I am so sorry I have no time to call you.
I’ve been so busy recently and I don’t want…

Good band, on top of it:

However, there’s one thing that makes it hard for me to get along with him, something it’s hard to put my finger on exactly because, well… it’s the same thing that makes it hard for me to get along with a lot of young Korean men around his age. It’s things he comes out with on occasion, in part, but I think it’s more the problem of communicating with someone who lives in a world where the kinds of things he says can simply be said, without a moment’s consideration.

Things like, “I’m not racist! I like hip-hop!” or “I just don’t like gay people, okay?”

Now, before you rush to remind me that people in Canada say stupid shit like this all the time, pause for a moment. I’m talking about someone who works in a field where dealing with non-Korean/non-white people and with openly homosexual people would be pretty hard to avoid. He’s university educated, and thoughtful and generous in a lot of ways… as long as you’re not black (or Middle-Eastern, or maybe Southeast Asia), or gay, or otherwise somehow too far along the difference scale for him to effectively grok you.

Both Miss Jiwaku and I have talked about this with him, she more gently and I more bluntly. In discussing his desire to go abroad and study more, I said something along the lines of, “You know, if you go there, there will be people who look at you and judge you just by your face. I know you’ve never experienced that, but do you think that feels good? Because that’s what you’re doing when you say you don’t like gay people — it’s the same.” Miss Jiwaku was gentler, pointing out that if he continues to say the kinds of things he’s said about gay or black people to us once he goes abroad, it will hurt his career — most people in his field will think of him as stupid and probably as an asshole.

What we haven’t said, and what I struggle with, is the fact that I don’t quite think of him that way– I mean, as an asshole… but I also struggle not to do so. I mean, he’s young, and he’s inexperienced. I suspect he’s never had a gay friend, or sat down and talked to an actual black person. He doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, and the things he says are well within the range of acceptable things to say for a lot of Koreans, sad as that may be. At the same time, he is generous and he has integrity — or at least, he has been generous to us, and shown us integrity. Neither of us is gay or black or any of the other things of which he presumably disapproves.

I am writing this post after having stumbled upon an old post I wrote, one that was, essentially, a rant about the general social acceptability of certain bigotries in South Korea today. It was a bloody-minded lashing out against all of that, daring homophobes to put their money where their mouth was and stop using digital  computers if they hate gay people so much — after all, we wouldn’t have them if it wasn’t for Alan Turing.

Of course, that is engaging in one of those things I hate — using a celebrated individual to exonerate a group when that group rightly needs no exoneration — but there’s another problem with it… which is, saying things like that just shuts people’s minds; it gets their resistance up, and good luck to you if you think you can get them to change their minds by criticizing them. Even getting people to rethink their attitudes by criticising their ideas is hard enough.

I’ve been thinking about why I have been writing such things — firing more and more angry, trenchant salvos off into the void — and I think that, besides the usefulness of a pressure valve to me personally, it helps me let off steam from work. After all, it’s one thing for you to encounter a bigot out there in the world, out in life. But classrooms are not life, and it’s far from unusual for me to run into a student who seems to think it’s all well and good to criticize Jews, blacks, women who behave in any way other than the wholesome expectation set upon them, white foreigners, “the Japanese” (each of these in one huge, easy-to-generalize-about monolith) or any number of categories of people. Richard Morgan attributes his penchant for violence in his writing at least in part to all the pent-up rage he repressed during his years of teaching ESL, and hearing people say the most nasty, bigoted things in a context where it was his job to be friendly, supportive, and to encourage them to speak more, as long as they use English.

Well, I don’t teach TEFL much anymore, but I am in a position where similar rules apply: I can call students on these things, but I have to do it in a way that makes it clear I’m attacking their statements or ideas, not them themselves. (And I have to constantly remind them of this, of course.) Perhaps the same dynamic has entered my blogging that Morgan describes in his fiction wrtiting, I’m not sure, but I do know it makes for a pretty boring blog. (Well, except for those few people who like to read the rants of expat teachers — I know one or two of those, but no more.)

But it’s also, I think, a kind of laziness. It’s so much easier to write what I wrote:

If you hate gay people so much that you’re willing to throw one out of school for daring to talk about himself honestly–breaking the rules of the religion you claim to bloody represent, and yeah, I did my fucking catchecism so don’t try to play that bullshit with me: there’s no “ostracize and cast out the kid” in “love the sinner, hate the sin”–then at least have the decency to repudiate all the gay influences on Western civilization.

Give the modern world back to those of us who appreciate it, and go live in the arid, joyless desert of your wildest fantasies.

Such as: get rid of your digital computers. Back to the abacus! Oh, didn’t you know? Alan Turing, widely considered the father of digital computing, was gay. Yep, queer, gay, homo, whatever nasty word you have in Korean for that. And nobody’s even apologized yet, apparently, for the way he was hounded to death by the British government. Who now look like scum for what they did to him.

And give us back the Sistine Chapel. Yeah, yeah,  Michelangelo successfully defended himself against the charge of homosexuality at some point or other, if I remember right. So do lots of gay people, and the  rumors that surrounded him were pretty powerful, and pretty persistent. Who knows, but… just to be safe, and considering his art has so many naked men in it… you’d better hand it over.

Oh, and literature. You have no idea how many major authors were and are homosexual, or bisexual, or whatever, do you? Well, I do, and I’m telling you: there will be big holes in the history of literature. Hell, statistically speaking, I’m pretty sure some of those who were inspired to write the Bible were something other than what we moderns delineate as heterosexual. Ooh, didn’t think of that, did you? Nah, you probably even think (erroneously, I might add) that the Bible referred to homosexuality often, or always did so negatively, right? Uh… no.

I could go on. But hey, if you feel like making a clean breast of it, that’s a start. I’ll bother with the rest of the list once you show enough conscience to follow through with that.

But I know you won’t, and that’s why you need to wake up your slammed-shut little minds and cut it with the persecution. If you want the fruits of all humankind to be allowed into your life, you need to stop punishing a few for being different… not just because those few contribute too, but because you are enjoying the fruits of all humankind, and it behooves you to be a bit more fucking civilized.

… than to say, something like this:

Look, I know that what you said is something that doesn’t seem wrong to you, doesn’t seem objectionable. I know that most of your friends wouldn’t bat an eyelid, but I do. I do, and most of the people of a comparable level of intelligence and education where I come from would more than bat an eyelid: they’d write you off as hopeless, or at least as stupidly blunt. They’d wonder whether you were a religious zealot, or whether maybe this kind of bigotry is just common in Korea; they would probably get a bad impression of you and your society. And they would very likely not bother to talk to you again.

And by the way, even those who share your views would, at a comparable level of intelligence and education, phrase what you said differently. They would say something less straightforwardly unselfconscious; they might say, “Well, I think people have the right to do as they please, but I’m a Christian, and… well, we’re not comfortable with homosexuality,” or something like that. Yes, yes, we have loudmouth bigots too, of course we do, but very few of are actually well-educated or intelligent… and those who are, tend to be using that kind of talk to appeal to the poorly-educated, ignorant, and/or stupid for their own political or economic gain.

The thing is, that latter kind of talk is the kind that does get people to think. Not the hopeless ones, but a lot of people aren’t necessarily hopeless. The latter approach means it’s possible to talk to this person, it’s possible to respect them while telling them, “Look, I’m asking you to rethink your attitude about this…”

The screaming, ranting indictments, unfortunately, most of the time just make nothing happen — they do me no good, they do my readers (most of whom I assume are in the choir to which I preach) no good, and it’s not like I talk this way in real life.

So, I think I’ve stumbled onto a resolution, not just for 2012, but for the future in general — instead of ranting, get the shovel and do the work. Dig, and if I have rage still, let it go into the fiction I write.

A debate won’t be possible until people actually recognize there’s an issue about which disagreement is possible; given how my students react when I recount experiences like this one or this one — almost always with unbelieving shock, as if this kind of thing never happens in Korea anymore — I think it’s gonna be a long, long time till such a debate even begins.

And of course, then people will have to be willing to debate. It’s not that I haven’t any Korean friends: I have a number who are quite free of apparent racism, or who do their best; I have friends whom I can call on that kind of thing, and they get it and understand — and they can call me on crap I say or do, too. They’re a solace, but in the abstract sense: they’re not people I feel I can call for support when I am experiencing racist treatment, not just because I feel they couldn’t do anything anyway, but because I’ve noticed a widespread conflict-avoidant tendency that is most pronounced in the nicest people I’ve met here. I get the sense that maybe conflict-avoidance is the way they managed to get through life in a society where the rules are pretty much in favor of the insensitive or the downright callous. I have trouble imagining any of my Korean friends (not including Miss Jiwaku) standing up to a drunk shouting at me on the subway. I know for a fact that several times when push has come to shove in a professional context, the wagons have circled and left me on the outside, even with those who I like to believe are sympathetic. Sympathy often costs a lot more here than it does where I’m from. So does getting into a real debate.

(And I realize now that, for all my discussing these problems, blogging about racism online has never fixed racism offline. I also realize that one thing I don’t do enough is to write about my friends — Korean or otherwise. Going through old posts and tagging them, I realized I used to write about my friends a lot, but now I don’t do it so much. I shall have to start again.)

Anyway, I have feeling the big changes that would proceed from any “Racism Debate” in Korea won’t be coming before I’m a senior citizen. (And I’m in my late 30s now.) I could be wrong — things sometimes change quickly here — but I think some things change faster than others, and there are a number of debates (the status of women being one) where the line is moving very, very slowly.

RulerOfYourOwnWorld

Somehow, though, my other (very brief) experiences with Korean TV dramas kept me skeptical. I don’t care for the kind of hyper-twisty, surprise-focused, romance-focused drama in any case, but in Korea this is worsened by the fact that the most jarring archetypal patterns (rich guy treats poor pretty girl badly; poor pretty girl falls for rich guy; poor pretty girl leaves decent-hearted not-rich guy for rich asshole) meld with other stuff I would rather not watch on TV (mom throws temper tantrum at family dinner; then she does it again… and again… and again…).

When it was recommended to me years ago, the show was really hard to get, and impossible for someone who couldn’t speak Korean; the program had been released on DVD, but without subtitles. I was given copies, along with fansubs (apparently by whoever this Totuta person is, who runs this website), and filed them away under “Watch when I have time.” Well, I ran across them again this winter, and decided to give the show a whirl, and what do you know: it’s pretty good!

The things I was told about it were generally true: it’s well-written, which means that all the characters — even the smaller supporting characters — each have their own story, their own unique struggle. In a sense, the show brings to mind that aphorism, widely misattributed (so they say) to Philo of Alexandria or to Plato, that one should be kind to everyone one meets, as they are all fighting a hard battle. In Ruler of Your Own World, this turns out, to some degree, to be true: everyone seems to be struggling — and sometimes giving up on the struggle — to deal with her or his own problems, and those problems become part of the story too, without overwhelming the main thread of the story.

Another thing this show does which is worth note is that it inverts the expected pattern. There is a rich guy who treats the female protagonist (Kyung) badly (and, to be frank, acts a lot like a child); but rather than falling for him, she relatively quickly spurns him and goes for the screwed-up but honest and much more grown-up ex-con in her life (whose name is Boksu). The ex-con has a very slim and stylish (but also relatively poor and potty-mouthed) long-term girlfriend (Mirae), a cheerleader who in most dramas like this would end up being some kind of oppressively horrible witch, except she isn’t… she’s very sympathetic, and I can’t help but kind of cheer for her, and empathize with her, even as I know that Boksu belongs with Kyung.

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Which is interesting, because even I can see that Boksu is not a very handsome guy. Which is not a crime: we can’t all be the handsomest guy in the show, but it does sort of violate the rules of Korean TV, as far as I’ve seen. He dresses like a regular lower-middle-class Korean guy in 2002, and his face is average. And while I like her as an actress, I don’t find Lee Na Young (Kyung) particularly attractive in this show — people constantly comment about her cheesy, country-style wardrobe and her looks. I can’t help but imagine that in most Korean TV shows, the casting would be inverted — that the lovers at the center of this narrative would likely end up on the outskirts of the story, while the man and woman rejected by them look more like the lovers paired at the center of most Korean TV dramas. That would be sad, as I’d say everyone brings their A-game to this show, and because I think that seeing people who aren’t stereotypically beautiful lends the show a kind of realism bolstered by the way each character is so different, so uniquely themselves.

Mirae, the foul-mouthed cheerleader who is, deep down, desperate not to lose the man she truly loves, is an excellent example of this, and probably my favorite character in part because even she, the prettiest girl in the show, looks like a normal person, not some Gangnam plastic-surgery bot… and in part, because she’s the inevitable underdog and yet she’s such a sympathetic character all the same. All she really wants to do is go to college and become a nurse. But she’s also a bit domineering, and has mothered Boksu — in ways he seemingly has outgrown. When he fails to break up with her, it’s understandable in some ways — he knows it will break her heart — but frustrating in others, since he knows that he really wants to be with someone else… and yet, I wondered whether he didn’t also crave the mothering he got from her, and whether it didn’t, deep down, remind him of his own domineering mother.

Once, last year, a student and I sat and discussed Korean dramas in comparison with American ones for the purposes of a presentation she had to do. I told her that one of the biggest differences I’d found was that, in Western dramas, it was possible to structure a narrative around something other than a love story. Love and sex do play a part in most TV shows — or, at least, relationships often do —  but, as the student agreed, a TV show like E.R. is kind of impossible in Korean terms: it’s focused on how an E.R. works, on the experience of being a doctor and on how doctors perform their jobs, on the health care system. Yes, there are relationships and even romances in the show, but the focus is the work being done in a busy emergency room in Chicago. This happens with police shows, with shows about criminals (I’m thinking more about Dexter and Breaking Bad than Weeds, mind you), and it can happen with people in jail (Oz, Prison Break).

