Professor Se Young Kim of Colby College Cinema Studies led a discussion on the use of firearms in... more Professor Se Young Kim of Colby College Cinema Studies led a discussion on the use of firearms in "The Way of the Gun" and the film’s impact in terms of militarization in the years since on September 23, 2020.
From Monday, November 1st at Colby College.
An investigation into the explosive popularity of ... more From Monday, November 1st at Colby College.
An investigation into the explosive popularity of Netflix's "Squid Game" (2021). Assistant professor Se Young Kim of the Cinema Studies Program discussed the show's depiction of South Korean game culture, and charted how "Squid Game" is the latest in a genealogy of violent Asian media, picking up on the momentum of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" (2019) and following the critical precedents of texts such as Fukasaku Kinji's "Battle Royale" (2000) and Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy" (2003).
Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Program.
"Techniques of Femininity: Contemporary Cinema and Women in Action," Society for Cinema and Media... more "Techniques of Femininity: Contemporary Cinema and Women in Action," Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2021 Conference.
Revenger (2018) is an attempt to capitalize and extend the popularity of brutal Asian cinema, especially as promoted through Palisades Tartan’s “Asia Extreme” label of home video. While violent Asian cinema in the 2000s was primarily circulated through international film festivals and home video, eleven years after Palisades Tartan’s bankruptcy, Revenger looks elsewhere for distribution: Netflix. Revenger picks up where Tartan Palisades left off and takes up trends in global action cinema, providing Netflix with a film it can mark, “Asian revenge martial arts film with a strong female character.” Femininity in Revenger must be understood as a component of the film’s high concept strategy wherein it will appeal to a particular viewer and algorithmically appear in his or her Netflix interface.
“Asian Digital Identities: Media, Platforms, and Cultural Wars,” Association for Asian Studies C... more “Asian Digital Identities: Media, Platforms, and Cultural Wars,” Association for Asian Studies Conference.
The success of K-Pop hinges on its transmutability, with audiences mimicking their favorite dance moves and uploading their efforts onto platforms such as YouTube. But this is a practice that both consumers and producers share, as K-Pop idols constantly imitate one another. In doing so, these so-called idols reveal the true conditions of their culture industry subjectivity, as commutable units. And yet, in their reproduction, which extends past the supposed ontology of gender, with boy groups covering girl groups and vice versa, K-Pop performs a type of auto-critique where idols rupture the aura that the industry so frantically produces. It is here, in its insistence on reproduction, that we also find K-Pop’s insurgent energy, its ability to cross borders, its reintroduction of the play in gender, and its potential to critique itself.
With Jennifer deWinter and Tara Fickle, “/pɒp/Asia,” The University of Chicago, Rose Yuen Campus ... more With Jennifer deWinter and Tara Fickle, “/pɒp/Asia,” The University of Chicago, Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong.
How do cultural norms affect gamers’ gaming motivations and, in turn, impact the gaming industry in Asia and the West? The second episode of the Video Games mini-series explores the video game differences between the United States and Asia, with a particular emphasis on countries that include China, Japan, and South Korea.
Guest Lecture, “How Does It Move? Action and Moving Image in Modern Japan,” Department of Asian L... more Guest Lecture, “How Does It Move? Action and Moving Image in Modern Japan,” Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles.
An adaptation and continuation of Inoue Takehiko's successful manga "Slam Dunk" (1990-1996), "The... more An adaptation and continuation of Inoue Takehiko's successful manga "Slam Dunk" (1990-1996), "The First Slam Dunk" (2022) opened to resounding success in South Korean theaters, becoming the most viewed Japanese film in the country (animated or otherwise), in April of 2023. Part of the film's success was due to the manga's immense popularity, published during the Cultural Ban when it was ostensibly illegal to disseminate Japanese culture. Between its critical role in the semi-legitmization of manga before the Japanese Cultural Influx and the inconsistent localization practices of publisher Daewon CI, "Slam Dunk" becomes an opportunity to observe an engaged site of dynamic interchange that troubles rigid borders of cultural flow. That hybridity, also evident in "The First Slam Dunk," helps us understand the film's curious crossover success with the built-in audience of middle-aged fans and newer, younger female viewers. As pundits have noted, nostalgia is central to "The First Slam Dunk," but like the original manga, the film's nostalgia does not observe strict boundaries of nation, gender, generation. Instead, it gestures to the broader experience that its eclectic audience shares, namely the post-crisis conditions of the last 30 years.
Claims of plagiarism accompanied the unprecedented success of "Squid Game" (2021), namely due to ... more Claims of plagiarism accompanied the unprecedented success of "Squid Game" (2021), namely due to uncanny similarities with Miike Takashi’s "As the Gods Will" (2014) and the heavy influence of Fukasaku Kinji’s "Battle Royale" (2000). But closer inspection of these threads and others, such as Oku Hiroya’s "Gantz" (2000-2013), reveals how "Squid Game" belongs in a longer genealogy in which South Korean speculative fiction has continuously engaged the postwar culture of Japan. Examined alongside "Yonggary, Monster from the Deep" (1967), "Robot Taekwon V" (1976), and "Ureme" (1986), which indebted to Japanese “Super Robot” anime and manga as well as tokusatsu film and television, this paper illustrates the fundamental hybridity of contemporary South Korean speculative fiction. In turn, that hybridity has proven critical to both Korea and Japan’s efforts to move past colonial antipathy and grapple with the tumultuous experience of the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries.
