Temporal Ruptures: Crises of Meaning in Hallyu Dystopias

References to American culture inflect the opening episode of Hwang Dong-Hyuk's Squid Game (2021). The contestants wear tracksuits reminiscent of Adidas' trademark style. The jazzy tune of "Fly Me to the Moon" colors scenes of competitors dropping dead. A masked man speaks English into a vintage American telephone. Similar citations pervade Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2020). The wealthy Mrs. Park interviews Ki-woo as an English tutor for her daughter. She later names him Kevin and never refers to his Korean name again. Mrs. Park's son is part of the Cub Scouts and is obsessed with American Indians. A wall of family photos features a framed cover story about Mr. Park with the heading, "Nathan Park Hits Central Park." Across the two works, the US circulates as a status symbol of power and prestige. However, these nods to US imperial supremacy are also cutting critiques of America's brand of neoliberal capitalism.

The works are simultaneously critical and conciliatory toward US empire, giving shape and form to its contradictory formation as a site of freedom and violence.1 I wish to suggest that the two works have gripped US audiences for precisely turning US imperialism into a tangible and intimate mechanism that produces crises around the meaning and experience of freedom and agency. I hope to further claim that, through facilitating these visceral confrontations, the works also induce anxiety in ways that interrupt the linear-progressive temporality of empires. This "double-speak" is symptomatic of South Korea's neocolonial relationship with the US After WWII, the US established a temporary military government in the newly postcolonial territory.2 The US then facilitated the first democratic presidential elections, backed Syngman Rhee and continued to to support him after the Korean War even as he went on to establish an authoritarian regime.3 More than defending democracy, the US was preoccupied with securing the region from Russian and Chinese control. As a consequence of this imperial contest, US military bases still populate South Korea. This history reveals the US as a violent imperial power despite its claims as a defender of democracy and protector against communist regimes. In her analysis of the Vietnam War, Mimi Thi Nguyen argues that liberal empires such as the US secure their global power by demonstrating their ability to grant to another "the advantage of human freedom" or "the gift of freedom" through liberation.4 This gift more concretely concerns "the opportunity to prosper — against a spectral future of their nonexistence, under communism, under terror."5Nguyen's insights reinforce what Chandan Reddy calls "freedom with violence," which describes how "the US nation-state continues to assert its [democratic-capitalist] form as the best possible totality for worldwide social relations" to effectively "monopolize the use of legitimate violence."6Nguyen adds that the burden of debt after receiving the "gift of freedom" comes with the obligation "to pardon the act of aggression and redeem the aggressor without imposing a further debt or, indeed, without dwelling on continuing harm."7 As a recipient of US freedom, South Korea cannot critique or oppose US empire without acknowledging this debt or how the US  makes modern life possible in the postcolony. Squid Game and Parasite express these contradictory structural and historical developments in which the privileges of freedom induce  states of submission that then obscure how US empire enacts violence against the very subjects it purports to defend.

Freedom with violence brings about an anxiety-ridden world of bound and suspended agency. This effect is none the clearer than in the rules that govern Squid Game. The rules are as follows: (1) The contestants must compete in the death games. (2) They will be killed if they stop playing. (3) The contestants can stop the games if the majority of the players agree to do so. The masked facilitators of the death games declare that these rules are in place to ensure fairness and objectivity, never mind their willingness to resort to violence to enforce their commitment to those values. Moreover, even when the Squid Game contestants successfully end the games through a majority vote, they soon choose to return to the arena. The contestants' willful return then clarifies the kind of freedom the contestants have: the freedom to experience their dispossession and death as a matter of choice. While the third rule presents an opportunity for the players to opt out of the games, this margin for agency merely produces the illusory perception that the players can choose the kind of violence they live with, between what exists inside and outside the arena. This choice constructs the conceit that the violence of the games is exceptional, even as the rules of the game reproduce the violent mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism in the "outside world" by facilitating the accumulation of wealth and power by dispossessing (or destroying) the vast majority of its participants. Put differently, the third rule clarifies how the violence of the games becomes preferable to the violence of debt and criminal prosecution, as well as how it renews the American Dream. Therefore, the last rule of Squid Game turns agency and choice into performative concepts that cement the illusion that there are preferable forms of violence capable of enhancing life's possibilities. The season's finale further reveals that the games are orchestrated by and for an international gambling ring of mostly Anglo-European members, clarifying the imperial context of the rules.

