bong. Bong’s fourth feature film, Mother (2009), is an interesting
work, dealing with the subject of coming-of-age sexuality. Before Mother, Bong’s two
previous films, Memories of Murder (2003) and The Host (2006), apparently present allegories
and metaphors about the political, historical and social context of Korea, such as American-
Korean power relations; rapid, growth-centered industrialization; and state authority
oppressing powerless civilians. But Mother explores a more personal arena of familial
relationships and sensitive emotional and corporeal relations that cannot be articulated easily.
Like Bong’s previous films—including his short films, Inconsistence (1994) and
Influenza (2004), and all of his previous features, Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000), Memories
of Murder (2003) and Host (2006)—Mother problematizes the violence of the official; that is,
the Korean government and the privileged class of Korean society represented by, mostly, the
police officers in those films toward subaltern people (who cannot articulate their thoughts and
feelings, because they belong to the class neglected by the given society). In terms of
consistent subject matter, Bong shows the characteristics of an auteur director, although he has
８５

made only four films so far.
Critiquing the hypocrisy of Korean society, the hypocrisy of the petit bourgeoisie, to be
precise, has been a common theme throughout his oeuvre. Even his debut feature film, Barking
Dogs Never Bite, also has a point of view that reveals a Korean society full of contradictions.
Although this film presents characters and a visual style inspired by cartoons, and somewhat
fairy-tale-like episodes make the film less socially engaging compared to his following films,
it clearly contains criticism against Korean society.
46

Mother shares similarities with his previous films in that the film also depicts
institutionalized violence and oppression by showing the hardship of non-heroic protagonists.
Mother focuses on the very private arena of psychology by presenting abnormal family
relations, although the mother figure is situated in relation to the very Korean sentiments
embedded within Korean society. In Mother, as in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1992) or Bruno
Dumont’s Humanité (1999), the question of “Who is the murderer?” is not crucial, although
this film is a detective thriller, which is mostly narrativized in terms of the process of finding
the criminal. Mother explores a more private and psychological arena compared to Bong’s
previous socially engaged films, which have somewhat obvious metaphors.
This film is about a mother whose name is not known, is just called mother (ommoni or
omma in Korean) by everyone in the film, and who shows an enormous (abnormally obsessive)
sacrificial love toward her son, Do-joon. She is recognized by everyone in the town only as a
mother, rather than having her own identity. This film, with the generic hybridity of a mystery

46
Though the film was a flop and did not receive much attention from film critics, a small number of critics and
audiences found the film’s black humor that criticizes the hypocrisy of intellectuals and media--TV, and the
detailed description of everyday lives quite intriguing.

８６

detective thriller comedy drama, shows the mother’s struggle to solve the murder of a teenage
girl, whose name is Ah- jong, for which her son is charged as the murderer. As the mother’s
investigation of the murder mystery unfolds, the fact that the girl was engaged in prostitution
in the small town is revealed. What is more striking and horrible in the story of this girl is the
that almost every man in the town had known about it and related to her prostitution. The
reason why Ah-jong engaged in prostitution is not clearly explained in the film; the film only
shows that she has a senile grandmother to take care of, having no parents,. As mentioned
above, from the perspective of the film’s overall theme— a mother’s insane love—the
question of who killed the girl is not that important. However, in the narrative of the film, the
question of “Who is the murderer?” becomes a matter of life and death for the mother and for
Do-joon.
The family members who save the daughter in The Host are replaced by a mother who
saves her son in Mother. However, the character of the mother, in her late fifties or early
sixties, is no Miss Marple (in Agatha Christie’s novels and movies based on the novels), who
possesses a sophisticated wit and crime-solving brain. As this film is set in a small town in the
countryside, as with Memories of Murder, Do-joon’s mother is characterized as a common old
lady running a small herbal store, with limited education and without a decent income. Only
the obsessive love for her retarded son, Do-joon, leads her to attempt to solve the murder
mystery in the town. The actor Hye-ja Kim, who plays Do-joon’s mother frequently represents
the very “Korean” mother figure, that is, the sacrificing mother figure, through TV dramas in
Korea. Yet, in this film, she slightly distorts her persona as a sacrificing and enduring mother
figure to a still sacrificing, but somewhat insane mother figure. This film is, as the title
８７

suggests, about a mother and her love toward her son. However, a complicated sexuality lies
behind the stories among the family, the girl, and the men in the town.
Although the main plot of this film is about the insane love of a mother, another
intriguing aspect of it is its representation of the sexuality of the characters, such as the teenage
girl who is murdered and Do-joon. In response to the question of why the victim of the murder
incident in Mother is a teenage girl (as in Memories of Murder and The Host), Bong has
explained, “That kind of incident [that is, a girl being raped by men or prostituting herself]
actually happens frequently in small cities in the countryside. The story of the teenaged
schoolgirl in Mother is partly based on an article that I read in a newspaper. The article was
about a teenage girl raped by almost all of the men in a small town. I heard that these kinds of
incidents happen more often than are reported as a news article.” Bong further explained that a
binary opposition between hypersexuality and asexuality exists in the film: one is the girl’s
hypersexual life with her classmates and the men in the town, and the other is the desexualized
lives of the mother and her intellectually disabled son, Do-joon.
47

In spite of and because of their desexualized lives, the film intentionally insinuates the
sexual relationship (or sexual tension) between the mother and her son, Do-joon (and also
between the mother and the son’s friend, Jin-ku). Although the mother and her son are
seemingly far from the arena of sex, the film deliberately allows the audience to speculate as to
whether she and her son have any kind of sexual relations. The conversation about whether or
not Do-joon and his mother sleep together is uttered several times throughout the film,
including the one between Do-joon and Jin-ku, the interrogation of Do-joon at the police

47
Hyong Shin Kim’s interview with Joon-ho Bong, October 2011.
８８

station, and the teenaged boys’ confession about Ah-jong’s prostitution. However, the question
is never answered clearly in the film, as the expression “sleeping together” may have different
connotations, depending on the context. The insinuated sexual relationship or the ambivalent
attachment between mother and son, the oedipal relationship (without a father in the family)
between the two, partly explains the mother’s abnormal attachment to her son and the son’s
attachment to his mother in the film.

Figure 7. Ambivalent sexual tension between Do-joon (Bin Won) and his mother (Hye-ja
Kim).

While the sexuality of the mother in the film is merely insinuated, the sexual desire of
the mother is represented through voyeurism, as opposed to the hypersexual tendency of Jin-
ku and his teenage girlfriend, about whom Do-joon has sexual curiosity as well. The mother,
while hiding herself in a closet in Do-joon’s room, happens to witness the sexual intercourse
between Jin-ku and his girlfriend. To save her son, caught by the police as a suspect for the
murder, the mother, believing Jin-ku to be the killer, sneaks into Jin-ku’s house when no one is
home to look for the evidence. When she finds a golf club with a red stain that looks like blood,
８９

Jin-ku and his girlfriend arrive at the home and the mother hides inside a closet, holding the
golf club. There is a close-up of her glittering eyes gazing at Jin-ku and his girlfriend having
sex that captures complicated emotions in her eyes: fear of being caught by Jin-ku, whom she
believes is a murderer; voyeuristic curiosity; and guilt at witnessing someone else’s very
private moment, something she is no longer capable of, or refuses to do any more.
From the perspective of the mise-en-scène of the film, the space where the mother and
Do-joon conduct their everyday lives represents how they construct their sexuality, with the
son being emotionally castrated by his mother. The film begins with the scene of the mother
cutting a medicinal plant using a straw-cutter. She is seen sitting down in a small, dark space at
her herbal shop, which is just like a den. From her point of view, her son, Do-joon, plays in the
streets in front of the herbal shop. He is seen outside the narrow and dark space of her shop
from her point-of-view shot, as if Do-joon is being surveyed by his mother. Because of the
sharp contrast of the lighting and the spatial arrangement between the bright street outside and
the dark herbal shop inside, Do-joon is depicted as being outside the womb—the herbal
store—but still connected to the womb, as he gives a look to his mother staring at him. While
she is staring at Do-joon, she keeps cutting the medicinal plant with the straw-cutter, without
looking at her fingers. Her fingers get closer and closer to the blade of the straw cutter, and,
finally, she slashes her finger. This short, but intense sequence is depicted through a brilliant
use of cinematic rhythm, generated through editing and framing. It is significant the symbolic
meaning of the straw-cutter. Through the cross-cutting of the mother’s use of the straw-cutter
and Do-joon’s innocence, it is possible to interpret that the scene symbolically represents that
the mother is attempting the castration of Do-joon. The film’s first scene presents the
９０

relationship between Do-joon and his mother that is maintained throughout the film: Do-joon
being castrated or desexualized by his overly protective mother.

Figure 8. Ah-jung’s body displayed upside down on the rooftop of the abandoned house in
Mother.

Figure 9. Memories of Murder, the dead body of a schoolgirl discovered in a bush.

