[Culture Op-Ed] BTS, Parasite, Crash Landing on You... Why Is the World Going Wild All at Once?

To begin with, let’s look at the case of the tvN drama Crash Landing on You, which may not feel as immediately tangible because the media have not covered it as fervently as BTS or Parasite. Rather than fragmented news articles, the explanation compiled on Namu Wiki makes it easier to grasp the situation.

“(Crash Landing on You) entered the Top 10 in viewership across Asia after being released worldwide through Netflix. In Taiwan, it ranked No. 1 by an overwhelming margin on the Korean drama Top 10 list compiled from February 4 to May 3.

This explosive overseas response was not limited to Asia. The Washington Post and Forbes in the United States selected it as, respectively, a ‘must-watch international series’ and ‘the best Korean drama of 2019,’ proving its international buzz. Britain’s BBC also showed strong interest by publishing a positive review of Crash Landing on You.

It ranked 6th overall on the list of the world’s most-watched Netflix TV shows and films during the COVID-19 social distancing period (March 21–March 27), as selected by the U.S. weekly Observer. It also ranked 4th overall in the global content rankings for the most-watched titles across OTT platforms such as Netflix and Hulu as of April 10.

According to a video uploaded on June 18, it was ranked 7th on Netflix Germany. In Japan, after being released on Netflix on February 23, it first gained popularity among existing Korean drama fans, then began a reverse climb through word of mouth and is now enjoying explosive popularity. According to an article dated June 27, it had remained in the Top 10 for 10 weeks and, with viewership increasing due to the coronavirus outbreak and Golden Week, had ranked No. 1 for three consecutive weeks.”

In short, it was a “massive global hit.” Those who mainly point to its reception in Japan interpret it as “a hit on the scale of Winter Sonata returning” (Chiharu Izumi). More precisely, however, one could say that the kind of impact Winter Sonata had in Japan is now occurring not only across Asia but also throughout North and South America and Europe. Crash Landing on You is, in effect, a “global-scale Winter Sonata.”

And it does not end with Crash Landing on You. Once that major hit occurred, other Korean TV dramas airing around the same time—Itaewon Class on JTBC and The King: Eternal Monarch on SBS—immediately picked up the baton and also became major Netflix-based hits. Now that position is being taken over by tvN’s It’s Okay to Not Be Okay, which has not even finished airing yet. On Netflix Japan, It’s Okay to Not Be Okay has overtaken the long-reigning No. 1 Crash Landing on You, meaning Korean dramas now occupy both first and second place.

The tremendous popularity of Crash Landing on You, and more broadly the global popularity of Korean dramas that it helped ignite, is clearly a subject worthy of study in its own right. And in any case, the first reason generally cited is the qualitative improvement of Korean dramas themselves and their securing of global competitiveness.

Back in 2004–2006, when Winter Sonata and Dae Jang Geum enjoyed phenomenal popularity across Asia, Korean dramas in fact had clear limitations in subject matter. They were largely divided into two categories: trendy romance dramas focused on relationships between men and women, and historical dramas. But in the 2010s, a sweeping transformation began in the drama industry, led by tvN, a cable channel under the major conglomerate CJ ENM, and JTBC, the general programming channel affiliated with JoongAng Ilbo. Not only did the range of professional subject matter broaden greatly, but so did the genres used to present it. The approach also became bolder and more provocative, breaking beyond the limitations of existing terrestrial broadcasters. In doing so, the industry came to embrace what had long been criticized as “endless love stories.” They were still “love stories,” but the strategy was to preserve “their strength” while also adding “freshness” through new settings and subject matter. About 10 years after such experimentation began, Korean dramas were finally reborn as content “recognized by the whole world.”

The reality of the “simultaneous trend” in one country’s cultural products, as seen in Japan and Sweden

But this inevitably raises a question. The current situation feels bewildering because everything seems to be happening “all at once.” This is especially true of the response in places like the United States and Europe, where the Korean Wave had previously struggled to penetrate.

It was only two years ago that BTS first reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard chart. Then last year, another K-pop boy group, SuperM, also hit No. 1 on Billboard, and both swept European charts as well. At almost the same time, the film Parasite won the Palme d’Or, the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in France, and then rode that momentum to win four Academy Awards this March, including Best Picture and Best Director. And now television dramas as well—not just one, but three or four gaining popularity at the same time. Even amid all this, K-pop continues to push acts like the girl group BLACKPINK onto Billboard and other Western charts.

