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Homosexuality in the TV Drama : on Beautiful Life

CHO SEO YOUN 1

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ABSTRACT

Beautiful Life is notable as the first TV family drama to deal openly with homosexuality. This essay analyzes the exceptional phenomenon of Beautiful Life, namely that it successfully achieves the objectives of its genre despite the fact that it deals with sexual minorities. As the TV family drama is oriented towards embodying the values of the harmonious family, faithfully maintaining everyday and conservative sensibilities, it is difficult to tackle socially and ethically controversial material such as homosexuality. In order to create a narrative that comfortably tolerates homosexual characters within these limitations, Beautiful Life must successfully build, over the course of its broadcast, a gradual foundation for assimilating the audience to the values and worldview of the family portrayed in the drama. Beautiful Life, unlike other TV dramas dealing with homosexuality, characterizes the homosexual not as an isolated metropolitan individual but as the eldest son of an extended family living together on Jeju Island, and draws parallels with the heterosexual marriage narratives of other family members through the introduction of a marriage theme for the character. These provisions lead to the cognition that homosexuality is not a burden for the eccentric and abnormal individual but rather an issue to be shared with the whole family, and that a natural acceptance of the homosexual family member is best for the harmonious survival of the family portrayed. In addition, Beautiful Life creates and sustains a certain specific emotion through the repeated use of metaphor in dialogues about the homosexual character, and also through highly contrastive visual and audio direction in situations dealing with the said character. These features function as strategies for the gradual relief of any antagonism towards seeing portrayals of homosexuality in TV dramas and for an affective acceptance of the existence of the homosexual character. In sum, the theme of homosexuality and the TV family drama genre do not clash, but rather work together in Beautiful Life. The drama ultimately places the two homosexual characters in the roles of 'our poor son' and 'son's husband'. Although this may be a limitation in terms of gender politics, it is a clear achievement of Beautiful Life that it does away with the fixed idea of a tragic destiny for the homosexual, which had inhibited previous dramas.

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