Love of K-Drama (Part 1)

Cultural politics and my snobbish self

I have been meaning to write this blog for some time now but kept postponing the moment. And why the hesitation? Because it was not on Hang Kang’s novels or Korean cinema but about K-Drama. I realized that the hesitation was me, my persona and what I considered myself to be. I am an avid reader, like seeing good films and reading about films, a fan of theatre and opera as also have a not so sophisticated interest in the celebrity lives of the stars (acquired during Corona lockdowns when our lives went online). In short I  am interested in all sorts of cultural offerings from across the world. All this seems okay but K-drama? It wasn’t a serious genre surely! What I am trying to say is that the snobbery surrounding my persona as a serious, elderly person seemed to be in jeopardy by becoming a fan of K-drama. 

 

And then I was introduced to a curated list of K-drama by a friend from India. My fascination grew as I began watching the serials. Even before this I was initiated into K-drama via the Culture page of The Guardian, for me a storehouse of information about books, films, theatres, interviews and news reports during lockdown. They wrote a review about the Netflix decision to invest in this genre as a good business proposition and suddenly our streaming screens were filled with K-drama. Sub-titled in every conceivable language (including Hindi), we could watch whether in Delhi or Amsterdam. It was here that I read about the ‘implausible’ tale (their take) of the K-drama Crash landing on you. I immediately looked it up and was hooked. And since then, I have indulged in daily evening sessions with a serial on the curated list and only discussed them with my friend who had suggested it to me. I watched alone, and on my computer, with headphones when others were present, almost as if it was a guilty secret. And even now, although a friend who made me part of his Netflix membership put it on my tv here in Germany, I prefer to watch the serials alone and in privacy and not with visiting friends. 

 

Another hesitation was the general reception among my friends here in Europe with whom I shared my growing fascination of K-drama which ranged from sceptical to dismissive. Can people act or is the acting all stylized and stilted? Do they talk about ordinary people meaning that if they don’t it was all rubbish. Are they realistic? Does it have any social impact? The most hostility was over Crash landing on You, one of my clear favourites, about a cross border relationship between north and south Korea. The comments about it by my politically correct, well-meaning liberal friends bristled with indignation that the situation in the north was being misrepresented; the north could only be depicted as a repressive society full of half-starved people under a cruel regime. So the only type of north Korean they were willing to accept was the oppressed men and women dying of starvation or the ruthless and cruel leaders which unfortunately, Captain Ri Jeong-hyeouk (the hero of Crash landing) was not. I worked my way through the dismissive tone, counteracted their criticism and mostly fell into the trap of defending K-drama. 

 

This tendency to explain ourselves especially when it is about something cultural haunts every interaction between the west and rest. If you are Indian, you fall for the trope of comparing and every single time the east seems quaint or objectionable falling short of the norm which is the west. And when in India friends use the same comparative game to reassure themselves of their cultural superiority, I feel duty bound to rise to the defence since Europe is also home. So a major hurdle to overcoming my hesitation was to step gingerly through the minefield of cultural politics. I embraced my Hindi movie going self and prepared to be introduced to representations and imagery, cinematic traditions, visuals, and romance that were very different and yet so familiar. After all despite the snobbishness I attached to my persona, I have been known to drag my friends to Hindi movie blockbusters for the love of Shah Rukh Khan, most recently to Pathan, and recently Jawan. 

 

K-drama: an appreciative Inquiry (!)

Appreciative Inquiry is an approach to evaluation in the social sciences focusing on strengths rather than on weaknesses in which realities are viewed as socially constructed. This opens up the possibility of seeing multiple realities as opposed to reality only as singular, out there, and fixed.

 

I am astounded by the sheer variety of the offerings in terms of themes, eras and actors, a taste of which I am about to give my readers. This is not a serial-by-serial review of the K-dramas I have seen over the last eight months but rather an appreciation of the genre based on what I have been watching and the social world it depicts. And this is also a little about my obsessive love (in good Korean and Hindi movie tradition) for some actors, themes and particular serials. I have now seen eight serials in that many months and each one was a surprise. You are wondering where I get the time since serials have many episodes (on an average 15) and each episode is at least an hour. I can do so because I am retired, single and have plenty of evenings to spare. 

 

Constructing herstory.  There are some common themes in the stories that keep recurring and others stand out if you compare them to films/serials on similar subjects in the popular Indian movie making tradition. As for example I found the take on history in one historical drama fascinating and different from the Indian tradition.  The serial Rookie Historian is about a young woman recruited along with three others as a court historian or chronicler in the seventeenth century Joseon kingdom. She stands out in her society as a woman for all sorts of reasons: her single status at her age, 26, and love of reading and intellectual pursuits. Woven around her the central story plays out and is about the tradition of the chroniclers/ historians in Korean history who had to record all meetings that the court had with strict impartiality. They were not allowed to share their chronicling with those in power, especially not the king. The serial shows several moments of stand-off between the king and the historians on the question of confidentiality and impartiality which make for great drama. While our heroine Goo Hae-kyung is in the middle of it and there is a crime and love story too, the central theme is about power and politics in the court and the historian’s traditional responsibility for speaking truth to power. It made my friend and I scour the internet for information on the Joseon kingdom (12^th to 17^th century). It also made me long for serials made by Indians, fictionalising historical events, not through a colonial or nation-state lens or now a Hindutva one, but picking these events to explore the tradition of the argumentative Indian. 

 

Diversity in which other worlds appear. There is a great diversity of themes, treatment of themes and social settings in the serials I have watched. There have been historical dramas (Rookie Historian 2019); contemporary social dramas (Something in the Rain 2013; Thirty-nine 2022);  love stories Secret Garden (2010), Hyde Jekyll, Me (2015) Crash landing on you (2019); and the cyber thriller Memories of Alhambra (2015) which is also an intense psychological thriller. Other worlds, or prosaically termed magic or the spirit world, is sometimes seamlessly woven into the main story often to make the characters conscious of a different reality as in Secret Garden. In Secret Garden, for example, Kim Joo-won, a super-rich, entitled prig falls in love with working girl Gil Ra-im, a stuntwoman and orphan who only has her trained body as capital; he finds it difficult to win her over her despite his ‘wealth, beauty and breeding’. Their spirit/souls are fleetingly swapped, his in hers and vice versa, so that they have to live the other through an embodied experience. The agent of this ‘magic’ is the love of a dead father for his daughter and the young man he saved.  

 

Working girls. A world apart from Secret Garden but also with a working woman as the central character is Something in the Rain. This is about the everyday life of a working girl from a middle-class family, Yoon JIn-ah, in contemporary Seoul. At 35 she is single, just broken up with her long-term boyfriend because he was two timing her, and lives in her parental home. She is caught in an unrewarding world of work as one of the sales agents for a coffee franchise. At work all the bosses are male, petty tyrants who consider everyday forms of sexual harassment and male domination as their birth right and whose dominance is safeguarded by women workers colluding in their own oppression.  It's also a love story, but an unconventional love at that for which she pays heavily. And then she takes a stand both at work and in her private life – muted, unspectacular but nevertheless a determined stand. And with this act she takes charge of her own life with all its complexities, anxieties and disappointments but one that is hers to determine and direct. This story about an ordinary young woman growing into her own could be happening in Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai or Amsterdam. 

 

The gender of agency is female. In fact strong female characters are an important feature of most of the serials I have watched. There is Gil Ra-im in Secret Garden an unconventional heroine who constantly apologises in order to survive in a class divided male world, but who springs into action when she perceives an injustice. She also persistently refuses Kim Joo-won’s advances seeing rich people for what they are. There is Yoon Jin-ah and the everydayness of her resistance. And of course there is Yoon Se-ri in Crash landing whose pluck and refusal to be daunted nature makes a friend of First Sargent Pyo Chi-soo, her nemesis. The three life-long friends Chi Mi-jo, Jeong Chan-young and Jang Joo Hee, who together meet and face the worst crisis to befall their friendship in Thirty-nine. Jung Hee-joo in Memories of the Alhambra, the de facto head of a family of three siblings and an aged grandmother whose quiet strength and intelligent interventions saves and  inspires Yoo Jin-woo to continue in his quest. Or Jang Ha-na in Hyde Jekyll, Me (2015) whose balancing act between the two sides of the divided personality of Goo, Seo-Jin, saves him. In what seems like a role reversal the women save the men. 

 

These agentive female characters remind one of the work of Hang Kang and especially her novel The Vegetarian in which the quiet resistance of a young woman makes her an agent of her own life as she turns vegetarian in a predominantly meat-eating culture. This act of resistance awakes agency and fuels her refusal to conform to the male ordering of the world around her. In fact all her novels are a ruminating probing of Korean culture in which questions of agency and conformity have particular resonance. These female characters in the serials thus continue a tradition in a popular format that for audiences in Korea are recognisable but would be in other cultures too. 