The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media, 2022
One of the most critically and commercially successful video games in the history of the medium, ... more One of the most critically and commercially successful video games in the history of the medium, "The Last of Us" (2014) made a much-needed and timely intervention in the representation of gender and sexuality. Following two survivors of a world-ending pandemic, Joel and Ellie, the game chronicles the latter’s journey in what creative director Neil Druckmann referred to as the “origin story” of a “female action hero.” But empowerment in "The Last of Us" is the acquisition of narrative and ludic agency in the form of action, and action ultimately amounts to violence that is brought to bear against a racialized Other. And while that violence may transform Ellie into an active subject, she must first be submitted to violence herself, as NPC AI and as object in Joel’s neurotic psychodrama. "The Last of Us" thus makes an admirable and somewhat successful effort to address the historical marginalization of women, but cannot do so without enacting its own process of digital exclusion.
This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asi... more This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asian American studies, Asian studies, and critical game studies. We discuss how digital games as an "Asiatic" medium function socially, culturally, politically, and economically and how games speak to Asian/American experiences through forms of play. The forum looks beyond representations of Asian Americans in games to ask how games themselves have become Asiatic products even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated in Asian contexts and are often concerned with, and played by, sizable Asian audiences. We also seek to push beyond critiques of games as frivolous cultural objects or as mindless militaristic purveyors of violence and rather ask how games and gaming cultures play with forms of race, gender, sexuality, and nation and offer alternative ways of thinking about "difference" more broadly. The following documents explore, from four different angles, how games have been framed as forms of "Digital Asia," as products of Asia and transpacific empire, and how games have permitted forms of solidarity and resistance for Asian/American communities. We ask, How does play function within virtual spaces conceived of as Asian or Asian inflected? How are familiar Orientalist tropes reframed in the particular language of gaming? How have Asian/Americans been shaped within gaming and developer communities? This enterprise took the form of a roundtable carried out virtually across four simultaneous Google documents over a series of a few months.
One of the most important video games to come out of East Asia in the twenty-first-century, Playe... more One of the most important video games to come out of East Asia in the twenty-first-century, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (2017), or PUBG, owes its premise to Battle Royale, both Takumi Koushun’s 1999 novel and Fukasaku Kinji’s 2000 adaptation. As with Battle Royale, PUBG consists of a deadly competition situated around scarcity in resources in a relentlessly dwindling playing field. Considered in the context of Japan’s “Lost Decades” and post-IMF Korea, the popularity of such a cruel contest becomes self-evident. Read in relation to its historical context not as allegory but rather as symptom, PUBG intimates an ideological and affective shift in the twenty-first century players reorienting their relationship to labor as they negotiate the terms and conditions of the zero-sum game of neoliberal Asia.
This essay looks at Na Hong-jin’s 2008 film "Chugyeokja/The Chaser," based loosely on the Yoo You... more This essay looks at Na Hong-jin’s 2008 film "Chugyeokja/The Chaser," based loosely on the Yoo Young-chul serial murders of 2003 and 2004. While the film asserts that the killer’s pathology can be understood as resentful misogyny, "The Chaser" simultaneously suggests that it originates in a perceived loss of sovereignty. Read alongside the film’s attempt to resist Hollywood hegemony at the box office and the idea that serial murder is a form of ‘advanced nation disease’, I argue that "The Chaser" reveals the relationship between the South Korean serial killer and neoliberal modernity in the country – both as a horrible side effect as well as a perverse emblem of progress.
From the very beginning, with the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll opening Gojira (1954, dir.... more From the very beginning, with the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll opening Gojira (1954, dir. Honda Ishirō), the U.S. has played a role in the tokusatsu (special filming) mode and the kaiju genre. For the popular superhero genre of the 1970s, American heroes provided a launching point for the cyborg protagonists and their kaiju nemeses. One such series was Kamen Rider (Masked Rider, 1971-1973), as the show owed much of his DNA to American superheroes. At the same time, Kamen Rider took substantial liberties with those heroes, resulting in a media mutation that offers insight into the figure of the kaiju, the tokusatsu mode, and the broader category of Japanese science fiction. This essay will provide a close reading of a number of early Kamen Rider episodes –titled “The Mysterious Spider Man” and “The Terrifying Bat Man” – in order to analyze the interplay between American superheroes, tokusatsu cyborgs, and kaiju villains. The titular villains of each episode invoke their American inspirations while simultaneously manipulating them: far from heroes, the kaiju here lean on totemic animality, resulting in hideous creations. By considering how Kamen Rider thus coopts U.S. media in the broader historical context of postwar rebuilding, this essay will tease out a precise dialectic of wartime anxiety that produces hybrid media, the very same hybridity of the heroes and kaiju themselves.
