The Hyper-masculine City

Abstract

Expanding on Kyung Hyun Kim’s seminal work on the ‘remasculinization’ of South Korean cinema (2004), this chapter begins by looking at the role of Korea’s militarised history and its impact on collective masculine consciousness, male crisis and anxiety. Unlike the preceding chapters, this case study initially focuses on a historical, ‘Golden Era’ Korean text—Yu Hyun-Mok’s Obaltan (1960)—in order to illuminate the prevailing patriarchal ideologies embedded within the post-war South Korean landscape. The chapter demonstrates the inextricable ties between Korean ‘maleness’, or the masculine subject, and the concept of national identity and trauma—a discourse that has influenced the development of South Korean cinema throughout the latter half of the twentieth century through to the present day. Questions surrounding masculine identity and ‘belonging’ persist, but they are addressed in different ways, as is evidenced by the eventual rise of the South Korean gangster genre in the post-millennial period. Latterly, therefore, the chapter focuses on Lee Jeong-Beom’s The Man from Nowhere (2010), in order to show that, despite the time difference, it still engages with the same themes and concerns (pertaining to Korean maleness, patriarchal hegemony and Confucian responsibility) as Obaltan. This demonstrates, once again, the extent to which genre discourse is localised or nationalised by South Korean cinema’s sustained attention on specific cultural anxieties. Throughout the chapter, there is also continued emphasis on Seoul and how it is rendered as a space in which the movements, transformations and developments of masculine consciousness can clearly be identified. This is particularly relevant in The Man from Nowhere, in which violent urban spaces are utilised as purgatorial realms and physical altercations highlight the collective trauma that remains inherent in the male body and subject.