UC Irvine

While Korean popular culture has infamously carved out an innumerable number of ‘soft masculine’ icons through K-pop and K-drama that often blur gender boundaries and blot out historical traumas, Korean cinema by and large continues to draw on characters that are based on violent and brutalized male protagonists. Last year’s hit film, Nameless Gangster, for instance, rearticulates the pressure of intense historical transformation from an authoritarian society where violence and corruption run rampant to a more humanized one where knowledge-power discipline, to borrow from Foucault, is disseminated through the scarred male subjectivity. This traumatized male subject, which aims at but falls short of what Etienne Balibar calls “post-subject citizenship,” is what draws my attention to the films of Lee Chang-dong. Peppermint Candy (1999), which depicted the Kwangju Massacre, developed an apologetic male protagonist that not only distinguished Korean cinema from other Asian cinemas such as Chinese Fifth Generation that focused on female characters, but also became a stock character of the Korean cinema since then. Blockbuster films such as Memories of Murder (2003) and Haeundae (2009) have deployed similar apologetic male characters through whom Korean historical scars are etched. By focusing on Mija, a 65-year old female protagonist, Poetry (2010) seems to depart from the “apologetic man” genealogy of Lee Chang-dong, but this paper will show that it is still a film where the process of remembering and forgetting as well as shifting acts or perpetuation and apology is anchored on insufficiencies of, not womanhood, but manhood.