Cinema, in its most massively produced and widely disseminated format in the twentieth and twenty... more Cinema, in its most massively produced and widely disseminated format in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is violent. In dialogue with both the public discourse and scholarship regarding the cinematic representation of violence, this paper approaches film violence through a Marxist framework. It does so to propose that the philosophy of Karl Marx reveals critical insight regarding the relationship between cinema, violence, and capital. In particular, this essay scrutinizes commercial narrative cinema and thus approaches cinema as hegemony. The violence of cinema is considered to have a role in reproducing the social organization of capitalism, namely the hierarchical relationship between the ruling and ruled classes. Cinema has historically used violence in narrative and spectacle to propagate these relations of production, the ontology of capitalism that consists of Cartesian subjectivity and its vertical orientation towards the Other. In other words, violent cinema is crucial for the subject in capitalism, for it shares the pivotal function of perpetuating class antagonism. But because cinema must constantly mediate the violence of capital, simultaneously obfuscating it while also maintaining it, violent cinema — like the proletariat — also holds the emancipatory potential of its own critique and eventual dismantling.
This essay examines the television and film series Kamen Rider Fourze (2011-2012), approaching it... more This essay examines the television and film series Kamen Rider Fourze (2011-2012), approaching it within its role in the larger mode of tokusatsu filmmaking in Japanese science fiction. Tokusatsu or “special filming” consists of live-action science fiction narratives that heavily feature special effects. Evident in the way that the first tokusatsu text, Gojira (1954, Honda Ishirō), refers to the U.S. hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll that killed twenty-three fishermen, the mode shares a deep connection with its historical context and is continually haunted by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the bombings did nothing less than force the Japanese to reconsider the contours of their own humanity, going so far as to engender new identities such as the hibakusha or “bomb-affected people,” the concern with humanism becomes a core component for tokusatsu. In the imaginary of science fiction, an emasculated nation reactualizes national trauma, copes with the anxiety of complete disarmament following the Potsdam Declaration, and coopts the technonationalist interest in science and technology that motivated the postwar rebuilding effort. While the atomic bombs pushed Japan past the limits of humanity, tokusatsu dreams of the possibility of new forms of life through colorful monsters and cyborg superheroes. Actualizing the fantasy of rearmament, these new creatures embody the desire of postwar Japanese science fiction and reveal it to be a cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment.
This essay simultaneously reads Kamen Rider Fourze as a representative of this history and a radical break. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida among others, this essay initially places Kamen Rider Fourze in this long tradition of postwar Japanese moving image culture. Like much of tokusatsu, Kamen Rider Fourze depicts a Japan under attack and details the rise of a teenage cyborg superhero. And although the hero of Kamen Rider Fourze decries Japanese disarmament and realizes the desire for a final weapon, the series actually moves into a radical space that hews much closer to Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg. Those politics are facilitated by Fourze’s alternative comportment to technology where technology does not merely operate as weaponry that obliterates the alien, enemy Other. Instead, technology functions as Heidegger’s techné and reveals the violent, binaristic, hierarchizing character of humanism. Fourze thus pushes past the resentful slave morality of World War II, opting instead for ethics that are framed around posthuman politics and the ethos of friendship. In the end, Kamen Rider Fourze points not only to a break in national trauma, but also to nothing less than the potentiality of a different mode of cinema that reorients the relationship between Self and Other.
This paper analyzes the Japanese television series Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (2011-2012) as a repre... more This paper analyzes the Japanese television series Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (2011-2012) as a representative of the Super Sentai franchise of Japanese popular culture. Super Sentai, or Super Task Force, is part of the tokusatsu (special filming) mode of filmmaking that features live-action science fiction narratives. As part of a history that begins with Gojira (1954), tokusatsu and Super Sentai both maintain a close relationship to post-World War II trauma. This paper traces the way in which Gokaiger maintains and dissem- inates the trauma of the atomic bombings using the mediums of television and film, but also extends that process into children’s play through the use of toys.
On February 3, 2012, the UK-based news site sky.com reported that a 23-year old Taiwanese man die... more On February 3, 2012, the UK-based news site sky.com reported that a 23-year old Taiwanese man died in an internet café in Taipei playing the online RTS game, "League of Legends." Other gamers had not noticed the lifeless condition of the man for ten hours. In 2010, a South Korean couple was arrested for starving their infant to death because they became obsessed with raising their virtual baby on the role-playing game "Prius Online." One month previous, also in South Korea, a 22-year old man murdered his mother for nagging him about playing video games. This paper analyzes these and other sensational cases where Asian gamers play without regard for life, their own or another’s, in order to show how their representation in the US and UK media is framed in techno-orientalist terms. Kim and Choe argue that these stories play into stigmas of video gaming as well as orientalist understandings about socially inept Asians, while occluding the social-historical construction of the relationship between games/technology and Asians.
Gamer death raises anxieties associated with techno-orientalist figurations of Asian gaming culture: the “wired” IT laborer and the proliferation of affordable, high-speed internet access, the awkward “geek” who is also a celebrity in the world of professional e-sports, and discourses around race and ethnicity constituted through gamer nations. Millions of skilled Asian "Warcraft" gold farmers and virtuoso "Starcraft" players invoke Western yellow peril fears in our increasingly globalizing and networked world, raising anxieties of a rising China, and of millions of Chinese laborers working "without end.” The image of Asians endlessly playing video games reiterate orientalist fantasies of a soulless, inhuman other, the very same images that proliferate through the sci-fi/fantasy worlds the gamers immerse themselves in. While the authors show how this “inhuman other” is often understood within the discursive powers of techno-orientalism that make the Asian other knowable and controllable, they also argue that this understanding reveals Western fantasies of virtual escapism while rupturing precisely these fantasies – of never working while video gaming constantly, and of eternal life without death. This chapter draws from empirical research as well as writings by McKenzie Wark, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Bernard Stiegler to argue that these instances of gamer death reveal aspects of Asian identity that upend notions of capitalist time, while pointing to ontological aporias that blur the distinctions between body and technology, self and other, and game and reality.
