| The mainstream South Korean erotic films of the 1980s have often been called ero yoˇnghwa only to be stigmatized and shunned as a group of non-artistic, apolitical, misogynic, and even historically regressive sexploitation films. In response to this progress-oriented view, this dissertation attempts to reconstruct the ero yoˇnghwa as a melodramatic expression of “vernacular modernism,” which is not only located between commercial and artistic films but also critiques the South Korean state-driven developmentalist modernization project implemented since the sixties. Resisting the binary opposition of progress and development against regression, I use the term retreat to shift attention away from this dichotomous opposition as well as from the negative effects of South Korea's rapid and “compressed” modernization, in particular the demoralization of South Koreans caused by severe capitalist competition. The introduction thus shows how this retreat is expressed in Korean erotic cinema and explains in historical terms how South Korean films have been eroticized before and after the ero yoˇnghwa.;Chapter 1 proposes the ero yoˇnghwa to be a vernacular erotic film genre that was responding to both state censorship and the contemporaneous transnational trend of erotic/pornographic filmmaking. It refutes the discursive dismissal of the genre as one that is ideologically and historically regressive by minjung critics and gender essentialist feminists. The second chapter problematizes the ways in which erotic costume dramas and anti-American erotic films nationalistically retreat into the premodern, interrogating how through their masculinism, universalism, ethnocentrism, and orientalism, these two subgenres deploy Korean women as an anti-modern symbol of colonized victims or the underprivileged. The final chapter proposes the Korean erotic film to be a pure culture of the death drive, not only using the Freudian dualism of Eros and death, but also exploring two dominant trends of the Korean erotic film's deathly closure: the taking of a poetic justice by a development-obsessed society against hypersexual and dysfunctional beings (pure Eros), and the exercising of poetic license in the artistic sublimation of the pure death drive instead of Eros. |