With regard to the sexuality of female adolescents, the visual image of the teenage girl’s
dead body is noteworthy. One of the most shocking images in Mother is the disturbing posture
of Ah-jung’s dead body, wearing a school uniform and hanging upside-down on the balustrade
on the rooftop of an almost collapsing deserted house. The close-up of a dead teenaged girl’s
face must be familiar to audiences who remember the close-up of the face of the girl, who is
one of the serial killer’s victims and is killed in a most brutal way in Memories of Murder. As
mentioned earlier, the teenage girl as a victim is a common theme of Memories of Murder, The
９１

Host and Mother. The schoolgirl killed in Memories of Murder, the schoolgirl swallowed by
the monster in The Host and the victim in Mother.
However, it is a misreading to interpret these films as misogynistic. For instance, in
Memories of Murder, even though the film does not tell the personal story or history of any of
the victims of the serial killer, and even though some of the female victims are seen through
the point-of-view shot of the unknown serial killer, the film does not keep an emotional
distance from the death of the women and does not depict the death from the perspective of the
killer; rather, the film evokes sympathy for the female victims from the point of view of the
two detectives, who desperately want to stop the killing. Also in The Host, the schoolgirl
(daughter), Hyon-so, killed by the monster around the end of the film, is probably the
protagonist of the film who is the motivation for her family’s struggle. In spite of the fact that
the actor lacks the stereotypical look of a hero (for example, an action hero like Sigourney
Weaver in the Alien series or Angelina Jolie in the Lara Croft series), Hyon-so shows, like the
heroic figures of sci-fi horror or action adventure films, an unrealistically decent humanity; she
is willing to risk her own life to save the boy, who is not related to her at all, and becomes a
heroic figure, like her other family members, who become heroic by the end of the film, in
contrast with the characterization of the family in the earlier part of the film.
In Mother, the victimization of the schoolgirl is not the ultimate punishment of being
hypersexual, or not being a good girl, unlike the convention of teenage slasher films, for
example, Scream (dir. Wes Craven, 1996) in a comical, self-referential way. Rather, her
victimization is presented as the symptom of the men’s oppressive sexual violence against the
physically and socially weak female (and the female body). Her victimization evokes
９２

sympathy for her. It is a common notion that the victimized female figures in Kwon- taek Im’s
films are regarded as an allegory for the victimized nation, although this view could be
problematic. Yet, the victimized female figures in Bong’s films function as metaphors to
reveal and criticize the hypocrisy (of intellectuals and officials) and violence (against the
weaker class and gender).
The dumped dead bodies of females in Bong’s films resonate with a bizarre effect.
Kyung Hyun Kim analyzed the landscape setting in Memories of Murder, arguing that Bong’s
postmodern landscape visualization is influenced by American genre cinema, and suggests that
Bong’s landscape is similar to the “desolate” American landscapes in the Coen brothers’ films.
He describes the discovery of dumped female bodies in Bong’s films as follows: “...if we
comb through the fields of reeds and forests, beyond the dried peppers in the front yards that
overlook the rice fields, and underneath the typically low mountain ridges of Korea, we find
the bodies of mutilated women.”
48
Whereas Kim’s overall analysis of Bong’s films focuses on
the depiction of landscape, in the visualization of the dead female body in the “desolate”
surroundings, the presentation of the female adolescent body is more fascinating, in that the
postures of the dead bodies and the facial expressions captured by a close-up shot are the
symbolization of the complexities that the female adolescent bodies evoke: the teenaged
female body as the object/victim of (perversive) personal desire, and, at the same time, the
female body as socially/institutionally victimized—which generates sympathy and anger (from
the audience), as the killings in Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother happen as a result
of the impotence and irrationality of society.

48
Kyung Hyun Kim, Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Globalization, Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
p. 38, 40-41.
９３

In relation to the female adolescent body being represented through ambivalent desire
and victimization, Bong’s depiction of dead female bodies is quite evocative of Hans
Bellmer’s oeuvre of adolescent female dolls. Bellmer (1902‒ 75) was a German sculptor
influenced by the Surrealism and Dadaism of the 1920s. His work on dolls produced
grotesquely distorted, naked bodies of schoolgirls often placed in a forest, hanging from a tree.

Figure 10. Hans Bellmer’s doll: a naked body, but wearing the white socks and black enamel
shoes that stereotypically signify a schoolgirl look.

Therese Lichtenstein explained that Bellmer’s adolescent female dolls were his response
to fascism in Germany, since the grotesque dolls are “a violent attack on the stereotypes of
normalcy evident in Nazi art and culture.”
49
His female dolls are, according to Lichtenstein,
his critique against Nazi Germany: the ideal female Aryan body found in Nazi high art and
mass culture. She further argued that, because of the “hyperbolical” and “theatrical” display of
the adolescent female dolls’ “innocence and victimization,” these dolls “establish an uneasy

49
Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: the Art of Hans Beller, Berkeley: University of California Press,
2001, p. 1-4.
９４

distance from more “natural” images of women and their social roles.
50
Like Bellmer’s dolls,
in Mother, the dumped body of a teenage girl, a teenage girl’s sexual desire, her being the
object of sexual desire, and an aversion to sexual desire, are all complicatedly entangled and
slippery.
The main plot of Mother concerns the abnormal relationship between a son in his
twenties and his mother. The intellectually disabled son, with a growing interest in sex, is
expected to defer his sexual desire and curiosity by his overly protecting mother. His growing
interest in sexuality results in the death of a teenage girl who has been selling her body.
However, while prostituting herself, she actually loathes the sexual desire of men. The men in
the town are afraid of the fact that the ugly truth can be revealed through a murder
investigation, so they try to keep the secret about her prostitution. They do not care if the
police wrongly accuse a man of being the killer, as long as their involvement can be concealed.
The insanity of the town’s people is revealed at the moment when the final scapegoat accused
of being the murderer is a man with Down’s Syndrome living in sheltered housing, meaning
that he does not have any power to resist injustice and cannot articulate his thoughts and
wishes. This film, by positioning teenaged sexuality as the main cause of all tragedies—the
deaths of two people, Ah-jung and a man in a junk shop, framing a mother and her son as
murderers, and the false accusation of a man with Down’s Syndrome as the murderer—
represents the irrationality within society.

50
Lichtenstein, ibid., p.16.
９５

Music Cinema
1. Punk, Hip Hop, Rock-and-Roll and Youth Culture in Hong Ik University Area
Films regarding music have flourished in Korea since the mid-2000s, particularly on the
subject of indie-rock bands, which began during the X Generation period (mid-1990s). The
area surrounding Hong Ik University was prolific in the development of such music and led to
the birth of what is now known as Hong Dae culture (the term Hong Dae is an acronym for
Hong Ik University). Hong Ik University plays a significant role in the cultural landscape of
Korea. Hong Ik University is one of the most prestigious universities in Korea for the study of
Fine Art and Visual Design. As a consequence, the area is highly influenced by the
surrounding artists. In discussing contemporary South Korean youth culture, this area is
considered to be the Mecca of many youth sub-cultures, including that of indie rock bands.
The area flaunts youth-oriented consumption and is home to multitudes of cafés with various
themes, psychic/tarot card-reading shops, bohemian-style accessory shops, tattoo parlors, and
piercing shops. The ambience of Hong Dae in South Korea symbolizes a perception of youth
that is liberated, challenging, uncontained and rebellious.
It is surprising that films about the music consumed by the younger demographic were
made only after the 2000s in Korea. Korean rock music has existed since the 1960s; however,
the lack (or, at best, scarcity) of films about music, that is, rock and roll films, as a sub-genre
of youth cinema in Korean cinema is stark in comparison to American and British cinema.
Indeed, the American and British film industries have produced a great number of films about
rock music from the 1960s onward, from the documentaries Don’t Look Back (dir. D.A.
Pennebaker, 1967) and Woodstock (dir. Michael Wadleigh, 1970) to fictional films, such as
９６

Almost Famous (dir. Cameron Crowe, 2000) and 8 Mile (dir. Curtis Hanson, 2002), not to
mention biographical films about rock musicians such as Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy (dir.
Alex Cox, 1986), Jim Morrison in The Doors (dir. Oliver Stone, 1991) and Kurt Cobain in
Last Days (dir. Gus Van Sant, 2005).
From the mid-2000s, several Korean films about rock music have been made, and most
of these films are about the bands in the Hong Ik University area. The following films were
made about rock music or musicians: Acoustic (dir. Sangheon Yoo, 2010), an omnibus film
about several young people who want to succeed in the indie music scene and college students
discovering the music of childhood memories; Sogyumo Acacia Band’s Story (dir. Hwangi
Min, 2010), a documentary film about the indie rock band, Sogyumo Acacia Band, and the
band’s female singer, known as Yozoh, nicknamed the Hong Dae goddess; Play (dir. Dajong
Nam, 2011), the semi-fictional story of a modern rock band, Mate, whose members play
themselves in the film; and Turn It Up to 11 (dir. Seunghwa Paik, 2009), a documentary film
set in a live-music club in Incheon. This documentary focuses on two indie-rock bands,
Galaxy Express and Tobacco Juice, which aim to be successful in live music clubs in the Hong
Ik University area. This chapter will analyze how youth sub-cultures (as a combination of
resistance and commercial complicity) are represented in films, and how this representation
specifically relates to South Korean youth sub-culture through the recently produced films
about indie- rock bands performing in live-music clubs in the Hong Ik University area in Seoul.