There is more. The Korean Wave is now advancing into the global comics market, which had all but been split between the United States and Japan. This is happening through webtoons. At this point, the word “webtoon” itself is becoming established as a term referring specifically to Korean webtoons, much as “manga” refers to Japanese comics.

Everything is happening “all at once,” in one sweep. Why is this happening? Is it simply because Korean popular culture content is that competitive? To state the conclusion first: this kind of across-the-board cultural expansion, happening “all at once,” is actually closer to a natural phenomenon. The same was true of Japanese popular culture, which became a global trend in the 1950s and 1960s, and Swedish popular culture, which flourished in the 1970s.

Though largely forgotten now, the boom in Swedish popular culture in the 1970s was enormous. Building on its advances in the 1950s and 1960s, Swedish cinema broke into Hollywood, the center of global popular culture, in the 1970s. Jan Troell’s The Emigrants and Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers were repeatedly nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Swedish film came to be regarded almost as a symbol of the art house. Around the same time, the craze for the Swedish co-ed pop group ABBA also began in earnest. They swept through Europe and, with the 1977 single “Dancing Queen,” even captured No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100.

Japan’s case was even more dramatic. As directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujirō Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi drew attention at the three major international film festivals from the 1950s onward, Japanese culture as a whole spread across Europe and the United States as a kind of leading representative of so-called Orientalism. It began with film remakes. The Hollywood movie The Magnificent Seven, adapted from Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai, was released in 1960 and became a major hit. As “Japanese film” suddenly became a hot topic, Hollywood began purchasing remake rights to other Kurosawa works such as Rashomon and Yojimbo.

Then in 1963, Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto achieved the unexpected feat of topping Billboard’s Hot 100 for three consecutive weeks with “Ue o Muite Arukō” (released in the U.S. as “Sukiyaki”). No one had predicted it. Soon after, Hiroshi Teshigahara, director of Woman in the Dunes, became the first Japanese film director to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director in 1966. Two years later, in 1968, Yasunari Kawabata, author of Snow Country, became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the end, this is simply how the structure works. When one cultural or artistic genre from a country achieves extraordinary success, that country’s culture and arts themselves are transformed into a global trend, leading to simultaneous achievements across multiple genres. In other words, this is the structure through which “across-the-board cultural expansion” occurs. But there is an important point to understand here. This is completely different from what Korean media have said countless times—that Korean culture is “addicting” overseas audiences, or that it is accumulating so-called “cultural credibility.”

It is, literally, a “trend.” One might compare it to late-18th-century Germany, where Turkish-style clothing became fashionable after Turkey was featured as the setting of Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio, or to early-20th-century Britain, where an Indian style spread across clothing and many other fields amid a boom in Indian cuisine during the colonial era. Through some particular trigger, the cultural and artistic products of a certain country become popular, and then all the country’s other cultural and artistic genres generate a “trend” all at once. More precisely, a particular genre that has attracted attention possesses such distinctive qualities that curiosity arises about its cultural background, and that curiosity spreads into interest in other genres. That is how a simultaneous “specific-country trend” begins.

When the trend ends, no one consumes Japanese or Swedish popular culture products anymore

Of course, the lifespan of such a “specific-country trend” differs from case to case. In any event, for countries that once rose to the peak of a global trend, their cultural products have, judging from past examples, tended to have somewhat longer staying power. Public awareness becomes so high that it is harder for products from latecomer countries to replace them.

For example, Japanese cinema continued to attract world attention until the mid-1980s. In the process, it broadened its base. Various samurai films, special-effects movies such as the Godzilla series, and contemporary action films starring Shinichi Chiba (Sonny Chiba) became steady sellers in Western subculture through the 1970s and 1980s. And that attention was then successfully extended in the late 1980s, beginning with Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, into interest in Japanese animation.

The same was true of popular music. The 1979 U.S. debut of the female duo Pink Lady and, in the 1980s, acts such as the bands YMO and Loudness helped place Japan squarely in the middle of the global popular music scene. Pink Lady first made waves in 1979 when their single “Kiss in the Dark” reached No. 37 on Billboard’s Hot 100. They gained popularity and attention by appearing on the TV show hosted by then-teen idol Leif Garrett. Later, in 1983, “Behind the Mask” by the Japanese technopop trio YMO appeared on Michael Jackson’s legendary album Thriller, and in 1985 the Japanese heavy metal band Loudness saw its album Sun in the East reach No. 74 on Billboard’s Top 200. It was, in other words, across-the-board success regardless of genre.

