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Re-reading Korean Movies in the 80s - A Book Review of The Secret Attractiveness of Ero-Banghwa: The Progressive Ambivalence of Korean Popular Films in the 1980s

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2025, 31(1), pp.633~657
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 10, 2025
  • Accepted : February 18, 2025
  • Published : February 28, 2025

PARK JIN-HEE 1

1중앙대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article explains how the author conceptualizes Ero-Banghwa and what various connections the genre of Ero-Banghwa has, and as a result, I aim to consider how useful the term Ero-Banghwa is in rebuilding the position of Korean films in the 1980s. One of the dominant impressions of Korean films in the 1980s from a general perspective is that it was the era of ero-movie, represented by The Ae-ma Woman. What The Ae-ma Woman evokes is not just the genre of ero-movie, but also film culture of that era itself. The era of the new military regime, which began with a massive oppression against citizens, was an era of coercion, oppression, and violence. Korean films, which faced the worst recession in history amid the mass spread of color TV at home, survived through small theaters and video rental stores. Korean films, which were produced and screened in this situation, were in a more poor position than ever. For this reason, ero-movies that dominated this period have often been treated as if they were the products of the 3S(Screen, Sex, Sport) policy. Lee Yun-jong's book, The Secret Attractiveness of Ero-Banghwa: The Progressive Ambivalence of Korean Popular Films in the 1980s, shows an attempt to crack this general and simple understanding of Korean films in the 1980s and rebuild the position of commercial films produced in the 1980s, especially Korean films, which can be called Ero-Banghwa, into texts with progressive values that reveal critical perceptions of Korean society. In particular, this article reviews how the author analyzes The Ae-ma Woman and Between the Knees which are representative Ero-Banghwa of the 1980s, which put women's sexuality to the forefront. The two films show that the sexual desire of the main female protagonist and the process of its resolution are working on a very social level, not an individual level. In conservative Korean society in the 1980s, their sexual adventures are understandably frustrated or failed. However, I can say that the adventures of these two protagonists, at least in the last scene, suggest another beginning, and this intersection of progressive and degenerativeness can be said to be the classic examples of Ero-Banghwa, which the author claims. In this process, it was also possible to hypothesize that Ero-Banghwa, which begins with The Ae-ma Woman, began the genealogy of a kind of spectacle film that can be called “pictorial turn” in Korea, just like the large-scale visual transformation of popular culture in the United States in the 1980s, which is the greatest virtue of this book that derives the need for more research on Korean films in the 1980s.

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