2. The Emergence of Rock-and-Roll Cinema in South Korea: Acoustic
Throughout the history of cinema, rock-and-roll films have occupied a significant
９７

portion of youth cinema. In the late 1950s, when the movie industry started to recognize
teenagers as a distinct consumer group, with t tastes and movie-going habits unlike other age
groups, the first youth films in Hollywood were what Thomas Doherty termed “rock ‘n’ roll
films.”

Analyzing the juvenilization of American films in the 1950s, Doherty argued that a
new genre, teen pics, appeared in the mid-1950s in American cinema, and many of the first of
these were rock-and-roll films, such as Rock Around the Clock in 1956 and Elvis Presley’s
movies in the late 1950s.
51

Probably, one of the most important first rock and roll films in South Korea is Waikiki
Brothers, directed by the aforementioned director Soon-rye Im in 2001. This film is about a
band consisting of middle aged males working at a small club in the countryside. The band,
Waikiki Brothers, has never been popular and is always in the crisis of dismantlement. Unlike
a stereotypical rock and roll film, depicting a success story of a band after overcoming all
hardships, Waikiki Brothers is a film about being at the edge of a failure of a rock and roll
band (similar to Im’s previous film, Three Friends, discussed earlier). However, this film
shows a hope by presenting the next generation of rock and roll, the boy working at the old
club learns rock and roll music from the middle aged band members and shows his talent in
music around the end of the film. Another rock and roll film worth to mention is Happy Life
(Joon-ik Lee, 2007). Similar to Waikiki Brothers, this film is also about a rock and roll band of
middle aged men. This film, set in partially in the Hong Ik University area, shows also a
generational succession of passion of rock and roll music, by presenting the Hallyu star, Keun-
suk Jang. The trend of producing rock and roll film is more visible in low budge cinema, and

51
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 2002, p. 60-82.
９８

the stories of rock and roll films of low budget cinema, although it sounds paradoxically, are
more close to the stereotypical success story of a rock and roll band.
One of the most representative examples of a rock and roll film of young musicians’
success story is Acoustic. Acoustic (dir. Sang-hŏn Yu, 2010) is an omnibus film that consists
of three segments: Brocolli’s Dangerous Confession, Bakery Attack and Unlock. The first two
segments are about musicians in the Hong Ik University area. The third segment is a sci-fi film
set in the near future about university students discovering music. In terms of the casting,
Acoustic shows the recent trend of idol band stars becoming actors, which seems contradictory,
in that it consists of famous and popular idol stars acting the characters of indie musicians.
In Broccoli’s Dangerous Confession, popular actor and former trainee at the SM music
studio, Segyong Shin, plays a girl who is a singer in the Hong Ik University area. She is sick
and will die soon. She composes a song titled “Broccoli’s Dangerous Confession” and, pleased
with it, thinks that she should record the song before she dies. With a close friend, who is also
a musician in the indie-music scene, she visits several recording studios and sings her song,
but, unfortunately, they do not like it. The night before an audition for another music studio, it
seems that she dies while recording her song on her own recording device. Whether she is
dead or alive is not clear at the end of the film. The film shows a live concert poster of her and
her friend with their photos and a clichéd phrase: “a New Discovery of Indie.”The ending of
the film offers several possibilities: firstly, it could mean that she died, but, after her death, the
song recording she made before she died is discovered and becomes known to everyone. Or,
the ending could be her fantasy or the fantasy of her friend: the fantasy of becoming successful
in the indie-music scene, so that they can play their music in live clubs in the Hong Ik
９９

University area.
The second segment, Bakery Attack, is the story of two boys in a band. The two actors
who play the band members are Jong-hyon Lee and Min-hyok Kang, who are the members of
an idol rock band, CNBLUE. This segment starts with a scene in which they are kicked out of
a live performance club (where posters of the concert of the Broccoli song of the previous
segment are seen on the walls). They decide to quit making music because they cannot earn
money as a band. On the way to sell a guitar, they happen to meet a bakery owner, who turns
out to be a former singer who composed a very famous song when he was young. After the
encounter with the bakery owner, the two decide to take up music again. The segment ends
with their performance on the streets in the area of Hong Ik University. Here, the street
becomes the live club from which they were kicked out at the beginning of the movie. This
could be, again, a fantasy, but the ending is cheerful and full of hope.
This segment depicts the two young men’s dreaming of being successful rock musicians,
just like many rock bands that actually exist in that area. This film is very much about the
indie-rock-band culture of Hong Ik University. The film starts with the poster on the door of
the concert hall, Rolling Hall. Rolling Hall is a well-known concert hall in the Hong Ik
University area. Several famous musicians have performed at the Rolling Hall, such as the hip
hop musician, Hyon-do Lee (who is a former member of the popular hip hop band DEUX of
the 1990s), and NELL, the rock band that started performing in the Hong Ik University
area and by the mid-2000s had become one of the most popular rock bands in Korea (after Seo
Taiji endorsed the band).

１００

Figure 11. The performance by Jong-hyon and Min-hyok at the Rolling Hall in Bakery Attack.

The third segment of Acoustic is Unlock, whose title comes from a smartphone usage
phrase: “slide to unlock.” Like the Bakery Attack segment, the male protagonist of this
segment is played by Sel-ong Im, a member of 2AM, one of the most popular boy bands in
Korea. As mentioned earlier, this segment is a sci-fi film set in the near future. After an
(imaginary) apocalyptic world war, Seoul is filled with abandoned, totaled cars and destroyed
buildings, similar to the apocalyptic world of the Japanese film Swallowtail Butterfly (1996),
directed by Shunji Iwai, the Japanese director who has made several significant teenage films.
In Unlock, the world is at an world war; because sound can be used as a powerful
weapon, music is prohibited. In a world where music is not allowed, the female protagonist
finds music with help from a college student (played by the aforementioned Sel-on Im), whose
major is Acoustic Resistance. The music has been saved in the smartphone, which is a
keepsake from her parents, who died during the war. By restoring the sim card, she discovers
the song her parents sang when she was only five years old and when the war destroyed the
world.

１０１

3. The K-Pop Industry
In addition to the emergence of rock-and-roll cinema, another significant trend that
emerged after the 2000s is films about idol bands. This sub-genre of music cinema, idol band
film, should be seen in the context of fandom youth culture, along with the hallyu phenomenon
of K-pop and the structure of the pop-music industry of Korea. To analyze the youth culture of
Korea since the 1990s would be incomplete without discussing the relationship between pop
icons and youth. The phenomenon of hallyu (Korean fever, the popularity of Korean popular
culture, including pop music, drama and cinema, around Asia, Europe, and America) was
made possible because of fandom power, as well as better legislation and governing of the
industry. The most significant aspect of the hallyu phenomenon is the K-pop industry.
At the core of the K-pop industry are idol bands. In South Korea, idol pop emerged in
the early 1990s, immediately after Seo Taiji. As Lee Dong-yeon, a South Korean culture critic,
pointed out, idol pop is a trend or a tendency, rather than a music genre, such as rock, blues,
jazz, or hip hop; although, if idol pop must be defined in terms of music genres, it is closest to
dance and electronic.
52
Idol pop is more about the system that produces it, rather than the
music genre, however. Idol pop in Korea is more about the management system and the
system of training potential idols by music entertainment companies.
The hallyu phenomenon arguably began with the popularity of K-pop, which is still the
most important field of Korea’s globalized entertainment industry, in terms both of the music
itself and of the star system of singers. To discuss K-pop, it is necessary to discuss the

52
Lee Dong-yeon, What is Idol Pop?: Symptomatic Reading, , in Moonhwa Kwahak Journal, Summer, Vol. 62.
Seoul: Moonhwa Kwahak-sa, 2010, p. 212-214. Translations are mine.

１０２

music/entertainment companies in Korea. Among the many music and/or entertainment
companies, the three biggest led the hallyu of the K-pop industry. They are SM Entertainment,
YG Company and JYP. These three companies not only produce music, but also produce
“stars”: the idol stars. And although some of the stars start their careers as singers, they also
often become actors. Because these three companies are equipped with a music label and star
management, they do almost everything in the music industry: from the audition for the
discovery of future stars, the training of them and producing the music, to the publicity that
makes them stars. With their own composers, wanna-be stars and systematic star management,
these companies are leading the K-pop industry.
Among the three companies, SM Entertainment has the longest history and is the biggest
music/star management company in Korea. It is not an exaggeration to say that the company
has changed the K-pop industry and has been leading the K-pop hallyu. SM Entertainment was
founded in 1995 with assets of approximately US $50,000. However, the company grew
rapidly after the success of their boy band, H.O.T. (which stands for High Five of Teenagers)
in 1996 and the girl group, S.E.S., (the initial of the three girls’ names, Shoo, Eugene, and
Bada—spelling “sea”) in 1997. H.O.T. and S.E.S. were the first boy band and girl group that
were systematically planned and developed by an entertainment/management company in K-
pop history. For a comparison, take Seo Taiji and Boys (which consisted of three members:
Seo Taiji, Hyon-sok Yang and Juno Lee). Seo Taiji and Boys should not be considered an idol
boy band, since the group was not the construct of any entertainment company and Seo Taiji
composed and produced their own music.
However, it should be noted that the success of Seo Taiji and Boys, who made their
１０３