The same goes for Sweden. Through the 1980s, it kept itself on the map by introducing a new generation of filmmakers such as Bille August to the world stage. In 1988, Pelle the Conqueror swept both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The high level of recognition enjoyed by Swedish pop, which began with ABBA, also helped the co-ed technopop group Ace of Base gain a foothold in the market in the 1990s. Their single “The Sign” topped Billboard’s Hot 100, and they enjoyed phenomenal popularity by selling 30 million albums worldwide.

In that way, both Japan and Sweden were able to maintain their place for roughly 20 years from the start of the trend. But what comes next is the problem.

As of 2020, the traces of Japanese popular culture in the global popular culture scene are essentially limited to animation. No one now watches or listens to Japanese live-action films or popular music, and the same goes for TV dramas. Indeed, people even say that South Korea is the largest foreign consumer of Japanese TV dramas. In truth, even animation has shown a clear decline since the early 2000s. Only dedicated otaku communities in various countries have held their ground, keeping it active within a limited niche market.

Sweden is in an even worse position. Apart from having a certain level of recognition in metal music, Sweden’s popular culture has, by 2020, seen its visibility fall so far that people hardly know what “Swedish popular culture” even means anymore. The fact that many people know ABBA but do not know ABBA was a Swedish group says a great deal.

This is the reality of a boom in one country’s cultural and artistic products as a trend. As noted, it is normal for things to rise “all at once” in a simultaneous fashion. But that does not mean every product in every genre truly has global competitiveness as a product in itself. They are simply riding the “mood,” so to speak. Once that “mood” fades, the genres that in fact lacked competitiveness begin to be discarded one by one. In Japan’s case, film was the first genre to fall away, and then music and novels soon dropped out of the global spotlight as well. Rather, animation, a later entrant, lasted comparatively longer and extended the overall lifespan. If we look only at the genres that served as the starting point, the interpretation that the trend lasts roughly 20 years is probably correct.

Now let us turn back to Korea. At present, the Korean Wave has expanded into K-pop, film, TV dramas, webtoons, and even novels, beginning with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. But in the end, this too owes much to trend dynamics, so when the boom fades, the genres that “actually” lacked competitiveness will fall away first. We do not yet know what will remain and what will be cast off, but given that overall popular culture trends now move far faster than in the past, it is unlikely that the lifespan of the trend will endure “as long as 20 years,” as in the cases of Japan or Sweden.

What the Korean Wave needs is not “cultural credibility,” but an “industrial constitution” of endless evolution

Of course, if we look on the brighter side, Korea is in a more favorable position than those other countries that once stood, however briefly, at the center of global trends. For one thing, unlike Japan and others, it relies very little on Orientalism. It has won sympathy and popularity through modern cultural forms that can resonate with the West. Being noticed on the basis of fixed stereotypes or cultural exoticism may draw immediate attention more easily, but such attention is also quicker to evaporate.

There is more. In the United States, which shapes global cultural trends, one strand of the PC (Political Correctness) line has come to advocate “diversity and inclusiveness.” Under this line, foreign-language content is to be treated not merely as subculture but as one branch of the mainstream. In a sense, Parasite’s Academy Award for Best Picture can also be seen as an achievement arising from this trend.

In this respect, the current situation itself is positive. It creates the conditions for Korea to follow a different path from Japan or Sweden. At the same time, however, there is something that must be clearly understood. As explained above, Korea would do well to abandon the expectation of the “easy business” it has so long hoped for—the idea that once overseas audiences are “hooked,” they will keep buying Korean popular culture products indefinitely. Concepts such as “cultural credibility” do not really operate in the popular culture market. At best, they help with initial market entry; after that, it is effectively a matter of each piece of content competing on its own.

Ultimately, the only path Korea can choose is to stop trusting in trends and become “the most diligent industry,” one that sharply penetrates each market opportunity as it arises. Each individual piece of content in each genre is where the real contest lies; it is no good trying to do business based on the impression that “the Korean Wave is excellent.” Given this reality, it is worrying that in the public sphere people are still repeating strange notions such as needing to publicize everything from hanbok to kimchi overseas in order to make the Korean Wave addictive. In the midst of such a ruthless business environment, nothing could be more foolish than trying to take a nationalist approach. If that happens, everything that rose “all at once” may also come to an end “all at once.”

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Original title: [문화칼럼] BTS, 기생충, 사랑의 불시착...왜 '한꺼번에' 세계가 열광하나?

Author: Moon-won Lee

Date: 2020-07-31

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=7&idx=22978