Table Of ContentKate Marshall and Loren Glass, Editors Post•45 Group, Editorial
Committee
Vicious Circuits
Korea’s IMF Cinema and the End of the American
Century
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Stanford, California
©2019 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All
rights reserved.
An early version of Chapter 1 appeared as “Memories of Memories: Historicity,
Nostalgia, and Archive in Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder,” Cinema
Journal 51, no. 1 (2011): 75–95. Copyright © 2011 by the University of Texas
Press. All rights reserved.
An early version of a part of Chapter 2 appeared as “Residual Selves: Trauma
and Forgetting in Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy,” positions 17, no. 3 (2009): 713–
40.
A version of Chapter 5 was published as “Neoliberal Forms: CGI, Algorithm,
and US Hegemony in Korea’s IMF Cinema,” Representations 126, no. 1
(2014): 85–111.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission
of Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun, 1971- author.
Title: Vicious circuits : Korea's IMF cinema and the end of the American
century /
Joseph Jonghyun Jeon.
Other titles: Post 45.
Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2019. | Series:
Post 45 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN
2018022960 | ISBN 9781503606692 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN
9781503608450 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503608467 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Economics in motion pictures. | Motion pictures—Korea
(South)—History. | Motion picture industry—Korea (South)—History. | Korea
(South)—Civilization—American influences.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.E27 J46 2019 | DDC 791.43/6553—dc23 LC
record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018022960
Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10/15 Minion Pro
Cover design by Angela Moody
Cover photograph from MacArthur Memorial and Archives
for Youngmin
Contents
Acknowledgments
A Note on Romanization
Introduction: Revenge Circulates. Empires End.
1. Concrete Memories: Historiography, Nostalgia, and Archive in
Memories of Murder
2. Company Men: Salarymen and Corporate Gangsters in Oldboy
and A Bittersweet Life
3. Segyehwa Punk: Subsistence Faming and Human Capital in
Looking for Bruce Lee
4. The Surface of Finance: Digital Touching in Take Care of My Cat
5. Math Monsters: CGI, Algorithm, and Hegemony in The Host,
HERs, and D-War
6. Wire Aesthetics: Tube Entertainment’s Flops and Hegemonic
Protocols
Coda: Hegemonic Pork
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
This is a book about a crisis that creates conditions under which
further crises become inevitable. Such malevolent inertia has come
to define the contemporary moment in even wider vistas than are
explored in this study. In times like these our care networks become
ever more crucial, so I am particularly grateful to all those that
provided guidance, interlocution, and camaraderie as I worked
through this project. I thank my colleagues at the University of
California–Irvine, Pomona College, and the Claremont Colleges,
especially Aimee Bahng, Kevin Dettmar, Chris Fan, Richard Godden,
Sharon Goto, Oren Izenberg, Kyung Hyun Kim, Jordan Kirk, Aaron
Kunin, Jerry Lee, Jim Lee, Julia Lee, Jonathan Lethem, Warren Liu,
Ted Martin, Annie McClanahan, Radha Radhakrishnan, Colleen
Rosenfeld, Jim Steintrager, Michael Szalay, Mayumi Takada, Kyla
Tompkins, and Kathy Yep.
I am also grateful to the many people who read and offered
feedback for parts of this book, exchanged work, and otherwise
helped to shape this project, including Lauren Berlant, Chris Berry,
Sara Blair, Dan Blanton, Sarah Brouillette, Jason Oliver Chang, John
Cheng, Ke-young Chu, Seo-young Chu, Joshua Clover, J. D.
Connor, Zara Dinnen, Florence Dore, Jamie Doucette, Sarah Evans,
Gloria Fisk, Mark Goble, Yogita Goyal, Sean Grattan, Dan Grausam,
Matt Hart, Andrew Hoberek, Hsuan Hsu, Tung-Hui Hu, Aaron Jaffe,
Mark Jerng, Susan Kang, Jinah Kim, Se Young Kim, Sonja Kim,
Yoonkyung Lee, Yoon Sun Lee, Michael LeMahieu, Andrew Leong,
Colleen Lye, Eunha Na, Viet Nguyen, Justus Nieland, Peter Paik,
Crystal Parikh, Albert Park, Hyungji Park, Josephine Park, Ignacio
Sánchez Prado, Kent Puckett, Anthony Reed, Margaret Rhee,
Haerin Shin, Min Hyoung Song, Leif Sorensen, Erin Suzuki, Amy
Tang, Chris Taylor, Charles Tung, Keith Wagner, Benjamin Widiss,
Cindy Wu, Ji-Yeon Yuh, and Nan Za. I would also like to thank my
students at Pomona College, where I taught this material, especially
James Doernberg, Henry Jenkins, and Timothy Reynolds.
This work was supported by the Academy of Korean Studies Grant
(AKS-2012-R00). I was also fortunate to receive a Fulbright
Research Fellowship in Seoul for 2016–17. Special thanks go to
Moonim Baek, who sponsored me at Yonsei University during that
year, and to Director Jai Ok Shim and her staff at the Fulbright
Korean-American Educational Commission, who were all incredibly
gracious. I also received a Hirsch Research Initiation Grant in 2014
at Pomona College, for which I am grateful. I am thankful to have
been given the opportunity to lecture on various parts of this study,
and I thank the audiences at those institutions and especially the
people that invited me: Robert Ku at SUNY Binghamton, Jennifer
Fay at Vanderbilt, Kevin Smith at UC Davis, Hyun Seon Park at
Yonsei, and Stephen Angle at Wesleyan.
I thank Kate Marshall and Loren Glass, the editors of the P•45
series, for championing this book. Emily-Jane Cohen, Faith Wilson
Stein, and Jessica Ling have been incredibly supportive during the
process. My anonymous reviewers performed extraordinarily
attentive readings, which helped improve the manuscript
tremendously. I am also grateful to my copy editor Joe Abbott for his
careful treatment of my work.
My family has been my primary source of support over the years.
Christina Cha remains my kid sister, despite the fact that she aged
out of that category long ago. My father, Sang Joong Jeon, has
always been a model of principle and decorum, and my mother,
Chung Ja Jeon, is my model for courage. I thank Jun-Seok Choe
and Soon-Nyu Choe for all of the great food and good cheer on our
summer trips to their home in Korea. To my daughter, Isobel, thank
you for all the happiness you bring me every day. I really love being
your dad. Try not to grow up too fast. Finally, this book is dedicated
to Youngmin Choe, who has read each iteration of each part of this
project as it moved clumsily from a series of conference papers to
articles to chapters. But more than the enormous amount of
feedback and dialogue without which this book would just not exist,
thank you for all your love and care. Our life together, our family, is
the best thing I have going.