debut in 1992, deeply affected the formation of the star-management system and the music
trend in the K-pop industry. After witnessing the success of Seo Taiji and Boys, that is, its
popularity among young people in their teens and twenties, Sooman Lee, the founder of SM
entertainment, must have seen the potential of K-pop.
One of the crucial things that made the company successful was its training system. SM
Entertainment is the company that set up the training system of idols for the first time in Korea.
The company has around 70 trainees at any given time, who are selected through auditions
held by the company. These auditions are very competitive, because there are many teenagers
who want to be idol stars and parents who want to make their children idols. The trainees, aged
in their early-to-late teens, typically receive two to eight years of training for singing, dancing,
and acting—some of the trainees are attended to both by musicians and actors. In addition to
singing, dancing and acting, they even receive language training, mostly English, Japanese and
Chinese, because they are intended to be successful in the international market. Of course, not
all of them can make their debut as a singer or a member of a boy band or girl group; many of
them fail and have to look for another management agent or even another job. Also, not all of
the groups are successful. If the executives of the company do not see commercial value in a
given boy band or girl group, the company disbands the group, regardless of the will of the
members. Yet, becoming a trainee is extremely popular and therefore competitive, because
becoming a trainee means there is a chance to be an idol star and becoming an idol star means
one can get fame, popularity and money.
As mentioned above, SM Entertainment has been the leader of K-pop hallyu. From the
beginning, the company was aiming for the international market, since the Korean pop market
１０４

is not very big, especially compared to the music markets of the US and Japan. The company
has forged a close relationship with entertainment companies in Japan since the late 1990s.

Figure 12. The beginning of the hallyu of K-pop: BoA (left) and Dong Bang Shin Ki
(right) of SM Entertainment.

The female singer, BoA, is the company’s, and Korea’s, first musician to be successful
in the Japanese pop market. BoA, born in 1986, made her Korean album debut in 2000, when
she was only 13 years old. Soon afterward, she went to Japan and made an album of Japanese-
language songs. She was able to sing and speak in Japanese and therefore successfully adapted
herself to the Japanese entertainment industry, because, during her two years as a trainee at
SM entertainment, she received training in singing and dancing, as well as in English and
Japanese. She also made her debut in the US, in 2008. Since BoA’s success (although she is
more successful in Japan than in the US), the company, and other music/entertainment
companies as well, have made their musicians enter the international markets more
１０５

aggressively, resulting in high rankings on the Oricon chart, the Japanese pop- music statistics
chart.
SM Entertainment has produced many popular idol bands—girl groups and boy bands—
including boy bands such as Shinhwa, Fly to the Sky, Dong Bang Shin Ki (Dong Bang Shin Ki
even uses different names for other parts of Asia: TVXQ in China and Tohoshinki in Japan),
U-Kiss, SHINEE, Super Junior and girl groups such as SNSD (aka. The Girls Generation), and
f(x). These idol groups have fans not only in East Asia (Japan, China and Taiwan), but also in
South Asia and even in Europe. Along with the popularity of Korean dramas such as Winter
Sonata in 2002 and Dae Jang Geum in 2003, since the early 2000s, these groups of SM
Entertainment have led the Korean Wave (hallyu) of popular music.
Along with SM Entertainment, the other two entertainment companies are YG
Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. The founders of YG and JYP were former
singers/dancers who were extremely popular in the 1990s.
53
In particular, Hyon-sok Yang,
who founded YG in 1996, was one of the three members of Seo Taiji and Boys. Many of the
people in the music and entertainment industries believed that the success of Seo Taiji and
Boys was owing to the talented musician, Seo Taiji, and not Hyon-sok Yang or Joo-no Lee, so
when Hyon-sok Yang started his new career as a music producer, he opened his music
management company in the early 2000s and started to discover and train new singers and
dancers, most of the people did not expect that he would be successful in the field. However,
against many people’s predictions in the music-entertainment industry, Yang’s company,
YG—specializing in hip hop, rap and dance music—became one of the top-three major music-

53
Sooman Lee, the founder of the SM Entertainment was a famous folk singer in the 1970s and 1980s.
１０６

producing and management companies by the late 2000s with the success of the boy group Big
Bang and the girl group 2NE1, among others.
JYP Entertainment, founded by Jin-yong Park in 1997, has created probably the biggest
single male Korean star, Rain (aka. Bi). Rain, who was born in 1982 and whose real name is
Ji-hoon Chong, got into JYP through an audition when he was in his late teens. After his
successful debut album in 2002, he broadened his career from singer/dancer to actor. He acted
in dramas that were popular throughout Asia, such as Full House, Sang Doo! Let’s Go To
School, and the famous director, Chan-wook Park’s, film, I’m a Cyborg, But That’s Okay in
2006. He even extended his acting career to Hollywood: he played a racer in the Wachowski’s
Speed Racer (2008) and even got the leading role in Ninja Assassin (dir. James McTeigue,
2009). After leaving JYP, Rain is still in the entertainment business as a singer, actor and
music producer with his own company. JYP Entertainment also has idol groups such as 2AM,
2PM and Wonder Girls. The founder of JYP, Jin-young Park, is a very talented musical
composer, producer and dancer.
K-pop music, with its references to dance, hip hop, and rap music, is deeply influenced
by American and Japanese pop music. These idols, or the generation of fans of these idols,
grew up listening to Britney Spears from the US and/or SMAP from Japan. However, K-pop
has formed its own musical style, for example by focusing more on melody than rhythm,
thereby making songs easy to listen to and sing along with. In addition to their readily
accessible musical style, the management system of the music/management companies, from
the training process to the regulation of the private lives of their stars, has engendered the
hallyu of K-pop. Strategically, they adapt to foreign languages to appeal to international
１０７

markets, rather than singing only in Korean. Many of the groups and singers that have
emerged since the 2000s, including all of the aforementioned groups, have Chinese or
Japanese versions of some of their songs to appeal to other markets in Asia. Some of the idol
bands’ members are fluent in English, Chinese, or Japanese, which enables them to
communicate with their non-Korean-speaking fans more effectively. Many of the idol bands
do tour throughout Asia, and, in the case of SM Entertainment, even in Europe.
The above- discussed three companies, SM, YG and JYP, have similar strategies and
management systems, but they have formed different styles of music and star marketing.
While the music of SM Entertainment is ballad/dance-oriented music, that of YG is closer to
hip hop/dance music, and that of JYP specializes more in R&B dance music. Also, if the
image of SNSD of SM Entertainment is that of cute and sexy girls, the image of 2NE1 of YG
Entertainment is one of bad girls. According to the business strategy and personality of each
founder of the three companies, Soo-man Lee of SM, Hyon-sok Yang of YG and Jin-yong
Park of JYP, each company has its own features in terms of music and star images.
Although these companies are the most well-known and biggest companies in the sense
of making popular idol stars, in terms of financial conditions such as budgets and assets, SM,
YG and JYP are much smaller than CJ Entertainment & Media (aka CJ E&M), run by the
family members of the founder of Samsung. CJ E&M has more than ten cable TV channels
and one of the two biggest multiplex theater chains in Korea (CGV). It is also in the gaming
business, handles film financing, production and distribution departments for both domestic
and international films. CJ E&M is a big threat to the other three music
production/management companies. It is run by Mi-kyeong Lee and Jae-hyeon Lee, the
１０８

grandchildren of Byeong-cheol Lee, the founder of Samsung, one of the biggest Chaebol
corporations in Korea. CJ E&M is expanding its business into music production and
management.
Since the early 1990s, with the star-management system of SM entertainment, followed
by YG entertainment and JYP, idol pop has become the mainstream. Although the distinction
between the mainstream music scene and the indie-music scene has become blurred in that
modern rock bands have become more popular or have broadened their market, especially
since the late 1990s, idol pop still occupies the mainstream, with access to broader markets
outside Korea.
The popularity of K-pop—that is, the popularity of Korean pop music and the idols of
boy bands and girl groups—was concomitant with the popularity of Korean dramas. As
Korean singers, mostly from idol bands, blur national boundaries by performing in different
languages, conducting concert tours in numerous regions, and have fans worldwide, the arena
of television has also blurred national boundaries. Since the late 1990s, it has been common to
see co-production dramas, for example, Japanese and Korean, Chinese and Korean, or co-
productions between all three nations. The significant turning point of the Korean Wave in
Japan must be the Korean TV drama series, Endless Love. The Endless Love drama series
consists of four dramas according to the four seasons, aired on KBS of Korea. It began with
Autumn in My Heart in 2000, which made Hye-kyo Song, Seung-hon Song and Bin Won
hallyu stars throughout Asia. The second drama in this series is Winter Sonata (2002). This
soap opera was extremely popular in Japan, which made the leading actors of the drama,
Yong-joon Bae (nicknamed Yon sama in Japan) and Ji-woo Choi (nicknamed Jiwoo hime in
１０９

Japan), big stars.
Because of the popularity of these dramas and the stardom of the actors, the Korean
government has built up hallyu drama tourist spots to attract fans, mostly from Japan, often in
the places where the dramas were shot. From the mid-2000s, another actor attained the
popularity of Yong-joon Bae in Japan: Keun-sok Chang. An actor and singer, Keun-sok
Chang started his career as a child actor when he was only five years old. Although he is
currently only in his mid-twenties, he has played in around 17 dramas and seven films so far,
including the film in which he acted as a rock musician, The Happy Life (dir. Joon-ik Lee,
2007), and dramas that were popular in Japan, such as You’re Handsome in 2009 and Mary
Stayed Out All Night in 2010.

