Theodore Hughes

10.18399/acta.2011.14.1.009

Hallyu Combat Film Korean War National Division

This article examines the ways in which the display of violence and production of affect in two Hallyu films portraying the Korean War and its immediate aftermath—T’aegŭkki (T’aegŭkki hwinallimyŏ; Kang Che-gyu, 2004) and Once Upon a Time in Seoul (Sonyŏn ŭn ulji annŭnda; Pae Hyŏng-jun, 2008)—represents a continuing negotiation with the trauma of division and the Cold War order. These contemporary Hallyu Korean War films reveal a certain anxiety regarding both the technics of film and the newly celebrated success of Korean cinema. These films are informed by two overlapping tensions: (1) between the technological and the emotive; (2) between the antiwar genre and a masculinist (and commercial) desire to display action and violence. T’aegŭkki and Once Upon a Time in Seoul offer both memories of the war and the circulation of images and commodities in the 1950s, a period crucial to the formation of the new post-1945 South Korean culture and the South Korean-U.S. relation. Paying particular attention to the links between technology, affect, violence and commercialization, this article shows how these films confront the human-technology association and the incorporation of South Korea into the global market in ways central not only to the meaning of the Korean War and the history of division that surrounds it but also to the transnational flow of images and capital that marks Planet Hallyuwood itself.