Endorsing upper-class refinement or critiquing extravagance and debt? The rise of neoliberal genre modification in contemporary South Korean cinema

AbstractSeveral socio-cultural outcomes of an elite nature are now attributable to neoliberalism and its various national incarnations: increased wealth concentration, debt of an extravagant nature, elevated status and the emulation of older aristocratic behaviour. This is unique to neoliberalism largely because of global media’s endorsements of such upper-class lifestyles found in advertising, television and now cinema. In this article, my analysis of neoliberal culture is specific to post-IMF South Korea (2001–2015), a country that now possesses one of the most concentrated forms of free market capitalism and one of the most stratified class systems because of it. Drawing on how corporate greed, self-aggrandisement and fashion acquisition – even conglomerate culture and financial transactions – become tropes in contemporary Korean cinema, I argue that these themes are capable, on the one hand, of displaying white-collar conformity, a nation seemingly comprised of smartly dressed entrepreneurs and servic...