부산대학교 도서관

By representing masculine anxieties and its rejuvenation, Korean cinema as a national cinema delves into the country's traumatic modernization process. Korean-American scholar Kim Kyung Hyun (2003) argues that New Korean Cinema of the 1980s-2000s has underwent a significant trend of remasculinization, which sheds light on the discussion of Bong Joon-ho's acclaimed film, Memories of Murder (2003), in this article. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, this article explores how the film critically questions the role that masculinity and remasculinization plays in the national modernization from two aspectsthe male anxiety and female subjectivity. The unsolved serial murder case in this film serves as a metaphor for the suspension of Korean masculine rejuvenation. Meanwhile, the female characters in Bong Joonho's films who defy the mother/whore and Sadism/Masochism binaries become the key component of the construction of the new subjectivity in Korean cinema. Recently, more New Korean films, like Bong Joon-ho's, challenge the traditional gender order and reconstructs the subjectivity of contemporary Korean society.