Professor Se Young Kim of Colby College Cinema Studies led a discussion on the use of firearms in... more Professor Se Young Kim of Colby College Cinema Studies led a discussion on the use of firearms in "The Way of the Gun" and the film’s impact in terms of militarization in the years since on September 23, 2020.
From Monday, November 1st at Colby College.
An investigation into the explosive popularity of ... more From Monday, November 1st at Colby College.
An investigation into the explosive popularity of Netflix's "Squid Game" (2021). Assistant professor Se Young Kim of the Cinema Studies Program discussed the show's depiction of South Korean game culture, and charted how "Squid Game" is the latest in a genealogy of violent Asian media, picking up on the momentum of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" (2019) and following the critical precedents of texts such as Fukasaku Kinji's "Battle Royale" (2000) and Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy" (2003).
Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Program.
"Techniques of Femininity: Contemporary Cinema and Women in Action," Society for Cinema and Media... more "Techniques of Femininity: Contemporary Cinema and Women in Action," Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2021 Conference.
Revenger (2018) is an attempt to capitalize and extend the popularity of brutal Asian cinema, especially as promoted through Palisades Tartan’s “Asia Extreme” label of home video. While violent Asian cinema in the 2000s was primarily circulated through international film festivals and home video, eleven years after Palisades Tartan’s bankruptcy, Revenger looks elsewhere for distribution: Netflix. Revenger picks up where Tartan Palisades left off and takes up trends in global action cinema, providing Netflix with a film it can mark, “Asian revenge martial arts film with a strong female character.” Femininity in Revenger must be understood as a component of the film’s high concept strategy wherein it will appeal to a particular viewer and algorithmically appear in his or her Netflix interface.
“Asian Digital Identities: Media, Platforms, and Cultural Wars,” Association for Asian Studies C... more “Asian Digital Identities: Media, Platforms, and Cultural Wars,” Association for Asian Studies Conference.
The success of K-Pop hinges on its transmutability, with audiences mimicking their favorite dance moves and uploading their efforts onto platforms such as YouTube. But this is a practice that both consumers and producers share, as K-Pop idols constantly imitate one another. In doing so, these so-called idols reveal the true conditions of their culture industry subjectivity, as commutable units. And yet, in their reproduction, which extends past the supposed ontology of gender, with boy groups covering girl groups and vice versa, K-Pop performs a type of auto-critique where idols rupture the aura that the industry so frantically produces. It is here, in its insistence on reproduction, that we also find K-Pop’s insurgent energy, its ability to cross borders, its reintroduction of the play in gender, and its potential to critique itself.
With Jennifer deWinter and Tara Fickle, “/pɒp/Asia,” The University of Chicago, Rose Yuen Campus ... more With Jennifer deWinter and Tara Fickle, “/pɒp/Asia,” The University of Chicago, Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong.
How do cultural norms affect gamers’ gaming motivations and, in turn, impact the gaming industry in Asia and the West? The second episode of the Video Games mini-series explores the video game differences between the United States and Asia, with a particular emphasis on countries that include China, Japan, and South Korea.
Guest Lecture, “How Does It Move? Action and Moving Image in Modern Japan,” Department of Asian L... more Guest Lecture, “How Does It Move? Action and Moving Image in Modern Japan,” Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles.
An adaptation and continuation of Inoue Takehiko's successful manga "Slam Dunk" (1990-1996), "The... more An adaptation and continuation of Inoue Takehiko's successful manga "Slam Dunk" (1990-1996), "The First Slam Dunk" (2022) opened to resounding success in South Korean theaters, becoming the most viewed Japanese film in the country (animated or otherwise), in April of 2023. Part of the film's success was due to the manga's immense popularity, published during the Cultural Ban when it was ostensibly illegal to disseminate Japanese culture. Between its critical role in the semi-legitmization of manga before the Japanese Cultural Influx and the inconsistent localization practices of publisher Daewon CI, "Slam Dunk" becomes an opportunity to observe an engaged site of dynamic interchange that troubles rigid borders of cultural flow. That hybridity, also evident in "The First Slam Dunk," helps us understand the film's curious crossover success with the built-in audience of middle-aged fans and newer, younger female viewers. As pundits have noted, nostalgia is central to "The First Slam Dunk," but like the original manga, the film's nostalgia does not observe strict boundaries of nation, gender, generation. Instead, it gestures to the broader experience that its eclectic audience shares, namely the post-crisis conditions of the last 30 years.
Claims of plagiarism accompanied the unprecedented success of "Squid Game" (2021), namely due to ... more Claims of plagiarism accompanied the unprecedented success of "Squid Game" (2021), namely due to uncanny similarities with Miike Takashi’s "As the Gods Will" (2014) and the heavy influence of Fukasaku Kinji’s "Battle Royale" (2000). But closer inspection of these threads and others, such as Oku Hiroya’s "Gantz" (2000-2013), reveals how "Squid Game" belongs in a longer genealogy in which South Korean speculative fiction has continuously engaged the postwar culture of Japan. Examined alongside "Yonggary, Monster from the Deep" (1967), "Robot Taekwon V" (1976), and "Ureme" (1986), which indebted to Japanese “Super Robot” anime and manga as well as tokusatsu film and television, this paper illustrates the fundamental hybridity of contemporary South Korean speculative fiction. In turn, that hybridity has proven critical to both Korea and Japan’s efforts to move past colonial antipathy and grapple with the tumultuous experience of the twentieth and twenty-first-centuries.
