DISQUS

Yeah, definitely there are cultural factors. (Which may exist in other Northeast Asian countries, but I know firsthand in Korean culture they exist.) Drinking especially is a major part of socializing here, is a major part of smoothing over workplace disagreements (among men: women tend to just cooperate on the work more carefully), and the drinking culture here is geared toward excess, to forced drinking-as-bonding, and to required drinking outings at work (to the point where companies that declare they will not hold forced drinking parties are seen as the unusual ones, though that is slowly changing). It's absolutely not unusual to see guys in suits completely drunk out on the sidewalk by 9 or 10 pm. And as a personal note, a medical intern I know had to fake an alcohol allergy to avoid being forced to drink by doctors on nights off (even on nights when she had early morning rounds or ER duty the next day. And needless to say, it usually affects one's grades, as an intern, or one's workplace status.)

A survey last summer by one of the major newspapers, I think it was, apparently found soju to be the main source of caloric intake for working men, (followed by sam gyeop sal and rice, in that order; for women, number one was instant coffee). I don't know how reliable the survey was, but...

Finally, an unmissable link would be the correlation between drinking and higher education here. College students form very strong bonds as freshmen -- social networks that outlast most other networks formed in University, according to some paper I read a while back. And guess which year of university is, as one Korean professor I know put it, "a drinking contest"? (There are reasons for it, of course; the fact that senior year of high school for any college-bound student is a single long gauntlet of study culminating in a college entrance exam means that freshmen year is almost guaranteed to be a time to goof off. But nonetheless, the fact is that freshmen year is when drinking habits -- usually excessive ones -- are not just picked up but enforced, with elder students getting the freshies druunk out of their gourds by insisting they have more and consume it quickly.)

I should note I'm not criticising. I'm just noting the fact. I'm actually kind of studying Korean drinking culture in relation to the Gin Craze in England, and there are a lot of parallels. If I were subject to the kinds of stresses and social pressures that many Korean guys are, I'd probably be right there with them with a bottle of soju in hand.

Oh, and on the smoking: it's widely thought that smoking habits are picked up during mandatory military service, if not before, because cigarettes are *dirt* cheap (and about the only form of consumption possible on the wages that conscripts get) and because, well, everyone else is smoking, so it becomes part of the culture of masculinity. (Links between military service and other elements of masculinity as coonceptualized in Korea these days are also noticeable, too.)

I'll crosspost my response to the above here, too:

Well, this is another thing we’ll just have to disagree about. I think there are plenty of things worth criticizing, but this isn’t one. But I appreciate you’re not the one who wrote about it, and I shouldn’t have implied you did.

It’s unfortunate they were unwilling to talk with you, were more interested in photo-ops, and I’m sorry I underestimated your willingness to engage. That is sad, really, and I agree it’s not cool.

That said, I think I’m not really bending over backwards to “justify” this: if you can show me where there’s a shred of anarchist thought presented as such (and not just as vehement liberalism) in the film, I might change my mind, but I’ve watched it a few times and taught it to a large class and I’m telling you — it’s not present enough for people to get, not even my students who are generally pretty aware of Western culture compared to your average kid their age. But the anarchism theme is relatively absent, especially here in Korea, where for most “normal” people the political spectrum is “democracy” vs. “communist.” I mean, what are you gonna do?

In fact, when the V-related buzz started — well more than a month ago, because I discussed this with someone about a month ago this Friday — I immediately thought, “Aha, they’re riffing on the protest scene,” which, at least on the Korean 2-disc edition, is right on the front cover. It was a given for me that the anarchist element wasn’t even a consideration here. Maybe that comes from having taught it and knowing how unlikely people were to know that the theme existed in the book (but not the movie).

So, I think you’ve overestimated how your chat with these people has colored my understanding: I wouldn’t have “totally misunderstood their message” because, frankly, I’d figured out their intended message and their apparent reasoning with the choice of character long before you talked to them, when this trope emerged online back in mid-May, and the discussion focused on the huge citizen uprising that is portrayed in the film, and not on the violence of the titular character or his (original) politics.

