Dog and Thief: Two Modes of Abject Agency Crossing over East Asian Capital Networks in Global Korean Cinema. (2024)

The narrative of double death and two transnational networks inKorean cinema (3)

The expression 'global Korean cinema' might sound awkwardif not oxymoronic. Does it refer to Korean films shot in a 'Gangnamstyle' or Hollywood movies made by Korean directors such as Stoker(Park Chan-wook. 2012) and The Last Stand (Kim Ji-woon, 2012)?Unmistakably all these testify to the globalization of Korean cinema,the ongoing global expansion of its production and reception like theK-Pop-driven Hallyu (Korean Wave). Against this industrial backdrop,however. I will address global Korean cinema like nothing other than apart of what I call 'global cinema' with its key issueslocalized in/around Korea. These issues largely concern 'systems ofinclusion' generating the neoliberal milieu and multiculturaltraffic as well as 'symptoms of exclusion' generated by thesewhole systems, involving illegal migration, casual labor, and variouscatastrophes. This conceptual pair epitomizes two phases of the worldsince the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s. with the fall of thecommunist bloc, ideologically oppositional nations and cultures began tobe incorporated into a single globe of rainbow communities where liberaldemocracy and transnational capitalism formed the so-called'post-political,' 'post-historical' Zeitgeist. Inthe 2000s, however, such catastrophes as the 9/11 terror and the 2008financial meltdown signaled the violent return of the repressed orexcluded and viral effects of socioeconomic networking and polarizationas if these were inevitable byproducts of glorious globalization.Radical antagonism now occurs less between internal social groups thanbetween a whole society or the world system and its unwelcome remnants.In this two-faceted global age, both subjectivity and community undergonew crises and changes. Global cinema can then be thematicallycharacterized as reflecting today's globalism with itsinconsistency and today's humanity responding to this new conditionof life.

Global cinema has a typical narrative arc allegorizing this humancondition. Main characters die symbolically at the beginning by beinglost, cast. detached, or expelled out of their community, while oftenencountering (this experience as) a traumatic event--on a daily level,it may appear as being abandoned, rejected, suspended, or fired fromtheir family, school, workplace, or institution. This symbolic deathmakes them the "abject," deprived of their social identity andeven homeless, jobless, or moneyless. Psychoanalytically, Julia Kristeva(1982, 1-18) defines the "abject" as that which is rejected orexcluded from oneself but not yet a separate thing, thus thrown in astate of limbo between subject and object, neither alive nor dead. Byextension, there has been growing scholarly attention to "socialabjection" (Tyler 2013), the suspension of political subjectivitywith legal rights. Stripped of their membership or citizenship, evenhuman rights, those characters above are forced to live in the state of"bare life" like animals or hom*o saver vulnerably exposed tolethal violence outside the law as Giorgio Agamben (98) would say. Therest of the narrative shows how they survive in this symbolic postmortemstate of being. Most of the abject then struggle to rejoin theircommunity and regain their subjectivity, which succeeds or fails towardthe end, often at the cost of their biological life--this means they areoften redeemed paradoxically through their real death. The two deaths,symbolic and real, bracket and shape the narrative of abjection andredemption in this way, creating the "zone between life anddeath" (where Jacques Lacan (1997, 270-83) locates the tragicabject Antigone). Put another way, it is the narrative of double death.

However, it is critical that the abject's task is not limitedto regaining their 'normal' state. They might take revenge,terrorize those who abjected them, or even destroy their ex- community.But in positive directions, they might also make a new relationship orform certain solidarity outside the biopolitical mechanism of abjection.In other words, the abject do not remain victimized once they cultivate'agency': the causative force to activate actions, thecapacity to act for a mission though effects are uncertain and might benegative. Agency is thus the abject mode of subjectivity. It is notpreformed but performed only at the moment of action, and it can beconstantly reperformed through temporary modulation and flexibleadaptation to changing circ*mstances. Agency in this performativity, notpredestined toward any lost origin or subservient to the establishedorder, accounts better for the (re)assemblage of subjectivityconfronting unpredictable crises in the global age than the traditionalnotion of identity or any a priori essence. So the abject with thisagency are literally 'agents' including, but not limited to,genre-specific professional (secret) agents in spy, crime, or disasterfilms, who are often abjected from their institutional agency like theCIA. Professional or not, the abject agents in general play the role ofaction heroes in the narrative of double death with the potential formodifying their original mission itself as well as themselves. Their'abject agency' often allegorizes the political impossibilityof Utopian change in catastrophic situations but also suggests someethical alternatives to the inclusion in or exclusion from the globalsystem. (4)