Ruler of Your Own World is somewhere in-between, in this aspect: the romance is a big part of the narrative, but at the same time, what characters do for money is also important: after all, the male lead starts out the show as a pickpocket just getting released from jail. The question of what he will do next preoccupies him, and his eventual choice to train as a stuntman is less shallow than it would have been in a lot of shows. When being a stunt man could have been presented as all leather-jackets and sunglasses and coolness, it’s actually presented as hard bloody work, as dirty and dangerous, as involving know-how that needs to be acquired, and under-respected by people who know nothing about it. We see Boksu screw up, and struggle, and learn.

Kyung’s job — playing keyboards in an indie rock band — is similarly empty of glamor: they get excited about small gigs, they scrimp and save the money they have, sometimes they consider pawning their instruments for cash, and so on. Their new lead singer isn’t an instant success — in fact, she suffers from terrible stage fright, something the band struggles with. Kyung’s family is less than supportive of her musical aspirations, and her rich-almost-boyfriend sees it as a hobby.

Other characters all have jobs of some kind: the rich guy is a journalist, Mirae is a cheerleader (and, later, part-time model) whose job kind of sucks; Boksu’s father drives a bus — and we see him doing it sometimes — while his mom runs a fried chicken shop. Kyung’s mother is a depressed housewife, but her father runs hotels (and is well-networked with local gangsters and thugs). Practically everyone in the story not only has a job, but is shown actually doing it, usually in less-than-glamourous tasks, rather than in the showy, cool, and overstylized fashion we’d see in most Korean TV shows.

(This brings to mind what I’ve read about how one of the first English-language novelists to focus on work as a major theme of his narratives, as something that kept the world and the Empire going, was Kipling. I’m not sure about that being quite true, but Kipling — and a lot of writers after him in the Anglophone world — have been making work an important part of characters’ lives, in a way that it doesn’t seem so often to be in Korean TV shows or in many of the Korean stories I’ve read in translation. I rather wonder if this is related to the way many of my students say they want to work in a big company, but only shrug when I ask what specifically they want to do. “Work in an office,” is the most precise response I usually get.)

Ruler of Your Own World

The show also — all the way back in 2002 — made some pretty clear comments on issues in Korean society. For one thing, Kyung — the sympathetic female lead — openly admits to having had premarital sex to her kinda-sorta-boyfriend, and isn’t willing to take shit for it. She also smokes, and drinks him under the table. Her meekness at home is part of the very reason she has so much trouble with her father (it is not so much a virtue as an annoyance to him). Boksu’s mother, meanwhile, is a broken woman, and there is no magic fix for this problem, only the struggle to relate to her sons (especially Boksu, who was the offspring of a now-terminated marriage to a violent alcoholic), and to men in general. The family relationships in this show seem a lot more real in their dysfunctionality than what I’ve glimpsed in other Korean TV shows. Parents less often throw fits than they just act like jerks sometimes, almost always in ways that relate to their own personal problems.

In any case, I’m only halfway through the program, but so far I get the impression the narrative is centered on the importance of doing the things one truly wants to do — of being honest with oneself, of walking around open to the world and to happy possibilities, of not being locked into an unhappy situation. In that, I’d say, it’s somewhat radical as far as Korean cultural messages go: I can’t count the number of times when Korean students or friends have come to me asking for advice on some decision or other, and reacted with shock when I asked them what they wanted to do, and told them they should do what feels or seems right to them. “You’re the only person who said that to me! I knew I should have asked you first!” is something I’ve heard time and time again, to my sorrow. When I ask what advice they got from friends, it almost always boils down to these two notions:

1. Don’t — DON’T! — consider what you want to do. In fact, if you feel an impulse to do A, you most definitely should do B, or C, or something else… but not A.
2. If you find the prospect of doing X unpleasant, then that is what is necessary and you really need to do it. (Justification for this is focused on the idea of career building, one’s future, economic stability, or whatever, but the main thesis seems to be that self-torture isn’t just occasionally inescapable — it’s a requisite part of becoming adult and “living well.”)

Anyway, I have thoughts about why these ideas seem to persist and to plague my students and friends whenever they seek advice — or, in many cases, even when they don’t ask for it, but get it anyway — and I think there are specific reasons why in Korea, adult responsibility seems to be so often paired with personal unhappiness and with not doing what one wants to do… but that’s for another post.

In the meantime, I’ll simply note that find it heartening to see a TV show that comes out hard-hitting against all that. The very title of the show does this: 네 멋대로 해라 basically translates as “Do What You Want To Do.” While it’s sad to me that this message might come across as unique or radical in entertainment, I’m glad it got some airtime almost a decade ago. I hope more like it gets out there too…

I’ll sum up my thoughts once I’ve seen the remaining episodes, I guess, so stay tuned for that! For those interested, you can see the show online, at least if you’re in North or South America (or have a proxy that will convince the site that you are… or, there’s always this). Like I said, by all accounts, it’s probably the best Korean TV drama ever made, so… well, there you go. If you can get past the stuff that a North American viewer (like me) is likeliest to trip on — the occasional overlong crying scenes, the weird pacing in certain “dramatic” moments, things like that — you might really enjoy it.

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More next time.

“Do you know him?” she asked, and mentioned that he’d been in Korea from 2001 until the time of the murder (in 2009), and had worked as an instructor at “a university in Jeolla Province.” I arrived in Jeolla Province in very late 2001, and I think it was in 2002 that a guy showed up as a new teacher in my workplace (a university in Iksan), after what had seemed like a year in Jeonju.

And the guy I knew was at least somewhat delusional, in a way that definitely affected his relationships. So… how about that? I actually have a sneaking suspicion I did know the guy, not that I’ll be visiting him in jail.

Even if the guy I’m thinking of isn’t the same person, it says something that the first person who came to my mind as a very likely candidate for being this guy was someone who spent years working with children in Korea. Brrrrrrrrr.

And now, another edition of Korean politicians making asses of themselves, and embarrassing their nation!

When I first arrived in Korea, I was cautioned to remember that here, in the case of an emergency, one does not dial 911, but rather 119. (Which is how it is in a lot of other countries, so I’ll resist the urge to make a joke that it is simply “backwards” to us North Americans — like so many other things in Korea.)

However, things have changed. I luckily haven’t had a need to call 119 yet, but then, how we define “need” has changed in Korea recently. A number of new services are now available through 119, at least for residents of Kyeonggi Province, including passport reissuance, problems at work, problems with your property, and problems faced by North Korean callers.

Of course, I am left wondering just how many more people have been added to the taskforce to screen and direct calls, and how much the changes have slowed down the vital response services related to fire, violent attacks, and other life-threatening emergencies.

While I’m no mathematician, I suspect that a sensible mathematical analysis would have revealed a significantly larger strain on the 119 responder workforce to direct calls correctly, as well as a increase in responder lag time — inevitable, given the mathematics involved in scaling up incoming data, but also crucial in life-threatening situations. I’d guess you would have to scale up employees exponentially to keep up with even a non-exponential increase in incoming calls.

So, it seems rather stupid that they didn’t just launch some other help line, say, 229, for less serious emergencies, for which people could wait to have their calls taken. They could even have had the calls routed to the same people who do 119, but have the 119 calls inherently prioritized. So, I’m going to class this as another case of a Nonfunctional System, right off the bat — because it involves truly stupid design.

But it gets better… because, guess who called 119 and was dissatisfied with his service?

Yes, Kim Moonsu, the Dojisa of Kyeonggi-do! That is, the governor of Kyeonggi Province. Now, when middle-aged men in power do anything in this country, it’s bound to go badly, but this is particularly ridiculous:

To summarize, Governor Kim placed a call to the 119 Emergency line. The responder took the call exactly as an emergency help line is supposed to do, politely asking, “Hello, what’s your emergency?”

Governor Kim then started throwing his credentials around, and waiting for… something. It’s not clear why he was calling, though long silences after his announcing his position in the government lead one to suspect that he was waiting for praise, or a little flattery, or something. In any case, Kim didn’t get it, and no wonder: 119, like emergency phone lines all over the world, gets an idiotic number of prank calls in a given week, as well as calls from mentally ill people. I would be extremely surprised if this was the first call the responder had taken from someone claiming to be a high government official.

But the responder kept it polite and businesslike. He kept asking, “What’s your emergency, sir?” Kim’s response was to keep insisting he was the Governor, “the governor, did you hear me? I’m the governor!” and demanding the responder’s name. The responder didn’t give it, but tried to move the caller back to his reason for calling, until it was quite apparent the caller had no reason for calling.

Finally, no doubt thinking of the other poor people who couldn’t get through and were trying to evade assault, rape, or a house fire, the responder asked once more what the emergency was, reminded the caller that this was an emergency line, and hung up.

So Governor Kim called back, hoping to harass the same person again; but 119 doesn’t work that way, so he got another responder. He ended up haranguing someone else. The second person gave his name right away, but didn’t give the name of the previous responder when Moon requested it (because, after all, he had no idea to whom Moon had talked); instead, he asked, “So what’s your emergency?” The responder explained that Kim ought to use the direct line if he wanted to talk to the fire station, since 119 is the emergency line. For emergencies. Soon after, Governor Kim told him (in what is, in Korean terms, impolite speech), “Fine. I’m hanging up.”

Soon after that, the two 119 responders were told they were going to be transferred to the countryside — the traditional Confucian punishment, exile. This didn’t end up happening, of course: there was enough of an uproar after the case was reported in the news, so Kim decided not to punish these two men for doing their jobs properly.

(It gives one pause, when it requires a public uproar to prevent people from being punished for doing their jobs properly, according to protocol, as trained… especially in a field where doing so can mean the difference between life and death for a caller.)

But it gets you to wondering about just how isolated from reality are the men running this society. Indeed, it brings to mind the passage in Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work where he argues that

people who make big decisions that affect all of us–don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility. Being unacquainted with falure, the kind that can’t be interpreted away, may have something to do with the lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people. (pg. 203-204.)

Crawford’s argument is that those who are likely to end up running society need to learn a trade, so that they experience their own capacity for unambiguous, undeniable failure enough times so as to develop a sense of humility, and of realistic considerations. Because, quite frankly, it frightens me that a position of so much power could be occupied by someone so little able to understand how the 119-emergency service works, and so little able to imagine how stupid his own behavior sounds in the calls above.

And that he didn’t grasp how stupid it sounds is patently clear, from what I was told: namely, that it was Moon himself (or perhaps a member of his staff) who uploaded the clip, when the uproar occurred! Talk about your failure to grasp reality.

This is, of course, just a stupid individual case, but I think it’s also a revealing glimpse of institutional blindness, to a degree that ought to chill us to the bones. These are the same guys brokering decisions on land development, the placement of nuclear facilities, and so on. That should leave us very, very disquieted.

And, considering that, I see the rabbit hole out there. It’s about algorithmic thinking, which I find is even harder for my Korean students to grasp than critical thinking. When there’s a problem, and I ask them to think of a solution, it is almost always unrealistic, untenable, or patently silly — or, worse, is a simple abjuration of ability to do anything at all.

And not just my students; in fact, a lot of the Korean “Nonfunctional Systems” I’ve discussed on this blog over the years relate to a poor sense of algorithmic thinking. Setting up systems to get things done smoothly is simply not a Korean forte — unless the system is received sui generis.

And sadly, the system received sui generis for running this society is pretty much received from haughty old men throwing their weight around and punishing their “inferiors” as if it were 1799 or 1899 — complete, it seems, even with traditional exile to the countryside for those who displease an older man in a position of power… even for doing one’s job properly and effectively in the presence of said older man, who is simply too ignorant to realize what he’s witnessing.

Doubtless, all of this connects to questions of the conception of agency in Korean society, and… wait, no, as I said, this is a rabbit hole I’m not venturing into today.

Oh, and via The Marmot’s Hole, these parodies are worth a look.

Probably, yes, it is too much to ask for. Sigh.

Well, Ding Dong, the Wicked Witch of the North is dead.

And while some of what Hitchens argued for made me ill, I think the world is nonetheless poorer for losing him… and he always seemed to me to bring a kind of brio and force — and a stunning clearheadedness — to the discussion of the world’s religious lunacy. Here’s a video fitting of both recent deaths:

Those looking for someone to hate in the void of Kim’s absence needn’t wait long. As always, North Korea already has had a hereditary successor to the throne of the Witch-King lined up for ages. And he looks like a real charmer, too:

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I’m going to leave the post as is, as a reminder to me to get the facts straight before I go off on my own rant. But as even Charles points out, the facts I got wrong don’t contradict my bigger observation on the lack of debate and reasoned discussion in Korean society. (In point of fact, the actual events seem to support my point even better than the version of events I’d been told, and posted about.)

Actually, it’s not just a lack of debate and discussion I’m thinking about now: it’s communication in general I find lacking. But I’ll get into that later.

ORIGINAL POST: I used to teach a course on debate and debating. I tended to focus on the importance of logical argumentation, and of supporting one’s thesis with evidence and sensible explanation, as opposed to the formalized “debate club” style of debate that was made available in other venues on campus.

I pretty much gave up on the course when my students, over several years, told me they loved it, but would never be able to apply it in real life. “This is Korea,” they told me, again and again, “… and around here, debates are won by whoever can shout the loudest, whoever is oldest, whoever has better connections.”

