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kaigou[note: incomplete research leads to reporting historical inaccuracies, but I just haven't had -- and knowing me, may never have -- a chance to fully/properly edit the post. please read the comments to see the corrections.]
I recently finished watching Hong Gil Dong, a retelling (and remixing) of an eponymous Korean novel. With a basic premise with the same archetypal lines as the West's Robin Hood, the Korean version was by Heo Gyun and was published somewhere around the late 1500s. (There seems to be some dispute as to whether Heo wrote the story, and I've even come across an article discussing a current-day historian's attempt to recreate/rediscover the footsteps of a 'historical' Hong Gil-dong. I'm as dubious of that project as I am of attempts to rediscover a historical Robin Hood or King Arthur, but I suppose there'll always be someone who thinks legends need a 'real' person behind them.)
In a nutshell, the summary of the original novel goes like thus:
An important detail is that Gil-dong, as the child of a slave, is a slave himself (despite having a noble father), which means the novel illustrates several socially radical points, and therein lies the contemporary noble belief that the novel was intended to foment rebellion (or at least major social reform, which to the average noble seems to have amounted to the same thing). Gil-dong's story effectively argues that a slave can a) become a hero of the people, b) continually out-wit and out-trick all the government forces arrayed against him, and even c) be appointed to a major political position.
The last of which, if you're not aware, has a mandatory requirement of passing the government civil service exam. Slaves didn't qualify to take the exam, so Gil-dong got the position solely due to his on-the-job skills, despite those skills being unsuitable/unallowed for the lowest of social standing (not to mention illegal! hello, bandit!). It had nothing to do with his family name, who he knew, or even who he'd bribed. Talk about seriously threatening the nobility (yangban); if it's true that anyone could gain power just by, y'know, being qualified on a practical level, and they didn't have to bribe or petition the PTB, what's next? The fall of Eastern civilization?
The real kicker is what happens while Gil-dong travels the foreign countryside seeking answers as to why people suffer: he's invited to become the king. It's a double whammy. Not only is he a slave, and thus completely unqualified to do just about anything with responsibility, the people are the ones who choose him.
Korea's pattern of kingship -- like nearly any other major monarchy or imperial family I can think of -- operated on a mandate of heaven: if the leader isn't a god himself (per Japan), he's the one chosen personally by god/heaven. To have a king chosen not by heaven, but by the people (who are at the bottom of this system) is to completely up-end the system. Taken to its logical conclusion, the people are supplanting god/heaven. After all, in choosing their king, they've already preempted the role of god/heaven to place its chosen representative on the throne.
A little about the author's political position/perspective, from AsianInfo.org. (Note that "Ho" seems to be alternate for "Heo", and "Jyun" alternate for "Gyun" -- one thing about Korean is that there seems to be at least three competing ways to romanicize.)
Gil-dong's story takes place during the reign of Yeonsangun, an actual King whose reign ended in 1506 (roughly a hundred years, give or take a decade, before the novel's writing). According to wikipedia: "[Yeonsangun] is often considered the worst tyrant in Joseon Dynasty, notorious for launching two bloody purges of the seonbi [scholarly] elite. He also seized a thousand women from the provinces to serve as palace entertainers, and appropriated the Seonggyungwan [royal university] hall of study as a personal pleasure ground." If you've seen The King and the Clown, you've seen one version of Yeonsangun in action, although that's the scenery-chewing version. I haven't actually found much in (non-fiction) articles that indicates Yeonsangun was what we might call truly mentally ill, so much as just utterly corrupted by the totality of his power. I'm not sure whether the moniker of "mad" in this case is more metaphorical, as subverting divine injunction (to be a Good King) and instead being a tyrant might by definition be a form of madness.
With Yeonsangun as the backdrop, Gil-dong's path is easier: if the King is a really great guy, who'd want to play along with a rebellious bandit fighting the system? Yeonsangun took the crown at age 18 and only ruled for twelve years... and it took the nobles that long to muster the willingness -- and power -- to oust the tyrannical king. The concept of a mandate of heaven is that strong, as it usually is when powering a monarchy: overthrowing the so-called 'rightful' king means not just inciting potential civil war, but also countering directly the will of heaven.
