K-Drama <킹덤>이 전시하는 토속적 미래학: 순종의 열망과 잡종의 변이 혁명

Abstract

As OTT platforms such as Netflix have continued to grow over the past three years, K-Drama, following K-Pop are having a big wave and ripple effect overseas enough to bewilder Koreans. Existing K-Drama allowed experimentation of various genres according to the grammar of OTT, and among them, the innovation of <Kingdom> and <Squid Game> made us look back on the infinite possibilities of K-Drama. This paper argues that among the factors that K-Drama have been accepted abroad they have the characteristic of political revolutionaryness that calls into question ones’s identity and ignites the desire for social change. For this purpose, among the numerous K-Drama works produced since 2019, Kim Eun-hee's <Kingdom> impressively developed the 'monstrous theory' of zombies, which is the desire for social change in the background of the Joseon Dynasty. First, the revolutionary nature of K-Drama is revealed as a new spatial aesthetic in K-storytelling, and it can be seen that it is a setting that is uniquely and frequently borrowed from <Kingdom> and other politicized films and dramas such as <Parasite>. Second, especially in K-Drama, 'blood' is often used as a symbol of equality. In <Kingdom>, the setting of a zombie eating human flesh refers to the transformation or becoming a monster, and the narrative about blood and bloodlines which refer to between purebred and crossbreed hybrid. In <Squid Game> also, the blood that the participants show when they die go directed to the moment when the weak become red, the only way the weak can stand in the same rank as the strong, paradoxically, reveals the setting of being freed from class subordination and gaining freedom only after death. Third, K-Drama saw that there was an ideological rationale to support this revolutionaryness. In particular, this paper examines that the monster theory of the Joseon dynasty exhibited in <Kingdom> is has a deep affinity with Deleuzian theory of becoming and the Korean Donghak ideology. Through this, it is emphasized that the Neo-monster theory, which can be explained by the combination of tradition and modern thought(so to speak, vernacular or indigenous futurism), was able to gain persuasive power as a new genre. This ideological uniqueness is one of Korean strengths and function as it political solidarity. These three characteristics contribute to the creation of a different texture from the concentional zombie films to the death game genres in K-Drama. and what K-contents, which are attracting attention in the world today, deserves to be evaluated as singular and sustainable.