That’s especially true when your connections give you control of water cannons.

I wrote the other day on what it’s like to live in a society where logic and reasoned argumentation is simply held at a low value. I have to say, if you disagree, step onto a university campus for a bit. I challenge you to find more than a minority of Korean professors who are using approaches that require students to express an opinion about anything at all at the undergraduate level. The literature students in one of my classes characterized their experience as basically a series of translation and multiple-choice exams or fill-in-the-blanks; the multiple choice parts and the fill-in-the-blanks parts both hinge on how well a student can recall vocabulary from a source text. For example, using the poem in my last post:

I’m __________ you.
Are you going to let our _____________ life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I _________ past the corner candystore.
I read it in the ______________ of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about ___________. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It _________ to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

When I heard this, I said, “So, basically… middle school exams!” They laughed, but there was an edge of weariness in their laughter. I asked the obvious questions: “Do you feel you’re learning anything in that class? Do you feel you’re getting your money’s worth from that class? Have you thought about saying something to that professor? Or about quitting that course and taking something else next semester?”

Sure they had. Thought about it, that is. But…

The but is crucial. The but hinges on many things:

• Are there alternatives?
• What would the repercussions be for questioning this mode of teaching?
• Is it worth it to extend one’s undergraduate studies by a semester — and take flack from family — in order to drop obviously worthless classes and take good classes in their place, later on?

But I think the biggest but is more deep-seated. I think the biggest but is the one that has been hammered into heads since childhood, and it is: Don’t rock the boat. Don’t start trouble.

The other day, the Korean Parliament passed the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. Well, I should say, a part of the Korean Parliament passed it.

What happened was that the [more] conservative party called a party meeting. I think they claimed they’d be discussing the party budget or something. Predictably, the opposition mostly stayed home. And what was the result? The rightwingers “convened a snap parliamentary session to force the bill through.”

So, yeah, a part of the Korean Parliament passed it. There was a 151 to 7 vote. There are 295 seats in the Parliament.

That’s how it works in a society without debate. Might as well just anoint champions and have them fight on the battlefield… in fact, that might even be a fairer way to do it, since at least both sides would know when they need to show up in order to play a part in the deciding of the law.

Now, this was a major bill: a bill that will determine the shape of Korean trade for the foreseeable future. It will affect the lives of all Koreans. But the right wing felt that a proper vote with full representation of elected officials was not necessary for this future-shaping decision. Doors were blockaded, in the way little boys do when they don’t want others coming into their treehouse. Much has been made of how a leftist representative set off a tear gas cannister, but frankly, that seems like a far smaller idiocy.

Not that I think the left is the victims here. This is what happens when you are sleeping on the job. These people should have known this would happen sooner or later. They need to recognize that nobody in the government respects or takes seriously the idea of democracy, and act accordingly. (Only then will democracy be possible.)

And in the streets, where people protest the FTA, the water cannons spray. In the cold. Because expressing your opinion? The water cannons deliver a very clear message:

Hey citizen: go ____ yourself. Go fill out your ______ multiple-choice exam.

What I wish is that the American government would say, “No, no, we don’t want the deal that way. We want you to hold, a proper, dignified, grown-up vote, and then get back to us with the real results.” That might sound paternalistic, but when a government behaves like elementary schoolkids fighting over a treehouse, I don’t think it’s uncalled-for. The shame would do the Korean government an immense good… in the same way that children telling off their parents when they do something unacceptable does the parents good, even when it’s unpleasant for all concerned.

But of course, since this agreement serves US interests, they are not going to be adult about it either. Promoting democracy is one thing when it means taking over other countries. It’s another when it means accepting trade agreements arrived at by the shadiest of means, apparently.

By the way, I’m not convinced that the FTA would be a wholly bad thing. Korea has some of the most extreme trade barriers I’ve seen in the developed world, and many of them serve mostly to benefit Korean corporations and harm Korean consumers. But it’s when you get down to the conditions of the FTA that I feel nervous: from what I read a while back, copyright and patent law, for example, are very likely to end up being more draconian in Korea even than in the USA. I suspect the cost of food here might fall, though of course unemployment will rise since, Korea being Korea, we all know that things will benefit the biggest companies most, and the little guy as little as humanly possible.

In the end, I wonder whether the whole parliament will be allowed into the legislature to vote on whether to subsidize the lubricant people are going to need (and, hell, already need) in order to avoid, tearing, bleeding, and general discomfort. We all know they won’t spring for the rubbers (and probably will insist no rubbers are used), but the lube, at least?

Unfortunately, the organization offering the job — a Korean TV network tasked with making Korea look nice and plain and innocuous abroad, in English — did not offer her a decent wage. The wage was, well, laughable.

One imagines maybe she was expected to be excited to work with K-pop stars. She was not.

When she asked whether the wage offered was negotiable, she was told it wasn’t. (Great negotiators, those Korean businesspeople: I’ve never heard anyone start with any answer than NO. Usually said with disgust.)

When she said it was unreasonably low, the woman offering her the job said, “But this is your chance to serve your nation!” This woman, who undoubtedly was a Korean-American, who undoubtedly was making a very handsom wage, who undoubtedly gives about as much of a damn about “the nation” as a waitress gives about the health of her restaurant’s diners.

I don’t remember what Miss Jiwaku said at this point; I do remember her saying sense of the situation being that there was no point in talking to someone who would come out with a line as ridiculous as that.

One wishes she had paraphrased Allen Ginsberg, who wrote, “It occurs to me that I am America…” For what else would serving Korea mean, if not working for the betterment of Koreans. I’m sorry, but accompanying some second-rate pop stars on an international journey of jingoistic fetishism is not “serving your nation,” no matter how anyone slices it… and if it is, then the definition of “serving one’s nation” is so broad that basically anything fits into that definition.

This is the thing I wish for the students I work with: they would realize the truth in Ginsberg’s poem –

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.

– can be said of the Chosun Ilbo, and of Korea:

I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by the Chosun Ilbo?
I’m obsessed by the Chosun Ilbo.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner bunshik restaurant.
I read it in the corner of Seoul National University Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. TV
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am Korea.
I am talking to myself again.

A nation that is defined as anything other than the aggregate of its people — the mass, not the minority who dress best, who eat the best food, who have the most connections — is not a nation: it is a lie, and a tool of manipulation.

Sadly, I can’t say that I imagine most Canadians (or Americans, for that matter) grasp this any better than most Koreans I deal with. That’s really not where I’m going with this. Where I’m going with this is… the way many Canadians or American fail to get this seems less insurmountable to me than the way many Koreans fail to get this.

Maybe that’s unfair of me, but sometimes it feels to me as if Korea is a car with the handbrake left on, and the lever for the handbrake broken off and thrown out the window. I feel like maybe some of the changes fended off by this hard-braking situation are ones that would be genuinely bad for people, but that this braking is also holding back a tidal wave of change that would improve the lives of most people.

And the worst thing is how insidious the opposition is… because the opposition is exactly the people who would most benefit from what changes could happen: female students spouting the ideology of the most virulently anti-feminist groups in the country; students who, with no embarrassment, say in front of me that “foreigners” are loud and rude and frightening, and then say they wish they could live abroad.

Sure, every change has winners and losers. Like the older Korean man I know who is so hung up on race that, as soon as he is in a room with a person of mixed-race, his Freudian slips embarrass me. (Like how, recounting the shock of the original TV series V, he mentioned being shocked to find out the alien was “half bla… er, half alien.”  I mean, seriously? This individual would have great difficulty being taken seriously in the same field he works in, in Canada. People would call him on it. He would be embarrassed often. (And he’s been abroad long enough to know better… or, ought to have known better, I mean.)

But it’s not just that. It’s the kneejerk reaction. Kneejerk reactions are not just common here — I feel like sometimes, they’re kinda what replaces discourse. While Gerry Bevers is about the most annoying person ever to write about Korea online, the fact he was censored and then fired is a kneejerk reaction. (Far better to discredit him, if possible, officially; and if he can’t be discredited, why should he be silenced? If he cannot be discredited, then why is he in trouble?)

I was trying to figure out a way of talking about how it feels to teach logic and argumentation in Korea, and I think this is it: it sometimes feels like teaching people who have been educated to behave as if kneejerk reactions are pretty much interchangeable with critical thinking.

“I don’t like gays, I’m Christian!” or “Of course I like the Wonder Girls, I’m Korean!” or “You disagree with me? Are you sure you’re Korean?” or “You’re a Communist!”

No, where you might hear Americans or Canadians say that kind of stupid crap to one another — and of course you do, because bigotry and stupidity are worldwide phenomena — you don’t tend to hear academics saying them, or at least not academics in the humanities. Academic bigots, or jingoists, or red-baiters, at least tend to have a little more finesse in the English-speaking world. They find handy ways to veil their kneejerk reactions. And the more educated someone is, in my experience, the more likely that person is to have a more complex and nuanced view of such things.

In Korea, my experience is that the more highly educated someone is, the more likely it is he or she will be more jingoistic than the average market salesperson. The more privileged the individual is, the more automatic the kneejerk reaction becomes. (And I’m far from the first person to observe this.)

But if we return to my understanding of culture as a set of multi-band equalizers, the thing is, critical reasoning is just set to a lower-value band in Korea. A counselor I know once told me that both according to his studies, and to his experience counseling mixed-culture couples, Korean culture teaches people to devalue logic and rational argumentation, and to favor emotional arguments, emotional justifications, emotional appeals. “Logic alone,” he said, “is distrusted in a way that makes no sense to us [Westerners].”

He wasn’t saying something as blatant as “Koreans are illogical,” and neither am I. Rather, there’s a certain value placed on logic in a given society. A lot of narratives in Anglophone world concern people coming to grips with the fact that their emphasis on logic and critical reason begins to break down when confronted with certain emotional realities. This is a valid and true criticism of a logic-centric, wholly pragmatic worldview.

But if you look at Korean TV, you see the incarnation of the opposite. Jobs are backdrops, like nice furniture. The center of attention is the emotional dimension — the emotional rhythms of the narrative, the reactions of feelings against feelings, the passions and rages. Middle aged women throwing fits and screaming, husbands weeping and begging for forgiveness. Not, like say in Modern Family, people pointing out one anothers’ illogical foibles, making fun of one another, but also somehow negotiating difference in a mutually satisfactory way.

What I think I’m saying is this: if someone made an illogical argument in my culture, I would expect the person to be called on it, mocked for it, or at least seen as an idiot. If the illogic was offered as a justification for an unacceptable behaviour, I’d expect the person to have a pretty good chance of being verbally smacked down sooner or later. But in my experience, in Korea, the verbal smackdown just does not happen, and somehow, according to the public discourse, the emotional argument seems to enjoy as much privilege as any other argument, including a logical one. Kneejerk reactions, emotional outbursts, and inane justifications seem to have somehow attained a place of privilege that is, functionally, comparably as inassailable as a rational, supported argument. Maybe this isn’t what all Koreans experience, but those closest to me describe such a reality, and I certainly see it on a regular basis in my own interactions… not universally, but so often I often find myself silenced by not quite knowing what to say.

Someone once wrote a brilliant essay describing what it’s like to be atheist, as if it were like living in a world where everyone around you believes in Santa Claus. Well, sometimes I feel like that in terms of aspects of Korean culture. Like, how age matters so much. Everyone has met people who are older and are bumbling morons. Yet people seem willing to play along with the justification that older people have more experience, and thus deserve respect. You can point out how lots of older people deserve no respect, for their experience taught them nothing. People will nod, and say, “Yes, that’s true…” but that doesn’t unseat the system of interaction — and obviously, it could never do so. It’s a logical argument posited against a nonlogical proposition.

I feel like I’m confronted with a lot more of these in Korea than I was in Canada. That’s subjective, so whatever. But I feel, in other words, like I’m in an environment in which irrational argument seems to be about as acceptable as rational argument.

I keep saying I feel, but it’s kind of a cop-out. I know younger Koreans who feel this way too. I know bicultural people who feel this way. I know Koreans who rage against in quietly, and then go along with it because, well, what can one do? And so, as many expats I know have observed, the prevailing feeling one gets in Korea, from Koreans, is of frustration, of constrained anger and weariness and a held-back desire to just say no to the constant pressures of being told what to do by anyone with one more year on his birth certificate than oneself.

After all, the favored comeback one encounters in any argument between people of different ages, once the confrontation gets too heady or the younger person begins to attain the upper hand, is “How old are you?”

Yes, argumentum ad hominem. Explain the term to students, and they get it immediately. Ask them to call people on it in a real life situation, and suddenly it slips out of their grasp. It is too patently common to reject… one couldn’t live here and do so.

This is hardly surprising: everyone I’ve talked to knows the problem. Schools don’t teach critical thinking here. They teach multiple choice exams. They teach to the test. They focus on getting students into a “good university” without ever addressing the question of whether the rankings that seem universally accepted here actually reflect real quality, or ought to do so.

Who does it benefit? I mean, it has to benefit someone, right? Well, in a low, mean, grubby sort of way, it’s good for the few richest percent of society. But the gap between rich and poor is growing… with consequences that I’m sorry to say are dire for everyone involved:

Dire for everyone — it’s not as if this problem is huge in many places across the face of the developed world — but I think of something a student long ago wrote in an essay on the zombie trope in American popular culture. She claimed that, in her opinion, Koreans would fare much worse than Americans in a zombie apocalypse. “They are willing to fight back, at least when things get bad. We wouldn’t fight back. I don’t think we’d last very long at all.”

