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'Run-DMZ' and the axis of vaudeville
By Stephen Epstein
alongside Southern preference for naming the two countries (ie "nambukhan"
for South and North Korea, where the North would prefer a form with "choson").
Just before he finishes, the camera's point of view reverses and is that of the
north. We now see the Tallae Umaktan, in plain black and white hanbok (traditional
Korean dress), looking down on the scene from the Freedom House Pagoda and
gesticulating toward the soldiers. The melange of camera viewpoints, linguistic
input and a quasi-surreal situation destabilize any ready interpretive
framework.
The scene then shifts, and the song proper begins. As the band sings lyrics
that pay tribute to the fashionable love interest of the title, we focus on
Northern and Southern guards confronting one another. In a less amicable replay of JSA, one soldier berates the other because
his counterpart's shadow falls over the line, and the two then spit at each
other in an escalating challenge. Fellow soldiers rush to them and guns are
drawn. Interspersed with this threatening imagery, however, are shots of the
soldiers from both sides dancing in unison along with the band and gazing at
them with longing, one of them even doing push-ups at their feet in an amusing
display of testosterone-fueled swagger. The band members thus appear as both
objects of desire and a force for reconciliation.
An abrupt cut away offers a second vignette that again recalls JSA. Here we
witness an abbreviated reenactment of the scene in which the Southern
protagonist steps on a mine while out on patrol and is rescued by his Northern
counterpart, again intercut with shots of the Tallae Umaktan performing, still
at Panmunjom. In Motchaengi, however, although the detonator is removed and the
mine evidently defused, immediately before the song's shouted "hey" signals the
end of the first chorus, the mine blows up along with the soldier in an
unexpected moment of black humor.
The second verse, which repeats the lyrics of the first, then shifts to a set
that recalls Welcome to Dongmakgol. We find ourselves in a traditional
rural village at a tavern. Three Southern soldiers are drinking with the
villagers when three Northern soldiers arrive, led in by a young woman,
reprising Kang Hye-Jong's prize-wining turn in the film as a slightly unhinged
girl. Guns are again drawn, and the opposing soldiers once more appear in
confrontation, as in the film.
The young woman twirls before them pushing the guns away with an utter lack of
concern, and the villagers merrily continue their drinking, while the soldiers
remain poised to attack one another. Yet again, the scene is interspersed with
shots of the Tallae Umaktan performing, now in ornate hanbok, and beckoning to
the camera in winsome fashion. As the song moves to its end, the standoff
yields to a sequence of cheery ensemble dancing, with Northern and Southern
soldiers stepping along side by side, the villagers behind them, in a spirit of
unity. And as the first half of the video ends with an explosion, so too does
the second conclude with an accidental detonation. The young woman nonchalantly
hurls live ammunition into the air, but instead of returning to earth as
shrapnel, it descends as popcorn, recapitulating one of Welcome to Dongmakgol's
most remarkable moments.
Viewers might well ask themselves: just what is going on here? How are we to
make sense of this video and its mischievous take on contact between North and
South? Of course, the generic conventions of music videos, with their penchant
for rapid cutting and edits, often make it difficult to reconstruct linear, or
even logical, narratives from them. To attempt to do so here is perhaps even
more fruitless than usual, given the postmodern pastiche of its intertextual
allusions. Rather, we might say that the video presents a fantasy realm that
allows for the free play of imagination. We encounter not merely the surreal,
but also a spirit of Aristophanic revelry or even quasi-Bakhtinian carnival
that upends rigid political structures in favor of collective release, as
figured in its images of drinking, eating, dancing and singing.
Military aggression is mollified through indulgence in bodily pleasures, and
via the Tallae Umaktan, who mediate between North and South in their capacity
as entertainers, as border crossers, and as women, a point to which I will
return momentarily. The band occupies a liminal space, flush against the
boundary between a past within the DPRK and a present in the ROK. This
liminality is explicitly symbolized by their performance on the Southern side
of Panmunjom, the demarcation line visible just a meter behind them.
Run DMZ
Indeed, the use of Panmunjom as the setting in which to introduce the band, and
the DMZ motif throughout, indexes changing representations of the North-South
relationship. Panmunjom offers a particularly fruitful site for artistic
manipulation because it encapsulates literally an interface between North and
South: the two sides stare each other down, present within the same space
across a clear dividing line.