I critically engage in this global cinema of abjection and agency,looking at contemporary films globally circulating in both themainstream market and the festival circuit. Locality functions here lessas the root of identification with a unique untranslatable reality,national or regional, than as a contingent springboard for embodying theconcrete universality of the global system and precarious life in it. Tomap global Korean cinema, then, I locate in narrative space twotransnational East Asian networks of capital around the Koreanpeninsula: two networks where global systems of inclusion are localizedand symptoms of exclusion appear in the form of the agents of capitalabjected from the very networks. The first network is the'North-West network' that ranges over North Korea,northeastern China including provinces populated with ethnic Koreanssuch as Liaoning, Heilongjiang, and Jilin (where the Yanbian KoreanAutonomous Prefecture is located) and Mongolia/Russia. The second is the'South-East network' that spreads over Japan, Chinesemetropolises such as Shanghai and Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. TheNorth-West network has emerged in the background of the former communistbig brothers. China and Russia, rapidly joining global capitalism sincethe end of the Cold War. The South-East network has long been thebackbone of the East Asian economic and cultural markets significantlyestablished in the world system. Korea has the tradition for filmco-production and distribution including both importing and exportingfilms especially over the South-East network, and now the North-Westnetwork appears as a new channel for such exchanges. These two networks,with their differences, could be seen as Korea's main routes forwhat Jungbong Choi calls "cultural regionalization" throughgeo-historical, ethno-linguistic, and emotive- aesthetic correlativesshared in the East Asian cultural sphere (2010), and also for"transnational-Korean cinematrix" including not only film butdiverse media and other public cultures (2012). But while Choiemphasizes the distinctive value of the term 'transnational'in this regional context, I will recontextualize it in the'global' frame.

The point is how these networks are cinematically represented asharsh existential conditions of film characters and their franticsurvival strategies, indicating their abjection and agency in thenarrative of double death. The notion of network can be explored in manyways, but for now. let's take it as a geo-eultural web ofconnections that subjugate the characters to the system of capital andpower, from which they often try in vain to draw Deleuzian "linesof flight," to flee, flow, or break through the cracks in thesystem toward a plane of exteriority (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 9-10).However, before delving into films in the two networks, it is worthmentioning a few films precursory to this theme that unfold dramas inthe Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) or similar places near the border,thereby touching on the origin of the division between the two networks,that is to say the division of Korea into South and North. In ParkChan-wook's Joint Security Area (2000), a South Korean soldier,lagging behind the line, strikes a mine but is saved by two North Koreansoldiers. Then, they deepen a dangerous yet Utopian friendship,exchanging gifts at a DMZ checkpoint until they are exposed by theauthorities and led to tragic incidents. In Welcome to Dongmakgol (ParkGvvang-hyun, 2005), the eponymous virtual village appears as a fantastichaven of lost soldiers from two Koreas and the UN during the Korean War.Touched by innocent golden-hearted villagers, these former'enemies' team up to protect the peaceful village from theattacking armies to which they belonged. Underground Rendezvous (KimJong-jin, 2007) shows another imaginary place in a demilitarizedvillage, a secret place that was built for the reunion of families andfriends separated by the truce line and which has been kept until the1980s as a time capsule, evoking Emir Kusturica's Underground(1995). On the Pitch (Kye Yoon-shik, 2010) is a comic fantasy about someNorth Korean guards of the DMZ who fall into the fever of theKorea-Japan 2002 World Cup through radio, melt down the nationaldivision, and join the imagined community of reunified Korea.

All these films have common points: (1) Protagonists are lost orseparated from their family or army, so their social subjectivity ornational identity is suspended though they could recover it by returningto their community. (2) These abject figures encounter other abjects orsubjects on the edge of borders and laws, and they experience unexpectedfriendship, unlimited hospitality, or unthinkable solidarity byexchanging various sorts of gifts beyond economic calculation. (3) Thispositive potential for a Utopian community is threatened by theiroriginal community that represents and monopolizes the sovereign powerof the nation. We end up seeing either a realistic tragedy of failure tokeep anarchic relations or a fantastic comedy that compensates for suchfailure. In sum, the DMZ is the dramatic place of the double deathnarrative in which subjects become the abject and then the agents of analternative community that is hardly imaginable or sustainable inreality. This narrative is both liberating and traumatic. The DMZ. thecrossroad of different national identities and ideologies that areliterally if temporarily disarmed, indeed stands for the networked topos(place) of abjection and agency and is thus figuratively locatable inbroader contexts--especially over the North-West network where NorthKoreans wander. That is, there are more scattered DMZs. not limited tothe zone around the truce line, where more different cases of abjectiondraw our attention to global Korean issues. While the films aboveapproach the national division in nationalist humanism, the films belowcast more cool-headed critical perspectives on abjection in the world ofglobal capitalism and migration. The DMZ. in this expanded sense,becomes a symptom of globally networked Korea.

The North-West network: the 'dog' and 'thief ofcapital

Including the actual DMZ, narrative space in the background of theNorth-West network is the main stage of North Korean defectors and(Korean) Chinese migrants. (5) When they come to South Korea for a newlife away from oppression or poverty, they mostly end up in totalabjection like the poor Chinese woman in Failan (Song Hae-sung, 2001).She, orphaned, enters into a paper marriage with a South Korean hood toremain in Korea, but barely escapes human trafficking and dies oftuberculosis while leaving a love letter to her near-imaginary husbandshe never met. He has completely forgotten about the marriage he signedto make pocket money but bursts into tears while reading her letter toolate to save her. Failan is perhaps the first major Korean film thatbrought to the screen hitherto unseen immigrant workers and theirimagined but failed integration into the Korean society that wasincreasingly rich and multicultural yet still harsh to strangers. But asthe film is a commercial melodrama that centers on the Korean abjecthero and his spiritual redemption through the ethnic Chinese woman, itremains exceptional to the North-West network films that mostly consistof trendy action thriller films showing Sino-Koreans on the one hand anddry realist independent films about North Koreans on the other. In thelatter case, for instance, Dance Town (Jeon Kyu-whan, 2010)--a third ofthe director's "town trilogy" including Mozart Town(2008) and Animal Town (2009)--highlights a North Korean woman who fleesfrom totalitarian oppression toward Seoul only to face a pitilesscapitalist reality that promises no better tomorrow.