The Palgrave Handbook of Violence in Film and Media, 2022
One of the most critically and commercially successful video games in the history of the medium, ... more One of the most critically and commercially successful video games in the history of the medium, "The Last of Us" (2014) made a much-needed and timely intervention in the representation of gender and sexuality. Following two survivors of a world-ending pandemic, Joel and Ellie, the game chronicles the latter’s journey in what creative director Neil Druckmann referred to as the “origin story” of a “female action hero.” But empowerment in "The Last of Us" is the acquisition of narrative and ludic agency in the form of action, and action ultimately amounts to violence that is brought to bear against a racialized Other. And while that violence may transform Ellie into an active subject, she must first be submitted to violence herself, as NPC AI and as object in Joel’s neurotic psychodrama. "The Last of Us" thus makes an admirable and somewhat successful effort to address the historical marginalization of women, but cannot do so without enacting its own process of digital exclusion.
This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asi... more This Field Trip brings together three scholars and two game designers working at the nexus of Asian American studies, Asian studies, and critical game studies. We discuss how digital games as an "Asiatic" medium function socially, culturally, politically, and economically and how games speak to Asian/American experiences through forms of play. The forum looks beyond representations of Asian Americans in games to ask how games themselves have become Asiatic products even when they contain no explicit racial representations, as they are manufactured and innovated in Asian contexts and are often concerned with, and played by, sizable Asian audiences. We also seek to push beyond critiques of games as frivolous cultural objects or as mindless militaristic purveyors of violence and rather ask how games and gaming cultures play with forms of race, gender, sexuality, and nation and offer alternative ways of thinking about "difference" more broadly. The following documents explore, from four different angles, how games have been framed as forms of "Digital Asia," as products of Asia and transpacific empire, and how games have permitted forms of solidarity and resistance for Asian/American communities. We ask, How does play function within virtual spaces conceived of as Asian or Asian inflected? How are familiar Orientalist tropes reframed in the particular language of gaming? How have Asian/Americans been shaped within gaming and developer communities? This enterprise took the form of a roundtable carried out virtually across four simultaneous Google documents over a series of a few months.
One of the most important video games to come out of East Asia in the twenty-first-century, Playe... more One of the most important video games to come out of East Asia in the twenty-first-century, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (2017), or PUBG, owes its premise to Battle Royale, both Takumi Koushun’s 1999 novel and Fukasaku Kinji’s 2000 adaptation. As with Battle Royale, PUBG consists of a deadly competition situated around scarcity in resources in a relentlessly dwindling playing field. Considered in the context of Japan’s “Lost Decades” and post-IMF Korea, the popularity of such a cruel contest becomes self-evident. Read in relation to its historical context not as allegory but rather as symptom, PUBG intimates an ideological and affective shift in the twenty-first century players reorienting their relationship to labor as they negotiate the terms and conditions of the zero-sum game of neoliberal Asia.
This essay looks at Na Hong-jin’s 2008 film "Chugyeokja/The Chaser," based loosely on the Yoo You... more This essay looks at Na Hong-jin’s 2008 film "Chugyeokja/The Chaser," based loosely on the Yoo Young-chul serial murders of 2003 and 2004. While the film asserts that the killer’s pathology can be understood as resentful misogyny, "The Chaser" simultaneously suggests that it originates in a perceived loss of sovereignty. Read alongside the film’s attempt to resist Hollywood hegemony at the box office and the idea that serial murder is a form of ‘advanced nation disease’, I argue that "The Chaser" reveals the relationship between the South Korean serial killer and neoliberal modernity in the country – both as a horrible side effect as well as a perverse emblem of progress.
From the very beginning, with the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll opening Gojira (1954, dir.... more From the very beginning, with the hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll opening Gojira (1954, dir. Honda Ishirō), the U.S. has played a role in the tokusatsu (special filming) mode and the kaiju genre. For the popular superhero genre of the 1970s, American heroes provided a launching point for the cyborg protagonists and their kaiju nemeses. One such series was Kamen Rider (Masked Rider, 1971-1973), as the show owed much of his DNA to American superheroes. At the same time, Kamen Rider took substantial liberties with those heroes, resulting in a media mutation that offers insight into the figure of the kaiju, the tokusatsu mode, and the broader category of Japanese science fiction. This essay will provide a close reading of a number of early Kamen Rider episodes –titled “The Mysterious Spider Man” and “The Terrifying Bat Man” – in order to analyze the interplay between American superheroes, tokusatsu cyborgs, and kaiju villains. The titular villains of each episode invoke their American inspirations while simultaneously manipulating them: far from heroes, the kaiju here lean on totemic animality, resulting in hideous creations. By considering how Kamen Rider thus coopts U.S. media in the broader historical context of postwar rebuilding, this essay will tease out a precise dialectic of wartime anxiety that produces hybrid media, the very same hybridity of the heroes and kaiju themselves.
