Kimchi and Spaghetti: The Western as Cross-Cultural Remake

Abstract

The western's obituary has been written time and time again yet somehow it always manages to rise from the dead in one form or another. In his influential book Hollywood Genres : Formulas,Filmmaking, and the Studio System, Thomas Schatz points out “…the Western lives on both as point of cultural reference and as a source of narrative and thematic motifs…” (Schatz 74). In the case of Kim Jee Woon's The Good, the Bad and the Weird (Kim 2008), the Western has been resurrected and transported from the mining camps, boomtowns and deserts of Reconstruction era America to 1930s Manchuria. The film is South Korea's first entry in the Western genre and is credited with launching a new genre, the “K-oater” (Elley 35). The film draws heavily on generic elements of the Western and the sub-genre the “Spaghetti Western”, especially the works of Sergio Leone, particularly Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. As a genre, the Western has been especially noted for its immediately recognizable iconic and thematic elements: gunfights and showdowns, saloons and sixguns, the frontier and the town, trains,bounty hunters, bandits and mysterious loners who drift into town and ride off into the sunset. The Western has been considered a “master key to unlocking and understanding the most basic elements of American identity” (Schatz 54). In particular, the myth of the frontier, encoded within the generic tropes of the Western has been “assigned a central,even defining, place in the foundation of American national identity and national character” (Schatz 55). The Western has also been used to comment on or criticize American domestic and foreign policy, and to interrogate concepts of social and gender identity. The genre has itself been interrogated in the form of the Spaghetti Western. The Spaghetti Western occupies a controversial place within the genre. It has been described as “an inferior imitation of the American Western, a revitalization of the same in terms of visuals and music, or in terms of added realism” (Fridlund 3). For Frayling, it “represented an extraordinary and potent cross-fertilization of American and European cultures” (Frayling vi). It is this idea of cross-fertilization that I wish to examine in regards to the latest incarnation of the “Spaghetti Western”,the so-called “Kimchi Western”. My essay will undertake a close examination of Kim's The Good,The Bad, and The Weird and Leone's The Good, The Bad and The Ugly in order to expose the operations of genre and culture in cross-cultural remakes. By examining the “narrative and thematic motifs” that dovetail with and differentiate the film from Leone's film, I will show how Kim uses the remake to investigate Korean historical, cultural and national identity.