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Date
2020-03-??
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英語學系
Department of English, NTNU
Department of English, NTNU
Abstract
In this essay I explore the Korean blockbuster, a film genre that enjoyedpopularity in South Korea as a local translation of the Hollywood blockbuster. Inexamining this hybrid cinematic form, I focus on the cultural dynamics informingthe genre’s ambivalent—at times even contradictory—aspirations toglobalization and localization, with both trends accelerating in Korea. As aparticularly poignant blockbuster film, The Good, the Bad, the Weird (dir. Jeewoon Kim, 2008) may well showcase and expand this complicated equation,particularly through its apparent adoption of several genres, including theManchurian Western. As a Korean sub-genre that was popular in the 1960s,Manchurian Westerns stage Manchuria of the 1930s, in which the Koreanpeople’s fight for the nation’s liberation from the Japanese occupation played outin part, thus inevitably converging on the theme of mimicry and post-colonialismthat has emblematized the Korean blockbuster’s genre-defining desire. In anattempt to understand the intercultural dynamics that inform this hybrid genre, Irely on contemporary post-colonial theory and film genre theories. I illustratehow this film—and the Korean blockbuster more generally—interplays withever-changing notions of Korean national boundaries and Koreanness today