The fear of being struck down by god/heaven or facing eternity in hellfire have been strong deterrents in many cultures. You can't just wake up one morning and say, "look, this guy's no good, let's trade up for a better model" (not to mention the question of whether the new model is automatically better -- after all, Yeonsangun looked good for the first few years, before he descended into total despotic wackiness). Yet at the same time, a ruler's apparent madness/tyranny allows the mandate to be questioned: if heaven were on the right track, why would it have chosen a ruler this bad? A bad king opens the door to questioning heaven, and that's exactly what the literary Kil-tong does.
In the 2008 television version of Hong Gil Dong by HONG Jung-eun and HONG Mi-ran (aka the Hong Sisters), therefore, the King had to be a bad guy. But they chose (and I wonder if the recent glut of movies with scenery-chewing Yeonsanguns may've also played a role) to displace Gil-dong's story to a different time. Or, at least, to appear to transpose the story, but for that to make sense, here's another short history lesson to provide context.
A hundred years after Yeonsangun came King Gwanghae (who incidentally was on the throne when HEO actually published Hong Gil Dong). The series' version of the King's name sounds similar, though various translators have used different transliterations, but for simplicity I'm using Kwang Whe per drama-addict's wiki. The similarity between "Gwanghae" and "Kwang Whe" seems to indicate that we're supposed to see a connection, however superficial. What's most important as a baseline is that Gwanghae's name represents a honorable fairness not unlike how USians see, say, Lincoln: someone who lived in tough times and despite that, did the best he could, and his best was better than expected.
Gwanghae was the second son of King Seonjo and a rather decent fellow, on the whole, who did his best to bring about peace and restore a lot of the damage done by Yeonsangun's purges. Gwanghae, like his (apparently incompetent) older brother, was the son of one of the King's consorts -- that makes him not entirely royal, and technically illegitimate, but still a prince all the same. When Gwanghae was only 18, Japan decided to conquer Ming, but with Korea geographically in the way, this meant conquering Korea first. (Easier said than done.)
At the first sign of trouble -- also known as "ohshit Toyotomi Hideyoshi just landed" -- King Seonjo fled northward with the court, leaving the Crown Prince Gwanghae in charge of the country's defense. By all reports, Gwanghae might be young (only 18) but already showing signs of brilliance, and a real gift for strategy. During a five year cease-fire in the middle of the Imjin War, Gwanghae didn't sit still, but turned his attention to rebuilding and repairing the infrastructure destroyed in the Japanese attacks. When fighting started up again, the battle turned mostly naval (where Korea didn't just dominate almost unilaterally, it also had Admiral YI Sun-sin in charge), and Japan was sent home with its tail between its legs.
Fast-forward to 1608, when Gwanghae was about 34 years old. He wasn't necessarily the favorite for the throne; that would be his younger brother, Yeongchangdaegun (aka Yeongchang) who was also the only legitimate son; his mother (Queen Inmok) was a royal wife, not a consort. The online articles I've found don't give any ages, but Seonjo's untimely death at age 56 was too soon for Yeongchang (Seonjo's favorite) to achieve the throne, not when Gwanghae was of age and well-seasoned for the role. I'm not sure of the age of majority, but Seonjo was crowned when he was only 16, so I'd guess Yeongchang had to be much younger than that. Regardless, Seonjo did make a royal decree before his death that Gwanghae would inherit.