And no, it’s not — ever — cool for Koreans to misappropriate Nazi imagery, any more than it is for us to slap the Japanese empire’s symbol on our stuff… which we still sometimes do. But no, it’s not cool, of course not. But if you don’t see that this is apples and oranges…

Frankly, lots of Americans took the film as intended that way, too. Cuccu, the poster after you [on my site], is an American who hasn’t read the book — and an intelligent one — and she didn’t know that V originally was about anarchism vs. fascism.

I don’t think scattered mentions of anarchism in blogs and film reviews is going to trump the reading the film itself elicits, which is a fantasy-narrative about how the liberal masses have sat around at home too long and let the conservatives take over, and now it’s time to take the nation back. With no translation of the book, what else do you expect people to take the movie as?

Maybe Japanese pidgin English is cooler, though I’m not sure how this contributes to the discussion. Maybe Japanese youth are more hip in the way they appropriate Western culture. (Though, I’ll note, that some very popular Japanese SF film (of the live-action sort) is a lot less sophisticated than one might imagine. How they took the superhero trope and got Ultraman — and kept making Ultraman the same way up to now — is beyond me.)

I find Korean ethnocentrism repugnant too, but I hardly think this is a case of it.

I do think it’s useful to set aside the postcolonial literary theory lingo and talk about the difference between “misappropriation” and reception.

Like, for example, how Western critics of Godzilla have routinely argued that it’s all about fears of nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the like. Only recently, I ran across a paper published not long ago that said, essentially, “Er, guys… there’s a little survivor’s guilt mixed in there too, how could we have missed this?” But this is something that was largely missed by Western viewers, who went on to create movies like Them.

So things that might be obvious to one set of viewers are not obvious to other ones. When they take up those symbols for their own use, we can expect some disconnect.

I’d wager when Koreans watched the original TV miniseries V, which was aired during earlier protests a couple of decades ago, I doubt that the whole Nazi-Jew allegory resonated as strongly for them as did the whole “colonized by aliens” thing. I’d like to look into how much people received it as a story about Japanese (or ostensible American) colonization, but I haven’t found any resources on that yet.

One last thing: I thought the Summer of Love was full of hippies — in October of that year they even held a funeral for the Death of the Hippies, so they referred to it that way themselves. Now I’m less sure I understand your esteem of the Summer of Love, since it essentially mainstreamed the bohemian culture that by the end of that summer was known as hippiedom; and anyway, my point was that cosplay was a part of the Summer of Love.

Last thing: the anarchism symbol usually has a cross-bar, like an A. The V sign doesn’t, although the graphic designer of the title in Korean cleverly made the ? on the phrase ?? ? ??? look like an inverted A. So while the graphic designer was probably familiar with the symbol — and it would be unfair to claim Koreans don’t know the Anarchy sign, therefore — I do think it’s understandable that someone would read the V sign as the film presents it — V symbolizing all kinds of things (violence, vigilatism, vision, the number 5, as well as Evey), but most prominently Victory. Maybe Korea’s a backwater and the kids don’t read enough English comic books (or well-translated ones) like in Japan. I don’t see how that’s an excuse to start throwing around words like “ethnocentric cultural misappropriation” unless we’re to dilute that word to the point where it means nothing but “misunderstanding” something.

But it does suck that they were such lamers and not interested in talking with you.

*****

Addition: at least we agree that hippies suck! :)

GI Korea,

The discussion seems to have continued here, though Rob also had a reply on his site. Heavily distributed thread!

As I noted, I don't think the popular reception of the film in the anglophone world imputes much anarchist thought in the movie, either. There are discussions of whether the movie was anti-American, anti-Christian, pro-terrorism, and so on. But as I noted, only 2.5% of discussions in English even mention anarchism.

I agree that the average person was ready to move on once the beef issue was renegotiated, and I think the people who pushed the protests for longer miscalculated how long the interest in just protesting everyday would hold out. I talked to people on Saturday who claimed that the masses would keep coming out till 2MB was impeached, though others were quick to contradict them.

The real problem, which Scott pointed out, is that the left had no agenda (at least after the renegotiation occurred) and that they need to articulate one.

