KJCKorea
Journal Central

The film Concrete Utopia achieved box office success and gained contemporary public acclaim, demonstrating the commercial potential of the post-apocalyptic film genre. This paper examines what the 'future' dystopia depicted in Concrete Utopia signifies. Concrete Utopia presents a cultural politics of an uncanny utopia through its genre, narrative time, and arrangement of cinematic apparatus. This is primarily centered around three temporalities: the temporality of screen media, the symbolic temporality of the child, and the temporality of flashbacks. Each of these times is divided into the present/near future, the time of screen media where documentary and SF are indistinguishable, the absence of children as symbols of the future, and flashbacks lacking a past to return to, respectively representing the present, future, and past. Screen media, beginning with the history of apartments and showing the ruined present, demonstrates the perpetuity of the fetishism towards 'apartments'. In the ruined present, children, who symbolize the future of reproduction, are absent. Concrete Utopia sutures the place of 'child salvation', a convention of the post-apocalyptic genre, with the reality of low birth rates, signifying the impossibility of imagining a long-term future in South Korea. Not only the symbolism of children but also the convention of flashbacks reinforces the persistence of desire for 'apartments'. If capitalism is a system that operates on the premise of an imagined future as a fictional construct, then the desire for 'apartments' itself can be said to be a fictional construct driving South Korean capitalism. This paper is significant in revealing the affective structure of post-apocalyptic genre visual media currently resonating with the public, and in analyzing the cinematic expression of 'future' in the here and now.

Concrete Utopia, Post-apocalyptic Film Genre, SF films, Disaster Films, Future, Flashback