To no one's surprise, Yeongchang was used as a pawn at an attempt at the throne, failed, and he and his supporters were put to death, but aside from the interfamily strife, Gwanghae's rule had some pretty significant good points. From the wiki page on Gwanghae:
From a Korean article (translated by javabeans at dramabeans.org):
Politically, Gwanghae was known as an excellent administrator and brilliant diplomat, but held back by the fact that his mother wasn't the Queen. His illegitimacy meant he operated without full backing from politicians, scholars, and aristocrats -- and their support (especially when it came to the various powerful factions) was absolutely crucial in any kind of kingdom-building (or rebuilding). Eventually one of those factions became the cause of his downfall. The quote from the Korean article (above) gives the usual gloss, but other articles go into more detail, mainly that his continued attempts to unify the various factions eventually resulted in one of those factions getting fed up and deposing him for someone 'more suited' to the throne. (Read: with more loyalty to a specific faction, namely, theirs.)
Additionally -- and this is quite ironic in light of Hong Gil Dong's version -- some articles also mention that Heo Gyun was investigated (or marked for investigation, it's not clear) for fostering anti-government sentiments. Gwanghae either halted the investigation, denied the nobles' petition to prosecute the author, or generally dismissed the nobles' panic that a novel could overturn civilization as we know it. If you consider the fact that Gwanghae himself was hardly considered King-material due to his mother's status, I'd say it's possible that Gwanghae in fact might've enjoyed seeing the nobles all a-twitter over a book that posited that "anyone might become King". Wasn't Gwanghae himself proof of that (even if not quite such an extreme case)?
The only reason I stumbled over this information is because I have, at best, only the barest familiarity with Korean history. Hong Gil Dong was presenting itself as set in a specific historical period, and I went digging to see whether there was a real Kwang Whe or Chang Hwi. What you read above is what I found, and that got me thinking.
I couldn't think of any novels or movies (other than outright alternate-history fiction) in which a major historical figure is false, ie, the story posits a King Robert crowned in the year 1250 when in reality that's the middle of the reign of King Henry III (1215-1272). Of those stories with historical figures as touchstones, I can only come up with examples that (at most) deviate in the middle zone, but all of them end up generally re-merging with the historical record. A few characters may die earlier, or die later, or die in a different way, or be presented as murder (exit stage left) instead of suicide (also an exit) or just curdled milk (still an exit) -- but in the end, where the historical Catherine the Great ends is where the movie ends. There might be a few speeches and a few extra battles (and a few love affairs) that never happened, but even the pretty-boy movie-version of Balian of Ibelin does broker the Treaty of Ramla, ending the Third Crusade and two hours of stupid-movie-hell.
Alternately, a story may posit that there's something we (as regular people) were never told, frex that such-and-such a pope was secretly a woman, or that a certain king was switched at birth (or switched and switched back, as in The Prince and the Pauper). The flip-version is when a reportedly-good historical figure is shown as less-than-good, with any actual goodness resulting from, say, being blackmailed by a third grade teacher, and that if other forces hadn't stepped in, today we'd be drinking chai instead of coffee and driving on the other side of the road.
It's when the audience isn't presumed to be familiar that movies and novels and television shows -- from what I've seen, at least -- get wildly ahistorical to the point of almost ridiculous inaccuracy. You can almost see the imperialist logic behind such pap as The King and I: "Who cares if this is hugely offensive to an entire nation and its people and their ancient history? They're, y'know, way over there, and our audience is here, so we can write whatever we want." (Which, I suspect, was the justification Anna Leonowens probably used herself, in writing her so-called autobiographies that later became the basis for Margaret Landon's The King and I: she could say what she pleased, because what Brits among her audience would know Thailand from Swahili-land, anyway.)
The dominant paradigm (usually, but not always, the West) is at a distance from both the source material and the foundation (culture) of that material, and thus feels free to appropriate and manipulate the facts as it pleases. The one getting appropriated and manipulated is going to demand historical accuracy, because the alternative is that unfamiliar audiences' first interaction with their culture is going to be via this appropriated and inaccurate representation. The dominant culture's product is always slicker, with a bigger budget and bigger names, and after being mangled by two hours of The King and I, will anyone stick around to see Thailand's own presentation of the true life and times of the historical Mongkut, king of Siam?