More notable is the North Korean defector in The Journals of Musan(Park Jung-bum. 2010). Musan, the name of his impoverishedhometown--let's call him Musan for convenience as in thetitle--also means the 'proletariat' in Korean. But in truth,Musan is a sub-proletarian subaltern whose resident registration number(which is given to all South Korean citizens) starts with"125," a social stigma that hinders him from findingemployment in Seoul. He belongs to nothing but the class below the classsystem with no secure job and wage. Typical realism is manifested inboth theme and style mainly when the camera follows him wandering in adingy urban landscape. The only object of his self-identification is hisbeloved dog that is found abandoned toward the beginning and dead at theend on the street--an animal abject undergoing double death--evoking theretired old man's dog in the neorealist classic Umberto D (VittorioDe Sica, 1952). Coincidentally or not. The Journals of Musan shows theabject protagonist changing from a precarious day worker posting fliersto a thief stealing his only friend (escape broker's money (whichitself is illegally taken from poor North Korean escapees), like theposter-becoming-a-thief in De Sica's other masterpiece BicycleThieves (1948). In effect Musan is a dog of his friend too. who sheltershim and asks him to bring that money left in his room; it is in the actof carrying out this task like an agent that Musan turns into the thief.Here, I would like to present the 'dog' and the 'thief asa crucial pair of figures that represent two modes of abject agency inthe circuit of the capitalist network: either slaving and straying likea dog or stealing and seizing capital like a thief. As if these are twosides of the same coin, a dog becomes a thief when its repressed desireor oppressed rights are not sublimated into social subjectivity. Movingfrom under the law to outside the law. a 'sub-law slave'becomes an 'outlaw stealer' and struggles for survival betweensymbolic and real death.

No doubt realism in the North-West network is the most consistentand palpable in Korean-Chinese auteur Zhang Lu. Grain in Ear (2005).Desert Dream (2007). and Dooman River (2009)--all having the characternames Soon-hee and Chang-ho--make up his trilogy about Joseonjok inChina (Korean-Chinese people whose ancestors moved to China mostly inthe period of late Joseon dynasty) and North Koreans who escape to Chinaand even Mongolia (not to South Korea). Their entrance to hardlyglobalized local communities nonetheless causes universal conflicts over'the others.' These abject figures barely live, barelyacquiring living necessities like animals that often appear beside themand symbolize their state of 'bare life." Local communitiestreat these strangers in different ways. The Chinese policeman in Grainin Ear is like an 'obscene superego,' harshly punishingillegal immigration and prostitution while secretly desiring the body ofthe lonely Joseonjok woman Soon-hee. In Dooman River it is the Joseonjokvillage in Yanbian that hosts North Koreans, but under the authoritiesof both China and North Korea, the autonomy of the village withtraditional familism works ambivalently as its hospitality turns intohostility when it comes to any threat from the outsiders. Not a legalcommunity, the Mongolian man's house welcoming the North Koreanrefugees in Desert Dream is a primitive "non-place." a spaceof transience like a hotel or airport that is always open and servesonly for a temporary stay (Auge 2009). The three films thus unfold thespectrum of the sovereign community's attitude to the abject,resonating with the double ethics of global societies regardingmulticultural migrants: the 'soft-ethical' pity/tolerance andthe 'hard-ethical' hate/violence.

On the 'soft-ethical' side, the most basic and generoushospitality is expressed in the form of offering accommodation andmeals. This warm gesture always leads to a quasi-family relationship.The Mongolian man in Desert Dream plays the role of husband and fatherfor Soon-hee and Chang-ho from North Korea, who in turn take the placeof his absent wife and daughter. North Korean kids in Dooman Riverreceive food from Joseonjok kids while joining the latter'sfootball team, and Chang-ho sacrifices himself to save a North Koreanfriend who has become none other than his sworn brother from beingdeported. Crucially, hospitality is not limited to a one-waydispensation but develops into a virtuous cycle of gift exchange like anaccelerating potlatch unrestrained by capitalist calculation. The hostsand the guests give and take not only material objects (a model missile,a crayon set, a hat) but also immaterial service and labor (playing,farming, cooking, cleaning). Not just giving something extra that isgood, this reciprocal gift-giving enables the giving of oneself to theother in the way of filling in the other's gap left by somethingabsent yet necessary. Conversely, the other can be given to me, enterinto my life deeply to the extent of becoming the kernel of myselfwithout which my subjectivity would disintegrate. The 'being'itself is then a sort of existential gift even without being recognizedas a gift in the economic sense of the term. At this point, gift-givinggoes beyond the soft-ethical tolerance and pity offered from theprivileged position of subjects in their sovereign community.

The tragedy occurs when gift-giving is put into the capitalistlogic combined with hard-ethical sovereignty. In Grain in Ear,Soon-hee's well-wishers--a factory owner, a policeman, and acompatriot--all enjoy her body by force and then abandon her like a dog.Whenever sex is traded and enforced as compensation for hospitality ordamage, the abject other is reduced to an expendable thing under theself-interested sovereign power. Conversely, then, the other-as-gift canturn into 'poison' (which the German word Gift means), alethal weapon terrorizing the sovereign figure or community by way ofreprisal for exploitation and abjection. Soon-hee, as the male subjectstreat her only as the other to expel, becomes a kind of terrorist byoffering poisoned kimchi, so to speak, a gift-as-poison, for a communityevent. This radical retaliation conducted by the abject who turns intoan agent of terror is as liberating as catastrophic like theslave's massacre of the masters in Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003),though such antagonism might fall into the vicious cycle of hard-ethicalviolence between the community and the abject in reality. In DoomanRiver, Soon-hee aborts her fetus conceived through a rape, and Chang-horesists the authorities that exclude his gift-like friend by shockinglykilling himself, i.e.. by giving his community the gift of his own deathas if he were killed by them. This alternative of 'killing or beingkilled' is a biopolitical double bind of the abject. The only exitis to leave the community, to draw a desperate 'line offlight' as seen at the end of each film, but it has nothing to dowith romantic nomadism that global jetsetters enjoy. With no promisedland to reach, this abject flight is not Utopian but rather'atopian,' abjected from any topos, any place fixed within acommunity. It has the potential agency to make a gift- givingrelationship on the edge of the community and poison this community atonce.

If the ambivalent notion of gift-poison indicates the(im)possibility to exit the system of power and capital, the similarlyambivalent agency of dog and thief rather concerns how to live withinit. Keeping this topology in mind, let's explore more (dog andthief) abject agents that abound in mainstream genre films beyond therealistic auteur cinema. Among others, the spy/espionage genre withsecret agents--the agent as a profession--has rapidly evolved in thepost-Cold War period since the first Korean blockbuster Swiri (KangJe-kyu, 1999). Typically, North Korean secret agents are abjected fromtheir agency, build excellent rapport with South Koreans (agents), andyet have to take the antagonistic position in the end. With a touch ofthe dramatic thriller, this narrative line penetrates films set in SouthKorea such as Secret Reunion (Jang Hun. 2009) and Alumni (Park Hong-soo.2012) and films showing global locations such as Typhoon (KwakKyung-taek. 2005) and Double Agent (Kim Hyeon-jeong, 2003). The abjectagents here are relentlessly subordinated to the sovereign system anddesperately struggle to survive in its closed circuit."

Remarkable is Poongsan (Jeon Jae-hong. 2011) written and producedby Kim Ki-duk. The title role is a kind of double agent who secretlydelivers anything for families separated between two Koreas whilebelonging to neither of them like a maverick mercenary. His socialidentity is suspended in selfabjection, and as 'Poongsan'means a North Korean breed of dog, he embodies animality when passingthrough the DMZ with his naked body all plastered with mud. This bordercrossing in camouflage, I argue, makes an ontological shift to thedeterritorialized zone of being. His animal body incorporates theenvironment like a "phasmid," a stick insect indistinguishablefrom a leaf or twig, and even looks like a ghost, apparent yet notappearing, just as the phasmid etymologically relates to the phantasm orapparition (Didi-Huberman 1998). However, this desubjective inhumanstate does not mean liberation from society since the agent is also adog of capital and power. The National Intelligence Service asksPoongsan to bring the lover of a former North Korean senior official whodefected to South Korea, but once the mission is accomplished, thegovernment agency rather tortures and uses Poongsan without paying him.He is treated indeed like an animal stripped of human dignity, a hom*osacer that they can kill with impunity outside the law.

This betrayal by the authorities provokes the 'dog' intobecoming a sort of 'thief of sovereignty. Poongsan traps both theSouth and North Korean agents who pursue him in a private prison, wherethey are now forced to become homini sacri who should kill each other asenemies. He watches this extralegal jungle without being seen, like aninvisible hand pulling strings from behind. In sum, Poongsan as anautonomous phasmid becomes an enslaved dog, and then a divine ghost, asovereign-like terrorist--the turn of a nomadic abject into a ghostlyagent of terror is typical in Kim Ki-duk's films including Bin-Jip(2004) and Time (2006). Interestingly, for Poongsan, this turn involvesthe new self-imposed task of debunking two Koreas' ideologicalregimes and their agents who, like the obscene superego, turn out to beridiculously driven by the desires for money and pleasure--which is alsomanifest in another Kim-produced spy film Red Family (Lee Joo-hyung,2013)). It is of note that Poongsan's earlier task commissioned bythe government was impelled by the desire of the North Korean defector,a possessive, jealous lover whom South Korea wants to use for diggingsecret information. Capital circulates through a kind of 'blackmarket' of such selfish desires, and the regime politicallyexploits this extralegal market against the other regime.

