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The Relationship between Reproduction and Reality based on the Layers of Records in An Old Lady—How Can a ‘Lumped’ Old Lady be Reproduced?

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2022, 28(1), pp.33-70
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2022.28.1.002
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : December 30, 2021
  • Accepted : February 10, 2022
  • Published : February 28, 2022

Jang Key Young 1

1연세대학교(미래캠퍼스) 근대한국학연구소

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This study set out to analyze An Old Lady with a focus on the motif of “records.” This film overcomes the typicality of an old lady. The study examined meanings connoted in this change and the reaction phenomenon according to the change. The film shows a “record” three times including a complaint, report letter, and memoirs with no name and title. These records make an important motif to overcome passive typicality that was repeated in the description of female characters in old age. In An Old Lady, an old lady is reproduced with this motif, becoming a subject “with a name” instead of others “put together.” Interestingly, the character’s “records” as an act she performs make viewers reflect on the characteristics of the film as a medium and also the significance of vicious comments for the film. As a “feature film,” An Old Lady points out that legal and institutional languages can nullify the possibility of existence itself. The victim from the real event that the film is based on and the main character can have their own narratives in the forms of “will” and “memoirs” instead of official records. Their self-speech points to the error of institutional language to measure and question a fact only with objective grammar. The study also categorized and examined vicious comments on the online rating platform for the movie, discussing prominently repeated types, which derived from the mechanism of tautology to reproduce only a known world. Discussing existence in the evaluation area of reproduction is interconnected to the deficiency phenomenon of their reading. Irony is found in their writing as they “rate without watching” while talking about “not watching the movie.” Their rating “exists in a state that cannot exist.” An examination of the implications of An Old Lady in and outside the film helps to read the reason of “deficiency in writing/reading acts” deeply introduced in recent cultural phenomena and also the fact that “reproduction of others” is not a synonym with “otherization.”

Citation status

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