Sobering thought. Now, twist your head a little to the right, squint, and imagine zombies driving around in shiny business suits, living in giant apartments with marble floors… ah, there, you see it now?

One wonders just how long this will have to go on before people decide they’ve had enough of the zombie apocalypse.

***

So I mentioned a while back how I’d be hosting a learn-to-brew session with some of my students, with the goal of producing two (approximately 5-gallon) batches of beer for a cocktail party being held later this semester.

On Wednesday night, we met up and I pulled a bunch of samples of different styles for them to try, including a Belgian Dubbel, a pretty hoppy American Pale Ale, a hoppier-than-style Belgian Pale Ale, a bottle of Leffe (for a proper BPA), an ESB (commercial bottle of London Pride), my Belgian Wit, my Belgian Saison (the Secret Agent recipe), and a German hefeweizen (I think it was an Erdinger), and my chocolate stout.

Ironically, the most popular style among the students was the one we decided not to make, because, sadly, we can’t get our hands on the grain that really makes British beer styles shine: that is, Marris Otter and the ESB style, as exemplified in our tasting by London Pride. (Which, incidentally, I was told later isn’t made with M.O. but rather Pale — not that we can get Brit. Pale malt either.)

We struggled to figure out how we could make it work, until finally we realized that without the ESB style in the runningour terrible decision could be skipped. After all, half the participants wanted to make a Saison, and the other half wanted to make a hoppy APA. I asked them to decide whether they wanted to have the yeast do the work, or have the hops do the flavoring work. Since we were split on that question, I finally suggested we try both approaches once, and put off doing an ESB until next semester, and until I can get some tips from the brewers I know on how to do an ESB right.

So that’s what we’re doing: a parti-gyle of 40 liters, split down the middle: half will be an APA hopped with Galena (for bittering) and Cascade and Willamette (plus a little more of my leaf hop Cascade dry hop before bottling, or after kegging), and a Saison fermented with Wyeast 3711, with a little spice added at the end of the boil. (Some ginger, some kaffir lime leaves, a spoonful of crushed black peppercorns, and maybe some fresh rosemary at the end of the boil.)

We will meet up tomorrow morning, early (10:00 am!), which meant today involved a lot of running around. By the time I’d formulated my recipes, it was too late to order grain and besides, for some reason (in a society where vast amounts of commerce is done online) Administration at my university frowns on receipts for reimbursement when the purchase occurred online. (Explain that.) I went to the LHBS which is on the absolute other side of Seoul, got the grain and hops, realized I’d underestimated the cost of hops in Korea, and headed home, only to have dinner and then head back out again in search of a bigger brewpot, some bleach, and some ginger. As I mentioned in the post linked above, this is an excuse for me to buy a bigger brewpot, and after some searching I managed to find one (aluminium, 50L, which should do for my bigger double batch brew sessions, in cases where I’m using same hops/different yeast.

(While I was at it, I found a 10L cooler with a spigot that I think I can use to do sour mashing, of which I plan to do a certain amount this fall. I’d prefer to have a round 20L cooler for both sour and non-sour mashing for single-batches, but didn’t see anything that size.)

Next Morning: Well, brewtime is half an hour away but Miss Jiwaku and I got up early, so we have installed our new fridge, rearranged fridge contents, put the old fridge out in the common room (I’ll clean it on Sunday), and done a bunch of other stuff. We still have to install the new semi-compact drum washing machine in the brew room, which will deprive me of a brewing-dedicated space (unless I can get a heavy-duty shelving system), but will free us up to do laundry without going up and down 3 flights of stairs twice per load. It’s a tradeoff I think I can live with… until spring, anyway.

Okay, so now I need to get showered and start hauling stuff out into the hallway. I’ll have the students helping me join in on carrying down the cooler, grain, boil pots, and so on… it should be a good start to the day. But I’d better go get organized. (I need to tuck my carboy of California Common into a bucket to cool or something…)

ORIGINAL POST: When I arrived in Korea, people were using the word “talent” in a way I really didn’t understand: it was synonymous with “performer”… even performers who quite obviously had no talent. And believe me, there were lots of those on TVs in those days.

I’m sure some people out there would say that the origins of the Korean girl-group must be found in Japanese pop music; it’s an argument I can understand, and indeed I imagined Japan as a probable origin of a lot of the pop culture that prevails in Korea — idols, boy-bands and girl-groups, and so on. And it may be the case, but if true, those origins lie much further back than one might think.

After all, look at this video from 1974, featuring (according to the person who posted it on Youtube) Seo Jio singing 그대없이는못살아 (“I Can’t Live Without You”):

Now watch it again, and imagine the singer gone from the stage. Just imagine the back dancers singing the song in bits and pieces, while doing that same dance.

Clearly, there is some kind of lineage here, between the group of female back dancers, and what we have today — it looks the same, except with the celebrity at center stage having been effaced, removed from the equation:

This serves all kinds of useful ends for the entertainment companies that did it, of course: whereas if you have a break with an individual “idol” (or, in older Korean lingo, “gasu”) performer, you lose the act, when you brand yourself a girl-group, individuals can come and go but the franchise, like some strange hybrid symbiont, can and does live on. Performers are interchangeable, the concept and branding and properties are the real act — and any girl with the right look and legs (and, one hopes, a modicum of singing and dancing ability, though I suspect that’s negotiable) can be slotted into a given act. Seen through the eyes of the entertainment corporation, the human female ought to possess only the following qualities:

• good looks (of a specific, currently fashionable kind)
• a generic uniformity, and interchangeability, with all other females in the industry
• a modicum of “customizability” for playing prefab fantasy roles: 60s chiquita, cowgirl, space voyager, Bond babe, femme fatale, aegyo cutie, etc.
• as an added bonus (but not truly necessary): ability to actually sing and dance. But not too good — we don’t want to make the other girls in the group look bad.

Smart business. Makes for quite crappy art, though. Unless you think the aesthetics of the following will last through the ages:

Frankly, I barely feel comfortable calling what those groups do on stage “dancing” — when you see someone do it alone, it becomes quite apparent how much of it involves standing still, and how much of it involves standing in place and wiggling body parts, or making faces and hand gestures. It’s hard to be bowled over by that when you’ve seen performers who actually sing and actually dance at the same time, do so for an hour or more straight.

(Angelique Kidjo, who I saw back in 2000, in Montreal, comes to mind: amazing, powerful voice, but also a really graceful dancer who never stood still during the show… no, really.)

Anyway, seeing Seo Jio’s video, it really hit me: the evil genius of pop music business was to remove (musical) talent from the equation, making it all about looks. There isn’t a surgery to make a bad singer into a good one, so you’re stuck dealing with a limited pool of talent. There is surgery to make average-looking people into good-looking ones, by whatever standards prevail; thus, music businesses expanded their pool of available talent far more than exponentially when they cut the “singer” from the stage show, and passed those duties on to the back-dancers. (Sort of the way, in a lot of smaller Western pop acts, the singer took on the dancing duties when budgets and logistics made back-dancers impossible. )

Of course, there are other points of origin for the Korean girl-group phenomenon. One clear one is the chorus line, and somehow, the allure of seeing a bunch of pretty females dance synchronously seems to have really caught on in Korea. I’ve long suspected that chorus-line dancing has been somehow linked not to industrialization itself, but rather to the internalization and aestheticization of industrial-age aesthetics, something that comes long after industrialization. (And seems to have happened for North Americans and Western Europeans around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In Korea, it is more recent, perhaps, but then, industrialization is more recent too.

Maybe synchronous dance is not so recent, mind you: if one watches the Ganggang Sullae (painful video here), one finds unison and synchronized movement emphasized — but then, dance is one of those things where unison and synchronized movement is a pretty constant thing… but Ganggang Sullae comes to mind mainly because it is a strictly gendered performance: women-only, at least in my experience, and supposedly in the Joseon era as well.

The thing that differentiates other synchronous dances, and even other synchronous all-female dances, from phenomena like the Korean girl-group and the Western chorus line, is that the unison is no longer simply an inherent part of the dance; rather, it the synchrony becomes a central feature of the performance — the dance becomes, in some sense, specifically about the unison and synchrony, as a feature of sexualized beauty. Such performances tend to feature younger women (especially in Korean girl groups lately, where “women” must have “and girls” appended to it) who are both attractive and who look, relatively, like one another — a movement towards uniformity that is, in fact, accentuated by the uniform dress codes, but also by plastic surgery, careful hair styling, and careful use of camera angles (as well as photoshop, in promotional materials at least).

In other words, the synchrony is mapped not just onto movement, but also onto appearance and that portion of sexuality that is brought into play in media entertainment. In a sense, I suspect it reflects (or caters to) some unsettling, unconscious desire new to consumerist culture for everything in the world — food, clothing, weather, scenery, sex partners, everything — to be subjected to the same process of standardization that so much of the stuff of our lives already has been. We can see examples of this elsewhere: the baffling (to me) desire to see bands play live, while expecting them to perform their songs exactly as recorded in the studio is one example. (I was shocked to discover this expected of me — indeed, encouraged by fellow musicians — when I played in a rock band.) The interest in foods that are consistent in a number of ways — hence the success of, and trust placed in, fast foods by travelers in distant lands. The experience of the international hotel, the boring coonsistency of the megabrew lager beer. All of these seem to be expectations possible only in a post-cultural, or rather consumer-cultural society.

(Which is to say that, once you have internalized the aesthetics and norms of a consumerist society, practices and aesthetics may continue to be linked to pre-consumerist culture, but in an important sense, the consumerist cultural revolution renders significant portions of pre-consumerist cultures impossible at worst, or at best marginal; meanwhile, at least the global consumerist system we have now, what floods in to replace preconsumer culture is the monocultural.)

There’s other observations to make, like about what Brian in Jeolla-namdo astutely dubbed the “Korean ‘sexy-dance’” (or sexydance); he was right to note the universal presence in Korean sexydance of a slight awkwardness — something I’d noticed before, and which most non-Koreans, or even Koreans who’ve been exposed to actual “sexy dancing,” recognize readily. Of course, sexuality is subjective — there are different things that turn different people on, and the shape of which kinks are popular and which not so much depends a lot on culture. Brian was right in noting that unsexy sexydances were a trend (and they still are) but I would add that the unsexiness is actually there on purpose: it’s part of the ostensible allure, and absolutely connected to the fact that young women are being used more and more for these entertainment franchises; the youth, the awkwardness of the sexydance… there’s an unsettling nexus of stuff going on there. (Not that most men who consume this stuff will admit it.)

But those and other observations are more culture-specific, and I’m more interested, in the moment, in questions regarding the universals involved in the generation of consumer culture.

One thing I can say that is hopeful, is that this sort of change goes in waves, and that resistance, or diversification, sometimes arises only as a reaction to the shift — and only once the consumerization has effectively steamrolled the old-fashioned competition. In the 1970s, there was no such thing as craft beer in most of the industrialized world: now, there’s even craft beer in Korea, marginal as it may be. In the basement clubs of Hongdae district in Seoul, other modes of pop cultural aesthetics are being messed with.

The interesting margins are interesting because they are often of better quality: artisanal cheese and beer and soap are better than their industrial, simplified, decharacterized counterparts. In a sense, what I’m talking about is the eradication of the artistic and cultural equivalents of those — “artisanal dance” and “artisanal art” and “artisanal music” and “artisanal aesthetics” sound silly, but you know what I mean–  the aesthetics held by people in a culture where it is normal to homebrew beer or liquor, make your own cheese (or get  it from someone who made it at home), where singing and dancing are participatory (rather than a spectacle to be consumed passively). The singing and dancing is more fun in that context, the cheese and the liquor almost always taste much better, and if one example doesn’t, you can find another that does.

But while I perceive it as a thing of poverty — cultural, artistic, and aesthetic poverty so extreme I don’t have words for it –  the industrialized mainstream culture is interesting to me for different reasons — especially when I try to understand how it functions. I think what I’ve stumbled on is the a surprising fact: while we may have looked at pop music as being fully industrialized in the past, that was an error. The machinery of industry had been applied to distribution, but even with bands or solo acts that were very popular at their zenith, the performers themselves to some degree were still engaged in a kind of cottage industry. (This is less true for pop groups than a lot of rock groups, but it remains relatively true in terms of the laborers; they may have ended up as serfs sometimes, but the system of production hadn’t quite been so thoroughly industrialized as it had in other industries until the girl-group and boy-band model was created. (Which, by the way, is not a solely Korean crime; I remember, back in 1994, when the Spice Girls was formed, being astounded that some company had simply put out a call for auditions, as they wanted to “create” a band to compete with the popular group (like Backstreet Boys and Take That) for a chunk of the pop music market. As a musician myself, I was blown away that it was the company creating the group, rather than simply some executive or headhunter coming across a group that had already existed and signing them, the standard pop-music-success-narrative I’d seen up until that point.)

All of this is quite icky to me, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing when one is considering writing fiction about the subject, especially the kind of fiction I’m working my way towards. I’m reflecting on that a lot these days, as I ready myself for a marathon drafting spree during Chuseok. I think I have a novel idea I can probably put onto paper during that time… or, at least, get a lot of it written then. We’ll see.

And yes, this upcoming fiction project does involve the Korean entertainment industry… among other things. But I’ll say more once I’ve actually got some work done on it.

More positively, there’s always Patti Kim, doing something that makes me think of Ella Fitzgerald a little:

… and Go Boksu (Ko Boksoo?):

For some reason, not one of the foreign teachers I know (except one) was told about this, so when we got the text message on Friday — yeah, on Friday — we were all shocked. I’m sure it was on a calendar somewhere — in fact, I’m told it was — but as for actually communicating the change, well: communication is not a strong point here.