Though not a spy film, The Yellow Sea (Na Hong-jin, 2010) is aseminal action thriller driven by such a unique abject agent asPoongsan. It touched off the noir trend of highlighting Joseonjokillegal immigrants and cruel villains in Korea as seen in Traffickers(Kim Hong-sun, 2012), New World (Park Hongjung, 2013), Sea Fog (ShimSung-bo, 2014), Coin Locker Girl (Han Jun-hee, 2015), Asura (KimSung-su, 2016), The Outlaws (Kang Yoon-sung, 2017), and a comedyMidnight Runners (Jason Kim, 2017). (7) In The Yellow Sea. a blackmarket of capital and crimes takes multiple forms between China andKorea. At the origin of the complex narrative are, again, very personaldesires. A bank manager steals a married woman from her husband, aprofessor, who steals the lover of another man. a bus company president.All these owners and thieves of the women officially represent fame andpower in the mainstream capitalist society. However, to kill theprofessor, the bank manager and the company president resortrespectively to the underground economy of contract killings viaJoseonjok killers. This black market of violence then unfolds twotransnational chains of gangs, brokers, and hit men in the chaotic waythat their (dis)connections are made as accidentally as pervasivelybeyond anybody's control while anybody can betray or erase anybodyelse.

It is in this lawless network that the Joseonjok protagonist Gu-namhas to carry his bare life. A poor taxi driver in Yanbian, he anxiouslyawaits to hear from his wife who went to Korea to make money, andsuffers from huge debts incurred for sending her illegally. In thiscrisis. Gu-nam accepts a job of contract murder offered by Myun-ga, agang boss, monstrous dog trader and smuggler of Joseonjok, only tobecome a dog-like slave of him. But Gu-nam, sent across the Yellow Seato Korea (where he also hopes to find his wife), is shocked to see histarget of murder plot (the professor) being killed by someone else; hismission turns out to be impossible to fulfill. Then, misunderstandingthe situation, the two groups of black-market agents want to kill Gu-namin pursuit of money. Gu-nam madly runs away while at the same timeembarking on a new task of finding and taking revenge on the invisiblehand who initially asked for murder and triggered this whole chaos. Thefilm thus develops into a "whodunit' of an abject agent whor*places the given mission of serving the sovereign network of capitalwith the self-set mission of revealing and attacking it. What drawsattention is that, as if to drive his taxi. Gu-nam must quickly mapunknown places to visit following contingent clues with no linearitinerary, transnationally from China to Korea and nationally along manycities and the sea on all three sides of the Korean peninsula. In thistough journey, he endlessly fights, hurts, bleeds, and heals himself.His subjectivity is nothing but this abject agency that continuallyadjusts and readapts to the threatening contingency of the world.Moreover, he trains his cognitive and corporeal faculties through theskillful 'bricolage,' the deft creation of tools from randomlyavailable, mostly abandoned materials as also seen in Poongsan. Thatway, the enslaved docile dog of the capital network changes into anindependent wild dog hunting for the truth.

Soyoung Kim (2013. 258-61) argues that Gu-nam's struggleallegorizes the pressure on precarious migrant workers in the globalsystem of "cognitive capitalism"--the post-Fordist latecapitalism in the age of information technology and information ascapital. This new capitalist regime depends less and less on full-timejobs, long-term specialization, material means and products, but insteadrequires quick instincts, flexible actions, multitasking skills tohandle immaterial assets, unpredictable situations, casual labor, and soforth. Of course. The Yellow Sea and Poongsan end with the abjectheroes' real death between China and Korea and between two Koreas,so they do not represent any success in that neoliberal system. Ratherthey come to resist it through their self-changing abject agency.Nonetheless, it is true that they cannot help appropriating cognitivecapacities and qualities required by the system in order to completetheir mission within it and even to fight against it. Their subjectionand resistance to the system are two flip sides of each other. Also,their quest of the truth accompanies extreme physical sufferings andself-healing mechanisms as their bare bodies are broken into bare bonesand yet restored like an auto-rebooting system. Such heroicallyidealized yet utterly abject bodies float over the global network ofcapital like its embodied antibodies--like its parasitic terrorists,ghost hackers, drifting guerillas in 'atopian' trajectories.

The South-East Network: cognitive, financial, and emotionalcapitalism

As is well known, the Jason Bourne series presented such an abjectagent adapted to cognitive capitalism and global networking well beforeThe Yellow Sea. The series has since influenced the spy genre not onlyin Hollywood but also in Korea as seen in The Berlin File (RyooSeung-wan, 2012) and The Suspect (Won Shin-yun, 2013), where NorthKorean agents go through abjection in a labyrinth of conspiracies andfights between North and South. In another fashion, such films as theIris series (2010) and The Spy: Undercover Operation (Lee Seung-joon,2013) imitate the typical James Bond theme and style, depicting SouthKorean agents who wield and maintain their sovereignty in globalsettings. These two trends represent global agency differently, yet theyare not opposite in fleshing out the globalized look of Korean cinema.Likewise, historical action films such as The Good, the Bad, and theWeird (Kim Jee-woon. 2008), War of the Arrows (Kim Han-min, 2011), andGabi (Chang Yoon-hyun. 2011) fantasize some moments of the past nationalcrises related to the North-West network (Manchuria. China. Russia) withnear abject agents fighting in splendid style. Here we can detect acertain nationalism of global Korean cinema itself rather than of itscontent; an industrial ambition enveloped in various genre fantasies ofthe state of emergency and new heroes as abject.

By extension, there is a case in which abject agency stands for notmigrant labor but global capitalism as such, and a dog-like characterdoes not become a terrorist agent but a capitalist agent. In thisdirection let's now move onto the South-East network. For example,the Korean outlaws in Choi Dong-hoon's The Thieves (2012) form agroup of abject agents who are not dogs but thieves of capital from thebeginning. They are seemingly antisocial rebels, but manifest the valuesand abilities that the global capitalist system demands and representswhile acting spectacularly for the project of stealing a big diamond.Their cognitive mapping is excellent for obtaining systematicinformation about places to intrude; their bricolage is the professionaloperation of high-tech equipment and not the ad hoc recycling of wastes;and their physical assets include not only power and flexibility butalso attractive style, fashion, and sex appeal. Linked in a smallnetwork of fluid connections, they also form a more extensive networkwith their transnational peers in Hong Kong, Macao, and Japan. Thoughthey are thieves, their fascinating intellectual, physical, and socialqualities bring up the image of jet-setting professionals orbusinesspeople who circulate capital rather than the image of migrantworkers circulated by capital. Interestingly, nobody notices theirsecret illegal work in public places not because they become ghostlyagents like Poongsan but merely because they look and behave just likeordinary people around them. Similarly, their black market of theftexists as a double of the legitimate market of exchange, so it isvirtually impossible to distinguish the two. Far from resisting globalcapitalism or fleeing from it, the ultimate desire of these thieves isto acquire the freedom to enjoy all pleasures in a luxurious lifestylethat money can bring from within the mainstream capital network withoutworking like a dog. The film ends with a scene in which they take ahappy rest in an upscale hotel in Hong Kong perhaps with a sense ofsuperiority over the public without being noticed.

The enormous commercial success of The Thieves, which overlaps withthe success of the thieves in it. indicates that global Korean cinemaco-opts the alternative potential of the abject agency to resist thecapital networks. If the agent of Poongsan exposes the gap between theideological regimes and personal desires, the agent of The Yellow Seareveals the gap between the black market and the legitimate market, thegap that capitalist individuals make but want to hide. On the contrary,the agents of The Thieves take this capitalist position while mergingthe underground and mainstream lifestyles. If The Journals of Musanshows the dog-like agent becoming not a terrorist but a thief ofcapital, this abject North Korean refugee is upgraded to the cool SouthKorean capitalist offenders in The Thieves. That they are the socialabject only makes their bourgeois characteristics more bohemian. Thedanger they risk in being chased by the police rather causes a visualthrill as they cross the boundary of the system with confidence in thetakeover of money and pleasures. In some sense, abjection is now anattractive motif, and abject agents are appealing heroes. This co-optionof the abject is a smart strategy of mainstream global cinema. Itrefreshes the cultural face of global capitalism by flexibly absorbingsome deviant imagination that could appeal to global audiences intocinematic entertainment. In this process, all the qualities celebratedin the capitalist system are displayed by its outsiders freed from beingexploited, and the critical capacity of abject agency is packaged in thehedonistic fantasy of acquiring capital without being bound by law andlabor. The masses buy and enjoy this fantasy. Then, does the filmultimately suggest that the capitalist is the most desired thief?

Here, let me briefly refer to Choi Dong-hoon's another hitTazza: The High Rollers (2006). As its poor protagonist steals hissister's money to gamble on hwatu (games with "flowercards" popular in Korea), this film also begins with the motif oftheft. However, the money, which he hopes to return later, is not just aloot but a debt to repay and an investment to make more money for thisrepayment. The gambling scene then appears as a black market for capitalgrowth rather than as a one-time playground, and the him--along with thesequel Tazza: The Hidden Card (Gang Hyung Chul, 2014)--appears as acommercial film about (pseudo) commerce. This reflexivity is multiple.First of all, the rules of gambling lay a commercial platform for the'noncommercial nature' of gambling, i.e.. luck, but hustlerscalled tazza who manipulate luck continue to break them. The rules existas far as the hustlers can violate them and because the opponents mustfollow them in order for the hustlers to win the game by violating them.If the opponents break the rules, the hustlers overturn the gamblingtable immediately as if the natural power struggle is always ready toexplode as the state of exception to the social contract of the rules.Gambling is thus a special non-commercial variant of general commerce.However, the implication is that this variant is the very core ofcommerce at large. The film shows the gambling scene like a miniature ofsociety, displaying the raising of capital acquired by fraud instead oflabor as though it is the natural way capitalism works. When a pushoveris tricked by the hustlers, they send his money to the gambling hostessconfederated with them and she lends money to the very pushover at highinterest, and then he loses it and borrows money again in the same waywhile they receive interest. This loop captures the process in whichcapital increases itself only by circulating itself while belonging tonobody and yet drowning somebody in debt. This underground economy showsthe ABC of financial capitalism based on debt.

Of course, cinematically. audiences are induced to enjoy thiscommercial film as a fantasy and not to confront the commercial realityreflected there. Towards the end, the protagonist's money is blownaway in the wind, but it is also intimated that despite the vanity ofgambling, he will return to it just as money always circulates the worldand life goes on--hence the sequel follows conventionally. Nevertheless,without gambling he would have been no other than a dog of capital whoslaves away but hardly escapes from a vicious cycle of debt and poverty.Thus his desire to live in "Tower Palace"--a symbol of wealthin Seoul--is no different from the desire of the world itself wherespeculative capital takes over the value of labor, the return on capitalbased on money-making-money is greater than the rate of economic growthbased on production, and class structure changes into the'winner-takes-all' system of 1:99. A hustler's line,"How could we make a living if the world is beautiful andequal?" is beyond a joke. For the fulfillment of desire, it isnecessary to embody "capitalist concepts, not human emotions."In this society where abnormalities are normalized, to train thegambling skill for the change of life is suggested not only as anecessary survival strategy for the have-nots but also as an active andenthusiastic self-development to realize their dreams beyond survival.This wonderful self-realization occurs as the cognitive-capitaliststealing in The Thieves and develops into the financial-capitalistspeculation in the Tazza series. As a result, the black market and thelegitimate economy intermingle ever more indistinguishably intopredatory capitalism.

Last but not least, global Korean auteur Park Chan-wook'sThirst (2009) can be seen in this context though it is a very differentfilm. (8) While the Tazza series is quite local despite evokingglobalized speculative capital, Thirst has a widespread global networkin the backdrop. On the one hand, the film's main stage, a store ofhanbok (traditional Korean clothes), is located in a Japanese stylehouse where trot songs from the colonial period flow out from an antiquephonograph, and people play Chinese mahjong while drinking Russianvodka. On the other hand. Thirst is a rare Korean vampire film looselybased on French novel Therese Raquin, with Bach's cantata playingand a Catholic priest, Sang-hyun, appearing as the hero who even visitsAfrica. This cultural mixture, though critiqued as stateless, indicatesthat other cultures are already deeply rooted in Korea as naturalsimulacra that would not stick out except on screen. Given that hanbokis so otherized that it is no longer a daily dress, the narrative spacelooks like a sample of the global, multicultural environment whereinternalized otherness and otherized selfhood fuse. There is also aFilipina married to a Korean man for money, and in a similar socialposition, Tae- ju, the heroine, appears as a quasi-abject figure who hasto work like a live-in slave under the owner of the hanhok store--herfoster mother and hysterical mother-in-law--and take care of her fosterbrother and impotent husband in a sort of incestuous marriage. Theshelter and the unpaid job that Tae-ju gets in return for her physicaland emotional labor imply no more than oppression and abuse.

In this aspect, as bloodsucking is a (Marxist) metaphor forexploitation, Tae-ju's change into a vampire can be seen as herchange into a subject of exploitation; that is, the dog-like workerbecomes a capitalist. The catalyst is Sang-hyun. He volunteers to beinfected with a virus devastating Africa in order to help find a cure,but dies; then he resurrects as a vampire after receiving unidentifiedblood and lives as an abject priest who fails to achieve religiousdevotion and salvation. However, this abjection unexpectedly brings himsome superhuman power and libido liberated from the ascetic ministry andemotional labor in religion including helping and praying to God fordying people. From the economic perspective, he now craves only capitalas blood for the maintenance and strengthening of this new capacity anddesire. His affair with married Tae-ju is like the plundering of privateproperty from the bourgeois family system. Furthermore, the scene ofSang-hyun and Tae-ju's mutual transfusion in an erotic-pose looksas though they become the doubles while multiplying their blood-capitalby circulating it as in Tazza. After that, Tae-ju leads serial killingsfor more and more blood in ecstasy, just as financial capital infinitelymonopolizes ordinary people's blood-like assets. The emotionallaborer who served her family with care and intimacy, a dog of emotionalcapitalism, is now a financial capitalist, a neoliberal thief full ofgreed. Killing is part of the natural economy for Tae-ju as she says,"Is it a sin for a fox to eat a chicken?" This law of thejungle works in the state of exception to the law of the society thatshe suspends as a "man-eating beast" or a sovereign agent ofblood. Humans are none other than bare lives, weak animals to devour.Animality and sovereignty become one as do the thief and the capitalist

This vibrant, unfettered blood hunt might look like an"affective performance" liberated from emotional labor, apositive play (Spiel) like games or gambling that Walter Benjamin seeshas some emancipatory potential in a capitalist society ([phraseomitted] 2014.44-45). But just as information processing in cognitivecapitalism and deceptive speculation in financial capitalism alsopartake of the nature of play as seen in The Thieves and Tazza. sodeviation from the system itself is co-opted into the system today.Interestingly, Sang-hyun, who liberated Tae-ju from her house, tries tobreak her bloody desire and avoid killing people after he kills a seniorpriest, a father figure to him, as if he wants to tell her."Let's not become monsters even if we cannot becomehumans." (9) This difference between the two vampires implies theself-division that a singular being undergoes between desire and ethicswhen losing or leaving their parental figures or God as the big Other.Sang-hyun says, "Not to suck up the entire blood of those killed isto devalue life"; this weird joke suggests his instinctive pursuitof ethical values that he cannot abandon even after quitting the church.For him, it is unethical to exploit and consume humans by abusingvampiric sovereignty as he may believe the potential sanctity of life isimmanent in the bare lives. He becomes a sort of abject agent whoimposes an ethical if not religious mission on himself. This missionturns out to be to renounce his transcendent power, thereby findingsacredness after the death of God not in the transcendent reign ofanimalistic desire but in the transcendent value of life which could bekilled by the very desire. Divinity is neither in God nor in sovereignanimality but human bare life to be believed as potentiallyself-transcendent because man would otherwise be nothing but an animalhom*o sacer.