Squid Game exposes how American freedom with violence works to evacuate subjects of their agential capacity for resistance, resulting in suspended states of agency. Demonstrating this contradictory mechanism of empire can induce anxiety,8 the "feeling of worry ... typically about an imminent event of something with an uncertain outcome" and the "desire to do something, typically accompanied by unease."9 While the rhetoric of freedom sustains the possibility for resistance and agency, its violent formation curtails that potential. Feeling anxious might even be the most defining characteristic of these neoliberal times as it might arise from desiring personal responsibility and control over impending catastrophes resulting from structural and systemic failures. Therefore, while American freedom stages quests for agency and self-determination (culminating in the American Dream) it also inspires the anxiety that the quests are unachievable. Cultural historian Sianne Ngai claims that anxiety guides subjects away from such psychically unbearable realizations; it re-orients the subject around the task of surviving contradictions, accomplished through projections and fantasies of exceptionalism. Indeed Squid Game situates audiences to identify with the main protagonist Gi-hun who wins the death games despite the odds, reinforcing how anxiety can be elevated into a "redemptive mode of affective self-discovery."10Anxiety involves a secondary movement that individualizes and empowers a subject's "capacity for projection."11 The projection of redemptive possibilities (of Gi-hun re-discovering his agency in the aftermath of its suspension) affectively protects audiences from dwelling on the contradictory mechanisms of US empire by deferring any reckoning to a future that never arrives.12 

Anxiety constitutes what Ngai terms weak affect, characterized by its non-cathartic and amoral qualities. As a weak affect, anxiety "has a remarkable capacity for duration" because it does not lead to transformation, resistance, or resolution.13 Contradictions can be endured. Towards the end of Parasite, Kim Ki-taek stabs his employer Mr. Park in the chest, and this grand display of agency and revolt against the more powerful and wealthy Mr. Park fails to transform any structure of power. News reports of the event comment on how police officials cannot identify a motive for the murder, and in a message to his son, Ki-taek expresses his befuddlement as to why he did what he did. A new German family moves into the mansion to replace the Parks soon after Ki-taek moves into the secret basement bunker to hide from the police. While the building's residents have changed, the structure and hierarchy of power it represents remains untouched. Ki-taek's once cathartic act of retribution and redemption becomes a source of confusion, stripped of its transformative potential. Nonetheless, while staging these contradictions through the production of anxiety, the film ends with Ki-taek's son reinvesting in those very failed ideals of agency and redemption. He claims he will strive to purchase the mansion outright and free his father from the basement. If Ki-taek manifests our deepest fears about the failures of individual agency and resistance, then Ki-woo restores those very ideals. Through the two characters, the film illuminates the movement in which anxiety delivers relief without resolving or transforming the status-quo. A true reckoning with the gap between action and transformation is deferred and displaced into the future as the present comes to an impasse.

While a weak affect, anxiety nonetheless unsettles the central temporal logic embedded in histories of colonial-imperialism. The US positions freedom as the teleological end-point to human history. Nguyễn explains, "the gift of freedom presumes to knowingly anticipate and manufacture this present and presence through [neo]liberalism as the rational course of human progress and historical and political transformation" (original emphasis).14 She continues, "In other words, the gift is among other things a gift of time: time for the subject of freedom to resemble or 'catch up to' the modern observer, to accomplish what can be anticipated in a preordained future, whether technological progress, productive capacity, or rational government."15 In line with this insight, leading sociologist of Korean studies Chang Kyung-Sup observes that South Korea has a long history of pursuing "an externally dependent and imitative modernization including, above all, rapid capitalist industrialization" to achieve what he terms "compressed modernity."16 Through such strategies, the nation successfully "abridged the duration needed for its transition from poor agrarian society to advanced industrial economy through a few decades."17 Chang contends that South Korea has since become a warped site of abridged temporality in relation to Western imperial powers, having "achieved incomparably fast capitalist industrialization, political democratization, and social structural change."18 South Korea has arguably entered the future in the present, pulling the deferred reckoning with the contradictions of empire into a more immediate sense of now. Instead of affirming this preordained arrival and the inevitable accomplishment of a neoliberal global order, Parasite and Squid Game present this teleological "arrival" in dystopic terms.

