21세기 한국의 연쇄살인범 서사 또는 (저)개발의 지리적 상상력 - 영화 「살인의 추억」(2003)과 드라마 「괴물」(2021) 겹쳐 읽기

Abstract

This paper seeks to read Korean films and TV dramas with a serial killer storyline as a geographical imagination, which I argue, has been the driving force of South Korean development over many decades. These texts reveal the retrograde shifts in gender and class relations in Korea, made more pronounced by neoliberalism in recent years. I argue that the period from the Hwaseong serial murders (1986-1991) to the Yoo Young-cheol serial murders (2003-2004), was one of simultaneous atrophy of masculinity and misogyny, femicide due to neoliberalization of South Korean political economy and society. The production of Korean films and TV dramas based on or inspired by these cases, including Bong Joon-ho’s Memories of Murder (2000) and the drama Beyond Devil (2021), proliferated and the serial killer narratives emerged as significant popular cultural texts. These films and TV dramas do not simply use rural villages or poor neighborhoods in Seoul as their settings, but rather, they incorporate the issue of ubiquitous development of middle-class apartment complexes into their narratives, carefully representing these areas as an eerie semi-natural environment or places of underdevelopment. Suggesting that rural areas and urban peripheries are spaces where potential crimes might occur, such representations further promote the universalized desire for this type of middle-class housing, i.e. apartment complexes, in South Korea. On the one hand, these housing developments epitomize South Korean middle-class’s heteronormativity and their heightened sense of security, provided by such spaces of dwelling, while on the other hand, they also bring about diminishing diversity in terms of spaces, regions, and the environment. The paper offers a broader critique of the cultural exploitation and depletion of imagination, resulting from the most dominant form of urban housing development in contemporary South Korea.