Fragments of Labor: Neoliberal Attitudes and Architectures in Contemporary South Korean Cinema

Park does so through sophisticated nonlinear storytelling that cultural theorist Rob Wilson perceives "is sublime in the technical sense, meaning it confronts traumatic and underrepresented materials haunting the Korean social system of capitalist global modernity." However, with an increase in personal autonomy, much civic and artistic dialogue becomes muted for the spurious, messy, and constraining end goal of corporate capital, which accommodates the agenda of neoliberalism in South Korea. [...] For example, in Park's SFMV^[각주:1], Kyu Hyun Kim misconstrues the film as being "unconcerned with the evils of capitalist exploitation," yet, on the contrary, I see this particular film constructing a narrative about this very exploitation. These victims whose "refusal (or inability) to transcend [these] subjective perspective [do not] enter into communication with one another";this happens because of two central symptoms of neoliberalism that Kim misses: self-reliance and reserved behavior that dictate antisocial communication amongst its characters. Thus, these symptoms rarely present any alternatives for its protagonists. And like the characters in Park's SFMV, it is no wonder that the neoliberal agenda in an actually existing institutional context has made a creative compliance to apolitical critiques like Kim's all the more prescriptive for the time. (221)

According to Keith B. Wagner, Park Chan-wook's SFMV is political text cause it reveals two symbolism of neoliberalim. one is 'self-reliance' and two is 'reserved behavior that dictate antisocial communication amonst its characters'. (Wagner, 2002: 221) Therefore, political representation in neoliberailism is more complicated because of the character of neoliberalism itself.

This scene is shot from the point of view of Ryu, also recently laid off, who is wating in a nearby car and plotting the kidnapping of Dong-jin's daughter with his girlfriend, Yeong-mi. A long shot positions Ryu in such a way that the viewer does not empathize with this act of physical desecration by the labourer but instead as questioning whether their kidnapping plan will work with all this sudden attention brought by Peng. In many ways, this scene finds a corollary with Gramsci's description of the turbulent time in Italian history, after the Great War, when workers started to become an indifferent mass, often resorting to violence and crime. These workers lacked a "clarity and precision to form a workers' consciousness" when social movements at this time were weakened by the capitalist consolidation of factories and worker sentiments for equality waned. In similar ways, the contemporary workforce of Park's neoliberal Seoul lacks the clarity and stamina to counter, or at the very least ability to challenge, the IMF's restructuring. In the neoliberal present of Park's South Korea, work is taen away and its employees are forced to pursue individualistic labour production, or more crudely, predatory action to attain and produce their own brand of capital (child abduction in this case, leading to monetary ransom). (227)

 For Wagner, neoliberalism in Park's films are characterises as fragment. For instance of SFMV, Wagner avers "인용구 삽입". Likewise, invisible subject at the front of camera are more alienated and fragmented, which seems to emphasises neoliberal character.

However, for the suture of the diesesis, Park shows the entity of idealised Chandra's hometown.

1. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance [본문으로]