Endorsing upper-class refinement or critiquing extravagance and debt? The rise of neoliberal genre modification in contemporary South Korean cinema

Abstract

Several socio-cultural outcomes of an elite nature are now attributable to neoliberalism and its various national incarnations: increased wealth concentration, debt of an extravagant nature, elevated status and the emulation of older aristocratic behaviour. This is unique to neoliberalism largely because of global media’s endorsements of such upper-class lifestyles found in advertising, television and now cinema. In this article, my analysis of neoliberal culture is specific to post-IMF South Korea (2001–2015), a country that now possesses one of the most concentrated forms of free market capitalism and one of the most stratified class systems because of it. Drawing on how corporate greed, self-aggrandisement and fashion acquisition – even conglomerate culture and financial transactions – become tropes in contemporary Korean cinema, I argue that these themes are capable, on the one hand, of displaying white-collar conformity, a nation seemingly comprised of smartly dressed entrepreneurs and service workers, whose corporate lifestyle innocently intersects with department store culture. On the other hand, there appears an underlying social and material degeneracy. The films discussed here – Monopoly, The Taste of Money, The Day He Arrives and My Black Mini Dress – fall into a neoliberal genre because they are in the service of clueing, reinforcing, and sometimes denouncing decadent Korean lifestyles. Some foster the status quo while others critique it; yet they embody the contradictions of neoliberalism to marketise culture while others contest such marketisation in their narratives. These films and many others articulate a neoliberal sociality, essential to understand placations and critiques of elite culture offered up in a body of cinematic work referred to here as ‘genres of neoliberalism’, borrowed from Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkins.