Love's Cruel Promises

Abstract

In the current international context, North Korea is invariably seen as a problem of poverty, human rights and security upon which the international community must act. Framed as such, Korean reunification and reconciliation are seen as desirable developments and compelling reasons for tackling the ‘North Korea problem’. Such framings, however, reduce North Korea to a problem that positions the ‘international’ and ‘South Korea’ as the source of its solutions. The assumption here is that a truer, more stable loving-relation between North and South Korea, and by extension the international, would improve the present situation in North Korea and the problems it poses to the rest of the world. This great optimism can be seen in popular South Korean films such as Shiri and JSA where love is deployed as a powerful agent of change. The argument of this article is that the idea of national reconciliation that intimately attempts to erase divisions and install (a redemptive) unity actually kills the embraced North Korea. To illustrate how alternative responses to North Korea are possible, I consider how love can be ‘a properly political transformative concept’ (Berlant 2011), through a reading of Hwang Sok-young's novel Baridaegi.

Keywords:

• Baridaegi
• JSA
• love
• national unification
• North Korea
• reconciliation
• Shiri

Notes on contributor

Shine Choi recently completed her PhD in International Studies from Queen's University Belfast. Her doctoral thesis drew upon postcolonial and feminist theories to examine the politics of North Korea in contemporary South Korean and western popular imagination. This article is a revised version of her research on love and inter-Korean relations that forms part of her doctoral thesis. The author would like to acknowledge all those who have contributed to her work over the years especially her thesis supervisors Debbie Lisle and Dan Bulley. She would also like to thank the journal editor Cynthia Weber and the two anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1 The literature on this international consensus is too numerous to cite but for a sense of how academic scholarship has articulated this view, see Cha and Kang (2003) and Haggard and Noland (2007). Smith (2005) critiques the idea that North Korea is a rogue state but retains the view that North Korea is a problem of poverty, underdevelopment and mismanagement of internal and external affairs.

2 There is a vast body of IR literature that critically examines how spaces ‘over-there’ get constructed as international problems requiring international/outside interventions. This article has benefited from this vast literature (e.g. Campbell 1998; Edkins 2000) but what I want to emphasize in citing Inayatullah and Blaney is the intercultural dimension of this construction.

3 The Ministry of Unification's public ad campaign is illustrative. To the backdrop of images of exemplary personal achievements and model life cycle of graduation, work ethics that lead to professional success and saving for marriage, the voiceover of one campaign ad pronounces: ‘Great results come from great preparations./ Unification is definitely coming./ Prepared unification will bring greater happiness’ (see Ministry of Unification n.d.).

4 I examine these two films because they have paved the way for other big budget films in South Korea and are viewed as the beginnings of the blockbuster era of South Korean films. It is important to remember that they are also part of a broader North–South Korea war genre that treat the ‘North Korea problem’ within the framework of nation/nationalism, as argued by Standish (1992), Lee (2000: especially 102–43) and Diffrient (2005). I follow the Korean order of putting the surname first followed by the given name for the Korean names in this article unless the author is known to use the western name order for his/own name.

5 Key texts in the love scholarship referenced in researching for this article include: Hendrick and Hendrick (1992); Illouz (1997); Langford (1999); Evans (2002); Shumway (2003); Hirsch and Wardlow (2006); Pearce (2006).

6 On this generic trait, see Williams (1998); Gledhill (2000); Neale (2000: 168–92); Berlant (2008).

7 From here onwards, I use the shortened names used in the English subtitle of the film to refer to the characters. Hee for Lee Bang-hee and Hyun for Lee Myung-hyun and so on.

8 A rich body of literature can be found on the various ways ‘the man’ gets centred and re-centred as the progenitor and the stable point of all things – history, violence, reality, fantasy, humanity, among others. Particularly relevant to the context of films, representation and narratives include Chow (1991); Bryson (1994); Zalewski and Parpart (1998); Kaplan (2000); Hooper (2001); Kim K. (2004); Aitken (2007).

9 The film's monster of choice is the Hydra, delivered through the voice of Ryu towards the end of the film: ‘Do you know what a Hydra is? She is a goddess with six heads in Greek myth. She has one body but many different personalities’ personifications (ingeok). Hyun and Hee are two totally different people, Hydra of our times. The reality of a separated Korea has turned her into a Hydra’.

10 Feminist scholarship has amply demonstrated how the figure of a peaceful woman is constructed through the binary opposition of the brave male protector and the innocent female civilian to justify war and militarization, that in turn creates secondary citizenship/personhood for women and feminized minority (see Ruddick 1989: 141–56; Enloe 1993, 2000; Elshtain 1995: 3–13, 163–225; Cockburn 1998: 13–22, 2004; Enloe and Cohn 2003; Moon 2005a, 2005b; Sjoberg and Gentry 2008).

11 The role of the military in constructing ideas of manliness, manhood and masculinity and the gender hierarchy that is erected in the equation of military and nationhood have been widely elaborated by scholarships on feminism, gender and masculinities studies. Of particular relevance for the contexts of this article are Enloe (1993, 2000); McClintock (1993); Zalewski and Parpart (1998); Giles and Hyndman (2004); Higate and Hopton (2005); Moon (2005a, 2005b); Nagel (2005).

12 The link between the military, manhood and male bonding is reified in JSA in the numerous scenes and levels. I focus on scenes in this article but also important is how objects – iconic sweets, an American pornographic magazine, photographs of women – are circulated to make the linkage possible.

13 For significance of music in melodrama, see Neale (2000: 184); Berry and Farquhar (2006: 104–7).

14 Adding another layer to emotion here is the widely known fact that this song that exudes loss, loneliness, longing and the difficulty of inhabiting the present, is a song by a singer songwriter who committed suicide as a young man a few years before the making of this film.