Anyway, I can’t complain too much: I was talking to another guy I know who is teaching at a university in Seoul, and who told me that in addition to classes, he has to attend two faculty meetings a week. (One in English, and one in Korean with English translation.) Every week. I fail to see how there could be enough business to necessitate weekly meetings within a department, let alone faculty-wide. (I suspect it’s just another kind of endurance test, especially since the meetings are first thing in the morning, ie. at 8:30 am.)

The funny thing is, even with meetings that often, he is in a position similar to mine in terms of being in the dark about things: I was telling him how I got the text message about the faculty meeting being on Friday morning — on Friday afternoon. (I’d thought it was happening on Monday.) He laughed, and said, “You should be used to last-minute everything by now, after so many years in Korea!” And then he told me a story of his own most recent, “Drop everything and come now,” notification from work, for a meeting everyone else obviously knew about beforehand.

Ah well. My schedule this semester looks okay, and the classes are not overwhelming so far. I’ll be busy this week, trying to get a story revised and out, as well as preparing for a couple of the classes. There are familiar faces in some classes, and a lot of new folks; the problems that have never been fixed still aren’t — and obviously never will be, because nobody seems motivated to get a faculty-wide movement going to fix those problems. But I know I can’t do anything about them except tell the students to be sensible and register wisely. (Stop taking classes out of order, stop turning COURSE 2 into COURSE 1 by not taking them in the correct sequence.)

Beyond that, my limited energy and time will be going to things I want and need to do. So there.

Student Rhiannon Brooksbank-Jones dreams of living and working in South Korea once she finishes university, even though she has never visited the country.

But while taking language lessons, the 19-year-old found that she couldn’t pronounce certain crucial sounds in the Korean alphabet.

Her dentist suggested it may be because she was born with a slightly shorter than average tongue, caused by having an unusually thick lingual frenulum – the flap of skin that joins the underside of the tongue to the floor of the mouth.

After discussing the matter with her parents and language tutor, Rhiannon decided to undergo an operation to correct the condition, despite the fact it has never caused her any problems in speaking English.

She underwent a lingual frenectomy, which involves making an incision in the flap of skin. As a result, Rhiannon’s tongue is now about 1cm longer, and she can say words that were impossible before.

Yeah, well, she says so. I’d like to hear her say 닭볶음밥  before taking her word for it, though.

There are a few things that struck me about this:

• First, the idea of someone’s tongue length being an impediment for learning a foreign language — when it did not impede their speech in their native tongue — is both pretty dubious as a first-cause explanation, and a myth that is extremely widespread in Korea. When I first read this, I assumed it was her Korean tutor (or a Korean professor) who put the idea into her head, and I can’t help but wonder whether her dentist (who suggested it) might be Korean — or whether maybe she picked up the idea from a Korean and suggested it herself to the dentist.While some people do have speech impediments resolvable with a lingual frenectomy, I don’t think Korean speech requires a particularly lengthier tongue than English… and, indeed, neither do plenty of Koreans believe this: quite the opposite, in fact! It was (and maybe still is, I don’t know) common mythology here that most Koreans have a naturally shorter tongue which inhibits English pronunciation; this led to a whole mini-industry of doctors hacking up kids’ tongues which, at least a decade ago, was doing a brisk business. A great mini-dramatization of it — at least, I think it’s a dramatization — is included in the excellent National Human Rights Commission-funded short film anthology If You Were Me. (The first one.)In any case: I imagine there are at least a number of Koreans who have “short tongues” and they all seem to speak their mother tongue fine, just as Ms. Brooksbank-Jones speaks hers fine.

  However, it is quite ironically funny that she got a surgery for the same reasons so many Korean kids had them forced upon them: because it was supposed to help her cross the pronunciation divide between English and Korean.

• It doesn’t sound quite creditable that, suddenly, after a surgery, she’d be able to pronounce things she couldn’t pronounce before.Acquiring a foreign language is tough for as few reasons. One of the most frustrating is pronunciation, and that is because it’s basically something that gets wired in when your a baby — during the babbling you do when you’re alone, after a day of hearing human beings speak.Obviously, your babbling — which is a kind of practicing of the sounds you’ve heard —  doesn’t usually include sounds or patterns you haven’t heard that day, and you lose your aural sensitivity to sound patterns you haven’t heard as well. (This is, evolutionarily speaking, why adults talk to kids so much, even when the kids are babies and cannot understand or respond; we’re building up the bricks of language competency phoneme by phoneme, at that stage.) So just as plenty of my students struggle to differentiate L from R, or J from Z, plenty of Westerners struggle trying to hear the difference between 방 and 빵, or 장 and 짱. (And pronouncing those right is not something that seems to be related to tongue length, if you ask me.)For the record, I still sometimes get those consonants wrong occasionally, after almost ten years. I don’t practice much, but I use them often enough. And the truth is, lots of Koreans aren’t all dainty and careful about it — just as some of us Anglos speak with a drawl or mush our vowels, some Koreans mix around, mumble through liaisons that are important for comprehension (is this kid asking his mom for something delicious, or a something to drink?), and sometimes blur between a single and double-consonant. Hell, a lot of people seem to mumble all the time, and they all seem to understand one another. If they can make themselves understood while barely opening their mouths…
• Finally, um:
  

  Image Source here.

  Maybe this girl has actually studied enough about Korea to being doing this other than naively. Sure, she sounds overly-credulous about what her church friends have told her:

  ‘In Korea they like good students, and I think having my tongue lengthened will be a real help with the course, especially during my year in Seoul.

  ‘I’d love to live and work in Korea one day and being able to speak perfectly will really benefit me.

  ‘Native English speakers can earn quite a lot of money in Korea, so that’s another option.’

  … but I mean, tell me that image doesn’t just smack of marketing to Korean guys?

  While I made an off-the-cuff prognostication about her future that I don’t think is necessarily realistic (or fit to write here) Miss Jiwaku got it right off the bat:
  “She’s gonna be a celebrity here, on TV. Like, ‘I love Korea so much, I got my tongue surgery so I could speak Korean!’; and they’ll have Dokdo behind her, and she’ll always be in a miniskirt.”

  I think she’s right: the makers of Misuda are drooling and rubbing their hands together — think Mr. Burns on the Simpsons. The only ting this girl could have done to ensure that more would have been to talk about Dokdo, or to proclaim, ” I love Korea, and want to marry a Korean man!”

  Hell, maybe if the biracial pop group thing I mentioned last week works out, they’ll even get the gumption to put together a new girl group called something like 백마 or 백년 ¹ or something?

Not to rain on her parade. It’s fine to be into a foreign language and culture. Maybe she is one of those rare souls who did need it and somehow nobody noticed when she was pronouncing English funny all these years. Maybe she’s being smart and calculated all of this and is fast-tracking her way to white-celebrity-in-Korea status. White girls are nonthreatening, after all, unlike white males, and getting more and more media attention. And she has been going to Korean church, watching Korean TV, and so on… she must know something about some of this stuff, at least.

But as for the tongue surgery, I’m quite dubious. I’d love to hear what a linguist or, better yet, a speech therapist with experience with Korean and Anglo patients would have to say about it. I expect dubiousness from any such specialist too.

Ah well: I wonder what will happen when this young lady gets to Korea. Hmm.

^{1. 백마 means “white horse” — an old Korean euphemism for having sex with a white woman, as far as I understand it, is to “ride the white horse”; meanwhile, 백년 is a pun on two homophones: “100 years” or “white b*tches”. I rather doubt either name would really be used, though the attitudes of producers, or of audiences, might well match the names I’ve suggested… in all of their unsettling dimensions.}

This, she assures me, was not the case a decade ago, when water park ads featured… you know, kids playing and families enjoying themselves together, and stuff. Sort of the way we would advertise water parks in North America:

A long time ago, I commented on how girl groups in Korea were not surprising — nor their sexualization, or the targeting of this overstated-but-unacknowledged targeting to middle-aged men. (For why I argued that, see here.) James Turnbull has been writing about the issue at some length, and it is of him that I thought immediately when Miss Jiwaku told me about Chocolat, a new girlgroup in Korea that has started promoting itself.

It seems these days that girl groups need to have some kind of selling point to be distinguished from one another, since, following the Korean business tradition, management groups have flooded the market with essentially indistinguishable products. (Even more indistinguishable given all the plastic surgery and those surgeries are making people look more and more similar here.)

Anyway, the selling point of Chocolat (쇼콜라) is… they have biracial members.

Seriously. But come on, given the status of race in Korea, is this surprising?

Mixed-race status is something that has been cropping up in Korean media, of course. In many advertisements, one sees mixed-race people — the men are almost always intended to look classy, the women usually to look sexy. It goes without saying, of course, that the mixed-race people used in advertisements are always half-Korean and half-white.

That is, of course, now. I remember when I happened to be watching the film “How to Keep My Love” (a cheesy Korean romantic comedy) on TV and I commented, “Hey, that woman… the tall one. She’s biracial, isn’t she?” I got an incredulous look, and the question, “How did you know that?” But it was obvious to me, and I was amused by the fact she actually had to “come out of the closet” (tearfully, in fact) in order for it to become common knowledge. In that film, it seemed quite obvious to me. I’m sure you can pick her out of this clip:

Things have come a long way, and I get the sense that being biracial —  at least, when it’s the “right” pair of races — Korean and white being optimal — is something people don’t admit tearfully anymore.

I have been expecting a musical act to start exploiting the aura of exoticism, permissibility, and sexuality that clusters around this particular region of race in Korea. Perhaps it took a long time because, you know, differing cultural attitudes towards kids and towards contracts (I don’t know any Westerners with kids whom I can imagine letting their kids sign contracts of the kind common in Korean entertainment); or maybe, because while sexualizing children worked here, and sexualizing mixed-race women (and fetishizing mixed-race people generally) worked here, people weren’t sure whether sexualizing mixed-race teenagers would fly.

But they’ve gone ahead and tried it, and make no mistake, they’re pushing the mixed-race angle really hard:

Indeed, if you read the comments for this video, you’ll notice what is plain to see if you watch it… or even a part of it. There are two girls in the group who are non-mixed-race Koreans, and they get very little focus at all. Including the Korean girl who is, nominally, the leader. All the closeup shots of faces are on the girls who are mixed-race, and of course, the one who gets the most facetime is apparently a 15 year old.

For those who are already all offended by my claim that they’re pandering with their mixed-race theme, look at the “intro video” for the band, released a while before their first song:

The video is in English (are they targeting the American market, or is this obviously American teenager just that bad at Korean?), and the members introduced first are all the mixed-race kids. Not only that, but obviously nobody even thought to prep the native Korean kids for the interviews, and surely someone knew that they were not going to be able to just squirt out an introduction in a foreign language all of a sudden… and they obviously didn’t do a second take.

Whereas the media hypersexualization of children is pretty much accepted — if not admitted — in Korean society, and the media hypersexualization of white women is all but de rigeur now, I think the idea that the media sexualization of biracially white/Korean children might not turn out to be as profitable an enterprise in Korea.¹

The band seems to be getting a pretty negative reception online, and it’s not hard to see why: the particular anxieties regarding race in Korea that the group’s promoters are trying to exploit — ambiguities of race, and the permissible exoticism of the non-Korean female — take on a life of their own when there is not a Korean male in the picture to “own” her (and, likewise, to “pwn” her).

Put that mixed race woman in a group of Korean women, without a man in the mix, and I think you might find what I’ve seen in reality: she gets ostracized, because she is the one who’s enviably different. And then, if you take a few of them and put them together, make them dominate a group, and let media out where they could remotely be understood (or misunderstood, or willfully misunderstood even) as looking down on Korean girls, and…

Well, I don’t know what will happen. But I expect a lot of negative press, a lot of anti-fans. Korean girls are not going to like this very much. What remains to be seen is whether the appeal to middle-aged men is going to be enough to outweigh that narrowing of audience.

Indeed, that question is a very interesting one — as it may affect the shape of Kpop to come, and while Kpop is far from the most interesting aspect of Korea to me, I can see how it could enmesh with other, much more interesting and important issues in Korean society.

Hmm…

^{1. And by the way, in case it’s unclear why I’m using the word “hypersexualization” here, I’m not opposed to media that avoids the self-righteous desexualization of teenagers. Teens are sexual beings, a fact that far too many narratives devised by adults ignore. Representing teens as actually sexual isn’t bad, as I argued here — though bear in mind, being sexual being hypersexualized for the audience are two different things: I’m cool with the former, I’m not cool with the latter. The point about hypersexualization is that it involves both exaggerated stylization and adultization, and it is carried out primarily for the “benefit” not of teens (who could be engaged by narratives honestly depicting the sexual identity of teens) but rather of particularly older audience members who are consuming the media primarily for that sexualization. See my post on the debate over the Wonder Girls group a few years ago for a more detailed explanation of this point.}

Apparently, a guy steps in and saves a woman from some thugs, only to discover that she is in fact a lovely little sex-hungry alien. She wants to rob him of his virginity, and for some strange reason, he refuses… so she tortures him.

No matter how cheaply done, no matter how confusing, this is definitely bound to be better than 7광구 (link is to my review)… but once I see it, I’ll expand this post.

For now, I can say I am looking forward to it, silly as it will probably be. (After all, I’m all for silly if it’s actually entertaining. And if they throw in smart, hey, I’m all for it — silly, smart, and funny would be great. But you know, I’ll take two out of three over the over-seriousness, boredom, and stupidity of 7광구, for sure!)