Figure 13. Bread named after Keun-sok Chang at the Lawson convenient store franchise in
Japan.
１１０

However, political and historical issues between Japan, China and Korea affect the flow
of popular culture. Several anti-Korean protests have been made through pop culture in Japan.
For example, there was the boycott of the viewing of the Japanese and Korean co-production
drama, 99 Days with a Star (Boku To Suta No 99 Nichi in Japanese), aired in 2011 in Japan,
because the Korean actor, Tae-hee Kim, who played the protagonist of the drama, had argued
that the island of Dokdo belongs to Korea. Dokdo is a small island located in the East Sea,
between Korea and Japan. The term East Sea is also controversial, as there is an ongoing
debate about how to name the sea between Korea and Japan; Korea argues that it should be
named East Sea (Donghae in Korean), whereas Japan argues that it should be called Sea of
Japan. Yet, in spite of the fact that political and historical issues still remain and heated
debates about history take place in Korea, China and Japan, in the arena of popular media and
culture, they do not seem to affect the reception of products.
To explain how the modes of consumption and distribution, as well as production, may
change people’s perception of regions in the globalized society, Arjun Appadurai’s
classifications are useful concepts. Appadurai suggested five “-scapes” for “global cultural
flows,” connoting how cultural flows are “fluid” and have “irregular shapes,” by using the
suffix “-scape”: (1) ethnoscapes, (2) mediascapes, (3) technoscapes, (4) financescapes and (5)
ideoscapes. According to Appadurai, these “-scapes” are different dimensions by which to
refer to the circulation of culture throughout nations and regions. Among these five
dimensions, his explanation of “mediascapes” is worth quoting in full in relation to the flow
of popular culture in Asia beginning in the 1990s. He argues:
What is most important about these mediascapes is that they provide (especially in their
１１１

television, film and cassette forms) large and complex repertoires of images, narratives
and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world, in which the world of commodities
and the world of news and politics are profoundly mixed. What this means is that many
audiences around the world experience print, celluloid, electronic screens and billboards.
The lines between the realistic and the fictional landscapes they see are blurred, so that
the farther away these audiences are from the direct experiences of metropolitan life, the
more likely they are to construct imagined worlds that are chimerical, aesthetic, even
fantastic objects, particularly if assessed by the criteria of some other perspective, some
other imagined world.”
54

The hallyu, or Korean wave, has changed the mode of reception and production of
popular culture, particularly in East Asia. Throughout the period from the 1960s to the 1980s,
Japanese popular culture was the most prominent one in Asia. However, from the 1990s
Korean popular culture started to share the market of popular culture in Asia. Arguably, the
wide spread of popular culture or popular media, such as cinema, television and music, has
affected the sense of nations, as nations are, following the notion of Benedict Anderson,
“imagined communities.”

4. New Media and Fandom Culture
Another significant trend in films about music that emerged after the 2000s was idol
band films. Idol band films, a sub-genre of music cinema, should be viewed in the context of
fandom culture, along with the hallyu phenomenon of K-pop and the Korean pop music

54
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996, p.33-35.
１１２

industry. In South Korea, idol pop emerged in the early 1990s, immediately after Seo Taiji.
Idol pop does not refer to a certain genre of music, but, rather, a certain system that generates
dol bands, and, as the term idol suggests, is based on fandom culture. In light of this, to
analyze youth cinema in relation to popular music in Korea, it is necessary to analyze fandom
culture. Fandom culture in Korea occupies a significant position among the youth, in the sense
that they do not have diversified venues through which to channel their passions. Fandom
culture in Korea should be situated in relation to new media, particularly the Internet.
Since the early 2000s, the Internet has changed the habits of media consumption and
production. Through websites that can share personal images and thoughts, such as YouTube,
Twitter, Facebook, Cyworld (a personal blogging/ social networking site, like MySpace or
Facebook, in Korea), and forum sites of various portals, online culture (and mobile culture
connected online) has become one of the most important dimensions of youth culture in Korea.
The younger generation since the 1990s is accustomed to sharing ideas and opinions with
anonymous fellow users. The sense of community, as well as of the individual, while this may
seem paradoxical, is solidified through online culture. The younger generation tends to be
interested in their own private issues, rather than public issues. However, because of the online
community culture and the information available online, they can easily get together if they
share tastes. When the younger generation makes an online community according to their
interests, the virtual community sometimes transforms into an offline community and the
members’ other social identities, such as educational background, race and class, do not matter.
The specific mode of use of the Internet among the younger generation has generated an
inclusive sense of belonging. This inclusive sense of belonging is the base of the culture of
１１３

fandom, which became more prevalent after the 1990s. There is an argument that “taste culture”
is a better term than sub-culture. Lewis has suggested that music and style-based youth
groupings are better understood as “taste cultures.” He related youth culture to popular music,
a primary resource around which contemporary youth cultures are constructed, but it is
conspicuously absent in the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham. Lewis also argued that musical taste “dramatically cuts across standard
indicators such as social class, age, and education in creating groupings with common musical
expectations and symbolic definitions.”
55
However, the term taste has a highly personal
connotation. To situate fandom culture, and youth culture, by extension, within a social
context, the term sub-culture seems more appropriate.
Here, the term youth subculture is used to refer to culture specific to the young
generation that is not shared with other age groups. However, the concept of sub-culture and
discussions of it, are multi faceted. Youth subculture can be defined broadly and relatively
depending on the places and times in which it is used. In Korea, the term connoting a cultural
specificity attributed to the young generation is Generation X. It should also be interpreted
differently according to the context. The expression X Generation (in Korean, X sedae)
56
has
been commonly used in South Korea since 1992, when Seo Taeji debuted and revolutionized
the Korean pop-culture scene, releasing music from a variety of backgrounds, such as hip
hop, rap, dance and rock. The X Generation is sometimes called the Seo Taeji Generation
because of the musician’s monumental impact on young people’s attitudes, fashion and music;
as mentioned above, he symbolized the new generation of the 1990s.

55
J. Lull ed. Popular Music and Comunication, 2
nd
ed. London: Sage, 1992, p.141.
56
As I mentioned earlier, the term “Generation X” has the reverse word order in Korea: “X Generation.”
１１４

There are several possibilities, but one way to define the X Generation of South Korea
in relation to popular culture is to say that the generation shares idol fandom culture more
actively and systematically than previous generations. The X Generation is very much
interested in popular culture and actually enjoys popular culture from the US and Japan; that is,
it is less hostile to these cultures than were previous generations. Further, it consumes
(and sometimes produces) popular culture from a variety of media, such as music and cinema,
making it the most prominent consumer group in current popular culture.
The mode of consumption of popular culture has established the style of the X
Generation. As Dick Hebdige has argued, style in sub-culture has “significance;” the
transformations of style goes “against nature, interrupting the process of normalization,” and
therefore styles have the ability to “offend[…]the silent majority.”
57
Although it could be
argued that youth culture does not necessarily imply resistance, the X Generation has been
making its statement conspicuously through various avenues in Korean society since the early
1990s and has been indifferent to the results or reverberations of this impact.
Yet, the young generation’s relationship with Internet culture is often conceived from a
negative perspective. In Korea, one of the most common terms associated with the relationship
between Internet culture and youth culture in a pathological way is pai-in. Pai-in refers to a
person who is desolate, or is considered a failure for not having a proper, psychologically
healthy life. The meaning of pai-in is similar to otaku (extreme mania) or hikikomori (shut-in)
in Japanese.
The culture or concept of pai-in is, arguably, affected by the Japanese concept of otaku.

57
Dick Hebdige. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London: Routledge, 1979, p. 18.
１１５

Otaku is defined as “a general term referring to those who indulge in forms of sub- culture
strongly linked to anime, video games, computers, science fiction, special-effects films, anime
figurines, and so on,” according to Hiroki Azuma, a Japanese critic.
58
In Japan, otaku culture
emerged in the 1970s, and the term otaku has had a negative connotation, particularly after the
Miyazaki Tsutomu incident (Miyazaki kidnapped, raped and murdered young girls in the late
1980s). Azuma suggested that there have been three generations of otaku: the first generation
is those who were born around 1960 and saw Space Battleship Yamato (1974) and Mobile Suit
Gundam (1979) in their teens; the second generation is those who were born around 1970 and
enjoyed the products made by the previous generations and developed otaku culture; and the
third generation is those who were born around 1980 and were in their teens when Neon
Genesis Evangelion was produced.
59
The word otaku became known in Korea in the 1990s,
around the time when Japanese animation—better known as Japanimation—started to gain its
popularity and reputation, not only in Korea, but also worldwide. There is no Korean word
equivalent to the term otaku, and otaku culture arguably does not exist in Korea. Even though
the aforementioned animations (Yamato and Gundam) were aired on TV and kids of the late
1970s grew up watching them,
60
and illegal bootleg CDs of Evangelion were circulated
among animation or Japanese film fans, otaku in the sense of faithfully enjoying a specific
genre or product more seriously, beyond mania, does not exist as a collective sub-culture in
Korea.

