Surrealistic Science Fiction in South Korean Film and Fiction
In the years following the Korean War (1950–1953), writers like Choi In-hun sought to chart new space to think beyond the national borders. In The Nine Cloud Dream (Kuunmong; 1961), for example, which takes its title after Kim Manjung’s 17th-century fantasy novel about the illusionary nature of perceived reality, Choi experiments with surreal dream spaces of repetition where competing radio broadcasts between the militarized state and the revolutionaries flood the labyrinthine streets, blurring the contours of reality and truth. Choi later turned to alternate history novels such as The Governor-General’s Voice (Ch’ongdok ŭi sori; 1967–1968) and Typhoon (T’aep’ung; 1972). Reminiscent of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender and his disembodied voice, the former is a four-part radio broadcast by an ex-governor of colonial Korea addressing the underground network of Japanese in liberated Korea who are plotting to take back their past colony. Typhoon, on the other hand, critically re-imagines the late colonial period, especially in relation to the international vision of anti-imperialist Third World alliance. In different ways, both novels revisit the colonial period and its ramifications, and they both critique President Park Chung-hee’s authoritarian developmentalist regime by shifting the focus to the urgency of decolonization.
While Choi’s nonalignment novels imagine decolonization both within and beyond national borders, Cho Se-hŭi’s A Little Ball Launched by the Dwarf (Nanjangi ka ssoa ollin chagŭn kong; 1978) documents the lives of those marginalized in South Korea during the tail end of the Park regime [Fig. 4-1]. In a dystopian folktale-like narrative that alternates between different perspectives and temporalities, Cho’s work tells a story of the protagonists—a dwarf and his three children—who face eviction due to the state’s plans for gentrification. The displacement drives the characters out from the parameters of reality, and the dwarf dreams of leaving Earth to live on the moon. Cho’s work relies on sf tropes such as space travel, alien life beyond Earth, and the hyper-industrialization of a “City of Machines” (S. Park, 177–179). In doing so, the novel offers up a new vocabulary for the proletarian characters to express their sense of alienation and homelessness.
Although its pulse can be felt in these earlier decades, surrealistic sf exploded after the 1987 political democratization amid the new wave of computer technology. For example, Song Kyŏng’a’s “The Book” (“Ch’aek”; 1996) recounts a story of a young woman whose dead mother returns home in the form of a book. In a Borgesian aesthetic, the book keeps expanding, adding new chapters on previously unknown episodes of the mother’s life all the while erasing pages as soon as they are read. Eventually, the mother-book evolves from words into action, helping around the house by cooking and cleaning. This sf transformation seeps into the personal and domestic sphere and asks new questions about the ways of being in a world of computer technology where the borderline between the real and the virtual blurs. Contrarily, Song’s short story “Elevator” (“Ellibeit’ŏ”; 1998) tells a darker tale about a fantastical and allegorical elevator that endlessly descends into an abyss. Inside the elevator, characters of all ages surrender themselves to lust and their basic instincts. The elevator eventually crashes and kills everyone on board. From the debris, corpses (corpse 1, corpse 2, corpse 3, etc.) put themselves together limb by limb and climb the stairs to do it all over again; the elevator restores itself and is pulled back up into the unknown.
Park Min-gyu’s short story collection Castella (K’asŭt’era, 2005) was one of the key works of surrealistic sf in the so-called post-IMF era—the years following the 1997 Asian financial crisis [Fig. 4-2]. The title story, “Castella,” extends Song’s Borgesian preoccupation with everyday technologies such as the elevator—or in Park’s case, a refrigerator—as the site for fantastical imagination. The protagonist, a college student, hears a strange noise in his fridge and tries to fix it. After some research, he comes to appreciate the crucial role that the fridge has played in human history by preserving food from rotting, which in effect has contributed to the survival of humankind. He concludes that the whole world may indeed be rotting, at which point he begins shoving things into the surreal refrigerator—from his father to his school to the printing press to the United States and China. Ultimately, the fridge becomes a world of its own, but he notices the next morning that the appliance has gone silent and is empty—all but a rectangular castella cake. Another story in the collection “Is That So? I’m a Giraffe” (“Kŭrŏssŭmnikka? Kirin imnida”; 2004) depicts the everyday life in the post-IMF era. The protagonist, a student in a vocational high school who works multiple part-time jobs, dreams of leaving for Mars and ponders on the sad and bizarre montage of humanity. After seeing his father dispirited at work, he takes on a new job as a pushman, or a passenger pusher, for the rush-hour subway. As the situation at his father’s company worsens, the protagonist’s father disappears only to turn up much later on the subway as a giraffe dressed in a suit. The story takes on the tone and form of surreality through intersubjective dreams and the way the protagonist blends everyday life with animal and planetary juxtapositions. Finally, Park’s short story “Roadkill” (“Rodŭk’il”; 2011) imagines a future where corporate mega-state of “Asia” is demarcated from the poor regions to which surplus laborers are banished. The protagonists are two robot border guards named Maksi/Mao and a young man who desperately tries to cross the border into Asia with his girlfriend and their newborn baby. Told in a fragmented, dream-like style, the story foregrounds the haunting reality of the human condition beyond the borders of Asia by likening their life-or-death escape to that of a roadkill. Taken together, these stories exemplify the diverse ways in which Park explores the terrain of traditional sf through poetic regeneration of absurdity and posthuman fantasy.
Along with Song and Park, Kim Young-ha too has experimented with sf during the post-democratization era. His novel Quiz Show (K’wijŭ syo; 2007) follows Minsu, an unemployed young man just out of graduate school [Fig. 4-3]. In order to pay off the debt his grandmother left behind, he sells the house and ends up living in a small, windowless apartment (kosiwŏn). The only thing that gives him solace is the online chat room where a quiz show is hosted daily. Soon, Minsu is pulled into a surrealistic quiz show boot camp, which serves as an allegory for the Internet—a space detached from everyday life but still tangibly real (Shin, 272). The boot camp is likened by one of the characters to the experience of dreaming in that the body remains still while the mind wanders through the mediated reality of the simulation. Throughout the novel, Kim effectively explores the strange, fantastical space in which people, and especially those enduring socio-economic hardships, find refuge from the crumbling scaffolding of reality.
The struggling, unemployed youths whom we encounter in Park’s and Kim’s works also appear in the film Collective Invention (Toryŏnbyŏni; 2015), written and directed by Kwŏn Oh-kwang [Fig. 4-4]. The film is a black comedy about Pak Gu, a cash-strapped young man who participates in a trial experiment for a new drug that transforms him into half-man, half-fish. Pak’s predicament goes viral all over the media, and everyone around him seeks to capitalize on his overnight fame. The Kafkaesque metamorphosis pays direct homage to René Magritte’s 1934 painting of the same title. By deploying this surrealistic image, the film offers a scathing reflection on inequality and class disparity, the sensationalism of news media, and the difficulty of finding happiness in contemporary South Korea.
As can be seen through these examples, surrealistic sf often gestures to the uncanny sense of estrangement born out of the oppressive forms of everyday life. It presents the strangeness of the quotidian in order to interrogate the assumptions of our lived reality and rethink what it might mean to be human in today’s technologized world. On the fringes of normativity, surrealistic sf serves as breathing space through which one can dream of an alternate, more hospitable future.