The Soft Power of the Korean Wave

Parasite, BTS and Drama

Youna Kim, Youna Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000437522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

At this fascinating historical moment, this timely collection explores the new meaning of the Korean Wave and the process of media production, representation, distribution and consumption in a global context as a distinctive and complex form of soft power.

Focusing on the most recent phenomenon of Korean popular culture, this book considers the Korean Wave in the global digital age and addresses the social, cultural and political implications in their complexity within the contexts of global inequalities and uneven power structures. The collection brings together internationally renowned scholars and regional specialists to examine this historically significant, visibly growing, yet under-explored current phenomenon in the global digital age. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, cultural studies, sociology, history and anthropology, and including a series of case studies from Asia, the USA, Europe and the Middle East, it provides an empirically rich and theoretically stimulating tour of this area of study, going beyond the standard Euro-American view of the evolving and complex dynamics of the media today.

This collection is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Korean popular culture and in film, media, fandom and cultural industries more widely.

PART I

Parasite

1

PRODUCERS OF PARASITE AND THE QUESTION OF FILM AUTHORSHIP

Producing a global author, authoring a global production

Dong Hoon Kim

DOI: 10.4324/9781003102489-1

The night belonged to Bong Joon-Ho at the 92nd Academy Awards ceremony as the acclaimed filmmaker’s Parasite (2019) enthralled the world by garnering four Oscars and becoming the first non-English film to win Best Picture. Repeatedly appearing on the stage, Bong received enthusiastic responses from audiences with his witty speech, humility and homage to veteran American filmmakers present at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood. The night, however, ended with a speech not by the filmmaker but by another member of the Parasite team who came up to the stage to receive the Best Picture award. Following producer Kwak Sin-Ae’s emotional acceptance speech, another staff member, encouraged by Bong, grabbed the mic to calmly talk in English about how much she loved Bong and his films. Without introductory captions, it was unclear to most viewers who she was, and it later turned out the woman with the last word was Miky Lee, the film’s executive producer, who is the founder of CJ Entertainment, now a film division of CJ E&M that produced Parasite, and CJ Group’s Vice Chairwoman in charge of the South Korean (Korean, hereafter) conglomerate’s massive media and entertainment business. Amid excited responses to Parasite’s success, Lee’s acceptance speech drew criticism in Korea, as many questioned whether it was appropriate for her to conclude the historic night and whether she even had a right to be on the stage with the staff. The public was more forgiving with Kwak, the CEO of Barunson E&A, who was involved with the day-to-day operation of the film’s production, but film critics, journalists and fans alike expressed disapproval toward Lee’s presence on the Oscar stage. Though it is a practice that producers and CEOs of production companies are recipients of best pictures at the Oscars and other film festivals, Lee’s critics labeled her as a mere investor and suggested that the creators should have received the credit, not the investor and that it would have been better if “she’d quietly remained as ‘invisible hand’ all along” (Suh 2020a).

Parasite, which narrates a grueling story of the impoverished Kim family that forms an unusual symbiotic relation with the wealthy Park clan, is now a major reference point for the impressive success of contemporary Korean filmmaking, a stylistic and thematic expression of social disparity spread across the globe, and the culmination of Bong’s authorial art. The accolades the film has received make it tempting to read the film’s poignant representation of class divides in Seoul as well as its varied achievements as connotations or symptoms of our historical moment. The film’s scrutiny of new class sensibilities in the overdeveloped world, its strong resonance with global and local politics about social injustice, its sophisticated style and visual metaphors, and the genius of Bong who pieced together all these components have been exhaustively discussed in attempts to unpack the film’s historic achievements.

What strikes me about the epic finale for the Parasite saga at the Oscars, however, is not just the epoch-making accomplishments of the film but the anonymity of the producers despite the instrumental role they played in the film’s achievements. In fact, what happened toward the end of the ceremony and its aftermath appears to be emblematic of the overall place of film producers in film history and criticism. Despite their seminal position in the film industry, their roles have been pushed to the margins of film history, and we seldom hear stories or theories about film producers. Noting the scarcity of scholarly studies of producers, Andrew Spicer, Anthony McKenna and Christopher Meir observe, “The financial side of art has always proved problematic for academics and critics alike… this apparent distaste for money matters within the academy could go some way to explaining the producer’s relative absence from Screen Studies literature” (Spicer et al. 2016: 1). Recognizing the commercial aspect of filmmaking and granting due credit to producers becomes an even trickier issue for a film like Parasite that is deemed a great cinematic achievement created by an artist as the public’s attempt to disapprove Miky Lee’s contributions to the film evidently showed.