58
Hiroki Azuma, Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, translated by Jonathan E. Abel and Shion Kono,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. p.3. originally published in Japanese as Dobutsuka suru
posutomodan: otaku kara mita nihon shakai (Tokyo: Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, 2001).
59
Azuma, Ibid. p. 6-7.
60
Although it was restricted to import Japanese film and animations for theatrical release, many Japanese
animations for children were always aired on network television, and, as a matter of fact, most of the animations
for child viewers on Korean TV were Japanese.
１１６

Addiction to Internet games has become a serious issue in Korea, especially among male
teenagers. With the popularity of PC rooms (for example, PC bang) with high-speed Internet,
many teenage boys go to PC rooms, which are located in almost every block in the streets of
Seoul, to play online games. Addiction to games among teenagers can be a serious social issue,
resulting in their missing classes or failing at school, and therefore generating crises of
conscience for parents regarding the education of their children. The South Korean
government is trying to issue a law called The Game Shut-Down, which would have
prohibited people under 18 years old from logging on to game sites, although the government
is meeting with resistance from the gaming industry. As the term pai-in has become commonly
used, and game addiction, or an otaku addictive tendency among the young generation, has
become an issue in Korean society, the relationship between the Internet and its users has
become to be perceived negatively in many cases.
While Internet addiction is often associated with male youths, idol fandom culture is
often associated with female youths. Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber have pointed out
that “Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings
in general.”
61
In Korea, as McRobbie and Garber have argued when analyzing British fandom
culture, although fandom culture in general is not only about girls’ culture, in fandom culture
vis-à-vis idol stars, there are clearly gender-based tastes. Girls are generally more active and
systematic in terms of participating in fandom activities. (However, there is a difference
between British and American girls’ fandom culture and the girls’ fandom culture in Korea;

61
Angela Mcrobbie and Jennie Garber, “Girls and Subcultures” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Post-war Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, London: HarperCollins Academic,
1976, p. 209.

１１７

whereas teeny-bopper sub-culture flourished in the late 1960s and the 1970s in Britain and the
US, in Korea the cultural equivalent of the teeny-bopper culture began in the 1990s.)
McRobbie and Garber explained the teeny-bopper syndrome of the 1970s in Britain as the
following: firstly, “teeny-bopper culture can easily be accommodated, for 10‒ 15-year-old
girls in the home, requiring only a bedroom and a record player and permission to invite
friends…. The culture also offers a chance for both private and public manifestations—the
postered bedroom or the rock concert.”
62
Secondly, it is easy to join teeny-bopper culture,
because it does not have any rules or require any qualifications. Thirdly, it is safe to be
involved in teeny-bopper culture. “There are no risks involving personal humiliation or
degradation, no chance of being stood up or bombed out.” According to McRobbie and Garber,
when teenage girls join boys, there is a risk that the girls will be sexually labeled. teeny-bopper
culture combats this attitude by “displaying a high degree of self-sufficiency” and claiming,
“We have a great laugh with the girls.” Fourthly, “The obsession with particular stars…can be
viewed as a meaningful reaction against the selective and authoritarian structures which
control the girls’ lives at school. That is, ‘obsessions’ can be a means of alienating the teacher,
and, if shared, can offer a defensive solidarity, especially for those who are conscious of
themselves as being academic failures.”
Henry Jenkins has suggested that fans of popular media are “poachers” and “nomads.”
Jenkins posited that fans’ “poaching” is reading media in a way that allows for “contradictory
interpretations,” but does not “necessarily reject the value of authorial meaning.” He further

62
Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, “Girls and Subcultures” in Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures
in Post-war Britain, edited by Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson, London: HarperCollins Academic, 1976, p. 220-
221.
１１８

contends that “poaching” is different from Stuart Hall’s “encoding/decoding” concept, in the
sense that Hall posited popular interpretations as fixed, while Jenkins’ “poaching” concept
“emphasizes the process of making meaning and the fluidity of popular interpretation.”
63

Therefore, according to Jenkins, the reading of fans is not always resistant. Also, Jenkins
argued that fans are “nomads,” in that they are always “in movement” and “advancing upon
another text, appropriating new materials, making new meanings.” He explained that fans,
when they read texts, do not just reside within one text, but interconnect texts in different
genres, including cinema, television drama and television news.
64

Following Jenkins’ idea of “poachers” and “nomads,” an analysis will be made of the
fandom culture of the youth generation of South Korea from the early 1990s. The way the
youth generation consumes media and how they participate in fan culture without necessarily
being resistant to mainstream authority in South Korea will be explored. They negotiate their
identity by sometimes being complicit with, and also by finding ways to problematize, the
mainstream through fandom culture. In this category, the proposed study will be an analysis of
the youth culture of “nomads” through the lens of various popular media, including the
Internet, music and cinema. As Korean youth’s fandom culture is largely based on the Internet,
including fan sites, blogs and social-network sites, films that represent youth culture in the
context of online culture will also be analyzed. Furthermore, as the young South Korean
generation’s fandom culture was initiated from the fandom of popular music, and because
popular music still plays a large part in fandom culture, youth cinema and youth culture in

63
Henry Jenkins. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. p.
33.
64
Ibid., pp. 36-37.
１１９

general, the relationship between popular music and youth cinema will also be explored.
The idol fandom phenomenon of both girl groups and boy bands should be regarded as a
social symptom in South Korea, which shows the change in the mode of popular culture after
the 1990s. The idol fandom phenomenon emerged in the early 1990s. The aforementioned
musician, Seo Taiji, whose nickname is Culture President, and other idol groups, cater to the
mentality of teenagers. Teenaged idol fan culture cannot be regarded as a counterculture;
rather, it is a combination of the sub-culture created through teenagers’ counter-school culture,
and also the sub-culture that is commercially produced by the mainstream that recognizes
teenaged power as the power of mass-media consumption. The Internet, among other media,
made youth culture flourish in South Korea after the 1990s. To refer to the youth generation,
which is actively involved in both making and consuming popular culture, the term prosumer,
the combination of producer and consumer, was coined to reflect the youth culture of Korea
since the early 1990s.
Internet (or Web) culture (or, in other words, the active use of the Internet, including fan
site and blogs) enabled fandom culture to blossom among the younger generation. Three films
center on the Internet culture of the youth generation: Romance of Their Own (dir. Tae Gyun
Kim, 2004), He Was Cool (dir. Hwan Kyung Lee, 2004), and Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do (dir.
Kŏn-hyang Kang, 2008). All three are based on Internet novels written by Gwiyeoni.
Gwiyeoni was born in 1985 and her novels were serialized on the Internet when she was in her
late teens. Her Internet novels were subsequently published as traditional books. Her writing
was very popular among teenaged Internet users—in other words, among teenaged netizens (a
portmanteau of the words net and citizen). Her writing style is famous for its use of teenaged
１２０

Internet linguistic expressions; that is, shortened word forms with certain omissions or even
altered spellings, as well as teenaged slang, and its excessive use of emoticons in lieu of
describing characters’ emotions through words. The main theme of her novels is the comical
depiction of romance from the perspective of adolescent girls.
These three films are representative of youth cinema, in that they represent a widely
examined subject in films about teenage girls: the fantasies of female adolescents. Moreover,
the way in which the films convey the method of teenaged communication, the use of
colloquial style and Internet language, is also worthy of attention in relation to teenaged youth
culture in contemporary South Korea. My Sassy Girl (dir. Kwak Jae Yong, 2001) will be
briefly studied as well, as it originated from an Internet novel written by an amateur male
writer. The identifiable and blatant characterization of the young female protagonist in My
Sassy Girl was groundbreaking in South Korean cinema.
Compared to the proliferation of films about indie bands in the Hong Ik University area,
films about girl groups or boy bands are rare. In 2011, two films about idol bands were made.
Here, Mr. Idol and White: The Melody of Curse will be discussed in comparison with the films
about indie bands in the Hong Ik University area.

5. A Star Is Born: Mr. Idol and White: The Melody of Curse
Mr. Idol depicts people in the music-entertainment business: idol group members and
music producers pursuing their dreams of success. Although the film is superficial in terms of
representing people in the business and naively dramatizing their struggle to be successful, the
film narrativizes the story of an idol group as a representation of the K-pop music industry in
１２１

the 2000s. The film begins with the suicide of the leader of an idol boy group, Mr. Children, in
a big entertainment company, Star Music. Feeling guilty over the death of the leader, the
producer of the group leaves the country. Three years later, the producer comes back to Korea
and tries to rebuild Mr. Children with the three surviving former members of the group. The
CEO of Star Music refuses to back Mr. Children again, so the producer, whose name is Gu-ju
(which sounds similar to Gooseju, meaning God in Korean), reforms the boy group on her own
by establishing a new entertainment company. Because the group needs a lead vocalist, Gu-ju
holds auditions. Through the auditions, Eugene, the male protagonist of the film, becomes the
new member and lead vocalist of the idol group. Under the guidance of the producer, Gu-ju,
Eugene and other members of Mr. Children receive hard training to dance and sing. Before he
becomes the new vocalist of Mr. Children, Eugene is a member of a rock band and a former
trainee at Star Music. However, Star Music did not find commercial potential in Eugene’s rock
band, and kicked him out from Star Music. Star Music becomes the antagonist threatening the
success of Mr. Children. However, by overcoming the threats of the big company, Mr.
Children becomes one of the most popular idol groups in Korea—which means that their
dreams come true.
The film is about an idol boy group in the music-entertainment business, but also about
people pursuing their dreams; this narrative was probably part of a strategy to appeal to the
part of the audience that is not interested in the music- entertainment industry. The film uses
several devices as a metaphor for dreams to accomplish; for example, the title song of the
idol group is “Summer Dream,” which they sing at the End of the Year Music Festival. Also,
Gu-ju tells Eugene that “Dreams never come true,” while, around the end of the film, Eugene
１２２

tells Gu-ju that “Dreams have come true.” This film is faithful to the narrative convention of
youth cinema by depicting young people pursuing their dreams, the hardships of the process of
growing up, and, finally, their goals or dreams becoming fulfilled.

