ABSTRACT:

DPRK Cinema: Consuming the Spectacle of Socialism and the People
Travis Workman (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities)

To what extent can we speak of popular culture in the context of the DPRK and how might the status of "the popular" there be understood in relation to the dynamics of production and consumption, subjectivation and agency, commodification and utopian impulses, etc., which have become the dominant interpretative categories for reading the markets of popular culture in post-socialist, late capitalism? With the generalized shift to neoliberal capitalism, which now governs the fields of popular culture to a great extent, posing the question of the existence or non-existence of popular culture within a closed "people's republic" seems either impossible or anachronistic. The question of popular culture in the DPRK seems to require an uncomfortable return to an economic and political model of culture that is a vestige of the modern past—the pop-cultural correlate of a failed state. Rather than burdening our comfortable understandings of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of contemporary popular culture with the monstrosity of its DPRK form, most political and cultural critics would rather refer to the "masses," as this term was used in theses about totalitarianism, and to debate whether the North Korean masses, supposedly unified in their ideology, are fascist, communist, or particularly North Korean.

In opposition to such readings of North Korean mass culture, in this paper I follow Slavoj Žižek's insight that Stalinism is not the opposite of capitalism, but rather its "symptom." I interpret DPRK popular films, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s, as anachronistic not in their totalitarianism, but rather in the way that their Socialist Realist aesthetic, often translated into a native "melodramatic realism," represents the individual's relationship to the modern nation-state and national economic development. Their non-simultaneity with our present lies not in their lack of liberalism or capitalism, but rather in their depictions of the individual's psychological and ethical relationship to modern processes that are not particularly "totalitarian," but which are no longer the dominant themes in the majority of world popular culture—e.g., glorified rationalization, the development of Historical Reason, the duties of national citizenship, and the linear history of a people.

Therefore, I argue that reading DPRK popular film culture, even its most recent productions, means confronting its modernity, not as some sort of alien invention, but rather in its more mundane primary investment: to mold the people (inmin) into national subjects with a shared historical purpose. To this end, I analyze films like Traces of Life, Urban Girl Comes to Get Married, Miles Along the Railway, and An Chung-gŭn Shoots Itō Hirobumi, showing how they draw from classical Soviet Socialist Realism and its attention to economic progress, historical drama, and national myth, but in an indigenized version that reflects the particularity of the North Korean nation-form. I focus on three main elements: 1) The use of Hollywood continuity editing and narrative realism to Socialist Realist ends; 2) The depiction of both mythic and everyday heroes who embody a dedication to the Party, the historical nation, or the contemporary nation-state; 3) the conflict and eventual reconciliation between personal (often romantic) desire and the love of one's country, Party, and family. In addition, following Thomas Elsaesser's discussions of melodramatic film, I examine how these films at once attempt to account for all possible excess by channeling individual emotion and desire toward a social norm, but at the same time displace this excess into their mise en scene and their music.

Travis Workman received his B.A. in Modern Literary Studies from UC Santa Cruz in 2001, his M.A. in East Asian Literature from Cornell University in 2005, and his Ph.D. from the same program in 2008. He is currently Assistant Professor of Korean Literature, Culture, and Media in the Department of Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His primary research fields are Korean literature, film, and intellectual history. His current interests include transnational perspectives on East Asia, state violence and historical memory, imperial histories, and humanism and its critiques.