This disruptive force of South Korean culture deviates from recent academic discourses on "techno-Orientalism," or the "phenomenon of imagining Asia and Asians in hypo- or hypertechnological terms in cultural productions and political discourse."19 The critique that techno-Orientalism sutures Western anxieties about its future demise to the technological prowess of Asian nation-states glosses over the Western consumption of Korean dystopian narratives. Parasite and Squid Game are all the more unique for downplaying the future-oriented imaginaries of technology emblematic of techno-Orientalism. Even as Squid Game draws on the same techno-oriental motifs (as with the mechanical doll in the first episode), the death games are based on children's games from the 70s and 80s. And while the basement in Parasite references the prevalence of bunkers in South Korean homes after the Korean War, its forgotten state speaks to how this technological invention has become a relic. In other words, the technology that shapes the two works do not pinpoint a hyper-modern future but a bygone era, like the Morse code Geun-se uses to communicate from the bunker. Technology becomes an emblem of what has passed as the detritus of failed promises and unfulfilled dreams instead of its usual association with material power and excess, producing a non-redemptive historical arc. As Alex Jung writes in a feature article for New York magazine, "It is less that Korean films have caught up with modern times than that modern times have caught up with Korean cinema."20 What seemed like an optimistic future in the aftermath of WWII and the dawn of US empire has become an undeniably dystopian present.

Capitalism breeds the speculative hope that the future will continue to improve on what was past in a predictable and progressive manner. This assurance of predictability might be the most seductive promise of US empire. Reddy explains that "by the twentieth century, US state violence was operating through and constrained by a drive ... to concretize the meaning of rational freedom as a freedom from the threat of arbitrariness."21 However, the contradictions in meaning and growing distance between signs and what they signify, having spiraled out from America's imperial projects, reintroduce the arbitrary and unreliable evaluations of human advancement. See contends that "capitalism is an elaborate form of gambling with debt," revealing the inherent arbitrariness with which its organizing logic emerges and the speculative nature of neoliberal capitalist accumulation that governs the value of stocks, real estate, and human life.22 Squid Game and Parasite apprehend how such instabilities of meaning and futures reveal risk and gambling as the de-facto mode of surviving an increasingly neoliberal-capitalist world. 

Squid Game and Parasite might then also examine anxiety in subversive ways, deviating from what I outlined earlier. Too much tension or chronic stress as a result of anxiety can make work impossible, such that gambling can fill up the resulting duration of suspended agency and paralysis. See calls this form of non-productive activity "a sign of workers' rejection of the reproduction of extricated labor."23 In episode 5 of Squid Game, "A Fair World," Ki-hoon has flashbacks of participating in a labor strike against an auto company where he was last employed. The scene cited events in 2009 when Ssangyong Motor's management announced plans to restructure the company that involved laying off all unionized workers at a manufacturing plant in Pyeongtaek.24 The workers occupied the plant for 77 days, withstanding violent attacks from the police. Ki-hoon loses his job and his dear friend in the process, after which he cannot maintain a stable source of income. His later "fall" into gambling perhaps expresses his resistance to the further exploitation of his labor.

Ki-hoon's willingness to play by the rules of Squid Game could then alternatively constitute a wager that totalizing structures will ultimately prove "the impossibility of totality."25 According to Walter Benjamin, "It is obvious that the gambler is out to win. Yet his desire to win and make money cannot really be termed a 'wish' in the strict sense of the word" because a wish seeks fulfillment in the relief with which one might exclaim, "finally!"26 However, for the gambler, winning or losing does not lead to a wish fulfilled — an end to desire. It leads to another hand, another roll of the dice, ad infinitum. As much as this repetition might renew optimism around enhanced prosperity, Squid Game and Parasite frame gambling as having equally disruptive effects under freedom with violence. Neoliberal capitalism stands on a developmental logic that invests in the future. Meanwhile, gambling negates that same progressive model. The repetitive temporality of gambling becomes divorced from the linear futurity of neoliberal capitalism by grounding a subject more firmly in the present for better or for worse. Gambling loses its overdetermined negative connotation, unsettling the present from being bound to any one future wish. While anxiety might distance a subject from the present by projecting its most threatening parts into a deferred future, the resulting state of suspended agency can unexpectedly pull the subject to perceive and experience the present anew.