Cinema, in its most massively produced and widely disseminated format in the twentieth and twenty... more Cinema, in its most massively produced and widely disseminated format in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is violent. In dialogue with both the public discourse and scholarship regarding the cinematic representation of violence, this paper approaches film violence through a Marxist framework. It does so to propose that the philosophy of Karl Marx reveals critical insight regarding the relationship between cinema, violence, and capital. In particular, this essay scrutinizes commercial narrative cinema and thus approaches cinema as hegemony. The violence of cinema is considered to have a role in reproducing the social organization of capitalism, namely the hierarchical relationship between the ruling and ruled classes. Cinema has historically used violence in narrative and spectacle to propagate these relations of production, the ontology of capitalism that consists of Cartesian subjectivity and its vertical orientation towards the Other. In other words, violent cinema is crucial for the subject in capitalism, for it shares the pivotal function of perpetuating class antagonism. But because cinema must constantly mediate the violence of capital, simultaneously obfuscating it while also maintaining it, violent cinema — like the proletariat — also holds the emancipatory potential of its own critique and eventual dismantling.
This essay examines the television and film series Kamen Rider Fourze (2011-2012), approaching it... more This essay examines the television and film series Kamen Rider Fourze (2011-2012), approaching it within its role in the larger mode of tokusatsu filmmaking in Japanese science fiction. Tokusatsu or “special filming” consists of live-action science fiction narratives that heavily feature special effects. Evident in the way that the first tokusatsu text, Gojira (1954, Honda Ishirō), refers to the U.S. hydrogen bomb tests at Bikini Atoll that killed twenty-three fishermen, the mode shares a deep connection with its historical context and is continually haunted by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the bombings did nothing less than force the Japanese to reconsider the contours of their own humanity, going so far as to engender new identities such as the hibakusha or “bomb-affected people,” the concern with humanism becomes a core component for tokusatsu. In the imaginary of science fiction, an emasculated nation reactualizes national trauma, copes with the anxiety of complete disarmament following the Potsdam Declaration, and coopts the technonationalist interest in science and technology that motivated the postwar rebuilding effort. While the atomic bombs pushed Japan past the limits of humanity, tokusatsu dreams of the possibility of new forms of life through colorful monsters and cyborg superheroes. Actualizing the fantasy of rearmament, these new creatures embody the desire of postwar Japanese science fiction and reveal it to be a cinema of Nietzschean ressentiment.
This essay simultaneously reads Kamen Rider Fourze as a representative of this history and a radical break. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida among others, this essay initially places Kamen Rider Fourze in this long tradition of postwar Japanese moving image culture. Like much of tokusatsu, Kamen Rider Fourze depicts a Japan under attack and details the rise of a teenage cyborg superhero. And although the hero of Kamen Rider Fourze decries Japanese disarmament and realizes the desire for a final weapon, the series actually moves into a radical space that hews much closer to Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg. Those politics are facilitated by Fourze’s alternative comportment to technology where technology does not merely operate as weaponry that obliterates the alien, enemy Other. Instead, technology functions as Heidegger’s techné and reveals the violent, binaristic, hierarchizing character of humanism. Fourze thus pushes past the resentful slave morality of World War II, opting instead for ethics that are framed around posthuman politics and the ethos of friendship. In the end, Kamen Rider Fourze points not only to a break in national trauma, but also to nothing less than the potentiality of a different mode of cinema that reorients the relationship between Self and Other.
This paper analyzes the Japanese television series Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (2011-2012) as a repre... more This paper analyzes the Japanese television series Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (2011-2012) as a representative of the Super Sentai franchise of Japanese popular culture. Super Sentai, or Super Task Force, is part of the tokusatsu (special filming) mode of filmmaking that features live-action science fiction narratives. As part of a history that begins with Gojira (1954), tokusatsu and Super Sentai both maintain a close relationship to post-World War II trauma. This paper traces the way in which Gokaiger maintains and dissem- inates the trauma of the atomic bombings using the mediums of television and film, but also extends that process into children’s play through the use of toys.
On February 3, 2012, the UK-based news site sky.com reported that a 23-year old Taiwanese man die... more On February 3, 2012, the UK-based news site sky.com reported that a 23-year old Taiwanese man died in an internet café in Taipei playing the online RTS game, "League of Legends." Other gamers had not noticed the lifeless condition of the man for ten hours. In 2010, a South Korean couple was arrested for starving their infant to death because they became obsessed with raising their virtual baby on the role-playing game "Prius Online." One month previous, also in South Korea, a 22-year old man murdered his mother for nagging him about playing video games. This paper analyzes these and other sensational cases where Asian gamers play without regard for life, their own or another’s, in order to show how their representation in the US and UK media is framed in techno-orientalist terms. Kim and Choe argue that these stories play into stigmas of video gaming as well as orientalist understandings about socially inept Asians, while occluding the social-historical construction of the relationship between games/technology and Asians.
