Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. xi, 252 pp. (Illustrations.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-6130-5.
Tourist Distractions analyzes Hallyu cinema through concepts of travelling and movement as epitomes of the Korean Wave. Hallyu cinema has been a critical site where capital, commercial commodities and cultural products circulate under the umbrella of “Asianization,” which the author defines as the shared affective experience of building East Asian networks. Geopolitical representations in East Asia and their re-imaginations among global consumer cultures open critical possibilities of reinterpreting regionalism and transnationalism through Hallyu in post-Cold War East Asia.
Choe elaborates on how cinematic representations of Hallyu cinema and their connotations reach beyond their cinematic diegeses through travelling and movement under the rapidly changing landscapes and afterlives of Hallyu’s own materiality in East Asia. Hallyu cinema is therefore not merely an important site of transnational commerce where the film industry and tourism converge, but also presents a transformative milieu that shifts Korea’s position from the postcolonial to the transnational.
Within these critical frameworks, the book is divided into three parts: “Intimacy” (Korea and Japan), “Amity” (Korea and China), and “Remembrance” (South and North Korea)—each of which consists of two chapters. Choe eloquently illustrates the trajectory of Hallyu discourses by showing the shifting emotions, tensions, and gestures echoing from embryonic transnational self-reflections to reveal manifestations of what she calls “tourist distractions.” By looking at Hallyu as affective media circulating via cultural and virtual commodity, her framing of “tourist distraction” is less indicative of cinematic spectatorship than representations of travel and tourist movement related to images and sites themselves, as well as the collective affect that continuously intervenes, disrupts, and re-contextualizes modern Korean society and culture.
“Intimacy” traces the theme of reconciliation between Japan and Korea: “Feeling Together: Pornography and Travel in Kazoku Cinema and Asako in Ruby Shoes” (chapter 1) through pornography, and “Affective Sites: Hur Jin-ho’s April Snow and One Fine Spring Day” (chapter 2) through an affective tourism by which audiences are expected to mimic the emotional experiences aroused in both spectatorship and through visiting the actual film locations. “Intimacy” further interrogates the colonial history and remnants of collective memory between the two countries. Focusing on the quotidian banality of its postcolonial audiences by way of sexual voyeurism, Choe argues that Korean and Japanese audiences obtained alternative viewpoints on their history and perceptions of each other. By cinematic intermediation through the narrative of postcolonial reconciliation, the colonial past and its legacies are affectively reinterpreted by obliterating historical references to the past, allowing audiences to virtually experience another’s body and place. The critical point of affective tourism is that viewers are expected to mimic the emotional experiences of filmic characters by visiting on-site locations, since the film sets were made when Hallyu began to gain momentum after the success of the drama Winter Sonata. Revisiting these locations, audiences become aware of Hallyu’s emotional and physical impact, both culturally and economically. Choe argues that the theme of “reconciliation through intimacy” is first generated in the embryonic stage of Hallyu, as distinct from the consumption of subsequent Hallyu films, such as April Snow (starring Winter Sonata’s famed lead, Bae Yong Joon), since it was produced to satisfy transnational audiences of Korean cultural products.
The book’s second part, “Amity,” explores transnational cooperation in the making of the film Musa, coproduced by Korea and China (chapter 3). Choe analyzes amity between the two countries through a so-called “bond of compassion” (yŏchŏng). Focusing on the parallel between the film and the MOD (making of documentary), which portrayed the development of a camaraderie between the Korean and Chinese actors and crew that transcended their complex relationship after the Cold War, Choe highlights the need for “provisional unity in order to accomplish pressing tasks” (108) beyond issues of nationalism and xenophobia. Stressing the foundation of shared affect emergent through “travelling” and collaboration, the author questions the circulation of the very localized meaning of “affect”: What would happen if local affect were to travel in a different transnational context? By analyzing the sonagi (rain) trope in the film Daisy by Hong Kong director Wai-Keung Lau, Choe analyzes the concept of sunsu (“purity” and “innocence” in Korean) (chapter 4). The recognizable fragments of sonagi and narrative are brought into the context of Hong Kong new noir to create a hybridized trope, which produces the anachronistic dialogue of aesthetic possibilities and contestation within the logic of transnational exchange.
The final section, “Remembrance,” shifts focus to South and North Korea. Here Choe addresses the past in relation to the concept of “border crossing” (chapter 5). For example, the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone), a site common to the films J.S.A.: Joint Security Area, Yesterday, and 2009: Lost Memories, embodies varying levels of engagement and signals a post-memory border crossing and discourse of unification and division that was never personally experienced but has come to feel vital or lived by future generations. Through these films’ references to the Korean War and the DMZ, a critical space opens in which to synchronously address historical redress and test reflections/reframing of history and subjectivity in the age of Hallyu. Thus, the DMZ has a performative quality as a site of contestation between states, individuals, emotions, and constitutions. Choe further questions to what extent these Hallyu film sites are considered as memorials (transient monuments), and how the film Taekgukgi becomes a virtual experience of actual history that becomes altered amid the slipperiness of memory and mobility of Hallyu cinema (chapter 6). The transient film set as tourist destination often loses its meaning after the vanishing of a film’s popularity. Choe thus problematizes the underlying problems of commemoration through commercial film sets as memorials, since the film’s representation of wartime trauma reflects a gap as each generational audience consumes different filmic texts of the same historical incident. The author warns that the will to repair and redress historical trauma through the “cooperative optimism” and the transnational appeal of Hallyu cinema comes at the cost of a “historical amnesia in potentially dangerous ways” (196). Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hallyu cinema has been published in the last decade, the transnational affect of Hallyu cinema through re-contextualizing it as audience emotions, tensions, and transnational self-reflections has not been the focus of critical attention. Tourist Distractions fills this void in Korean film studies with a persuasive voice by establishing the transnational linkages of Hallyu to Japan, China, and North Korea since the early inception of the Hallyu boom. The structure of this book is, in this sense, coherent and logical. The book embodies the extent of global distribution of Hallyu and its appropriation of South Korean cinema as cultural exports of soft power to show the logic of tourism and the transnational network of cultural exchange, and the bonds of commonality in Asia through modes of commodification. The book ends by posing a rhetorical question, appropriating Spivak: “Can the global commodity speak?” The answer may be affirmative, but only within the prison of the global commodity mantra.
Yongwoo Lee
New York University, New York, USA
pp. 844-846