21세기 초 한국영화의 미디어 기억과 역사적 트라우마: 〈올드보이〉

Abstract

This paper explores how contemporary Korean films in the new millennium deal with historical memories as a matter of media memory in the face of the historical and cinematic turn to post-history and post-cinema. In the early 2000s, when movies of nostalgia such as Friend (Kwak Kyung-taek, 2001) appear, Old Boy (Park Chan-wook, 2003) puts historical aspects of Korean modern history in the film, while it ostensibly depicts a mythical world surrounding incest desires. Historical memories are written through media devices in the movie, and these entries are linked to the search for private memories of Oh Dae-su and the re-enactment of the trauma of Lee Wu-jin. In other words, memory appears in the form of media memory, especially media trauma. Furthermore, Old Boy not only writes the historical phase of Korean modern history, but also shows the self-reflexivity of the visual media throughout the film. And this cinematic memory constitutes a kind of response to the digital turn in cinema in the early 21st century. Anxiety about memory and oblivion implied in Old Boy, which is immersed in the search for past trauma and memory, is an anxiety about the perishing history in the post-history era and an anxiety about the decay of cinema as a medium representing reality/history in the post-cinema era. In Old Boy, director Park Chan-wook actively brings images of reality to the screen but deletes them at the same time. Here we face the ambivalent desire to write history on the screen and to escape from such history. As a text in which contradictory desires collide, Old Boy exposes the very historical state faced by Korean cinema that was freed from historical weight in the 2000s.