In the late 1990s, South Korean film and other cultural products, broadly known as hallyu (Korean wave), gained unprecedented international popularity. Korean films earned an all-time
high of ＄60.3 million in Japan in 2005, and they outperformed their Hollywood competitors at Korean box offices. In Virtual Hallyu, Kyung Hyun Kim reflects on the precariousness of
Korean cinema’s success over the past decade. Arguing that state film policies and socioeconomic factors cannot fully explain cinema’s true potentiality, Kim draws on Deleuze’s concept of the
virtual, according to which past and present and truth and falsehood co-exist, to analyze the temporal anxieties and cinematic ironies embedded in screen figures such as a made-in-the USA
aquatic monster (The Host), a postmodern Chosun-era wizard (Woochi), a schizo man-child (Oasis), a weepy North Korean terrorist (Typhoon), a salary
man-turned-vengeful fighting machine (Oldboy), and a sick nationalist (repatriated colonial-era Spring of Korean Peninsula). Kim maintains that the full significance of
hallyu can only be understood by exposing the implicit and explicit ideologies of protonationalism and capitalism that, along with Korea’s ambiguous post-democratization and
neoliberalism, are etched against the celluloid surfaces.