If historical revisionism is not also to be historical appropriation, the audience be familiar enough with the original/correct version to understand where the revisions occur (and possibly also parse the storyteller's meaning in the change-from-historical). Lacking familiarity with the true historical record results in simple appropriation per The King and I or any of plenty of other quasi-historical "based [very loosely] on a true story" a la tripe like The Kingdom of Heaven or The Last Samurai. When the story pivots on the audience's own shared-culture history, or is so well-known to the audience as to be practically an additional cultural history (as, I'd argue, dominant USian culture has adopted British history), then the audience are no longer simple spectators in the "let's remix someone else's history with no regard for the truth of what happened." Instead, they're participants in "let's remix our own history to discuss/highlight what might have been."
Hong Gil Dong was only the Hong Sisters' fourth outing for independent, original scripts, and I twigged on a few signs that they were still finding their footing for complex villains. Or perhaps it's that in remixing so much else of the original story with their own ingredients that they couldn't also spare the extra attention to keep Kwang Whe from descending into caricature.
Back on topic: the bottom line is that one of the signs of an uncertainty or distrust in the hero (on the part of the author/s) is the need to make the big bad even badder. The bad guy can't just glare at little old ladies; he must bite the heads off kittens. He can't just threaten to tie up the heroine; he must daily execute a hundred weeping child-actors. He can't just make a bad or short-sighted political decision; he must levy taxes that will clear out thousands by starvation in muddy gutters. The more violent, or crazy, or unethical the bad guy, the more I suspect attempted manipulation on the part of the writers, that they're not convinced I'll go along with the good guy as Really All That, so they have to make his opposite Really Really Not All That.
In fact, if you had no idea of history other than what you see in Hong Gil Dong, you'd probably think Gwanghae/Kwang Whe was little more than a pompous, irrational, lust-crazed, blood-thirsty, superstitious tyrant who lazed in bed and threw temper tantrums when forced to, y'know, actually earn his keep as King. But I also suspect that the Hong Sisters weren't actually meaning Gwanghae by-the-book.
First, the two royal siblings have a surname of Lee, not Yi. (Is this a transliteration thing? A result of the updated romanicization methods? Or an attempt to indicate that the story's "royal family" is not the actual/historical Joseon dynasty of the Yi family?) Second, Chang Hwi may be close to Yeongchang, but only by a syllable, and not even a rare syllable/sound, at that. Third, Khang Whe has a family background with some likeness to the historical Gwanghae, but his characterization, his actions, and his final end have more in common with Yeonsangun. Although one delightful element of the novel, reminiscent of the trickster mind-games between Prince John and Robin Hood, is lacking from the Hong Sisters' version. Turning Khang Whe into a totally unhinged madman means losing the opportunity to see Khang Whe/Yeonsangun's wits at work, matched against Gil-dong/Kil-tong. In fact, there's only one major instance of Gil-dong showing the brilliant flashes of trickster-work that I'm told are in the novel, which is really sad (and, I suspect, indicative that the television series' single instance was possibly an adaptation from the novel, because thematically and stylistically it stands out as very different from the rest of Gil-dong's hijinks.)
Digging further into Yeonsangun's historical record has me re-thinking whether the Hong Sisters' were truly tapping Gwanghae as the sole template for Khang Whe, because Yeonsangun's life contains parallels that match too neatly with the sister's extension and exploration of the legend. Yeonsangun was deposed and replaced by a puppet-king, his younger half-brother Jungjong, who then ruled for thirty-eight years. According to the wiki overview on Jungjong's life:
Additionally, JO Gwang-jo is himself a rather Gil-dong-like figure, both in the sense of being someone willing to speak truth to power and in the aspect of being framed by opponents for reaching too high. The conflict between the two men neatly parallels the story's conflicts between Chang Hwi and Gil-dong:
Also, from the wiki page about JO Gwang-jo (which is really quite lengthy, compared to the usual entries on Korean kings during the same general time period):
Granted, Gil-dong is about as far from a scholarly figure as you can get, but the rest matches up.
