Ideological stereotypes shaken off on North spies in S.Korean films

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Ideological stereotypes shaken off on North spies in S.Korean films

By Park Gayoung (Global Times) 09:59, August 08, 2013

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Movies on inter-Korean conflicts have become cliché in South Korea, with the most popular and consistent ones being cloak-and-dagger tales.

The 63 years of division has created many spy characters, beginning with merciless child-killers at the height of anti-communism sentiment, then realistic livelihood-first spies that reflected North Korea's deprived economic situation, and now individual and attractive spies more about glamour than ideology.

The changes in the trends of spy movies reflect the time and how South Koreans perceive their Northern neighbor.

In the early 1990s, South Korean students had to watch films in which North Korean infiltrators kills a 9-year-old boy who says "I hate communists," (based on the alleged murder of Lee Seung-bok, a young Korean boy in 1968) or an animated cartoon about a boy captain who catches spies.

Before the early 1990s, different movies had same portraits of fearless, heartless spies.

And there came Swiri in 1999, a tragic love story of North and South Korean top elite spies that was a mega hit. Later in the same year was The Spy, probably the first movie to make a joke of the situation.

A North Korean spy, dispatched to steal a gene sample of a super pig to solve the severe food shortage in North Korea, is robbed upon his arrival in South Korea. The spy is confused by South Korean society, but the character is not compromised by the temptations of freedom or money.

After these movies that mirrored the time amid late president Kim Dae-jung's Sunshine Policy and cordial inter-Korean relations, spies are portrayed as human beings whose faith is determined by the divided motherland or who cultivate friendship with South Korean counterparts.

In the last five years, thrillers have increasingly focused on individuals.

Another movie, also called The Spy, made in 2012, focuses on the individual lives of four spies sent to the South for quite a long time without any significant mission.

The main character makes money by selling fake Viagra to send money to his mother in the North and to meet raising housing prices.

Meanwhile, a female spy works hard as a real estate agent to raise her kid as a single mom. And another young man worries about the falling price of cows. Their concerns are very similar to those of South Koreans.

In 2013 that marks the 60th anniversary of the cease-fire in the Korean War (1950-53), a new breed of spies was born: sexy, cute, intelligent agents closer to James Bond than reality.

The success of the latest action film Secretly, Greatly, based on a popular Web cartoon, is somewhat different from other profitable films on North Korea.

What made the commercial success of the movie was the three North Korean spies played by South Korean heartthrob Kim Soo-hyun and two other young and trendy actors.

Won Ryu-hwan, played by Kim, is a North Korean elite agent who speaks five different languages. Won is sent to pretend to be an idiot in a poor hillside village. The second character Lee Hae-rang takes on the duty of becoming a rock musician.

The last and the youngest, Lee Hae-jin, who shows more respect to Won than to his motherland as part of his sublimated homosexual love for his comrade, is simply to become a high school student.

While spy movies turn into fantasy, the existence of spies is real.

Top-level North Korean defector Hwang Jang-yop claimed in the late 1990s that about 50,000 spies are in South Korea at every level.

This figure may be exaggerated, but espionage incidents do occasionally come to the surface.

Under the Lee Myung-bak administration, 25 people were arrested for espionage activities, 40 percent more than the previous liberal government.

But in the cinema, spies are more likely to stay fantasy than reality, with another film starring a teenage spy ready to hit theaters later this year.

This turn to fantasy might be a result of the deeply strained inter-Korean relations. People already dropped their view on North Koreans as red monsters when films began describing them as human beings 15 years ago.

While it's difficult to change that perspective back to the past stereotypes, South Korean people probably want to escape from the reality of extended hostility between the South and the North, and just focus on their individual needs.

The author is a reporter with the Global Times.