After years of commentators pointing to the oxymoronic name "demilitarized
zone," to the extent that noting the incongruity had become a cliche, we are
witnessing a genuine demilitarization of the zone in South Korean pop culture,
such that it forms a setting for humorous play. Diaspora Korean Brandon Lee,
for example, also makes fine use of the JSA set for Panmunjom in his Planet
B-Boy sequence "Run-DMZ", in which Korean breakdancing crews, costumed as
Northern and Southern soldiers, square off against each other in a spirit of
competition that resolves as intra-Korean solidarity. The distorted mirroring
effect between North and South that occurs at Panmunjom can now be treated as
if it belongs to a geopolitical fun house.
Motchaengi and Planet B-Boy also suggest the extent to which South Korean
images of the North are being articulated in an intertextual form. That is,
South Korean pop culture is now self-reflexively engaging with a history of
portrayals of the North and differing visions of the nature of a divided Korea.
Motchaengi and Planet B-Boy allude directly to the already canonical JSA, but
also comment more obliquely on a half-century's tradition of representations
and the malleability of these representations. Just as hegemonic, top-down
interpretations of the North have been challenged from below in the South,
North Korean refugee and diaspora subjectivities are now sculpting the contours
of these representations as well.
That the Tallae Umaktan simultaneously embodies aspects of self and other as a
saet'omin band makes their contribution to South Korean popular culture
particularly noteworthy. In coming to grips with the unusual spectacle the band
presents, commentators have regularly invoked a discourse of homogeneity,
seasoned with enticing difference. As one reporter remarked, " ... other than
their Northern accent and way of speaking, there is nothing that distinguishes
the members of the Tallae Umaktan from young women of the South." Similarly, a
Yonhap News story in 2006 noted with surprise that in making the video for
Motchaengi the members of the band wore komushin (gumshoes) for the
first time, but that their grumbling over how the flat shoes make them look
shorter is precisely what one would expect from South Korea's shinsedae new
generation).
Similarly, in self-description, the band members and those who work with them
contrast cultural aspects of the North and South, but identify a desire to meld
the two. For example, Im Kang-hyon, the composer of Motchaengi,states that
"some think that North Korean music is backwards (ch'onsuropta), but in
fact it has a high degree of artistic accomplishment. We want to demonstrate a
fusion of North Korean artistry and the South's ease and refinement."
The comment, appearing in Yi Chae-won's (2006) article "Tallae Umaktan: We Want
to Convey the Fragrance of Unification," gives pause for thought: while the
discourse of unification often stresses the recovery of lost homogeneity, North
and South are also often simultaneously set apart with complementary qualities,
not simply because of ideological difference and not always to the detriment of
the North.
This notion of the complementarity of North and South has, of course, long
played a role in an important realm: the four-syllable set phrase namnam
pungnyolit (Southern man, Northern woman) helps shape perceptions that
the ideal Korean couple brings together a man from the South and a woman from
the North. The aphorism has appeared as the title of two films, in a 2008 KBS
radio sitcom that stars Im Yu-gyong of the Tallae Umaktan, and now crops up in
matchmaking services, such as Namnam pungnyo kyorhon k'onsolt'ing (Southern
Man, Northern Woman Marriage Consulting), whose owner is a saet'omin woman.
The increasingly high percentage of women among North Koreans now in the South
as a result of lopsided demographics in the North Korean refugee population,
the stir created by the North Korean cheerleaders at the Taegu Universiade in
2003, and the increase in international marriages of Korean men to women from
elsewhere in Asia have all likely played a role in maintaining the durability
of the phrase. Although the maxim itself predates national division, it also
may now suggest in gendered terms a hierarchical relationship between the
nations and how as Grinker wrote, "as the two Koreas diverge, south Korea takes
on the role of metaphorical colonizer to north Korea as metaphorical other".
Nonetheless, this widespread metaphorical equation of gender and hierarchical
national relations is undergoing a complex evolution on the Korean Peninsula.
The Tallae Umaktan itself underscores the ongoing importance of the North to
South Korean
Continued 1 2
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