 

Friendships as the motor. These women rely for support and strength on their friendships. Friendships and love between friends, men and women alike, is a salient aspect of the stories. According to a review in Asia.com friendships push the story forward. The three women friends in Thirty-nine each have love interests of their own but these are incidental to the main story, which is a celebration of female friendships. The band of four soldiers in Jeong-hyoek’s platoon and who are closest to him share among themselves a comradery that is protective, affectionate but critical of each other, especially of the loud-mouthed Pyo Chi-su who is also the most senior. I found the relationship between Captain Ri Jeong-hyoek and these four interesting. On the one hand, their relationship is one of subordinate and authority figure and that is made clear. But on the other hand they are closest to what Jeong-hyoek has to what can be called friends. The lines of authority which they clearly abide by doesn’t prevent them from sharing the puzzling behaviour of this alien creature, South Korean Yoon Se-ri, who has crash landed into their territory and their lives, and whom they have formed a secret pact to protect. Even the youngest member of the team doesn’t hesitate in his questions and comments. The authority of the captain, as of Pyo Chi-su  the sergeant, is continuously punctured by these frank exchanges; relationships here are clearly more complex than just being either about authority or familiarity. Similar ambiguous friendships between the boss and his subordinate are seen in Secret Garden, in Memories of Alhambra and Hyde Jekyll, me where the wonderful Mr. Kwon, Goo Seo-jin’s personal assistant, acts as his mentor, protector and friend.

 

Following the K tradition of social critique. Social criticism is common to most of the serials I have watched; the ruthless class divide being most often depicted. Unlike in the film Parasites (2019), the Korean film that has won the most international awards recently and which depicts an open rebellion by the underclass resulting in a blood bath, the ubiquity of class and social critique in the K-dramas is disguised in relationships, exchanges and behavioural rules. The rebellion is often in terms of cross class relationships with penalties for the rule breakers. There are a number of serials that feature Chaebols, an English transliteration of the Korean word which means plutocracy, rich business family or monopoly, a class that holds a lot of power in Korea. In fact this super-rich class constitute an upper caste, a sort of Korean Brahminism, with rules for who can marry whom. As for example, the mother in Secret Garden is very difficult to understand for those unschooled in the social codes of caste. The mother is willing to see her son live a half-life as he loses his memory rather than letting Joo-won remember Gil Ra-ihm who is working class and therefore out caste.  It is understandable for us Indians though - we know the fate that lies ahead for cross caste/ class or inter community relationships. 

 

The authority and despotism of elders and especially parents with younger people accommodating it, would be inconceivable in the west but since we are used to it as Indians I didn’t bat an eye lid at the high handedness of parents on display in the serials. And because we are used to it we can also appreciate when this supposedly monolithic power and authority begins to crack under the pressure of insurrections big and small by the younger generation. 

 

In nonfamilial relationships arbitrary power is held to account by calls for fairness and justice as in Crash landing where Ri Jeong-hyoek frequently challenges the dreaded State Security department in North Korea to abide by rules (almost as if he is living in a social democracy instead of a totalitarian state). Appeals for justice and fairness animate the Rookie Historian. Here again we see continuities in this tradition of social critique in film and literature:  in the Parasite which foregrounds a distrust of wealth and authority; and Hang Kang’s Human Acts which depicts how a military regime massacred civilians protesting military rule in Gwangju in 1980 and showcases the resistance by a civilian militia  made up of high school children, workers and ordinary people who took arms from the police stations and forced the army into a temporary retreat.

 

Love is a many splendored thing. And then there is the treatment of love and romance which of course features in all the serials but not in the same way. Sometimes its central, as in Crash landing, Secret Garden, and perhaps Hyde Jekyll, Me. At other times it’s a sub plot which is connected to the main story line as for example in Rookie Historian, Thirty-nine and Memories of Alhambra.  Something in the Rain stands apart because it’s both: love brings out the agency in Yoon Jin-ah to take a stand, at work and with her lover, and the very love that liberated her. 

 

The love tropes would be easily recognisable to Indian audiences: boy meets girl, girl meets boy, they do their best to deny their feelings; attraction begins at a point of confrontation; traumatic events in the past when shared evokes sympathy and stirrings of romance; unexpected accident, trauma or in some cases coma or life-threatening event of one of the lovers seals the relationship. Flirtation tropes include sudden and unexpected bodily contact, one or the other is partly dressed, or engineered meeting. And lots and lots of yummy food (mainly cooked by the man) and getting sozzled on beer +Soju so that one can express one’s feelings, is a major ingredient in the flirtation. 

 

And in the best ones before the love story can get sentimental to the point of becoming sticky sweet, it’s fractured by witty dialogue sometimes between the lovers themselves tripping each other up, or by friends’ humour and plain old jokes at the expense of the couple in love. 