Figure 14. Trainees, the four members of Mr. Children, and trainers, Gu-ju and her co-worker.

In terms of gender politics, the film does not present a stereotypical structure; that is, a
male supporter shaping/manipulating a female protagonist’s fate. As the reverse of this
structure, the music producer, Gu-ju, who creates the boy band and turns the members of the
group into stars, is female. Even her name, Gu-ju Oh, as mentioned earlier, implies (or
connotes) that she is a god or savior (Gooseju in Korean), who controls the lives and fates of
the idol group. After Eugene sings a song during his audition for the company that Gu-ju
founded, Gu-ju tells Eugene, “You can’t do it by yourself, but I can make you a star.” The
film presents Gu-ju as more responsible than the members of the boy group for whether or not
they succeed in the entertainment business. Considering that most of the producers in the
popular-music industry in Korea are male, and that the entertainment business is male-
１２３

dominated, the representation of gender in this film goes against stereotypical gender relations
by depicting a female producer controlling the fate of the boy group.
This film narrativitizes the process of growing up for the members of the idol band, and
represents the K-pop industry of the 2000s. Although the film has an optimistic ending, it
depicts the contemporary entertainment business by representing characters that the audience
may relate to real people in the business, such as the big three companies, SM Entertainment,
YG Entertainment and JYP Entertainment. The film reflects the curiosity and interest of
audiences in the K-pop industry, led by entertainment companies and their producing and
management systems—in other words, the wave of K-pop, led by corporations.
White: The Melody of Curse (dir. Kog Kim and Son Kim, 2011) is a horror film and is
the story of a girl group that gained popularity by singing a song entitled “White;” however,
the members of the group are mysteriously killed, one by one. Eunjeong Ham, who plays the
protagonist, the leader of the girl group in the film, is, in reality a member of a very popular
Korean girl group, T-ara. She began her career as a child actor and became a singer later on.
She therefore plays a part that mirrors her real life.
The film is the story of Pink Dolls, a group with four female members, each of whom is
in charge of one aspect of the group’s act: rap, singing or dancing, just like a typical idol girl
group created by and treated as a commercial product by a big studio company. The film
depicts jealousy among the girl group members and the pressure and competition to win the
adoration of the masses. The film is critical of the commercially centered popular-music
industry—the system that includes both producers and consumers. For example, the film
shows girl group singers who cannot sing and who have a substitute singer hidden for live
１２４

performances, as it is actually a common belief that girl group members do not know how to
sing. In addition to criticizing the production system of popular music, its consumers—that is,
fans of idol groups—are depicted as demonic. During their performance on the stage, the fans
shouting the names of idol members are visualized as the ghost threatening the girl group.
Rather than enjoying being successful as an idol group, the film presents members of the girl
group as obsessed with success and having phobias about the response from the public. The
girl group singers’ reactions to the responses of the consumers are almost hysterical. They
keep checking news articles, fan sites, and their replies on the Internet, worried about receiving
bad comments, as the group may be disbanded if they lose popularity and the company loses
faith in them as a commercial product. Since the fate of the idol group members is up to the
company, they have to put up with their unfair contracts and unfair treatment in the
entertainment business. The producer of the girl group says that “Idols cannot strike.” The film
suggests, although superficially, that the music-entertainment business treats idol members as
if they are slaves in the business, which reflects the reality of the contemporary Korean
popular-music industry.
Whereas films about boy bands and girl groups, such as Mr. Idol and White: The Melody
of Curse, respectively, are faithful to genre conventions, Acoustic does not have a clear
narrative structure. Each segment in Acoustic is more like a combination of episodes. In terms
of the narrative, Acoustic has the sensibility of independent, low-budget cinema. However, in
terms of the casting, Acoustic does not possess the sensibility of independent cinema, since
popular stars and idol members play musicians of the indie-music scene, which, again, could
be viewed as a paradox. In this regard, Acoustic is neither independent, low-budget, nor
１２５

commercial, cinema. Whereas, in America, auteur films were made in the music-film genre, in
Korean cinema, as the history of the music-film genre is relatively young, it exists either as
experimental cinema, featuring singers/actors from popular idol bands, or as commercially
driven cinema within the traditional generic conventions, such as horror or melodrama.

6. The Representation of Youth in Music Cinema of the 1990s and 2000s
According to Lawrence Grossberg, in the US, the discourse of Generation X emerged in
the early 1980s, when the baby-boom generation was experiencing the next new generation. In
the 1980s and 1990s, the image of Generation X in the media was mostly of twenty-
somethings, and the media characterized the generation as “bored, unmotivated slackers who
felt entitled to everything, who whined a lot, who wanted to be entertained rather than
educated, who were increasingly conservative—as opposed to the ‘good’ baby boomers, who
have constructed themselves as radical in their youth and reasonable in their adulthood.”
Another media representation of the young generation during that period was youth as
romanticized and innocent, such as in the films of the American director, Steven Spielberg. As
Grossberg argued, through the 1980s to the 1990s, the strategy of media representing youth as
a “nostalgic image of innocence” was replaced by “a highly politicized and largely
conservative agenda that emphasized the threats to children and the ways the system, having
failed the children, was producing a generation of monsters, whether because of welfare,
public education, liberalism, single-parent families, the media and popular culture, or capitalist
exploitation.” Grossberg argued that this conservative media representation was owing to the
conservative reaction of the American society of the 1980s against the 1960s liberal spirit,
１２６

including the “civil rights movement, feminism, gay liberation, drug use, popular culture, and
so on.” He also argued that, in this media representation of youth of the 1980s and 1990s, in
contrast to the youth of the 1960s, an “attempt to celebrate the youthful rebellion of the 1960s”
exists.
65
This analysis of the image of youth in the American media is similar to the image of
youth in Korean music cinema. The filmmakers of music cinema, both in the mainstream and
independent cinema scene, have a rather conservative perspective in their portrayals of youth
in a South Korean context. The image of youth in music cinema in South Korea from the
1990s and 2000s is apolitical and ahistorical: the young protagonists lack historical and
political consciousness and show naï vety in pursuing their dreams to be successful in the
music industry.
The image of youth with a critical conscience about society (and history), such as in
Petal (dir. Sun-woo Jang, 1996), A Single Spark (dir. Kwang-su Park, 1995), and the films
made by university students in the film movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s, became
rare in youth films of the 1990s and 2000s, not only in music cinema, but also in other sub-
genres of youth film. Unlike American and Western European societies, 1960s Korean society
did not experience the civil-right movements, including feminism and gay liberation. These
movements became articulated only in the 1990s in Korean society. Korean youth cinema
began to incorporate these civil-rights issues from the 1990s; however, the image of the youth
with a social conscience (in its narrowest, political sense) became rare in Korean youth cinema
during the same period.

65
Lawrence Grossberg, Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics, and America’s Future, Boulder: Paradigm
Publishers, 2005, p. 37.
１２７

AFTERWORD

This dissertation examines the representation of youth and youth culture in South
Korean cinema in relation to other popular culture, with the following aims. The first
consideration is to elaborate upon the relationship between youth culture and the popular
media. The second is to examine the mechanism of how youth culture, positioned within
popular culture, flourished in South Korea, particularly since the 1990s; situating youth culture
in relation to popular culture requires an analysis of the historical, political and social contexts.
Thirdly, the dissertation aims to theorize South Korean youth cinema and to elaborate upon
both the critical and social aspects of youth cinema. Finally, by analyzing youth films
according to specific themes, this dissertation explains how the South Korean media represent
youth culture and the meaning(s) produced by representing youth culture through the popular
media. This research ultimately aims to explore how youth consumes and negotiates with
popular culture.
This study acknowledges the significance of cinema in youth culture in South Korea
since the 1990s, and delves into how cinema represents youth and how youth associates with
cinema. Because youth and youth culture are modern concepts, and the meaning of youth is
fluid, rather than fixed, this dissertation posits that the definition and range of youth cinema
are flexible. To analyze youth culture and its media representations, this dissertation has the
following four approaches.
Firstly, this dissertation explores the emergence of the new generation (shinsedae in
Korean) in South Korea in the 1990s. This study situates the new generation of the 1990s
１２８

