“마인드 게임” 드라마 속 새로운 문화기억 서사와 시간 경험 구조에 대한 고찰 — <시그널>과 <눈이 부시게> 분석을 중심으로

The recent Korean TV drama Signal stages two contemporary policemen who investigate several unresolved crime cases that actually took place in Korea during the 1990s. In contrast to the actual unresolved murders, Signal succeeds in resolving the crimes, particularly through the male protagonist’s accidental connection with another policeman who lives in the past temporality of the 1990s — a fictional (and even surrealistic) encounter between the present and the past that makes it possible to arrest the criminal and then revise cultural memories of corrupted pasts. This paper examines this new tendency in Korean cultural narrative, especially as embedded in two TV dramas. In particular, I borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s concept of a “mind-game film”, which denotes a narrative that revolves around psychologically unstable figures, such as those who suffer from schizophrenia, amnesia, or dementia, thereby providing a temporally reversed and convoluted narrative. In so doing, I address how this new mode of narrative extends cultural memory discourse and revises contemporary spectators’ perceptions of temporality in Korea.