Gamer death raises anxieties associated with techno-orientalist figurations of Asian gaming culture: the “wired” IT laborer and the proliferation of affordable, high-speed internet access, the awkward “geek” who is also a celebrity in the world of professional e-sports, and discourses around race and ethnicity constituted through gamer nations. Millions of skilled Asian "Warcraft" gold farmers and virtuoso "Starcraft" players invoke Western yellow peril fears in our increasingly globalizing and networked world, raising anxieties of a rising China, and of millions of Chinese laborers working "without end.” The image of Asians endlessly playing video games reiterate orientalist fantasies of a soulless, inhuman other, the very same images that proliferate through the sci-fi/fantasy worlds the gamers immerse themselves in. While the authors show how this “inhuman other” is often understood within the discursive powers of techno-orientalism that make the Asian other knowable and controllable, they also argue that this understanding reveals Western fantasies of virtual escapism while rupturing precisely these fantasies – of never working while video gaming constantly, and of eternal life without death. This chapter draws from empirical research as well as writings by McKenzie Wark, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Bernard Stiegler to argue that these instances of gamer death reveal aspects of Asian identity that upend notions of capitalist time, while pointing to ontological aporias that blur the distinctions between body and technology, self and other, and game and reality.
Uploads
Videos by Se Young Kim
Hosted by the Maine Film Center.
An investigation into the explosive popularity of Netflix's "Squid Game" (2021). Assistant professor Se Young Kim of the Cinema Studies Program discussed the show's depiction of South Korean game culture, and charted how "Squid Game" is the latest in a genealogy of violent Asian media, picking up on the momentum of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" (2019) and following the critical precedents of texts such as Fukasaku Kinji's "Battle Royale" (2000) and Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy" (2003).
Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Program.
Revenger (2018) is an attempt to capitalize and extend the popularity of brutal Asian cinema, especially as promoted through Palisades Tartan’s “Asia Extreme” label of home video. While violent Asian cinema in the 2000s was primarily circulated through international film festivals and home video, eleven years after Palisades Tartan’s bankruptcy, Revenger looks elsewhere for distribution: Netflix. Revenger picks up where Tartan Palisades left off and takes up trends in global action cinema, providing Netflix with a film it can mark, “Asian revenge martial arts film with a strong female character.” Femininity in Revenger must be understood as a component of the film’s high concept strategy wherein it will appeal to a particular viewer and algorithmically appear in his or her Netflix interface.
The success of K-Pop hinges on its transmutability, with audiences mimicking their favorite dance moves and uploading their efforts onto platforms such as YouTube. But this is a practice that both consumers and producers share, as K-Pop idols constantly imitate one another. In doing so, these so-called idols reveal the true conditions of their culture industry subjectivity, as commutable units. And yet, in their reproduction, which extends past the supposed ontology of gender, with boy groups covering girl groups and vice versa, K-Pop performs a type of auto-critique where idols rupture the aura that the industry so frantically produces. It is here, in its insistence on reproduction, that we also find K-Pop’s insurgent energy, its ability to cross borders, its reintroduction of the play in gender, and its potential to critique itself.
How do cultural norms affect gamers’ gaming motivations and, in turn, impact the gaming industry in Asia and the West? The second episode of the Video Games mini-series explores the video game differences between the United States and Asia, with a particular emphasis on countries that include China, Japan, and South Korea.
Papers by Se Young Kim
This essay will provide a close reading of a number of early Kamen Rider episodes –titled “The Mysterious Spider Man” and “The Terrifying Bat Man” – in order to analyze the interplay between American superheroes, tokusatsu cyborgs, and kaiju villains. The titular villains of each episode invoke their American inspirations while simultaneously manipulating them: far from heroes, the kaiju here lean on totemic animality, resulting in hideous creations. By considering how Kamen Rider thus coopts U.S. media in the broader historical context of postwar rebuilding, this essay will tease out a precise dialectic of wartime anxiety that produces hybrid media, the very same hybridity of the heroes and kaiju themselves.
This essay simultaneously reads Kamen Rider Fourze as a representative of this history and a radical break. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida among others, this essay initially places Kamen Rider Fourze in this long tradition of postwar Japanese moving image culture. Like much of tokusatsu, Kamen Rider Fourze depicts a Japan under attack and details the rise of a teenage cyborg superhero. And although the hero of Kamen Rider Fourze decries Japanese disarmament and realizes the desire for a final weapon, the series actually moves into a radical space that hews much closer to Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg. Those politics are facilitated by Fourze’s alternative comportment to technology where technology does not merely operate as weaponry that obliterates the alien, enemy Other. Instead, technology functions as Heidegger’s techné and reveals the violent, binaristic, hierarchizing character of humanism. Fourze thus pushes past the resentful slave morality of World War II, opting instead for ethics that are framed around posthuman politics and the ethos of friendship. In the end, Kamen Rider Fourze points not only to a break in national trauma, but also to nothing less than the potentiality of a different mode of cinema that reorients the relationship between Self and Other.
Gamer death raises anxieties associated with techno-orientalist figurations of Asian gaming culture: the “wired” IT laborer and the proliferation of affordable, high-speed internet access, the awkward “geek” who is also a celebrity in the world of professional e-sports, and discourses around race and ethnicity constituted through gamer nations. Millions of skilled Asian "Warcraft" gold farmers and virtuoso "Starcraft" players invoke Western yellow peril fears in our increasingly globalizing and networked world, raising anxieties of a rising China, and of millions of Chinese laborers working "without end.” The image of Asians endlessly playing video games reiterate orientalist fantasies of a soulless, inhuman other, the very same images that proliferate through the sci-fi/fantasy worlds the gamers immerse themselves in. While the authors show how this “inhuman other” is often understood within the discursive powers of techno-orientalism that make the Asian other knowable and controllable, they also argue that this understanding reveals Western fantasies of virtual escapism while rupturing precisely these fantasies – of never working while video gaming constantly, and of eternal life without death. This chapter draws from empirical research as well as writings by McKenzie Wark, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Bernard Stiegler to argue that these instances of gamer death reveal aspects of Asian identity that upend notions of capitalist time, while pointing to ontological aporias that blur the distinctions between body and technology, self and other, and game and reality.