An additional parallel that the Hong Sisters might've been tweaking as well: several times, Chang Hwi is treated successfully for near-mortal wounds, by Yi-nok. If Chang Hwi is the fictional counterpart to Jungjong, then Yi-nok might be a nod to Dae Jang-geum, the only female Royal Physician in Korean history. (The real Dae Jang-geum's life is shrouded in mystery, so it seems to be anyone's guess as to where she came from or how she learned her skills.)
It feels like a missed opportunity, in some ways, and it makes me wonder why the Hong Sisters chose to apparently recast a respected king as a complete despot. What kind of socio-political message were they hoping to convey, by the distortion? Most times I've seen such revisionism, it's either to humanize a previously too-mythic personage (such as the plethora of movies about the young Queen Elizabeth I), or it's to create sympathy for a character previously reviled (ie that controversial film about Hitler as a young art student). It's a lot harder to think of examples where a respected historical figure is recast as completely at odds with his/her reputation, let alone nearly night-and-day as between the historic Gwanghae and the fictional Kwang Whe.
I think the Hong Sisters were expecting the audience to know all of this Gwanghae/Yeonsangun history already, and to see the irony created by the mashup contrast. Except that I also think that a) for once, they overestimated their audience's history knowledge (as opposed to, what I gather elsewhere, is their more usual modus operandi of often underestimating their audience's intelligence). And b) their reliance on "make the bad guy really bad" undermined the potential to see Gil-dong as the counterpart to Kwang Whe (as the illegitimate child who achieves something) instead of as the counterpart/partner to Chang Hwi (the royal child who is the puppet of others).
All this, I think, is why in the last few episodes, there's a flashback to the King's time as Crown Prince, when the series previously had made no real attempt to humanize him. The flashback is loaded with telling, considering it's pretty short: the adviser's words let us know Kwang Whe is still a prince, not yet a king, while Kwang Whe's words let us know he's aware of/sensitive to his illegitimacy via consort-mother, and his determination to prove to the ministers that status of birth has no impact on a man's worth, and that he'll be a good king for his people no matter what the nobles say. But in light of the rest of the show's representation, this minute's worth of a flashback doesn't give the impression that Kwang Whe did achieve things, so much as make it seem as though Kwang Whe might've intended to achieve good things, but unfortunately went completely insane immediately after being crowned.
I find it intriguing that dramabeans posted the article's translation (without credit, so no idea when the article was first published, but I'd bet at least a week or so previous, since javabeans first discussed it with her parents and then had to translate the text prior to posting)... and it's right around the same week as the episode with the flashback. My understanding is that a lot of the scripts are written very close to actual filming date, so it's possible the flashback's addition was meant to respond to and/or allay audience-confusion or misunderstanding about why Kwang Whe, in particular, became the kingly vehicle: basically, to remind the audience that Kwang Whe's own rule pivots on issues about his il/legitimacy.
That highlights the issue with audience knowledge, and the assumption that if one's culture is strong enough, wide-spread enough, and the audience members are relatively well-versed in some basic shared historical understandings of that culture, then you can play with it. If half your audience has never seen a motorcycle before, then a show about hacking a Harley into a ape-hanger duct-taped chopper is probably going to baffle them more than please them.
The inclusion of that flashback makes me suspect that late in the game, the Hong Sisters realized a good chunk of their audience had never seen a motorcycle. The point of using Kwang Whe as the foil had been lost, and a good part of the dramatic gains of the historical revisionism were lost, as well. Or if not lost, at least only partially regained, since it's information that would've made previous points significantly more poignant, if the background were known.
In the dramabeans post about Korean audience's dissatisfaction with Hong Gil Dong's liberal treatment of history, a number of the comments expressed notions like "If you want historical accuracy, you can always watch history/national geographic/discovery channel" and "From the very first scene this drama set itself up as being a very creative and funky re-interpretation of a Korean legend. Why would anyone be surprised when it plays loose with the facts?" and a rather astute "For someone who has NO knowledge of Korean history, I thought Kwang Whe was a made up character since he seems like such a caricature."
