TV드라마 <마을-아치아라의 비밀>에 나타난 애도의 정치적 상상력

Abstract

This study set out to investigate the political imagination of mourning embodied in a TV drama titled The Village: Achiara's Secret. The drama puts a death that has not been mourned in the front and traces its cause. Here, the journey of searching for truth involved in the death represents an act of completing mourning. The process of revealing a doubtful death that nobody remembers and mourning the death exposes the truth of massive order that caused the undeserved death. The drama thus makes viewers imagine the political nature of mourning beyond personal mourning to grieve over death. Exposed through the political imagination of mourning by the drama, the problematic reality had the following aspects and facts: first, the long-standing patriarchal system surrounding the Korean society works as a comprehensive political, social, and cultural principle within the society. It also prevents women from becoming subjects with the conditions of violence and suppression, accumulates capital, and reinforces the systems made by men. Secondly, the maternal instinct and family myths, which the Korean society is pregnant with in a secret and ongoing fashion, force people to distinguish themselves from others and manipulate a life of indifference to others and confusion. The possibilities of mourning's political nature are revealed in the process of investigating the truth through the solidarity of others and the practice of the mourning community. At the same time, the limitations of mourning's political nature are depicted as it is aroused that such a practice can never make a success in its true sense in the Korean society. In the end, the drama introduces a metonymy for the Korean society through the political imagination of mourning. In short, The Village: Achiara's Secret makes a challenge to the limitations of TV dramas that either compromise with the ruling ideology or reinforce it further by embodying the political imagination of mourning. In other words, it is a controversial work that has raised questions with the ruling discourse that has been taken granted, exposed the order of the Korean society's old irrationality and contradiction, and helped the viewers have a drama-based reflection.