Michelle Cho

10.18399/acta.2014.17.1.006

genre cinema revenge narrative gender critique Kim Tong-in Jang Chul-soo

The place of Jang Chul-soo (Chang Ch’ŏl-su)’s Bedevilled (Kim Pong-nam sarinsakŏn ŭi chŏnmal, 2010) in the cycle of recent South Korean revenge films hailed for their pairing of poetic visuals and “extreme” violence seems rather straightforward, yet this article argues for Bedevilled’s singularity as a work that critiques the gender politics of transnational genre cinemas like the slasher-horror and rape-revenge film, and the Korean literary and film genres that also serve as its important intertexts. This article examines the multiple modes by which Bedevilled interrupts the use of the revenge trope as a depoliticizing, privatizing system of generic representation through its citation of colonial period naturalist writer Kim Tong-in’s well known short stories “Potatoes” (“Kamja,” 1925) and “The Seaman’s Chant” (“Paettaragi,” 1921) and Kamja, the 1987 film adaptation of the same story directed by Byun Jang-ho (Pyŏn Chang-ho) and starring Kang Su-yeon (Kang Su-yŏn), amid its visualization of the slasher genre’s complex gender dynamics. Analyzing Bedevilled’s trans-media adaptation of two of Kim’s best known works of short fiction and a key example of the 1980s genre cycle of t’osok ero yŏnghwa (Nativist erotic film), I chart the film’s ironic repetition of the earlier works’ visual and narrative tropes, particularly in the film’s disturbing presentation of patriarchal oppression as a pervasive social disease. By embedding tales that attribute characters’ fates to their social environments within the anti-heroic conventions of the revenge narrative, Bedevilled mobilizes two incommensurable genre frameworks to reorient the drive of social critique towards alternative modes of collective identification rather than those based in nationalism or subordination to patriarchy’s psycho-sexual violence. Moreover, the film’s juxtaposition of unexpected genre frameworks becomes the basis for its gendered critique of Kim’s literary legacy, the cinematic repertoire of male fantasy in 1980s literary films, and contemporary conventions of institutionalized misogyny.