A lot of this is not just applicable to depicting people with physical disabilities, but also to depicting people of any group about which one does not know intimately, or which experiences the world in a way different from oneself (through the lens of another gender or sexual orientation, a different race or religion or culture or philosophy, and so on):

• Expect to be blindsided by the holes in your own knowledge and understanding. Even when you do a lot of research, you’re going to get some things wrong, because your preconceptions will fool you: there are the things you know, the things you don’t know, the things you think you know but have wrong, and the things you don’t realize that you don’t know… and telling these apart is simply really, really hard. you can wait to be blindsided by an editor who knows more than you, or a reader who points out how badly you botched it, should the work see print; or you could go ahead and pre-empt that by getting your narrative vetted. Show it to someone who will know and be honest with you about it. And when they tell you, listen; be open-minded. Be flexible. Realize that some things you think you know are in fact wrong. And even when you’re depicting someone who is different in some imaginary way, it might be useful to ask people whose experiences might trip up questions you might not think to ask.
• Remember, people of every group are human. They’re complex, and imperfect, and especially in the aggregate, some of them are bound to be jerks. Simplifying them, forcing them to abide by a ridiculous standard of behaviour, in order to secure sympathy is wrongheaded and amounts to another form of dehumanization; it will take away from the story’s believability, and/or dilute sympathy felt for the character. Don’t slot people into the role of mere victims or exaggerated saints, or especially pure victim-saints.
• Think carefully about how your character’s condition will shape the way the story works. A film is a very hard medium for telling the story of a blind person. (Not impossible, but difficult. I suspect Derek Jarman’s Blue is a more successful project in some ways than Blind, because it forces the viewer to be blind; but it is also less successful, because it alienates the viewer in ways that Blind doesn’t.) A feral child would make a terrible narrator. A character who cannot hear will present specific challenges for a storyteller. These limitations can be great, but you have to take them seriously.
• Consider the fact that, however strange, difficult, painful, or unimaginable the state of your character might appear to you, it is his or her normal reality. He or she does not live life implicitly comparing his or her limitations to your much less painful, difficult, or limited experience: while having no hands is hard for you to imagine, for your character, it is — to whatever degree he or she is used to it — just normal, everyday reality. Sensitivity exercises (like being blindfolded for a day) can be misleading: a real blind person is far less ungainly in his or her home than you are when blindfolded, because he or she is used to it… mind, this is true as long as the furniture doesn’t get moved around in his or her absence. Remember, you also have shortcomings that others might find stunning or shocking — an inability to swim, relative innumeracy, partial visual impairment in one eye, a fear of heights, and so on. (Three of these four are examples from my own personal experience, but I wouldn’t say I “suffer” from any of them.) For you, that’s just normal. For your character, his or her condition is normal too. Grok it…

  Oh, and remember that this condition is probably also part of the lives of millions of people out there. Or dozens. Or hundreds. Or at least some. Don’t do them the disservice of propagating myths about their condition; grok it.

• Ask yourself what the victory condition for the narrative is, and ask yourself whether you’re including the character’s condition for a good reason. Why are you telling this particular story? How would you know if the story is successful? People who are marginalized aren’t exploited only by bad employers or unsympathetic fellow citizens: they can also be exploited by storytellers who choose to include them in stories simply as a gimmick. (I’m not saying this was necessarily what happened in Blind, though I do think the guide dog part of the story involved a lot of manipulative gimmickry and reinforced popular ignorance/misconceptions about guide dogs.) Remember that there are real people out there with the handicap or other marginalized status you’re writing about, or something analogous to the imaginary condition or state you’re discussing, and for them the condition or state is more than just a flashy gimmick: it’s their daily reality. You don’t need to become a crusader for them, or make your fiction didactic — indeed, doing so might well make your work less effective or even detrimental to their cause — but this reality deserves some respect, awareness, and consideration.

While I’d bet nothing here is a shocking revelation, I think all of these points are worth reminding yourself about when you’re setting out to write a story about someone with a disability.

There’s the little fact that the villain is a doctor… which in itself is interesting, in that it does seem a trend more in Korean film than in other national cinemas I’ve looked at (like, say, Indonesian cinema or French or Canadian or Bollywood… or of course Hollywood). One finds a rather surprising number of films in which the bad guy, the monster, the psychopath, is a some kind of professional, especially a doctor, lawyer, or very successful buusinessperson.

Having heard stories from behind the scenes at a couple of hospitals and medical schools, I know that some doctors really are, very likely, psychopaths, or jerks at the very least. (Every doctor I’ve known well has mentioned an intern nicknamed “Malig” (for “malignancy”), for example.)

But that is true of any society, and seems unlikely as a reason for the pattern. Rather, I think, the cinematic representation reflects generalized resentment of people in the professional class. (The wine-swilling scumbag businessman villain in the unfortunate 2010 thriller remake of Kim Ki-Young’s The Housemaid comes to mind. Then there’s the rather off-putting lawyer husband in The Good Lawyer’s Wife who, if he is not a villain, is probably that film’s closest thing to it. Were I to sit around thinking about it, I’m sure many more examples would come to mind.)

Well, expressions of resentment for the elite is nothing new, but there was something that turned me off the particular choice of villain in Blind — and that is, he is a gynecologist — and the one scene in which we actually see him working, he seems to be performing an abortion. Now, psychologically it may be that one could see one’s way to imagining a certain kind of man, doing that job, might develop an unhealthy attitude towards women. (Assuming he’s screwed up to begin with, of course.)

But what struck me is — his being a gynecologist doesn’t seem to play directly into the narrative. He could, just as easily, have been an opthamologist, though it might have been less chilling. (It would have been more high-stakes, though, assuming he knew more about optics, vision, and blindness.) The thing that struck me, though, is that I’ve never seen a doctor villain in a Korean film who specialized in the most hateful-of-women branch of medicine popullarly practiced here today. No need to hint, I’ll show you what I mean:

IMG_2021

Posters like this are all over the place in Seoul: it’s difficult to go out without seeing one. And at least some of the women who go out and see a barrage of it aren’t exactly oblivious to the fact it represents a kind of constant onslaught on their self-respect, their image of themselves. It’s not just like the doctored pictures of women on the covers of magazines — rather, the message is that you are, in your natural appearance, necessarily insufficient and that plastic surgery is the solution to the apparent problem.

A large proportion of my students are women, and a considerable number of them — far more than their male counterparts — consider this situation seriously, think about it, and try to write about or talk about it in classroom discussions, essays, speeches for contests, and so on. One story I’ve heard a couple of times is of a female student going to a plastic surgery clinic and inquiring about something common and routine like eyelid surgery. What the reported about the experience was this: the doctors said things like, “Yes, we can do that, but you know, for your face, we  need to do some work on your nose. Also, to let your beauty shine through, we would need to do something about your jawline.” That is, suggesting other forms of plastic surgery that these women didn’t seem to feel they needed.

Well, yes, that’s what happens when you make plastic surgery into a high-paying business, of course.

But it still kills me that, while I’ve seen doctors of other specialties depicted as corrupt, bad, twisted, or mad — gynecologist, a psychiatrist, and others — I’ve never seen a plastic surgeon presented as a predatory monster harming women. And yeah, that annoys me. If there’s any medical specialty that is more profoundly anti-female than that, I don’t know of it. And while I’m not about to buy the line that gynecologists perform (illegal, in Korea) abortions out of the goodness of their hearts, or as secret allies of women’s liberation — I know too much from accounts  by other female students, including one who was a nurse/receptionist in a gynecological clinic where a lot of abortions apparently got performed a decade or so ago — I do think there’s a hatred of women implicit in the the practices of a lot of plastic surgeons here. While that has come  forth in certain films, I think, I’ve never seen a plastic surgeon presented as a woman-hating psychopath; this strikes me as profoundly ironic.

By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that Korean villains are always upper-class. I think many are, as part of that whole underdog aesthetic that is popular here — the long-suffering good guy finally gets a break, saves the world, or whatever. There are plenty enough thugs and uneducated bad-guys in Korean movies, I’d think. But when they aren’t illiterate thugs, Korean villains have a surprising tendency to be people of an elite class, whether military, economic, or professional. And that is worth commenting on, I think.

Am I missing something? Is this pattern common in Western thrillers to? I tripped on it, so I assumed it wasn’t but maybe I’m not seeing something that is bluntly obvious in Western films. 

For those curious about what I mean about knowing about blind people being a detriment to the film, I suppose a little background is necessary.

I worked with blind people, and visually impaired people, back in Montreal. We were working for a company that designed tutorials for blind people on how to use Windows software. I even dated a visually-impaired woman for a while, after she left the company. One of my co-workers — the only one who was completely blind — had a seeing eye dog; he was also somewhat of a pervert, and came on to at least one co-worker. (“It’s even sexier if we screw on the boss’s desk!” he apparently said, during one unwelcome advance on a co-worker. Oh, and if I remember right, he was married, too… to a sighted woman who at least seemed very supportive.)

I mention this not to out this former co-worker of mine as an adulterous, sexually-harassing jerk: I doubt anyone reading this blog knows him, and if they do, well, it’s not such a surprise, is it? No, I mention this to point out that blind people are like anyone else: they’re not all saintly and sad and long-suffering. They’re not “poor souls” in the sense that many sighted people imagine. Yes, doing certain things is harder for them, like, say, jaywalking on a busy street, or playing baseball — though, have I told you the story of the blind guy who beat me in a game of pool? (Yes, he had help, but how else is a blind person supposed to play pool?) Some blind people are nice and decent, and some are really assholes — just like anyone else. Some blind people become bitter, or even outright assholes, because of the difficulties they face, especially when they get no support from their family, or their society, of course; but most of the visually impaired people I’ve encountered — either through my former work, or through the woman I dated, or through another ex who worked with several Special Needs organizations in Saskatoon — have been about as likely to be average as anyone else.

In the film, though, the blind protagonist is made to suffer onscreen. Although she  has been blind for three years, she seems not to have learned how to cook for herself, and much is made of her having what we might call a “bad blindness day.” I’m adapting that from the expression “bad Korea day,” an experience many expats report — some days, thing after thing specific to Korea just disturbs, aggravates, and frustrates you, all in a series. Well, the metaphor is probably apt: most  of the people I knew who were outright blind had been so for a long, long time, and were well-adjusted. For them it was normal, while for the protagonist, she’s more of a recent emigrant to the country of the blind. She’s only been blind for three years… but you’d think she would have learned not to turn up the gas on the stove to the maximum temperature when frying up her dinner.

While it’s believable that she would have “bad blindness days,” what I’m objecting to her is the extreme sentimentalization of her condition. We’re supposed to feel sorry for her. This is exactly the kind of story a sighted person would tell about a blind character, and it’s based on the misperception that people who are blinded become irrevocably miserable — a myth debunked in scientific studies, such as those mentioned in the wonderful book Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Sure, people who were blinded as adults may take longer to adjust, and are perhaps more likely very frustrated at how poorly supported people with their condition are here, just as white people arriving in Korea (and suddenly subject to all the dumbass, racist garbage their non-white friends back home were already dealing with regularly, but which they likely barely noticed most of the time) often experience difficulties in dealing with how things creep into certain aspects of daily life. Being suddenly blind in a society as non-supportive of blind people as Korea is, that would be a revelation, and suddenly they would “see” (metaphorically) that lack of support much more clearly. (As we in the audience “see” the traffic light in one scene, lacking an audio signal, as radically non-supportive of the blind and visually impaired.)

But it’s important to recall that blind people — even those blinded as adults — don’t exist in a perpetually pitiful, sad, sobby state. They pick up their lives and move on. They date, and some marry, and some even cheat on their spouses. They have kids, or hobbies, or both. They have jobs, quit jobs, get new jobs. They get drunk, they go to concerts, they listen to music at home. Some of them “watch” TV, and hold birthday parties with dozens of people present, and some of them write books or play musical instruments. They are people, and their blindness often isn’t their defining characteristic. (When I think of the visually-impaired woman I dated, I don’t think of her visual impairment first — I think of her sassy attitude, and of her seriousness about education — she had learned to read using a magnifying glass as a teenager, if I remember right, and as soon as she could she began to read voraciously, if slowly, for years on end. Oh, and her unapologetically bad taste in music — ugh, Paula Abdul! Also, her tirelessness and patience in explaining to people that most blind people aren’t “blind” but visually impaired, and so on — more about that below.)

My point is this: most of the visually impaired people I’ve known would have been annoyed or insulted if I’d felt sorry for them, or at the very least would not have seen a point in feeling sorry for them: blindness, or visual impairment, was the normal state for them, and while the few I asked said they would definitely take any treatment that would give them sight, a few (mostly those who’d always been blind) said they were happy the way they were, and most generally seemed to be quite well-adjusted to their condition.

Which brings me to the second issue that bothered me. The way Blind is shot, I kept having to remind myself that the protagonist — a blind former police office — wasn’t just visually impaired. There are a few shots that are supposed to simulate what she perceives — including details she is filling in perceptively. We see people moving toward her, whom she is perceiving either through hearing, or using a rudimentary perception enhancement tool. More details are given than she would herself perceive, since it’s a film and we need to know who’s doing what in those scenes, but it’s confusing if you know about visual impairment.

The reason it’s confusing is that one gets the impression that those shots, being both over-details and  POV shots from the protagonist’s point of view, represent the vision of someone with severely impaired vision, rather than someone who is fully blind. According to Wikipedia:

The WHO estimates that in 2002 there were 161 million visually impaired people in the world (about 2.6% of the total population). Of this number 124 million (about 2%) had low vision and 37 million (about 0.6%) were blind.