Maybe the best way to approach this is to set aside participation in the dominant paradigm (if you are part of it), and find a cultural participation that's of a minority paradigm (whether national, regional, ethnic, or even familial).
First, think of a historical figure -- from your own cultural history (whatever that may be, on whatever level) who's generally respected as someone worthy. Try to pick someone without excessive controversy (or, at least, something we might no longer find controversial, like "she didn't want to get married" or "he wanted a better education"), because the analogy works better when it's someone seen in hindsight as A Pretty Good Leader. For USians, the low-hanging fruit would probably be historical figures like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
Now think about whether respect for this figure is culturally shared. When you see that figure mentioned in pop culture novels or movies or television shows, or even poppier instances like commercials, is the figure treated as an object of fun? Chibified/caricatured, or drawn with dignity? Is the person's name pretty wide-spread, such that you think you could probably say to just about anyone in your culture, "wow, so-and-so was a great guy!" Is the average member of your shared culture likely to not only know the name, but also respect the historical person?
Next, the cultural grounding: in television and movies, is the culture and its members represented accurately, or at least with dignity and respect? Or is it ridiculed, reduced to little more than an ethnic joke, included only for the sake of a token, treated as the object of fun for its crazy customs, its backwards native religion, its strange accents, its funny clothes? Religion-wise: or is the native religion watered-down into barely a shadow, which in turn is commercialized and venerated despite having little to nothing in common with the real thing? Do the people you see in movies and television and books -- that are reportedly people from your culture -- even look like you, talk like you, walk like you, have the same priorities and stories and values as you?
Setting aside how your own culture presents the person, can you think of any representations by other cultures that have been inaccurate or disrespectful? Can you think of any time you've seen this much-loved and/or much-respected character treated -- by other cultures' representations -- as a buffoon, a cheat, a liar, an idiot, a murderer, an insane scenery-eater? Have you ever heard or seen or read a representation of this historical figure that you know is so wrong, so completely off-base, but the dominance of the culture doing the presenting drowns out your protests before you even have a chance to say anything?
Here's an example: the first Twilight movie grossed $192.8 million in North America, and $199.8 million internationally. That's $392.6 million dollars -- a crapload of zeros -- worldwide. The movie also contains characters who are purportedly members of an actual Native nation: the Quileute people. Now, if you were to divide $392.6 million dollars by whatever X would be the average ticket price, that'd still be... well, a whole lot of people. Now imagine if that many people were introduced to your tribe's name, overnight, by way of that one movie. The Quileute have about 750 members total, and I'd bet the proportions are something like for every member of the actual tribe, there are probably five thousand viewers. Maybe more.
There's no way the Quileute could ever muster a voice loud enough to drown out the impressions that so many people, across the planet, now have of them. Yes, the story is fiction -- it's about vampires, for crying out loud -- but it's also got a whole lot of references to things that aren't fictional. Not that I've read the books (I'm masochistic, not stupid, thanks) but I do recall someone mentioning that the author used existing town names in the text, and existing landmarks. If a fan googles a keyword in the book, there's a chance they'll get a hit for the real town/landmark/tribe.
Now, think about googling for Quileute and realizing they're an actual nation. Because your first introduction was via fictional distortion -- and because you have no other basis upon which to differentiate 'real' from 'fictional' and because the story already plays with that real/fictional line by using 'other' real, existing places and landmarks -- it's going to be very, very hard to undo the first impressions.
I've seen similar reactions among new-to-anime fans, who take the representation of, say, a Japanese holiday or classroom or street-scene and extrapolate into what (they believe) the 'real' must be like: that all Japanese do X on Y date, that all people in Z city are likely to knife you versus all people in city A who are sweet and friendly. Now think of if it were your culture that's been so badly misrepresented, creating a lasting impression in otherwise ignorant or unknowing minds, that in turns creates a presumption of certain behaviors or values or beliefs. Think about if that representation showed the historical figure you've chosen -- back in the first step -- as someone evil, or stupid, or just plain crazy.