And while I agree it'd be nice if people could just write to their CongressCritters here, as they can in the US, but I think we both know that Korean CongressCritters aren't as likely to respond to letters. It's how longstanding, established democracies work, yes, but I doubt American democracy worked that way 21 years in, either. And that's a nuance I think the Obama comparison misses, though I would agree that Christian conservatives shutting down the government would probably be a bad thing.

Then again, I imagine Obama would actually manage things better early on, instead of relying on spin and other aggravating retorts like, "I'm the most powerful man in the country!"

As for the beef, well, as I've said, it's become obvious the protests are also about more than that... except for those for whom it's all beef and nothing else. In other words, it's a jumbled bloody mess. But they're planning for it to cool off into weekends only, which will be a boon to many of the businesses in the Gwanghwamun area. My favorite sushi joint was, I'm pretty sure, locked out of customers (who didn't want to walk an extra mile to get to the restaurant for dinner) for weeks!

I crossposted the above at my site. We can continue there or here, in case GI Korea doesn't want the thread to be hijacked by this one subtopic.

Apologies, this rambles a bit.

First off, I find it hilarious that one might call the use of costumes in a protest movement "retarded," consider its long history. For example, "retarded cosplay" figured in none other than protests of the Vietnam war, and after all, the hippies you think so highly of also followed a rather ornate set of costume codes during the Summer of Love; on one level, it could easily be seen as having involved a rather large exhibit of "cosplay." Does that make the Summer of Love "nothing serious" and "retarded" too?

But there's a more interesting example in the Luddites. They made extensive use of cross-dressing, somehow not mentioned in Wikipedia at all, though you can see on the image on the main Wikipedia page that the image of Nedd Ludd is of a man in a dress. They did it for a simple reason, which was that violence would be much less likely used on women than on men, as well as to effect a kind of disguise. This kind of thing isn't even limited to the twentieth century, either: the Luddites and Saboteurs were famous cross-dressers, for the same reasons. And -- realistic or not -- the fears that were expressed online in discussions of how authorities might respond to the protests, such as for example agents provocateurs starting fights among protesters, were oddly reminiscent of the same fears nineteenth-century Luddites.

And also note: I'm not saying the protesters are the same as the Luddites. The Luddites had a pretty clear goal in mind and seemed to be fighting for a clear agenda... sort of. (Though there's scholarship that suggests it was a different agenda than we commonly think, thanks to anti-Luddite propaganda, so even there there's some confusion.) The lack of clarity here is something I've criticized myself, in my comment responding to you, and people I talked about it with on Saturday mostly agreed. But masks and disguises and costumes have long been a part of protest movements -- including some that you hold in high esteem -- so mocking it here as "retarded" and mere "cosplay" seems unfair.

As for intellectual laziness and not reading movie reviews, I understand your exasperation, but you seem to be overlooking the fact that the movie was not the comic book, and that plenty of people -- not just lazy ones -- don't read movie reviews or blogs about the films they see -- especially the ones they liked or that resonated for them. We can go around denouncing them as ignorant and ethnocentric, or instead, and this is likely to be more useful in figuring out what they did and why, we can ask ourselves why they chose to take up that symbol despite their not being anarchists themselves.

One useful starting point is the fact that anarchism was almost completely excised from the movie: most of the English-language critics who mentioned it were mentioning its absence from the film, and any Korean critic who did otherwise, even in Cine21, was undoubtedly just trying to show off that he or she had read the Wikipedia entry on the book, because dude, seriously; that movie is not about anarchism. In any way, shape, or form. It all but screams for an American-liberal reading.

And by the way, before you dismiss that observation, and before you get too comfortable with the idea I'm patronizing Koreans here, I'd like to point out that the English-speaking internet has largely much missed out on the connection too. If you Google (English-language webpages only, to ensure we catch all the references to anarchy in English) for "V for Vendetta" you'll find close to 4 million hits. Then add "anarch*" (a wildcard that will include anarchy, anarchist, anarchic, anarchism, etc.) to the search and it drops down to just a bit over a hundred thousand mentions.

When you calculate it all out, it appears that approximately 2.5% of English-language discussions of V for Vendetta make any mention of anarchism or anarchist thought... in other words, the majority of Anglophones discussing the film online -- Anglophones who have the leisure of reading book reviews and even of going out and reading the original comic book in their own language -- are also guilty of "ethnocentric cultural misappropriation," or, er... no, that would sound silly, wouldn't it?

