KJCKorea
Journal Central

TV drama <Royal Family> arouses the viewer’s interest with the familiar material of conglomerate/revenge. when we see the hidden side, it resists the customs that we believe as a universal value and gives us a chance to reconsider the dominating ideology which works only by the neoliberalism order. <Royal Family> is a story on the basis of the revenge of a daughter-in-law on her mother-in-law, who owns a large company, for 18 years of suppression. Unlike other family dramas, women characters such as competent daughters and daughter-in-laws play important roles. They represent the women characters who actively participate in the competitions and become the subject of desire. Junggawon, the background of the drama, can be interpreted as a projection of the neoloberalism society rather than family space. And this space produces the image of the men who feel humiliated. The conflict based on the ruling order which was considered as a common fact broadens conflict of an individual to the public sphere and calls the matters of society. At first, the revenge of Kim In-sook is on the fast track, but eventually it ends with the event of ‘the missing(absence) of the heroine.’An open text like this gets rid of the utopian fantasy which most of the viewers want from TV dramas. It suggests the new chance through the character ‘Cho Hyun-jin’, who grows up throughout the drama. Although <Royal Family> directly calls the matter of the ‘dignity of man’using nonperson, the heroine represents the way of the capitalism order in an attempt to succeed in her revenge. The ‘proof of man’ that Kim In-sook wanted to achieve might succeed externally, but could fail in terms of the proof of the dignity of man. Nontheless, The revenge is meaningful because it suggest the fact that ‘the dignity of man cannot be destroyed’ even in the deep-seated neoliberalism.

TV drama, conglomerate, convention, revenge, disdain, neoliberalism, dominating ideology, hospitality