That's the power of stories, but when that power is multiplied by almost 400 million dollars, think of trying to counteract that power. Unless you have the means to compete on the level of so many millions of dollars world-wide, then you're probably -- sad but true -- out of luck. Millions of people are going to be convinced that your beloved and respected King was a bald, pompous fool who insisted everyone had to be shorter than him and wouldn't have known a fork from a spoon if it weren't for some self-righteous bint in a hoopskirt. If the story's popular enough, it could be sixty years down the road and you'll still be forced to deal with complete strangers who assume that their familiarity with this inaccurate, appropriative, fictional history gives them the power to judge your version as false. If sixteen million people believe it's true, then it must be true: Siam was saved by a self-promoting liar, and the Quileute people aren't even really human, or are only barely so.
Now consider what it'd be like if your culture comes instead from a position of dominance. You release a movie or television show or novel about this respected historical figure, and the clout that comes from being the dominant paradigm means audiences will say, "ah, this will form our basic understanding of this event or person or place". It's not an issue of not-knowing reality from fiction; the problem is that you can't tell what's fiction if you don't know the reality. So if you don't know Korean history, how do you know what's been made up... and thus the ground of the power is to be in a position where you can say: the audience does know the reality, to be able to extract which is fiction. But the real power comes from being able to say: and those who don't know will take our word for it, because we're the paradigm whose right-to-present are dominant.
This might be one reason for the reported crankiness from viewers, during HGD's broadcast. When you think of Korea's place on the international stage over the past century, other than the lasting effects of the DMZ and Korea's economic expansion, it's otherwise mostly ignored by the broader dominant cultural paradigm/s. I can't even remember the last time Korea or Koreans (other than, say, USian movies or books about the Korean Conflict) were mentioned in any pop culture story. Japan, sure, and China, of course, but Korea? Hmm, no, not really.
That makes Crazy Kwang Whe into nails on a blackboard: it's presenting a respected figure as someone barely even laughable, and just this side of totally evil. If I felt my culture gets little enough notice or respect anyway (and this is majorly analogous to how I feel about the USian-culture-at-large when it comes to the distorting impact that Gone with the Wind had on the rest of the country's impressions of the Deep South), then like hell would I enjoy a story that basically posits that one of the culture's respected figures should be dismissed as three crayons short of a full set of hangers.
It's a recognition, I suspect -- even if not verbalized in so many words -- that one is not in control of one's own cultural presentations. And since externally-created cultural presentations are almost always shallow at best and disrespectful (even erasing) at worst, creating a cultural representation that's on the same (very low) level would feel like, well... Bluntly, it'd feel like the story sold out, and presented itself through the lens of the dominant external paradigm. For me, it would be like watching a movie created in Alabama, by native Southerners, that take all the stereotypes and sexism and classism and racism and happy-darkies and faux-courtesy crap of GwtW, and amp it up further. It would rankle, and it would feel like my own culture is saying, "yes! when you say we think slow because we talk slow, you're right! when you say Southern men marry their first cousins, when you say a Southern family barely has an entire mouthful's worth of teeth among them, when you say a group of Southern women together have about as much IQ as the front row of a Conway Twitty concert, it's okay, because you're right!"
The risk is that this message won't be taken as satirical (because that's breaking the history, and if you don't own it, you can't do that) but as confirmation of the stereotypes. It risks being interpreted as cultural insiders effectively confirming the stereotypes imposed by cultural outsiders. It's granting permission to reinforce those stereotypes, because the insiders themselves have accepted those stereotypes and in turn presented them as self-produced truth. If you don't have cultural power and a big cultural megaphone, that's the message you give by playing into stereotypes.
If the rest of the world talks down your history and your historical figures (when it even notices that your history even occurred), then I can see how such negative and caricatured representations would make you start spitting nails. At least in my own example, it would make me feel like telling my fellow culture-members: don't do me any favors. Please.
