1980년대 한국영화에서의 죽음과 에로스의 단면 - <변강쇠>에서의 노동과 유희의 불가능한 병치

Abstract

The closure of ero film, the mainstream adult-targeted theatrical cinema of South Korea in the 1980s prevails with the death of its main protagonists. Given that ero film is a genre utilizing eroticism and sexuality at its best, it is ironical that its conventional ending with death aims to morally punish those who are not eager to work hard in their pursuit for sexual pleasure. In other words, a dialectical synthesis between Freudian Eros and death drive cannot be made but undone by their struggling conflicts in many ero films, which incurs the tragic end in them. Postulated by Sigmund Freud, Eros and death drive are dualistic energies propelling human life, in which the former is a constructive force led by libido and sexual reproduction and the latter is a mystic self-destructive drive into an inanimate state prior to the life. This paper attempts to construe this conquest of death drive over Eros, namely the sadistic endings prevalent in the 1980s ero film not only as the result of the Chun Doo-Hwan regime’s implicitly excessive censorship of the national cinema but also as the regime’s cultural succession to the Park Chung-hee administration by enforcing Foucauldian ‘biopower’ that had turned the nationals into working machines serving to construct their fatherland as the advanced industrial capitalist country. The 5th republic of South Korea masqueraded as a promoter of cultural liberalism under the banner of the 3Ss Policy encouraging 3Ss, namely screen, sport, and sex so that the production of ero films could be invigorated by the Policy in that the film genre is combined screen with sex. However, the republic, in fact, discouraged South Koreans to actively seek (sexual) pleasure and leisure by emphasizing that those who were engrossed with Eros and sexual pleasure in the ero film not only trapped themselves into self-destruction caused by the death drive, but are also literally punished with death, whether suicidal or homicidal. This paper analyzes the film, Byun Gangswoe (1986) as an exemplary text among the 1980s ero film showing that those who seldom work but play are punished with death. In so doing, it inquires into how the ero film represents the incompatibility of labor and enjoyment in South Korean society of the 1980s inasmuch as it was influenced by the spirit of Western capitalism that Max Weber explained as the peculiar union of protestant asceticism and mammonism. Insofar as Byun Gangswoe ends with the hypersexual punished by Korean indigenous religious figure, jangseung rather than the Christian God, this paper seeks the meaning of the incompatibility and vernacular linkage between Eros and death in ero films in the context of South Korean society in the 1980s rather than Christian asceticism.