In the last scene, Sang-hyun goes to see the sunrise with Tae-ju towelcome their demise. This drive toward death also implies his ethicaldesire for self-transcendence, for transcending his sovereign animalityby choosing to die of his own free will against the very sovereignanimality. Something that is in him more than himself is realizedthrough this paradoxical abject agency. His self-salvific sacrificedelayed after the first death is rendered possible upon this seconddeath. Allegorically, Thirst tells a story in which the abject freedfrom the religious and family systems of emotional labor seek thepleasure of neoliberal capital growth and then performs ethicalresistance to this infinite greed through self-destruction. Here isanother direction of realizing abject agency.

In conclusion, today's global Korean cinema is full of abjectagents who traverse the dual East Asian networks of the neoliberaltrinity: cognitive, financial, and emotional capitalism. These agentsrange from dog-like workers to capitalists like thieves, from ghostlyterrorists attacking the system to transnational professionals embodyingthe system. And there is a penitent choice of ethical suicide away fromthe vicious circle of slaving and stealing, of attacking the system andappropriating the system. That being said, all of these cases implyconformity or conflict with the global system, or at best aself-destructive rejection of it. What is absent is the imagination fora better world, and this absence is covered with artistic achievementsand commercial fantasies. But as global Korea cinema has never ceased tobe dynamic, let's hope that it will experiment with morealternative potentialities of abject agency.

References

Agamben. Giorgio. 1998. hom*o Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare LifeTranslated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress.

Auge. Marc. 2009. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity.Translated by John Howe. 2 edition. London; New York: Verso.

Choi. JungBong. 2010. "Of the East Asian Cultural Sphere:Theorizing Cultural Regionalization." China Review 10(2): 109-36.Choi, jungbong. 2012. "Of Transnational-Korean Cinematrix."Transnational Cinemas 3 (1): 3-18.

Deleuze. Gilles. and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1998. Phasmes: Essais Surl'apparition. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Jeong, Seung-hoon. 2014."DMZ: Atopia in Global Korean Cinema." In DMZ: Stories ofToday and Tomorrow. 125-54. Seoul: Space for Contemporary Art.

--2016. "A Generational Spectrum of Global Korean Auteurs:Political Matrix and Ethical Potential." In The Global Auteur: ThePolitics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema, edited by Seung-hoonJeong and Jeremi Szaniawski, 361-78. New York: Bloomsbury.

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lacan. Jacques. 1997. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar ofJacques Lacan (Book VII). Edited by Jacques Alain-Miller. Translated byDennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton.

Soyoung. Kim. 2013. "The State of Fantasy in Emergency."Cultural Studies 27 (2): 257-70. Tyler. Imogen. 2013. RevoltingSubjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain. London:Zed Books.

[phrase omitted] Kim. 2014.[phrase omitted]: [phrase omitted].

[phrase omitted] Hanyang Univ. 2014. [phrase omitted]: [phraseomitted].

(3) Korea will refer to South Korea hereafter unless South Koreaand North Korea need to be specified. This and next sections include asubstantial revision of my previous essay on the subject (Jeong 2014).

(4) For more elaboration on global cinema, abjection, and agency,see my Introduction in this journal issue.

(5) Though the global facet of the North-West network is new. itsgeographic area has long been present in Korean cinema. Early films suchas Frontier (Kirn Do-san. 1923) and Vagabond (Kim Yu-yeong, 1928) depictthe struggle of Koreans colonized by Japan to survive across and beyondManchuria in northeastern China. This area and era reappear in thepostwar "Manclui Westerns" about independence activistsincluding Farewell Duman River (Im Kwon-taek. 1962) and Speak, the YalnRiver (Kang Min- ho, 1965). If the Korea-China border is the colonialsubalterns' transnational exit, the border between two Koreas hasbeen the tragic stage of the fratricidal Korean War in war films andmelodramas about family separation such as Marines Are Gone (LeeMan-hee, 1963) and North and South (Kim Ki-duk. 1965). The issue ofdiaspora peaks in such films as The Winter That Year Was Warm (BaeChang-ho, 1984) and Kilsocleum (1m Kwon-taek, 1985) that resonate withthe family reunion events broadcasted in 1984 (see. among others.Hanyang University Contemporary Film Research Institute. 2014). Theaftermath of the war is seen later on as in Address Unknown (Kim Ki-duk.2000) and A Good Lawyer's Wife (Im Sang- soo, 2003). However, therecent flood of North Koreans (mainly dtie to famine in the late 1990s)and Korean-Chinese (illegal) workers into South Korea is reflected onlyin global Korean cinema.

(6) On the other hand, there have been many comedies that depicttraditionally demonized North Korean spies in a daily setting withhumor, sympathy, and humanism, and thus liberate them from SouthKorea's 'red complex': The Spy (Jang Jin. 1999), Man fromthe South. Woman from the North (Zeong Cho-sin. 2003). Spy Girl (ParkHan-jun. 2003), Secretly Greatly (Jang Cheol-soo, 2012), and so on.

(7) This trend reflects the ongoing influx of Joseonjok up to overa million (taking up over 40% of all foreigners in Korea) since the 1992establishment of Korea-China diplomatic ties and the consequent increaseof their crimes. But it must be noted that Joseonjok's crime rateis about average despite some sensational cases, and the stereotypicalxenophobic demonization of them on screen has been criticized.

(8) This part on Thirst expands my brief comments on it putelsewhere (Jeong 2016. 372-73).

(9) It is a famous line from Hong Sang-soo's On the Occasionof Remembering the Turning Gale (20(12)

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