Yes, it would, because after all, as I imagine you know, this is precisely how popular cultures work. Figures morph and transform over time, and their treatments by later derivative artists -- especially in film! -- change their popularly understood meanings. These days when we think of Superman, we think of him fighting "crime" or taking on an insane military-industrial-science complex (as often personified by Lex Luthor); that is, as an extension of the justice system or the state. Most of us don't think of old Superman as a raging fighter for the rights of the working poor, though in the early days of the comic, he often fought villains like slumlords, corrupt state orphanage administrators, and crooked bosses. Most people don't remember that in Korea and America alike.

And perhaps you have missed the discussions of V online in English, but there was actually a lot of disappointment expressed (by those who knew and loved the book) at how little of the original intellectual/anarchist basis remained. This is one of the reasons Alan Moore himself hated the film and distanced himself from it: he noted that is actually recast the original political conflict in the book -- fascism versus anarchism -- as something else -- American neoconservativism versus American liberalism. So, really, even Moore thinks the movie is in itself an American-liberal tirade against American neo-conservativism. How can we fault Koreans for correctly seeing that in the film?

Then we factor in the subtitling -- where detail and nuance is always lost -- and lack of access to the comic book, and what we get is a liberal fantasy narrative about citizens rising up against a neocon government. In other words, the protesters used the symbols you saw with pretty much direct continuity to their use in the film. Yes, there is a level of utopian fantasy here. That, too, should be familiar from earlier protests movements, including ones you esteem highly.

But basically, it seems to me they were using liberal icons as a protest against conservativism that they perceive as aligned with American neoconservativism.

Which is, I imagine, what they would have told you, had you asked them why they'd taken those symbols up. Perhaps in not so many words, because it would be obvious to them, and puzzling that you would ask about something that seems unrelated to the film. But it seems important to me to know -- and I don't mean to be nasty here, but I think this is a valid question:

Once you discovered that they hadn't been aware of the anarchist trope in V for Vendetta, and once you established that they didn't know the V-sign was an inverted anarchy sign...

Did you ask them why on earth they decided to use the symbol and mask? Or did you just decide they'd misunderstood everything and were idiots, and walk away?

I don't know, what you've written seems like a really, really cheap shot, and I think there are much better places to aim those strong uppercuts and jabs of yours.

I also think Martin makes a good point. There's a rush to make this or that representative. The organizers are out of touch, so everyone involved is out of touch. There are some ajeoshis buying beef, so all of Korea will buy beef.

I will note that a couple of million people tuned in on live webTV broadcasts of the protests at the height of this thing. That's almost one out of every twelve or thirteen people in Seoul. (Assuming those tuning in were concentrated in Seoul, that is.)

And finally, Agora discussions have been tending to push for weekly, rather than daily, demonstrations for a while now. I hardly think two months straight of demonstrations coming to an end qualifies us to start throwing "tin pot" around. How many North Americans would show up for two months straight for an issue we might consider loftier -- like, say, prosecuting for illegal wiretaps, or fighting the abandonment of habeas corpus for "suspected" terrorists?

Well, I don't want to defend everything about the protests, even if I am being perceived as the main sympathizer among the foreign bloggers, but I will note as I did on Roboseyo's page:

I'm not so surprised that the protesters didn't know so much about V for Vendetta -- having done a weeks-long analysis of the graphic novel and movie with one of my classes (a Pop Culture class, I think it was), I discovered that most of them, even after seeing the movie, didn't have the foggiest clue he was an "anarchist."

They'd mentally slotted him into a kind of "anti-dictator" category, and thus into the "good guy" side of things, and that was as far as it went for the film. When we looked closely at the graphic novel, which has a lot more criticism of the thorough corruption that exists throughout V's society (oppressor and oppressed being often roles played by the same people), and looked more at the texts and other stuff that are, in the graphic novel, explicitly (bang you over the head with it explicitly) referenced, and which a reasonably aware Westerner would get right away, they started to get it, but then they were confused, because "anarchists are bad" and V was, er, mostly not bad.

