Spectacle Korea: Transfiguring national boundaries, trans-imaging national culture in the case of the good, the bad, the weird

In this essay I explore the Korean blockbuster, a film genre that enjoyed popularity in South Korea as a local translation of the Hollywood blockbuster. In examining this hybrid cinematic form, I focus on the cultural dynamics informing the genre’s ambivalent—at times even contradictory—aspirations to globalization and localization, with both trends accelerating in Korea. As a particularly poignant blockbuster film, The Good, the Bad, the Weird (dir. Jee-woon Kim, 2008) may well showcase and expand this complicated equation, particularly through its apparent adoption of several genres, including the Manchurian Western. As a Korean sub-genre that was popular in the 1960s, Manchurian Westerns stage Manchuria of the 1930s, in which the Korean people’s fight for the nation’s liberation from the Japanese occupation played out in part, thus inevitably converging on the theme of mimicry and post-colonialism that has emblematized the Korean blockbuster’s genre-defining desire. In an attempt to understand the intercultural dynamics that inform this hybrid genre, I rely on contemporary post-colonial theory and film genre theories. I illustrate how this film—and the Korean blockbuster more generally—interplays with ever-changing notions of Korean national boundaries and Koreanness today.