Cinematic Representations of Korean Cities in Hollywood Film: Techno-Orientalism From Neo-Seoul to the Marvel Universe

초록

Although Seoul is one of the most successful mega-cities in East Asia and the center of the creation of Korean Wave cultural content such as television dramas, feature films, music videos exported internationally, Seoul's cinematic representation in the last ten years as found in Hollywood mainstream cinema has regulated it largely to an East Asian urban stand-in or backdrop, a megacity which denotes a techno-orientalist rather than a cosmopolitan culture in its homogenization of the city and its inhabitants that form and constitute these urban milieus. This article surveys three Hollywood films that feature Seoul as a city, and one that features Busan: Two of these films within the genre of science fiction depict Seoul as a site of destruction in Colossal (2016) and the other as part of a global, American military industrial complex for screen in The Bourne Legacy (2012). Within the action/fantasy realm of the Marvel Universe franchise, Seoul (Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)) and Busan (Black Panther (2019)) both serve as an exotic technological for its staged chase scenes. These four Hollywood representations together characterize a developing but consistent pattern of a Western, conditioned cinematic visibility of Korea's cities that contains little depth beyond its own glocalization as an exotic spectacle in an attempt to inject a cosmetic multi-culturalism in their media products.

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