 

K-drama and film share the fascination with obsessive and forbidden love with the Indian film making tradition. One thinks of Mani Ratnam and his film Bombay (1995) where both obsessive and forbidden love play out against a background of divisive political upheavals of the 1990s in the city that gives the film its title. On the Korean side there is the recent film Decision to leave (2022) from director Park, Chan-wok, in which a police detective investigating a case is obsessively attracted to the ‘suspect’, a love forbidden to him. Love as an obsession and forbidden is in a number of the serials I have seen; in Crash landing on you where the ‘we’ between Ri Jeong Hyoek and Yoon Se-ri is completely forbidden, he is a north Korean soldier and she an heiress from the South, a country divided by borders, in which the presence of one in the other’s country is a national security issue and punishable by death (in NK). Obsessive and forbidden love (his for her) is on display in Secret Garden where in the first few episodes one is perplexed by Kim Joo-won’s behaviour towards Gil, Ra-im which oscillates between love-hate, attraction-rejection as he obsessively pursues her across class divides, across forbidden territory. 

 

Expressions of love are subtle, tender and leave a lot of room for interpretation. It has been said of the film Decision to Leave that this is a love story entirely told through quiet glances. The tender glances stolen between Yoon, Se-ri and Ri Jeong-hyoek over a glass of soju in the company of the favourite four men from his platoon in Crash landing is a classic. It is reminiscent of the Tagore song ‘kar choker chawar haway dolay mon’ which translated badly means, ‘the waft of whose glance is rocking/ swaying my heart/mind.  As in Memories of Alhambra, the love stories depend a lot on non-verbal communication although love when it is spoken is touching and full of longing. Love is also about protecting the other, tender concern and often saving the other by believing in them. It’s about willing the other to live. Physical expressions of love are for the most part chaste, the first embrace is momentous, the first kiss a commitment. There is a lot of coyness about displaying feelings in front of others which is easily recognisable to us. A sex scene, if there happens to be one, is under bed covers or shown up to the point that the characters are fully dressed. The exception is Something in the Rain in which there are scenes in bed and exposure of flesh but not nudity. And yet, as in Crash landing, the story thrums with longing and desire.

 

This extraordinary celebration of love is happening in a society where women are deciding to stay single because combining earning a living/having a career with having a family is becoming impossible. Male chauvinism pervades workplaces, families and everyday interactions but this is nothing new or particular to South Korea; it exists everywhere. And yet in the serials you get a profile of masculinity that is enchanting: tender, loving, often given to tears. Food plays a huge role in the serials which is familiar for us Indians. The men cook and feed their women as a love offering.  In the real world though birth rates are falling (record low of 0.7 in the second quarter of 2023) indicating a looming demographic crisis and women are finding it difficult to find ‘suitable’ partners. In many of the serials the women are in their late thirties and in Thirty-nine the three friends are as in the title thirty-nine, and single. South Korea is also one of the countries where the population suffers from high personal indebtedness, especially among the poor, which is the subject of the now famous serial, Squid Game.

 

There is a lot of run in the mill K-drama and mindless stuff out there just as there is in the Netflix offerings from other places in the world,  including India. And then I noticed that the ones I really liked were those where either the actor Hyun Bin or Son, Ye-jin or both were the main protagonists and I followed them in trying to select the best ones to see. I have now seen Hyun Bin in four serials including with Son, Ye-jin in Crash Landing and in each he plays a different kind of character showing his versatility. He has a Masters in Theatre and film studies and is well known in Korean cinema including award winning films. Similarly Son, Ye-jin who studied at the Institute of Arts and Film in Seoul is a wonderful actress and well established in film where she has won a number of awards. I have seen three serials in which she is the lead including Crash landing and each one is special. What I am trying to say is that Korean film and television serials have an established tradition which compare favourably with the best from other parts of the world. Both Hyun Bin and Son, Ye-jin come from this tradition of great acting and direction. It is understandable that Korean film is better known because many have won acclaim on the international film festival circuit. Now with streaming a whole other television serial culture has opened up to international audiences but it is important to bear in mind that it doesn’t come from nowhere and that it is not just a Netflix creation. It is embedded in a rich history and tradition of film and television about which most of us know very little.

 

The art of collaboration

As with reading a novel, watching a movie and seeing a painting, so it is with K-drama: there is the critical element of collaboration, a moment when one suspends disbelief and cooperates in the making of the emotions that animate the story. It is when a cultural artefact can make me a willing participant in the world being created that it has achieved its purpose. And because we bring ourselves to this moment by agreeing to read a book, watch a movie and so forth, our own histories, tastes and ideals are implicated in the collaboration or rejection of what we are experiencing. I have often found that something I enjoyed was not necessarily one that a friend did. But as I have tried to say here, this should not dissuade me or you.