earticle

영어

In this paper, Bong’s 2020 Oscar-winning film Parasite is examined in terms of how Korean subjectivity is shaped transnationally through an affective engagement with neoliberalism to evoke a late capitalist desire for hyperreal consumption of “all things American.” In the film, as Koreans internalize knowledge of and consumption of America as a hyperreal commodity, transnational American entities serve as the key currency of valorizing their class-based ontology against the non-diegetic backdrop of the US empire. Like other Korean filmmakers of his generation, Bong found Hollywood through the transnational flow of American culture, which was originally mediated by the US military presence in Korea. Bong’s positive identity as a neoliberal elite leading K-movies in terms of Hallyu is the obverse of his neocolonial affectivity, a transnational creole whose Korean subjectivity has been transversally Americanized in the empire. The co-presence of America in Korea as a transnational flow of neoliberal potentials surfaces in duality: that America is both the object of neoliberal desire for Koreans to simulate and emulate and a rendered equivalent to the structural faults of neoliberalism they perceive necessary to overthrow. In the film, this results in the gruesome event of a serial killing against the backdrop of a fancy birthday party.