McGill University Professor Michelle Cho’s Talk at the Centre for the Study of Korea
February 7, 2014
Dr. Michelle Cho admits that she watches Korean dramas for stress relief and she is certainly not alone. A cursory search online shows how expansive Korean dramas, variety shows, and their celebrities have become. This has generally been dubbed as the “Hallyu” phenomenon, and it is often noted for its transnational appeal throughout Asia and its ability to inspire ambivalence, detractors, and celebrants. Dr. Cho examines two Korean dramas – Dream High and Answer Me 1997 – to elucidate important aspects of this highly entertaining subject matter, such as media literacy and cultural citizenship.
Partnered with a boom of commercial filmmaking in the early 2000s, “Hallyu” catapulted Korean pop culture after the IMF financial crisis into global awareness. Scholarship has been generally ambivalent on this popular topic, but Dr. Cho notes that this global strategy has also created significant disjunctive consequences. She gives examples of contesting binaries of eroticism and chastity, cosmopolitanism and nationalism, or even superficiality and authenticity. Watch any Korean music video and you are likely to see all of these binaries operating simultaneously in the context of national prowess, the rhetoric of cultural exchange, and pre-packaged, commercialized pop culture.
Dr. Cho elaborates on a number of these significant themes, but it’s interesting to note her commentary on the “language of cultural technology.” Noting the metaphors of kinship and pedagogy whereby managers of young Kpop stars claim to be pseudo-parents and teachers to their young charges, Dr. Cho highlights Park Jin Young, founder of JYP Entertainment, who plays this pedagogical role both in real-life and in the show Dream High. He self-markets and represents himself as a teacher to the star cast who plays ordinary roles to ironically become the stars they already are or bigger. This mutli-layering of media realities highlights a fascinating self-critique by the media industry where they emphasize the exploitative nature of the business, while also flipping the desire for celebrity as a community building endeavour of honest emotion and popular sentiment. In conjunction, Answer Me 1997 is an extended flashback on the development of the telecom industry and Dr. Cho illustrates how the drama asserts the pop culture fan as an ideal subject – expressing the character and virtues of the nation. These examples are just tidbits of multifaceted themes to be sure and it is evident that Dr. Cho does not lack objects of inquiry in this diverse arena of tensions.
Self-critique that invites viewer involvement, mass mobilization of citizens towards media literacy, the shift to pop culture consumption from political participation—Dr. Cho’s conclusions are complex, questioning, and insightful. Something to think about the next time we ready our popcorn for another spree of Korean dramas. Some much needed intellectual insight to an already highly addictive affair.
Q&A Highlights:
Was Dream High broadcast before the Gangnam Style phenomenon?
Michelle Cho (MC): Yes, Dream High precedes the Gangnam Style phenomenon. Psy’s international fame raised his status in Korea, but he has long been a fixture in Korean entertainment. His commentary on the nouveau riche or superficiality of urban Seoul has been noted, but he’s also commenting on the industry.
Your thoughts on how these affective national qualities affect migrants? People watching overseas?
MC: One of my main research questions in looking at Hallyu and Kdramas is asking what happens to these national narratives when they’re consumed by populations who are not aware of these subtexts/intertexts. I don’t know the answer to the question on what happens to these shows, divorced from that national context, but it’s really a key question...the conclusion we can draw is that these texts are not just singular unified texts, but they are different texts for different people and might be useful to compare. Melodrama is so interesting, because articulating how melodramatic sensitivities operate in the Korean context raises some important questions about how melodrama is characterized in the North American context and how does these conventions translate? For example, there’s a subgenre called “makjang” dramas. A category of Korean dramas that is particularly intense and melodramatic. They are often these very exaggerated melodramatic tropes like the incest plot (you are separated from your lover because they happen to be your half-brother), or someone suddenly has cancer. “Makjang” itself is a term that means “taking things to their end, their limit,” and so this kind of understanding has a Korean specificity.
What are your thoughts on the theme of temporality, the repetition of the body, of history, of change, and so on, running through your talk?
MC: That’s a great question. I think that the structure of temporality that interests me that I would characterize as the primary one of these shows is one of compression and fleetingness. I think that this is what creates the problem of historical memory and repetition within the genre. So, you have the same storyline. You know they often say it’s the same story over and over with subtle variations, and if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all (but, I don’t know why I’m addicted!). I agree with that characterization, it is the same core narrative, but the differences are important to observe. You can see traces of the contemporary situation being expressed even in this hackneyed form, even while the temporality of the TVdrama is intended to erase and replace.
Read the event description including speaker bio and abstract here.
Article and Interview by Sang Ik Song, a student of medical anthropology and history at the University of Toronto