Reviews by Se Young Kim
Hosted by the Maine Film Center.
An investigation into the explosive popularity of Netflix's "Squid Game" (2021). Assistant professor Se Young Kim of the Cinema Studies Program discussed the show's depiction of South Korean game culture, and charted how "Squid Game" is the latest in a genealogy of violent Asian media, picking up on the momentum of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" (2019) and following the critical precedents of texts such as Fukasaku Kinji's "Battle Royale" (2000) and Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy" (2003).
Co-sponsored by the Cinema Studies Program and the East Asian Studies Program.
Revenger (2018) is an attempt to capitalize and extend the popularity of brutal Asian cinema, especially as promoted through Palisades Tartan’s “Asia Extreme” label of home video. While violent Asian cinema in the 2000s was primarily circulated through international film festivals and home video, eleven years after Palisades Tartan’s bankruptcy, Revenger looks elsewhere for distribution: Netflix. Revenger picks up where Tartan Palisades left off and takes up trends in global action cinema, providing Netflix with a film it can mark, “Asian revenge martial arts film with a strong female character.” Femininity in Revenger must be understood as a component of the film’s high concept strategy wherein it will appeal to a particular viewer and algorithmically appear in his or her Netflix interface.
The success of K-Pop hinges on its transmutability, with audiences mimicking their favorite dance moves and uploading their efforts onto platforms such as YouTube. But this is a practice that both consumers and producers share, as K-Pop idols constantly imitate one another. In doing so, these so-called idols reveal the true conditions of their culture industry subjectivity, as commutable units. And yet, in their reproduction, which extends past the supposed ontology of gender, with boy groups covering girl groups and vice versa, K-Pop performs a type of auto-critique where idols rupture the aura that the industry so frantically produces. It is here, in its insistence on reproduction, that we also find K-Pop’s insurgent energy, its ability to cross borders, its reintroduction of the play in gender, and its potential to critique itself.
How do cultural norms affect gamers’ gaming motivations and, in turn, impact the gaming industry in Asia and the West? The second episode of the Video Games mini-series explores the video game differences between the United States and Asia, with a particular emphasis on countries that include China, Japan, and South Korea.
This essay will provide a close reading of a number of early Kamen Rider episodes –titled “The Mysterious Spider Man” and “The Terrifying Bat Man” – in order to analyze the interplay between American superheroes, tokusatsu cyborgs, and kaiju villains. The titular villains of each episode invoke their American inspirations while simultaneously manipulating them: far from heroes, the kaiju here lean on totemic animality, resulting in hideous creations. By considering how Kamen Rider thus coopts U.S. media in the broader historical context of postwar rebuilding, this essay will tease out a precise dialectic of wartime anxiety that produces hybrid media, the very same hybridity of the heroes and kaiju themselves.
This essay simultaneously reads Kamen Rider Fourze as a representative of this history and a radical break. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Derrida among others, this essay initially places Kamen Rider Fourze in this long tradition of postwar Japanese moving image culture. Like much of tokusatsu, Kamen Rider Fourze depicts a Japan under attack and details the rise of a teenage cyborg superhero. And although the hero of Kamen Rider Fourze decries Japanese disarmament and realizes the desire for a final weapon, the series actually moves into a radical space that hews much closer to Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg. Those politics are facilitated by Fourze’s alternative comportment to technology where technology does not merely operate as weaponry that obliterates the alien, enemy Other. Instead, technology functions as Heidegger’s techné and reveals the violent, binaristic, hierarchizing character of humanism. Fourze thus pushes past the resentful slave morality of World War II, opting instead for ethics that are framed around posthuman politics and the ethos of friendship. In the end, Kamen Rider Fourze points not only to a break in national trauma, but also to nothing less than the potentiality of a different mode of cinema that reorients the relationship between Self and Other.
Gamer death raises anxieties associated with techno-orientalist figurations of Asian gaming culture: the “wired” IT laborer and the proliferation of affordable, high-speed internet access, the awkward “geek” who is also a celebrity in the world of professional e-sports, and discourses around race and ethnicity constituted through gamer nations. Millions of skilled Asian "Warcraft" gold farmers and virtuoso "Starcraft" players invoke Western yellow peril fears in our increasingly globalizing and networked world, raising anxieties of a rising China, and of millions of Chinese laborers working "without end.” The image of Asians endlessly playing video games reiterate orientalist fantasies of a soulless, inhuman other, the very same images that proliferate through the sci-fi/fantasy worlds the gamers immerse themselves in. While the authors show how this “inhuman other” is often understood within the discursive powers of techno-orientalism that make the Asian other knowable and controllable, they also argue that this understanding reveals Western fantasies of virtual escapism while rupturing precisely these fantasies – of never working while video gaming constantly, and of eternal life without death. This chapter draws from empirical research as well as writings by McKenzie Wark, Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille, and Bernard Stiegler to argue that these instances of gamer death reveal aspects of Asian identity that upend notions of capitalist time, while pointing to ontological aporias that blur the distinctions between body and technology, self and other, and game and reality.