The indifference to film producers, along with efforts to empower the director as a true force behind the production of Parasite, leads us to revisit questions of who creates a film and who deserves credit for film production – a set of questions that has been exhaustively examined and debated in relation to film authorship or auteurism that considers the director as the author of the film who is responsible for the film’s artistic qualities more than anyone else on the staff and that has been an influential approach to film criticism since the 1950s. This chapter investigates how Parasite came into being, focusing on how the film and its director Bong were both produced to be a globally appealing film and auteur respectively. It specifically uncovers accounts of producers who have been marginalized not only in the Parasite saga but overall in critical ruminations of the global emergence of Korean cinema for the last three decades. This interrogation of the producer also entails an examination of Bong’s involvement with Parasite as producer. Instead of merely perceiving the filmmaker as the author of the film who oversees the film’s creative aspect, the chapter will probe the seldom-discussed role of Bong as producer and how it contributed to the film’s global circulation. In an effort to relocate the inordinate attention placed on the text and filmmaker to the industrial context to read Parasite in a broader industrial and cultural context, the first half of the chapter takes the form of industrial studies, examining CJ’s production and distribution of Parasite and Bong’s other works in relation to the company’s globalization strategies. The next section of the chapter transits into a more theoretical analysis which engages in the question of film authorship. As this chapter will demonstrate, CJ’s and Bong’s producership actively employs the auteur for the production and distribution of their films targeted at the global market, which influences not only the way a film is produced, distributed and received but how Bong’s auteur persona is constructed. Through examining changing relations between the producer and the auteur, the auteur’s producer role and the industrial appropriation of film authorship as demonstrated in the case of Parasite, the chapter seeks to reconceptualize film authorship and bring to light other sets of critical questions that have been sidelined by celebratory, enthused or symptomatic accounts of Parasite.

Parasite, film industry and media globalization

Everyone has a theory about how Parasite made history at the Oscars, and Ted Sarandos, a Netflix co-CEO, also has one. In his interview about Netflix’s recent global expansion, Sarandos claimed that Netflix deserves credit for Parasite’s success because Netflix’s global business that brought a great number of international titles to an American market offered American viewers a lot more opportunities to be exposed to international films and get to appreciate them (Low 2020). Sarandos further alleges that Roma (2018), a Spanish-language Netflix original that put the streaming platform on the Oscar map, “opened the door for Parasite to be as successful as it was” (Ibid.). In fact, there are some notable connections between Parasite and Roma. Directed by Mexican-Hollywood filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, Roma had a historic success of its own at the 2019 Oscars as it took home three Oscars. Both Bong and Cuarón are highly regarded auteurs today and are among a handful of non-Hollywood filmmakers who are favored by Hollywood studios and are respected in US film circuits. Both Roma and Parasite marked the directors’ returns to their home countries after successfully establishing themselves in Hollywood with their respective Hollywood projects. Even their subjects appear to be similar as both films explore issues in social disparity. Considering their success in Hollywood as international films directed by non-American filmmakers, Sarandos’s claim that Netflix played a meaningful role in lowering the barriers for international productions in the American market and that Roma deserves credit for Parasite’s success sounds reasonable. Interestingly, however, there is another important similarity between the two films the Netflix co-CEO did not mention: They were the products of two powerful film and media groups that ran aggressive promotional campaigns, including Oscar campaigns.

It is not a secret shared only among those in the film industry that Hollywood studios run Oscar campaigns as the Oscars is considered an effective way to market their films. Oscar campaigning targets over 8,000 eligible voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences through screeners, parties, mailers and ads: “The campaign trail for the Academy Awards is expensive, exhausting, and not really about the movie,” and campaigns are run like political campaigns in lobbying votes, and studios hire consultants as politicians do (Wilkinson 2019). This practice started in the 1990s, but campaign budgets have drastically increased in recent years with the advent of Netflix running aggressive Oscar campaigns. It is estimated that studios now spend up to $15 million to lobby Oscar votes, but Netflix’s campaign for Roma raised eyebrows as it was considered extreme even for Hollywood standards. With an astonishing budget of $25 million, Roma’s “historically expensive” Oscar campaign resulted in ten nominations and three Oscars (Epstein 2019). Oscars are now not only the most prestigious but “most valuable” (Kenyon 2020), and thus it would be naïve to think that Parasite’s success was thanks solely to the genius of an individual filmmaker. CJ ran its own Oscar campaign for Parasite under Miky Lee’s supervision, spending about $10 million, which is close to the published $11 million budget for the film.