In other words, most people who have some kind of visual impairment aren’t 100% blind: that’s only, approximately, 20% of all people. If you know this, those trick shots where we “see through her [blind] eyes” end up being somewhat confusing. And while someone might argue that there’s a little the filmmaker could do, I think there are a couple of responses: one could be to ask yourself why the protagonist needs to be completely blind, as opposed to visually impaired. (Of course, unrealistic numbers of Koreans in films and TV also lack epicanthic folds; we are used to everyone on the screen being a contrived long shot. Still…)

Another question is to ask yourself whether those shots needed to be quite so detailed as they were. (I like to imagine that, given the quality of audio systems in theaters, we could have been immersed in the protagonist’s consciousness, the screen dark and the audio system getting a powerful workout, for short spans of time — it would have been both more disorienting for us, and more powerful —  but of course you would probably have to see the film in a  THX-equipped theater… and besides, this factlet won’t distract most people, who assume anyone with a visual impairment is blind, period. (And thus won’t be jolted out of the story when they suddenly see what looks like it could be POV shots from a visually impaired person.)

Then there’s the seeing eye dog. When I was new on staff at that tutorial place I mentioned, I saw my co-worker with a seeing eye dog, and I quickly, squatted down to talk to the dog and pet it. I was told, “Don’t! Not when he’s working… it’s something you aren’t supposed to do with seeing eye dogs.” There are a few scenes where the protagonist’s seeing eye dog engages in cutesy play when he is working, and it jarred me. Not because people wouldn’t do it, but because when they do, they’re not asked not to do so, and told why. Of course, there’s a reason that the dog’s cuteness is played up — and more than just the abiding desire for cuteness in all things so common in Korean media — but nonetheless, it’s a jarring distraction… if you know anything about guide dogs.

Finally, the protagonist’s self-control in a certain scene towards the end is difficult to stomach. If someone put you through hell, and tortured you, and was a known murderer and psychopath, would you conk him on the head and hope he’d stay down, or, with a heavy object in hand, would you bash out his brains so as to be sure he would stay down? I’m not advocating murder, but killing (or seriously injuring) someone who has been stalking and trying to kill you for days on end is just bloody common sense, and not the sort of thing a sensible audience gets bothered about — especially if not doing so leaves you in further danger. However, I think this silliness is tied to a need to see the blind protagonist in a kind of hagiographic mode.

This is something we see a lot in the Korean media: when you’re supposed to feel sympathetic for a character who is unusual in some way — a way that is not conventionally accepted or supported or included by Korean society — the character is usually cast into a dual role of victim and saint.

First, the character must suffer before one’s eyes, in a victim-role that is pathetic beyond the point of understanding, so that the audience feels sorry for them. Characters put up with awful treatment without a word of protest; they accept beatings, beratings, mockery, or injustice without complaint, and usually retreat to their homes to weep in silent sorrow. This is a pattern not just common in fictive depictions of the physically handicapped, but also of other marginal groups in Korea, for example in TV documentaries: one cannot watch a program involving a marginalized person without seeing them either in extremely poor circumstances, with sad music in the background, or even weeping and crying. (This is why the short film collection If You Were Me, Vol. 1 was so radical: the guy in the wheelchair does deal with some difficult circumstances, but he also, to the degree possible, seizes control of his life and fights for his rights… or so I remember it.)

(The standard, by the way, is not solely Korean: I’ve seen similar patterns in fictionalized accounts of the Holocaust or of the African American experience of slavery, where the Jews or African-Americans were all pure-hearted, sweet and kind victims; as if rudeness, bigotry, exploitation, sexism, theft, and violence were impossible among groups who were oppressed, unseen in the ghettos and camps, unknown in the slave quarters. As if, when experiencing the worst horrors of history, those horrors victims all splintered in exactly the same way, towards the gentle, the kind, the forgiving, and the pathetic — and none became full of hate, rage, cruelty, and vengefulness? When bad things happen to good people, sometimes good people stop being good… but bad things also happen to bad, or so-so people. People aren’t automatically good just because they’re victims. Obviously, since oppressors have justified their brutality towards these very groups on the basis of ridiculous claims about their morality, their behaviour, or subhumanity, one wants to tread carefully — but to rip out the essential complexity of people in a bid for sympathy is misguided: what you elicit is fake sympathy, as well as a distorted morality: surely, genocides and enslavements are wrong because genocides and enslavements are wrong, not because of the cloyiong goodness and purity of the murdered or enslaved!)

Second — and this is a stage we usually don’t see in TV documentaries, but do see in films — when these neglected minorities are pushed beyond the limits, they refrain from fighting back effectively. Oh, they will lash out. They may fight to defend themselves from grievous bodily harm, or explode at someone whose maltreatment of them is so extreme that no audience would believe or sympathize with passivity from the chsaracter at that point. But the never, ever kill someone; they never, ever lose their self-control, they never act the way most people would — bashing out the brains of the person who is trying to kill them with a brick or a rock or a baseball bat, for example. At the very least active, they lash out briefly, until their attacker retreats; at the most, they will knock out the attacker and save themselves temporarily.

The pattern, for minorities, is both offensive and disempowering. It brings to mind the dichotomy of “good foreigner” and “bad foreigner”, which is what Koreans really mean when they talk about “qualified” and  ”unqualified” English teachers. If you look at the image of a good foreigner, what you tend to see is that he (for it is the male ones that attract all the concern) is either asexual, or sexual only within his own race; he never responds to maltreatment by Koreans in kind — he does not curse when cursed at, he does not defend himself when attacked, he does not threaten when threatened. He is emasculated, passive, and obedient to Korean male, whether authority figures or just random men telling him what to do. And he does it all smiling his goofy Robert Halley smile. Or, if he fails to attain this standard, he is a dangerous, bad, rude, gangsterish, nasty type who doesn’t deserve to be in Korea — an unqualified foreigner. Dating a Korean woman is enough to make him unqualified. Having worked retail back home can make him unqualified. Not politely regurgitating how wonderful Korea is, or joining in on histrionics about the evil of Japan and their encroachments on Dokdo, can get him labeled a bad guy. even taking offense at treatment that no Korean would accept can get him labeled “bad.” In short, being a non-Korean man, as opposed to a non-Korean muppet, is enough to get him labeled bad.

It’s a standard I’ve seen applied to migrant workers (as in the important but problematic film Bangga! Bangga!), North Korean refugees (for example, in the important but problematic film Musan Ilgi), and the handicapped (most dramatically, in the — nevertheless wonderful and groundbreaking tragedy — Oasis, though the film gets a pass in my books because it explores the complexity of the characters’ inner world, and also was made a long time ago. It’s a striking pattern: in Korean films, one nearly never sees a non-Korean (in face, a non-Korean male) who is allowed by narrative logic to get violently angry, or use violence in self-defense. While romantic male leads in Korean narratives can do all kinds of problematic things and still be aesthetically coherent as a romantic male lead, the ethical expectations for everyone else — women of any race or class, poor Korean men, non-Koreans, handicapped people, North Koreans, and children — are far more strict.

I think this is a pattern also present to some degree in Blind — hence the cop-out in the climactic scene and the cloying and, to me, unrealistic epilogue tacked onto the film…  although I must explain my position about this carefully.

I don’t mean to castigate the people involved in Blind. Problems or not, it’s good to see the physically challenged out in the open for once; Miss Jiwaku was telling me about an article she read recently, in which a British mouth painter (both without hands, and with tiny feet) visited Korea and commented along the lines of, “It’s a very nice country, I like Korea very much, but where are all the handicapped people?” The response Miss Jiwaku described her getting was an awkward silence. Meanwhile — and I think this was the same article (I’ll add a link or links when I can) — the author reported, during a trip to some European country, seeing a bunch of physically handicapped people around town — relaxing in the park, going along the streets in their wheelchairs, and so on, a Korean rushed into a shop and inquired whether a violent demonstration by the handicapped was afoot, to which the shop owner made a face and said, “What do you do on nice, sunny days? You go outside. That’s what they’re doing!”

The latter anecdote is relevant for two reasons: one, the physically challenged in Korea are often hidden away, and it is unusual to see them in public as a general rule. (I’d say that in the past year, I’ve seen maybe three or four groups of deaf people conversing in sign language, one visually impaired person with a white cane, and a couple of people in wheelchairs, and I live on the outskirts of the biggest city in the country.) But the anecdote is also telling because, when there are large numbers of physically challenged people in public here, it is often in order to attend a demonstration. One thing people tell me, often, is that the handicapped in Korea fight vigorously, fight very hard, for their rights, for better support, for respect. That this has not been achieved cannot be blamed on them, everyone agrees.

I can’t help but wonder if their families fight; I wonder whether fighting is understood to mean taking your handicapped relative to the park, to a restaurant, for a walk in the evening, or whatever. I wonder how many people push their political representatives to provide better support and help for these people to be integrated into society? (Then again, roughly half the population of Korea is women, and you’d think getting female-specific health care costs by national insurance in to the degree male-specific health care is would be easy… yet it hasn’t happened, as anyone who’s visited the gynecologist for an HPV vaccine or pap smear can tell you.) I don’t know. But I do know that depicting such people as perpetual victims might give people something to feel vicariously sad and guilty for a while… and doesn’t force people to confront their own complicity in the marginalization and tangible oppression of these people.

But you know, inertia is inertia, and that’s part of why I’m reticent to criticize this film too much. Korea has quite a distance to go in its acceptance of the physically challenged and in the integration of them into public life, the recognition of them as human beings with the full rights to dignity, experience, and happiness. (And Canada, the USA, and the rest of the Western world, while having made some inroads, is far from perfect too.) In that light, Blind isn’t just a fairly taut and thoughtful thriller — through the protagonist’s unseeing eyes, we are made to “see” how unfair it is how blind people are either dismissed or go unsupported in Korean society; we see how very capable they can be (for the blind protagonist is a key witness to a murder, and provides a number of crucial clues from her “ear-witness” and tactile/olfactory account).

The film does a lot of things well, and is certainly a step in the right direction. It’s just, if you know more than the average person about visually impaired people, the things it got slightly wrong will stick out to you like a sore thumb.

I think there are a few very simple things that production companies in Korea need to realize, if they want to start putting out films as successful as The Host on a more regular basis. I figured I’d put them all in one place, and if someone wants to translate them and post them around, all I ask is that a link

• SF is of the Fans, By Fans, For Fans: Don’t fund genre film projects with people who neither understand nor love those genres at the helm of the project. Seriously: ask the person pitching the project about his or her love of genre films, ask what he or she thinks of major SF authors (Korean, American, Japanese, etc.). If the person doesn’t seem to know SF, doesn’t seem to love it, then just say no. People who don’t love jazz will never make good jazz albums. People who don’t eat kimchi will never, ever make great kimchi. It’s the same with genre: someone who doesn’t love or respect SF, or horror, or fantasy, or rom-coms, will not make a good one. Someone who does the genre will have standards, and passion, and a sense of what SF people like and love, and how to achieve all of that, and will go that extra mile to make sure it turns out as wonderfully as it can… by the standards of people who love those genres… and they are the core of your #@*!$ audience. They would evangelize Korean SF to their friends, except you’ve given them barely anything to share…
• Stop Dithering About Marketing: You need to quit turning movies into failures by mis-marketing them. Market SF as SF. If it’s not actually comedy, don’t market it as comedy. (Black comedy plays well to SF lovers, SF plays less well to straight comedy fans.) You need to make posters that actually sort of give a sense of what the film is about, the mood and style of the film, and so on. This is elementary. If you make an erotic film and put a kids’-movie poster up in cinemas, and the film is rated 19+, you are going to lose shit-tons of money. This is elementary. It’s true of SF, too. So market SF as SF, not as kiddie fare, or comedy, or horror, or whatever else you think will sell. Sell the movies to your audience. Make a good SF film, and the whole Korean internet will hear about it on opening night, and the SF fans especially will book tickets. Several of the Korean SF fans I know saw Avatar at least once, if not two or three times, in the audience… even those who knew the plot was stupid. That’s what I call hunger… and an audience waiting to be served.
• Expand Your Audience Intelligently: Yes, it is possible to write romantic SF films. (Go watch Blade Runner again. Or even the recent Star Trek reboot film.) If you want to do SF comedy, think about how time travel can be funny. Back to the Future compares very favorably to, oh, Heaven’s Soldiers — mainly because of the humanity of the characters in Back to the Future, the awkwardness of the situations they’re propelled into by the SFnal idea of time travel, and the relatability of the characters’ responses to those situations shines where the nationalist claptrap of Heaven’s Soldiers falls flat. If you want to make horror SF, it’s possible; detective/crime/thriller SF? Sure! Military SF, erotic SF, comedic SF… these are all possible, and can help win more fans for the genre, or at least works within the genre. While it’s not exactly my kind of film, Cyborg She (by Kwak Jae-yong) does exactly that: it’s an SF chick-flick, and if it’d been shot in Korean, I think it would have done quite well here.
• Stop Remaking American SF Films: Yes, really. Stop trying to “adapt” foreign works of SF to film. Natural City is a terrible adaptation or “reinterpretation” ofBlade Runner (via Japanese anime like Ghost in the Shell)– so bad it actually misses the point of the original works in both genres. 7광구 feels more like an offense against The Host and the Alien series than homage. The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl riffs on The Matrix, but shows no sense of actually having grasped how the film manages to mobilize interesting and important intellectual questions through pulpy SF tropes. Homage is okay, when done well — there’s tons of it in some Korean works, like The Host and especially Save the Green Planet, that works very well. Both of those films are very Korean, and it’s no surprise that they’re the only remotely successful commercial SF films made in Korea since 2000. And if you’re not sure how to Koreanize those SF tropes, well, this next point is for you:
• Go Hire Real Korean SF Authors, or at Least Buy Their Stories : There actually is a community of SF authors in Korea, writing Korean-styled SF. Some of it is actually quite good, and might make a great adaptation to the screen. No, really! Yes, you would have to pay them money. But what you would get in exchange would be SFnal narratives tailored to your own culture. Believe it or not, different cultures do SF with a different “accent” and these authors are not only well-versed in SF, but also have done the really difficult work of figuring out how to make workable SF narratives that are also culturally coherent to Korean audiences. The track record of Korean SF films suggests that filmmakers have a lot to learn from them. All you need to do is ask. They love SF and would be exactly the people you should pay — as consultants, as screenwriters, or as authors whose works could be optioned — to help you make blockbusters that rake in the cash and the fans, that launch series, that popularize SF and create a new and powerful revenue stream for Korean cinema.Oh, and… buy the stories. Don’t rip off SF writers. If you do, you’ll get a bad reputation, people will pan your films, but more importantly, you will be flying blind from then on. Korean SF authors are your biggest resource, and by the way, they can also advise on adaptations… They want any adaptations done to be done well, so they will be happy to discuss changes and ideas and so on, to a point. If you need evidence of why not doing so is a bad idea: the “differences” between the film 2009: Lost Memories and the book In Search of an Epitaph by Bok Geo-il may have saved the filmmakers in the plagiarism case that followed the film’s release… but they’re exactly the reasons why the film is so damned bad, and lost so much money… in other words, the departures from the novel made in the film are exactly the kind of, ahem, “workaround” that wasn’t worth it in the end.

