2024-08-03 15:12:39
Occult-noir, etc., which have recently risen rapidly
Limitations on the way to deal with social injustice
Public accountability rather than private punishment
◇This is a harmful genre/Written by Park In-seong/252 pages/20,000 won/Nabi Club
The subtitle of this book is ‘How Mystery Became a Hip Genre’. The title of the book is somewhat ‘mysterious’. Just as China tried to exterminate sparrows during the Great Leap Forward, there is no dictator who would point a finger at the mystery genre and order its extermination.
However, there are ‘adults’ who frown, saying, “Children learn by watching crime dramas and movies.” The author explains that mystery is ‘the genre most densely developed in terms of customs and grammar’ and ‘a genre that kills people to save people.’ In other words, the title is a kind of sarcasm. “Mystery is not a story about harm, but a story about harm. To know the truth, you have to take risks and jump in. A good mystery provides a deep understanding of society.” This book explains that ‘mystery is a story model that solves social problems revealed in the form of crime in a public way.’
The author, a literary critic, freely moves from the Sherlock Holmes series to the latest narratives, novels, movies, dramas, and games. Analyzing the occult genre represented by ‘The Exorcist’, ‘The Wailing’, and ‘The Grave’, as well as historical and science fiction (SF) mysteries, the author says that in Korea, the noir genre, which is consistently produced as a movie and has a clear audience preference, is particularly interesting.
If the classic hard-boiled detective distances himself from the immoral society, the protagonist of Korean neo-noir dreams of escaping while being mixed in the immoral world (even while being on the front lines). The hand of salvation that an individual can trust comes not from the public system but from a blood-related group centered around the family, which is likened to a ‘vigilante group’. The Netflix movie ‘Gil Bok-soon’ released last year is one of the representative examples. The protagonist and the people around him enter the contract killing industry because of their family and blood ties, and they fall because of it.
In this way, the mystery genre becomes a ‘counternarrative against private methods’ in the public sphere of law, institutions, and society, but in this respect, the author diagnoses that Korean mystery still has a long way to go. “I’m not saying that it has a long way to go in terms of the sophistication of the trick or the intensity of the material. It’s in terms of what kind of social responsibility mystery can evoke in today’s Korean readers. For mystery to become a popular genre means that it should not be a story where each member of the public pursues personal satisfaction, but a story that constitutes a public sphere that can mediate readers.”
In particular, the part that the author emphasizes is toward regionality, or ‘locality’. This is because he believes that the story of a crime can only come to life when it is connected to socialized oppression or alienation rather than personal emotions. “It is important to suggest a direction for the uniqueness of Korean mystery and to set up a signboard for it. When the logical story of the mystery about the criminal as a social symptom is added, the authentic Korean mystery will be able to secure popular persuasiveness.”
The author is a professor at Busan Catholic University and a planning committee member for the literature team at Kyobo Bookstore.
Culture reporter Yoo Yoon-jong [email protected]
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- great
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- I’m so sad
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- I recommend it
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2024-08-03 15:12:39