So the cultural reception of V here seems to have been more as an anti-dictator vigilante superhero, and not so much as an anarchist... which is understandable, given the way a lot of the explicit references to anarchism are stripped from the film.

(And as far as I can find online, there's no translation of the graphic novel available in Korean. Maybe some of those who're so critical should work on a translation, if they want people to know the whole story of V?)

This is, by the way, rather par for the course in terms of the Korean reception of foreign pop culture tropes, but especially in genre (sf/fantasy) films. Most Koreans I know, even those who've read The Lord of the Rings, think of the elves primarily as cuties, not as tragic figures fleeing Middle Earth. They think of the dwarves as gruff and hilarious cutie-pies, too, not as vaguely inhuman greedy nuts who're on the edge of extincting themselves, but good to have on your side in a battle. And so it goes...

So anyway, whatever else we may wish to pick on, I don't know quite how fair it is to criticize people for using a symbol in the sense they (understandably) received it in from the film version, which is the only version realistically available to most of them. (Unless there is a Korean translation of the graphic novel, but as I say, I haven't found one yet. And I'm not surprised, given the political content.)

And by the way, I'm thinking seriously about this because I'm writing precisely about this in an article that's due... uh... oh my. At the end of the week!

Weirdly enough, I find that on my test blog, it's working perfectly EXCEPT for the using a excerpt as a teaser function. I have that option selected, but it's not showing up when I log out and visit the page.

(http://test.gordsellar.com)

Would you like me to install it on a testblog on my site with all the same plugins installed, so that this problem with messed up comments can be investigated? For the moment, just to let my site run like normal, I've had to disable the Postlevels plugin.

Sorry for the bad news and so on.

WordPress database error: [Lost connection to MySQL server during query]
SELECT * FROM eclx_comments WHERE comment_post_ID = '2951' AND comment_approved = '1' ORDER BY comment_date

Comment on this post below

Logged in as gordsellar. Logout »


You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.

WordPress database error: [MySQL server has gone away]
SELECT ID, post_title FROM (eclx_posts LEFT JOIN eclx_postmeta ON eclx_posts.ID = eclx_postmeta.post_id) WHERE post_date '2007-02-05 06:50:28' AND post_type = 'post' AND (eclx_posts.post_status = 'publish' OR (eclx_posts.post_status = 'private' AND (eclx_postmeta.meta_key = 'post_level' AND eclx_postmeta.meta_value

Somehow, it's messing up the handling of comments, or, at least, that's my guess. Thoughts? (I'll leave the messed-up page up so you can see it.)

Whoops, solved it myself. For the record, the old Attachfile plugin (of which there may be a new one, but since I don't use it anymore, it's toast) was having a conflict with the new PostLevels 1.1.

Take care, and thanks very much for the wonderful update!

Any idea what the plugin might be causing the weird effects I'm seeing on my sight right now, with the following error showing up in in the main posts area (as well as other stuff elsewhere):

WordPress database error: [Lost connection to MySQL server during query]
SELECT * FROM eclx_attached_files_meta WHERE post_id = 2961 ORDER BY file_name ASC

When I deactive Post Levels 1.1, it goes away. (But so do post levels.)

Think it's a plugin conflict? Maybe the Page Restriction Plugin? (I'm scared to fiddle since some of the code for that one is hardcoded into the template or something.)

One small note of disagreement, but only about the third thing you think he should do. Acocuntability for DPRK and strengthening the US-Korean alliance are good ideas, but I don't know about blanket endorsement of FTA with the US.

What I've read suggests that the FTA that exists in North America (NAFTA) hasn't actually had much tangible effect in improving the lives of Canadians. Our relative income has dropped, if you adjust for inflation, and this is despite major increases in productivity and even working hours. This is only according to a couple of sources, and only one on hand -- John Ralston Saul's Reflections of a Siamese Twin, a book about Canadian history, culture, and politics.

The rest of your post, I have no major objection to. But I doubt Roh will actually change his tune. That's such a dangerous thing to actually do, in politics, and risky. I suspect he'll leave those tasks to his successor, if he even conceives of them as necessary.

Also, you link to Nomad isn't a link to Nomad at all. You might wanna fix that. :)