That about wraps up my thoughts. Who knows whether the people who need to see it ever will, but at least I’ve said my piece. Now, back to other stuff.

Sector 7 is shot amateurishly, it is badly acted by almost the whole cast — and since at least some of the cast can act, I suspect it’s badly edited and badly directed; the budget was mostly used creating CG for a rather unimaginative monster; it was derivative of The Host (괴물), the Alien series (especially Aliens; it was badly written; it had the aesthetics of a Korean TV show on the big screen; and it was plain insulting to the intelligence of its intended audiences, not only Koreans but also those audiences abroad for whom a poster has already been designed. (I’ve got it in the extended post, below.)

A more thorough critique is below, as well as a discussion of the film in the context of what I’ve said about Korean SF films in general. But the short capsule review is: it repeats many of the mistakes of the 

In 2002, the year I arrived in Korea, SF cinema in Korea was undergoing a crippling attack… from within. Three movies were made around that time: The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl (2001), 2009: Lost Memories (2002), and some other 2002 film I’ve forgotten that was less SF and more dark-fantasy/adventure.

These three films bombed, none more spectacularly than The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl, a record-setter for budget and for failure. The net effect was to set back the interest in making SF films, and even blockbuster-type films in general, for a few years, as Jinhee Choi discusses in her book.

7광구 is bad enough to remind me of those days. It has me worried that the Korean film industry will shy away from SF films, rather than shying away from the movie’s awful director and, (probably, to whatever degree this film is their fault too, the people who wrote the script).

The Resurrection of the Little Match Girl also set several other specific trends which apparently plague Korean SF cinema even today, as Sector 7 (7광구) clearly demonstrates. In my recently published paper on the subject (which is in the current Acta Koreana, for those interested), I argued that some there are three specific problems that affect most Korean SF films.

1. Lack of Generic Fluency & the Trope Salad Sydrome: Directors, screenwriters, producers, etc.  either don’t know the genre well enough to do an SF narrative justice, regard it as dumb kid stuff, or, more alarmingly, imitate canonical (ie. foreign) SF without actually getting the point. In the worst case, SF is a random grab bag of crappy tropes to be mixed and matched.
2. Anxieties of History, Postcoloniality, and Identity: Mainstream ethnonationalist revisionist historiography is so powerful in Korean popular culture that in many SF films, SFnal conceits and speculation itself play second fiddle to the demands of this — inherently conservative, anti-radical, anti-other, anti-critical, and even downright anti-speculative in some subjects — that it makes the kjinds of questions, speculations, and inversions common in SF impossible.
3. Anxiety of Influence: Media SF in Korea is usually experienced as foreign culture; there are specific anxieties about the source cultures — Japanese and American — which are exacerbated by the place those nations have in popular Korean conceptions of history, but there also seems to be a deeper distrust towards (and repudiation of) the speculative in SF which runs through many SFnal movies.

All three of these problems apply strongly to Sector 7, to differing degrees. The speculative elements are plain stupid: the background story behind the monster, especially, leaves one boggling — to the tune of explaining that one has developed an antigravity technology powered by goodwill and salt. The reworking of source material — this film clearly attempts to riff on The Host and on the original Sigourney Weaver-featured Alien series, though I’d swear other set-pieces riffed on other films as well — is generally poor, predominantly because Sector 7‘s monster fails to effectively serve as a metaphor for anything at all, let alone the oil business, the way The Host metaphorized the socioeconomics of poverty and disempowerment within the context of Korean development and the Aliens in the Alien series represented the horrors of maternity, nature out of control, and so on.

Likewise, the makers of Sector 7 seem to have failed to grasp what was evident even in the weakest of the Alien movies, and bluntly obvious in The Host — and which the inestimably wise Chris Kammerud recently put it to me as a central message of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as well: that when we fight monsters, we also discover how monstrous we ourselves are. In the Alien films, Ripley grows less and less human; the commonalities between Gang-du and the monster in The Host are widely-commented on; and brash though the horrors are in Buffy’s high school life, she is at times brutal, dehumanized, and horrified at what she sees in herself. In Sector 7, there is none of that: the film lacks metaphorical depth, and the primary reason is the characters.

Oh, and of course, there’s an intellectually incoherent milksop to ethnonationalists — those are de rigeur in bad SF films out of South Korea, of course — at the end, where there’s something about how Japan and Korea were both drilling in that spot, Japan stopped, and then Korea had to continue… or those evil, wily Japanese would move in again. Or something. I hardly cared enough to pay attention to the milksop at the end, as the film didn’t even present to relate to energy issues, global warming, fossil fuels and their non-renewability, global dimming… no, it was just about a monster on an oil rig. Period.

(It could easily have been a metaphor for nuclear power, mind you: in the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima plant, in the light of Korea’s continued installation of many, many nuclear power plants, the film could have been about human-designed energy sources going out of control — about nuclear disaster and its horrors, or about the horrors, likewise, of continuing to rely on oil in a world where oil is choking our skies and helping push climates out of equilibrium, raising the seas, and so on. Who knows — some of that may even have been in the first draft of the script… I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t a part of what ended up on the screen. All we ended up with, in the end, was some vaguely ominous anti-Japanese jingoism.)

Meanwhile, anxieties of influence are profound for this movie, as well they should be. The film is so derivative that, in fact, specific moments from the final battle in The Host are recapitulated in it. (I was wondering why the character facing down the monster had a pole in hand, and went, “Oh, no, don’t…” — because, yes, the scene is quite reminiscent of the final battle in The Host, except of course there’s no family drama, no community, just an old man with a pole and a lighter being stupid, heroic, or both.) But the film also refers, quite unmistakably, to the Alien series of films, and Ha Jiwon’s character is clearly supposed to be a sort of Korean equivalent of Sigourney Weaver’s character, Ripley.

The problem isn’t that Ha’s character, whose name I forgot — yeah, that’s telling — has a girlier side that Ripley doesn’t. The problem is that there’s nothing in between that girly side, the side that cries and gets cutesy and turns all soft and pink and gooey or screams in pain while getting stitches when it suits the lazy storyteller, and the side that is supposed to be tough as nails — saving the oil rig operation, taking a potentially serious injury to save others’ lives, racing her potential love interest around the deck of the oil rig on a motorbike.

(The scene is notable and memorable not for its coolness, but for the awful green-screen work: it’s obvious the motorbike stuff was shot in studio, and then SFXed onto the rig — about as obvious as the claymation in the original Clash of the Titans, I mean. It looks like a cheap local-TV affiliate homemade advertisement for Uncle Chulsu’s Scooter Barn. Seriously — it was embarrassing. I have a feeling that this scene was what Ha Jiwon was thinking of when she reportedly cried after seeing the premiere screening of the film.)

I’ve complained that Ha’s character had basically no substance, but this only is especially notable because she is supposed to be the interesting character of the film: the same is true for all of the other characters. The characterization mainly consists of a series of inversions: the dude who is composed and cool at the beginning (played by Park Chulmin) loses his shit pretty quickly when things get messy; the nasty-mouthed, annoying shithead guy whose pronouncements for the first hour of the movie are mostly the same bloody line — “E saekiya!” (approx. “You fucker!”), which he says, in various variations, about twenty times in the first third of the film — becomes the weepy, terrified loser.

Not one of these characters was remotely relatable. Not one. No, not even that one.

Oh, and there’s a “scientist”  (some girly in a white lab coat) who dies pretty quickly. I don’t remember when the scientist guy dies, but it must be early on too. I didn’t care about him either. It’s necessary they died early, because if they’d have survived, they would have spent the rest of the movie pointing out how everything that follows her death is scientifically impossible: the little fishies from the depths of the ocean that are a new source of (ahem) energy, as in, they’re highly flammable and, like a pyromaniac’s dream of the Energizer Bunny, just keep burning and burning. Such as the monster these little fish become, somehow engineered by one scientist chick and her male scientist boss (of course he’s her boss) and some petroleum engineers into a creature with legs and a (relatively, compared to your average Seoul subway passenger) highly evolved sense of how to walk around? How did they manage to evolve the creature that way? Uh, ask the sci… oh, right, they’re dead. Well, maybe the oil rig workers had minors in Renewable Energy-Providing Monster Design and Genetic Engineering?

Most annoying among the characters is the standard, obnoxious and hyper-exaggerated “loser” character… the character type which strikes me as the laziest in Korean media, and a very common one — the 왕따 or “outcast.” In this film, the outcast character is a clownishly weird roughneck who has a hopeless crush and who simpers, snivels and clowns until you are ready to sign up for Roughneck University yourself just for the chance to kill him. He’s also stupid enough to get himself bitten in the face by a phosphorescent deep-sea fish that was safely stowed in a tank. Thank goodness that character took very little time to die — he’s next after the scientist chick.

The least hateable character is the boss who shows up about twenty minutes into the film, and whom everyone seems to love way more than people ever really like their bosses. (When he turns up on the rig, things devolve into a cutesy greeting (puke!) followed by a drawn-out pseudo-characterization scene, where people eat and get drunk and then compare their scars… in other words, they hold an MT, and he is talked into extending the operation of the rig for a few more months because Ha Jiwon’s character really wants to strike oil there, and it would have meant so much to her dad. Geological engineers? Renewed survey drilling? Eh? We don’t need no stinkin’ science! Sentimentality is what makes the film go round… Of course, in the end, he turns into the most-hateable character in the film because the whole stupid conflagration is his fault: greedy businessman that he is, he engineered the monster on purpose. Oh, I am so surprised.

(Don’t worry, he dies too.)

On the characterization, I think the closest experience I’ve had in Korean cinema to this film was Haeundae (2009) in that I was, to be honest, happy every time a character died, and my primary annoyance was when one or another character evaded death, however temporarily. (Aside from a very few: I found the characters in that film almost universally unlikeable, aside from Ha Jiwon’s.) I didn’t care about any of the stick-figurey characters in this film, and worse, I actively disliked them: I hate the clownish loser; I hate the skinny smartmouth guy who cusses all the time; I hate the “cool”-headed guy who’s been on the rigs for years; I hate the woman who jumps from toughie to cutie in two seconds flat. Perhaps it’s that these Korean-styled archetypes grate for me; but it’s also that these characters are nothing more than archetypes, like cardboard cutouts flapping in the wind. I cared for not a single character, and not one was really sympathetic. Not one.

It’s difficult for me to express my disappointment with this film. When The Host was released, it sent a message: SF could be timely, political, and meaningful; it could embrace issues in the recent past, and address issues — like the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the empowered elites and the rest of Korean society — that mean something to Korean audiences. Indeed, The Host proved not only that such a film could be a hit, but that SF could be a powerful tool in expressing criticism within a social context where those who control the arena of discourse — the government — has limited power to control or suppress.

What Sector 7 represents is not just an absolute lack of understanding of, or respect for, that lesson. It represents an attempt to set Korean SF back not just to 2001, but all the way back to 1967… yeah, to the days of Yonggary, when a film didn’t need any deeper meaning, or figurative significance; where characters could be thin as newsprint paper, and plots could be mainly built on the idea that spectacle is all you need.

Well, that might have worked in 1967, but it’s not going to work now — not even in Korea, where audiences are used to TV content completely lacking in political critique, where these kinds of thin character archetypes and hackneyed stories are far from uncommon. The buzz on the net is bad… really, really bad.

Those hastily drawn-up movie posters made in English, for marketing to America? Um… I wouldn’t pay to have them printed up in mass quantities just yet.

Films like these make me really, really want to tell film producers a few simple rules that will help avoid the waste of money that films like this represent. Hell, in fact, I think I will post such a list. Tomorrow…

For now: save your money. See something else. Don’t support this travesty of SF… even the bug sucks in this bughunt.