within the context of the historical and cultural changes of modern Korea and examines how
the youth cinema of Korea represented the younger generation. Throughout the history of
modern Korea, from the late 1950s to the 2000s, the generations of youth are significantly
associated with the political, social and economic changes of the nation. It is a particularly
South Korean phenomenon that the naming of young generations, which are approximately
from the late teens to the early thirties, has corresponded to historically critical incidents: (1)
the Liberation Generation/the Postwar Generation, which were in their late teens and twenties
in the 1940s and 1950s; (2) the 4.19 Generation of the 1960s; (3) the Yushin Generation of
the 1970s; (4) the 386 Generation of the 1980s; (5) the X Generation of the 1990s; (6) the
IMF Generation of the late 1990s and 2000s; and (7) the Candlelight Generation and the
880,000 Won Generation since then. It should be noted that democratic protests and labor
movements were mostly led by individuals in their twenties in the 1980s, and, since the
1990s, a participatory culture, which should also be regarded as a political practice, has
emerged among the young generation. The mode of political engagement of the young
generation since the 1990s has become more diversified compared to the young generations of
the 1960s to the 1980s. For instance, for the younger generation of the 2000s, engaging with
political issues became entertainment through the use of new media, such as YouTube and
SNS.
Secondly, this dissertation argues that popular culture has existed within youth culture
from its beginning in South Korea, and vice versa. In South Korea, the young generation are
the most active consumers of media and capitalist commodities, much more so than any other
demographic. This study constitutes a consideration of the sudden excess of youth culture
１２９

since the 1990s, which was deeply influenced by both domestic politics and global change. For
example, the political change led by Daejoong Kim, who became president in 1998, played a
significant role in the unprecedented abundance and flourishing of the discourse of popular
culture, in which the younger generation is involved, both as consumers and producers. Kim
was the first opposition party leader to become president in South Korea through a democratic
presidential election. Immediately following his inauguration, he allowed the importation of
Japanese media, which had previously been banned, and systematically deployed policies to
invest in and promote Korean popular culture. It should be noted that Kim’s understanding of
the economic and cultural value of popular media has been the strongest among South Korean
presidents. This domestic political change was combined with global change; that is, the
transnational circulation of popular culture in Asia. In addition to the global phenomenon that
blurs national boundaries in terms of the production and circulation of mass media,
government policies to promote Korean film, television, and popular music made the Korean
wave (hallyu) in Asia possible. The production and circulation of popular culture have always
been deeply affected by political change in South Korea, and this dissertation is an analysis of
the power dynamics and paradigms that have had an impact on representations of youth since
the 1990s.
Thirdly, the dissertation focuses on the new generation of the 1990s and 2000s in
relation to how they consume popular culture. This study examines the significance of Seo
Taiji, the musician of the early 1990s, and the emergence of the Seo Taiji Generation. With
regard to the significance of the popularity of Seo Taiji in the early 1990s, this dissertation
analyses why the New Generation of the1990s is important in the history of popular culture in
１３０

South Korea and how the new generation of the 2000s associates with media, including
cinema, music and the Internet. From the 1990s, South Korean society has been witnessing the
sudden excess of popular culture, and the younger generation from the 1990s onward has
been more open to Western and Japanese popular cultures and has appropriated these cultures
within the Korean cultural context. This change in the topography of popular culture was
owing in part to the policy of the government to promote Korean popular culture, which
resulted in the Korean wave, as well as the transnational flow of popular culture and became
more visible from the 1990s.
Fourthly, the dissertation examines youth cinema in South Korea by classifying it into
four different categories: high-School; delinquency; coming-of-age sexuality; and music
cinema. These four themes are the subjects that reflect the new tendencies of South Korean
cinema since the 1990s. Youth cinema is not a 1990s phenomenon in the history of South
Korean cinema. However, youth cinema had been a dormant genre in South Korean cinema
until the late 1980s, stretching back throughout the dark ages of the 1970s and the1980s, with
the few exceptions of 1960s youth cinema, which was affected by the sun tribe films of Japan
and 1970s high teen cinema, both of which were short-lived and did not become a full blown
popular genre, unlike youth cinema in other parts of the world. Youth cinema, with its various
themes and subject matter regarding the issues of the younger generation from their late teens
to early thirties, emerged in the early 1990s. The aforementioned four themes reflect the
issues that the young generations of the 1990s and 2000s have to deal with. The films analyzed
in this dissertation are, arguably, representative films under each category. Yet, it should be
admitted that many other films that might be categorized as youth cinema are omitted from
１３１

this dissertation, as it is an impossible task to include every film that is relevant and important
to the themes that I designate in South Korean youth cinema of since the
1990s.
The final version of this dissertation was written in 2012, when South Korean youth is
confronted by the beginning of a new era in terms of the use of new media: from the Internet
to mobile platforms and from the age when a personal discourse remained private to the age
when private discourse becomes public through SNS. This dissertation attempts to capture this
edge of change in the consumption of new media in relation to the context of popular culture.
With regard to the use of new media by youth, future studies, for example of the 2010s or
2020s, might offer different perspectives.
The production and circulation of popular culture have always been deeply affected by
political change in South Korea, and this study is also an analysis of the power dynamics and
paradigms that have had an impact on the representations of youth since the 1990s. I hope this
study will contribute theoretical variety to youth-culture studies in academia by addressing
youth culture as represented in youth cinema in South Korea, and by encompassing both male
and female youth cultures concurrently through the issue of sexual identity in adolescence.

１３２

BIBLIOGRAPHY

English Sources
Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Austin, Joe, and Michael Nevin Willard, eds. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and
History in Twentieth-Century America, New York: New York University Press, 1998.

Choi, Jinhee. The South Korean Film Renaissance: Local Hitmakers and Global
Provocateurs. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2010.

Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the
1950s, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002.

Dyer, Richard. Stars, London: British Film Institute, 1998.

Gateward, Frances, ed. Seoul Searching, Albany: New York State University Press, 2007.

Hentges, Sarah. Pictures of Girlhood: Modern Female Adolescence on Film, Jefferson:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 2006.

１３３

Howard, Keith, ed. Korean Pop Music: Riding the Wave, Folkestone: Global Oriental Ltd,
2006.

Kim, Kyung Hyun. Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Globalization, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2011.

Lau, Jenny Kwok Wah, ed. Multiple Modernities: Cinemas and Popular Media in
Transcultural East Asia, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003.

Lee, Namhee. The Making of Minjung: Democracy and the Politics of Representation inSouth
Korea, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007

Lewis, Jon. The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture, New York:
Routledge, 1992.

Lichtenstein, Therese. Behind Closed Doors: the Art of Hans Beller, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001.

Osgerby, Bill. Youth Media, New York: Routledge, 2004

Pomerance, Murray, and Frances Gateward, eds. Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of
Masculinity and Youth, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.
１３４

Quandt, James, ed. Kon Ichikawa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Russell, Mark James. Pop Goes Korea: Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, and Internet
Culture, Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2008

Shary, Timothy and Alexandra Siebel, eds. Youth Culture in Global Cinema, Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2007

Korean Sources

Kim, Changnam, ed. Popular Music, the Music Movement, and Youth Culture. Seoul: Hanul
Academy, 2004

Kim, Dong-ho, ed. The History of Korean Cinema Policy, Seoul: Nanam, 2005.

Kwon, Bodrae. Et al. The Window of Boy and Youth: The Everyday Lives of Early Modern
Period in Magazines, Seoul: Ehwa Woman’s University, 2007.

Lee, Myungjin. The Consciousness and Social Identity of the 2030 New Generation in Korea,
Seoul: Samsung Economy Research Center, 2005.

Yi, Hyo-In. et al. The History of Korean Cinema: 1960‒ 1979. Seoul: KOFA, 2004
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Yi, Hyo-In. A History of Korean Cinema: From Liberation through the 1960s, Seoul: KOFA,
2005.

Yoon, Haedong. Et al. Re-reading the Modern. Seoul: Yeoksa Bipyoung-sa, 2006.

Periodicals
Chŏng, Su-wan. “Comparative Research between Korean Youth Cinema and Japanese Youth
Cinema of the 1950s‒ 1960s,” in Younghwa Yeonkoo, Vol. 26. pp. 324‒ 340. 2002.

Kim Dae-joong. Text of a Speech, vol. 2, Seoul: The Presidential Secretariat, 2000.

Lee Dong-yeon. “What is Idol Pop?: Symptomatic Reading”, in Moonhwa Kwahak Journal,
Summer, Vol. 62. Seoul: Moonhwa Kwahak-sa, 2010.

Maeil Economy Newspaper, Korea, August 21, 1997.

Sohn, Sok-chun. Hankyore Daily Newspaper, Korea, October 21, 1998.

Web Sources
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dpz-lN6Lo40
KOFIC, Statistics: The Prediction of th Market Size for Korean Cinema (language in
Korean), http://kofic.or.kr/cms/58.do, 2012

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kim, Hyong Shin (author)

Core Title The new generation on screen: youth cinema and youth culture in South Korea since the 1990s

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 08/07/2012

Defense Date 06/08/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Korean cinema,K-pop,OAI-PMH Harvest,youth culture

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lippit, Akira Mizuta (committee chair), Choe, Youngmin (committee member), James, David E. (committee member)

Creator Email hyongshin.kim7@gmail.com,hyongshk@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-89740

Unique identifier UC11288925

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Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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