Page 1 of 5 'Run-DMZ' and the axis of vaudeville By Stephen Epstein
Just over 10 years ago, in 1998, Roy Richard Grinker published his important
book Korea and its Futures: Unification and the Unfinished War. Grinker,
bringing to bear keen anthropological insight and a fresh comparative
perspective, argued persuasively that the South Korean nation exhibited a
collective desire to maintain the dream of unification rather than achieve it.
In Grinker's cogent analysis, South Korea has wished to continue imagining a
homogenous Korea without confronting dissonant evidence to the contrary about
its alienated sibling to the North. For Grinker, the general ignorance of most
South Koreans about the everyday life of the North Korean people has allowed
North Korea and a unified Korea to function in the Southern imagination as
"blank slates open to fantasy and projection"; moreover, in his
analysis, a resultant discourse of homogeneity (tongjilsong) disrupted by
national division has functioned as a stumbling block to unification.
Much has changed, however, since Grinker's book appeared, and his thesis
deserves re-examination 10 years on. Increasing contact with the North and its
people has rendered South Korea's neighbor more familiar but attitudes towards
it more complex.
Despite the souring of the North-South relationship that has occurred since Lee
Myung-bak assumed the presidency in February 2008, a decade of the "Sunshine"
policy, the partial demystification of the North that accompanied it, and the
momentous 2000 summit meeting between Kim Jong-il and Kim Dae-jung have all
contributed to popular Southern re-assessments of North Korea and North Korean
identity. Amidst a trajectory of increased interaction, in 1998 Hyundai Asan
began tours to scenic Mount Kumgang, extending them in late 2007 to Kaesong,
just across the border from Seoul.
Although shepherded away from direct contact with the citizens of Kaesong, for
the first time South Koreans in large numbers observed a North Korean city at
close quarters. In addition to the 1.9 million South Korean tourists who set
foot on North Korean soil before the tours were suspended last year, roughly
half a million North and South Koreans visited each other's country for
official and semi-official purposes in the last decade, in contrast to a figure
of 2980 for the entire 1989-1997 period.
Equally significantly, by 2007 the number of former North Koreans in the South,
whether one prefers to term them t'albukja (refugees from the North) or saet'omin
(new settlers), surpassed 10,000 and they now form a substantial minority
within the Republic of Korea (ROK). There has thus been exponential growth in
the number of South Koreans who either have firsthand experience of the North
or have met those who grew up in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK).
Critical as well to a change in the South Korean imagination of North Korea,
but perhaps less immediately obvious, are important internal developments in
South Korean self-understanding. Since the turn of the millennium, such factors
as the Korean Wave, success in the 2002 football World Cup, and global
leadership in digital technologies have dramatically reconfigured the South's
sense of its place in the region and in the world; simultaneously, greater
labor migration and a phenomenal spike in international marriage are altering
the ethnic makeup and consciousness of South Korea itself.
Despite any nostalgia one might find for a purer Korean "essence" untainted by
globalization, the South enjoys an unassailable confidence in the superiority
of its system to that of the North. Popular perceptions of the dangers the
North poses to South Korea have focused in recent years more on its potential
to inject instability by suddenly imploding or igniting a conflict with the
United States than as an ideological menace.
In this paper I consider how South Korean understanding of what it means to be
- or to have been - a citizen of the DPRK has evolved during the last decade.
How does South Korean popular culture reflect that evolution and, in turn,
shape ongoing transformations in that understanding? These questions have
significant policy implications in light of Grinker's earlier argument: is the
South Korean imagination being enlarged to make room for an inclusive but
heterogeneous identity that accepts both parts of the divided nation? Or,
conversely, is a hardening of mental boundaries inscribing cultural/social
difference in tandem with (anything but linear) progress in political/economic
rapprochement? In examining these questions, I offer a diverse sampling from
key discursive sites where the South Korean imaginary expresses itself,
including music, advertising, television comedy programs, film and literature.
Certainly, as widely noted, policies of engagement have led to noteworthy
changes in the South's images of North Korea. Although always subject to
partial contestation, prior to Kim Dae-jung's presidency, South Korean popular
representations of the North were one-dimensional, depicting it generally as a
demonized object of fear or contempt, with North Korean characters almost
inevitably spies or terrorists - cardboard caricatures of evil incarnate, or,
at best, brainwashed automatons, victims of the state. Evidence of evolution
became particularly apparent with the blockbuster movies Shiri in 1999
and Joint Security Area (JSA) in 2000, which put a more human face on
North Korean adversaries. These films have drawn a great deal of attention, and
I do not dwell on them here.
