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A Hollywood Kid's Schizophrenic Homage: The Meaning of Hollywood in South Korea of the 1980s Detected in Lee Jang - ho's Y's Experience

Yun-Jong Lee 1

1동아대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to reconsider Lee Jang-ho's Y's Experience as a film text that is tightly related with the South Korean reception of Hollywood and Western culture before and after the 1980s. For Y's Experience is a 1987 South Korean remake of a 1948 Hollywood melodrama film, Letter from an Unknown Woman directed by Max Ophüls. Given that Lee made the films imbued with the anti-Americanism and nationalism that peaked in South Korea in the eighties, it is ironic that Lee remade the Hollywood film by the time South Korean filmmakers also started to vehemently rise against the state approval of direct distributions of Hollywood films in South Korea in the late eighties. I would call this ironic attitude of Lee's "schizophrenic" inasmuch as it reflects the South Korean ambivalence, namely admiration and contempt or love and hate towards the West and Hollywood in the eighties. As a schizophrenic homage to the Ophüls film, Lee's remake seems to be based in his perception that Letter from an Unknown Woman is a safe text that is rather European than American as a film adaptation of Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig's eponymous novella. This paper thus inquires into the meaning of the United States and Hollywood in South Korea of the 1980s by analyzing Y's Experience in comparison with the source novella of Zeweig's and the Hollywood film version of Ophüls's.

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