What is noteworthy here is that CJ is well versed in Hollywood practices and owns enough financial prowess with which it can compete with the Hollywood majors. CJ’s Oscar campaign also demonstrates that the executive producer’s work did not simply end when it wired the money to the production firm or at the release of the film at cinemas. Indeed, its major task commenced when the film was completed. Though the history-making performance at the Oscars garnered a lot of media spotlight, the Korean powerhouse ran a much longer global campaign for the film that began at another major film festival in May 2019 – the Cannes Film Festival. The film premiered at Cannes where it earned the Palme d’Or, becoming the first Korean film to receive the festival’s highest prize, was released in Korea in July to a strong box office response, and finally came to the American shore in October, an ideal time for Oscar contenders to be released. It was at Cannes where Bong and CJ hired Hollywood PR agency ID-PR that represented them in running the Oscar campaign (Thompson 2020). Between Cannes and the Oscars, Parasite was screened at dozens of international film festivals, and it collected almost 200 awards and distinctions. During its Oscar campaign, Bong, actors and producers toured the United States, doing 600 interviews with the media and participating in over a 100 “taste screenings” and post-screening question-and-answer sessions with voting members and audiences. All these indicate that CJ used film festivals as its major marketing means for the film, but this is nothing extraordinary for film projects pandering to global audiences. Film festivals are no longer just venues alternative to the mainstream, commercial film culture but they are increasingly involved in film sales, distribution and marketing, creating “nodes of global business in which films circulate as commodities and attracting all sorts of players in film business” (Wong 2011: 129). Netflix had turned to the exact same strategy in the previous year for Roma that won over 200 awards and honors, another striking similarity to Parasite.

Parasite narrates a locally grounded story and was made with Korean staff and cast, but it was inherently a global project like Bong’s previous two films, Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), and its global marketing, promotion and exhibition plans were principally informed by Hollywood practices. Importantly, it was not just the financial capacity that enabled CJ to promote the film in a Hollywood manner, but CJ’s film business has been fundamentally modeled after the Hollywood system from its beginning. Established in 1995, CJ Entertainment has been a key player in the global emergence of Korean cinema in the 1990s that saw the complete overhauling of film and media business in the nation. There was a growing investment in media industries in both public and private sectors, which gradually transformed Korea from a purveyor of hardware products to a soft power. Such conglomerates as Samsung, SK and Daewoo competitively created film and media subsidies, and venture capital firms invested the money into film productions. CJ Group, a food and food service company, joined in this craze for film business. The timing of this business expansion coincided with CJ’s separation from Samsung that began around the death of its founder Lee Byung-Chul, the grandfather of Miky Lee, in 1987. CJ looked to expand its business beyond food and beverage to transform into what the company describes as a lifestyle company. CJ’s entry into the film business was opportunistic like other film companies that emerged in the 1990s, but unlike its competitors, the very birth of CJ Entertainment was a highly globalized event. CJ surprised everyone in both the Korean and American film industries when it was revealed as one of the two major investors for DreamWorks Pictures, a film studio formed by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen (Iritani 1996). In exchange for its investment, CJ received distribution rights for DreamWorks’ titles in Asia, except for Japan, and sat on the board of directors. But more importantly, DreamWorks agreed to provide CJ staff with its business acumen on film distribution, financing, marketing and management, which became the basis for CJ’s efforts to build its own system (Go 2016: 28). Miky Lee was the architect of this deal; she initially negotiated the deal for Samsung, but when the conglomerate walked away from the deal, she persuaded her brother Lee Jay-Hyun, Chairman of CJ, to invest $300 million in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: popular culture and soft power in the social media age
• Part I Parasite
• Part II BTS
• Part III Drama
• Index