Recent years have added, if not finely nuanced representations, at least a
broader array of hues to the palette from which depictions of the North are
drawn, and in the discussion that follows I wish to highlight significant but
less noted developments. I concentrate on an important trend in the South's
imagining of North Korea since the turn of the millennium: dealing with the
DPRK, as widely conceded, is serious business, and its nuclear program and
ongoing food shortages often dominate media images of the country outside of
the Korean peninsula. In the last decade, however, cultural productions from
South Korea have often treated the North in modes that draw on comedy, irony or
farce in preference to more straightforward, solemn readings. This partially
reflects a broader postmodern turn in Korean popular culture, but one might
hypothesize that the ironic mode has also become a strategy for dealing with a
growing sense of heterogeneity on the Korean peninsula. If North Korea is no
longer viewed as an evil portion of the South Korean self, but rather as
another country and one with a special relationship to South Korea, the South
Korean imaginary becomes freer to treat these differences as humorous rather
than threatening.
Let me begin with an intriguing case study. In 2006, observers of the South
Korean music scene (K-pop) may have noted a surprising entry in K-pop's
continual search for fresh sensations: the industry's appetite for local
equivalents of the Spice Girls - which has currently achieved an apotheosis in
the Wonder Girls - led to the debut of the Tallae Umaktan (the "Wild Rocambole
Band," as at least one source has translated it).
Composed of five women who had trained as musicians and dancers in the North
and who had arrived separately as refugees in the South, the Tallae Umaktan
came together in the hope of finding success in the competitive local pop
scene. Although high-profile defector Kim Hye-young has made a career as an
entertainer in the South, the Tallae Umaktan are thus far the lone case of a saet'omin
"girl group" or "boy band". The members of the band played up their Northern
origins as their comparative advantage and attracted a modicum of press
attention, both domestically and internationally.
In sporadic television appearances, they performed songs that drew on North
Korean shinminyo (new folk ballad) stylings and a heavy t’urt’u ("trot",
an older form of Korean pop music) influence. Despite an initial minor flurry
of media interest, however, the group has already disappeared more or less from
view. Although the band's musical talent won admirers, ultimately the Tallae
Umaktan is a novelty act within contemporary South Korean society, and, as with
novelties, interest waned once the period of novelty wore off.
Nevertheless, the Tallae Umaktan's very existence and its lighthearted and
self-referential fusion of North Korean identity and South Korean popular
culture merit attention. In particular, the band's video for their catchy tune Motchaengi
(Sharp Dressed Man), with its parodic homage to memorable scenes from JSA and
2005's Welcome to Dongmakgol, raises questions about reconstituted
understandings of the North. Far from dwelling on dark or melodramatic images
of North Korean refugees, the music video takes a playful approach; to be a t'albukja,
it tells us, does not automatically mean to be somber.
Shrapnel as popcorn
Directed by O Se-hun and using a set created for JSA, the video opens with
perhaps the canonical image of direct North-South contact: Panmunjom, the de
facto border. The camera gazes northward across the demarcation line, capturing
in the frame Southern soldiers from behind, while a North Korean officer
goosesteps across the background to the rear of two North Korean guards at the
line. The initial shot, as might be expected, thus encourages the audience to
share a Southern viewpoint.
Meanwhile, however, a red scroll unfurls down the screen with the band's name
in a font style that clearly suggests North Korea, as accordion music, equally
evocative of North Korea, plays at a muted level. Inset in this introductory
sequence is a small split screen where an announcer declaims in an exaggerated
tone. His heavily reverbed voice, reminiscent of propaganda broadcasts, is
punctuated by a high-pitched shriek and exaggerated gestures.
Although unquestionably introducing the band, his words are muffled and
distorted, rendering comprehension difficult. Nonetheless, one can make out
snatches of phrases mixed incongruously such as the Northern choson inmin tongmu
(North Korean comrades), nyosong tongmu (female comrades),
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
Let me begin with an intriguing case study. In 2006, observers of the South
Korean music scene (K-pop) may have noted a surprising entry in K-pop's
continual search for fresh sensations: the industry's appetite for local
equivalents of the Spice Girls - which has currently achieved an apotheosis in
the Wonder Girls - led to the debut of the Tallae Umaktan (the "Wild Rocambole
Band," as at least one source has translated it).