In the opening scene of Parasite, Ki-woo declares his plans to go to college to which Ki-taek proudly responds, "That's my son. A man with a plan." But when the Kims confront Geun-se in the basement, Ki-woo murmurs in shock, "This wasn't part of the plan." Ki-taek later tells his son that the way to make a fool-proof plan is to have no plan. He continues, "That's why you should never plan. If you don't have a plan, you can't fail. You can't do anything wrong. Doesn't matter if you kill someone or commit fucking treason. Nothing fucking matters." While the idea of a plan wards off Ki-woo's anxieties about imminent catastrophes, the continued effort to sustain and make a plan also reveals how the very idea of a future holds the present hostage. Ki-taek radically suggests that having no plan is the key to experiencing freedom. If nothing matters then there is nothing to lose or attain. When there is nothing to attain then you are already fulfilled. There is no point to the future.

At an earlier moment in the film, Ki-woo receives a scholar's stone from his friend. He stands in sincere awe at the symbolic significance of the rock and its purported function as a talisman for prosperity. This encounter with the symbolic power of the rock seems to play no small role in inspiring Ki-woo's master con against the Parks. And tellingly, at the imminent moment his con unravels into disaster, the rock loses its symbolic status as a mere heavy and blunt weapon that Gean-se uses against Ki-woo. In the aftermath of his sister's passing and his father's disappearance, Ki-woo releases the rock into a stream after which the camera pans out and lingers on the scholar's stone as it blends in with the surrounding rock formations, losing all its prior signifying value. The scene suggests that the quest for freedom and agency does not culminate in any achievement of symbolic or material power, much less fulfill any purpose. The scene instead meditates on how existence can exceed the power of metaphors and ideologies — where the present is free and untethered from having to arrive somewhere else, inviting what Berlant calls "a potentialized present."27

As mentioned earlier, Ki-woo nonetheless devises another plan to save his father from the basement bunker at the conclusion of the film. He promises to earn a legitimate college degree, become a successful businessman, purchase the mansion, and, by extension, produce his father's freedom. His plan props up the ideals of upward mobility, meritocracy, and the American Dream, posing as an alibi to the very oppressive structures responsible for his family tragedy. The moment comes off as deliriously ironic At the same time, we can deduce that Ki-woo's plan is not "fool-proof," leaving room to interpret his optimism as another possible con that facetiously affirms US exceptionalism. This "double-speak" moment further allows the film to register as a satire as much as a tragedy, comedy as much as horror. In Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong discusses how "humor runs counter to the sublime: instead of transcending, you are made acutely aware of the skin in which you exist."28 Along these lines, the ending of Parasite sharpens our capacity to perceive the uncertainties of the present whereby capitalist utopia can slip into dystopia, optimism into dissonant and dysphoric feelings.

As a form of risky play, Ki-woo's plans unfold as another gamble in which dramatic changes can occur at the flip of a coin and turn the meaning of freedom, agency, and resistance irrelevant. The phenomenal popularity of both Parasite and Squid Game is all the more striking for being so unexpected. Their success has positioned South Korea as a leading cultural producer that can compete with the reach and influence of American culture. This rise of Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, constitutes a series of confounding events in which a non-American power seems to have a better grasp of what constitutes America and the American psyche, disrupting master narratives of US supremacy. The critical acclaim of both South Korean productions in the US (the most recent being Squid Game's Emmy awards) might constitute a defensive reaction to this surprise, neutralizing the works' unsettling insights with celebratory narratives of inclusion and transcendent multiculturalism. Only time will tell what becomes of this Korean Wave and how much of the present has become available for new modes of being.

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Sunhay You (@Sunhayyou) is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Rhode Island School of Design, specializing in transnational Asian/American studies. 

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