If this post so far seems at some length, I think it's because it's hard to grasp just how radical it is to play with one's history, especially if the culture has previously felt itself outnumbered and out-shouted by outsider interpretations. If we take the position that the historical inaccuracies in Hong Gil Dong are intentional (and not just simple caricature for the sake of laziness or genre), that ahistoricity is, in itself, a pretty radical thing: the Hong Sisters are approaching Korean history from a position of socio-cultural dominance.
By mixing and matching between Gwanghae and Yeonsangun and Jungjong, I think they're expecting the audience to have a shared cultural/historical grounding, and that viewers are mostly comfortable with that shared ground. I think their story-choices are a sign they believe the actual facts to be dispersed and recognized widely enough that no one would be fooled into thinking the real Gwanghe was anything like the scenery-chewing, virgin-chasing, scholar-killing, alcohol-hazed, bare-chested Kwang Whe of the television series. It's like if I were to do a movie in which Lincoln was secretly pro-bowling and cheated at croquet and had an affair with a chicken: I could trust that my audience would say, "this is a fictional, probably satirical, version of Lincoln, but we can laugh because we know the truth." In other words, the reality, and a level of comfort in knowing and accepting that reality, means the audience is not threatened by the satirical or ridiculous or embellished.
Think back to the analogy and consider distortions of the USian Deep South, or of India, or of the Maori: when you can comfortably say that enough people are aware of your (culture's) voice, that your culture has a big enough megaphone, then you have cultural power. You've become the authority of your own culture, representing yourself as the Last Word On How It Was. When you're potentially pitting yourself against juggernauts that rake in millions of dollars at a time, you've either got a serious pair or a really big megaphone -- and you know how to use it. Or use both, for that matter.
It's one thing to get "a little loose" with history for the sake of a story; it's another thing altogether to completely overturn a respected historical figure just to make a socio-political point. The former is the midway step between utter accuracy as defiance against outsider representations; the latter is only possible (or should I say, only comfortable for cultural-insider audiences) once outsider representations are no longer even on the board.
You can really only play with history when you have the power over that history. You have to own it, before you can break it. The more the Hong Sisters messed with the historical record in their story (or at least masked the origins under misnomer-names and red herrings), the more power they're claiming on a cultural level. To break the history is to say not only that one has the public/global-culture right to remix history for the sake of a story; to break the history is the next evolutionary step.
I say, "own it before you can break it," but perhaps that's not quite it. Maybe it's more that you can only play (with the history) when you're no longer standing over it with a weapon in a defensive position (though admittedly the first version is catchier, and shorter). As long as the general-you -- the creators and consumers of a cultural product -- are in defensive mode against appropriation, there's no room to play. Only once all appropriative/intrusive cultural-outsiders have been beaten off and/or overthrown, can the culture begin to play with the question of what might have been, because the what really happened is settled and under the control of all culture-members.
There are plenty of other kdramas that play fast and loose with history, but I've yet to come across one that seems to have hit the hot buttons while doing so. I think that's mostly because of the insertion of Gwanghae elements into Yeonsangun's story, reinforced by the too-alike name. But on the other hand, I wonder also if the Hong Sisters didn't fully intend to trip the cultural hotwires, to force people to consider that it's time to move away from staunchly defending a pristine version and limiting historical manipulations to slight details... and to recognize or begin to accept the cultural dominance implied in the act of playing with, and breaking, your own history for the sake of a fun story.
I recently finished watching Hong Gil Dong, a retelling (and remixing) of an eponymous Korean novel. With a basic premise with the same archetypal lines as the West's Robin Hood, the Korean version was by Heo Gyun and was published somewhere around the late 1500s. (There seems to be some dispute as to whether Heo wrote the story, and I've even come across an article discussing a current-day historian's attempt to recreate/rediscover the footsteps of a 'historical' Hong Gil-dong. I'm as dubious of that project as I am of attempts to rediscover a historical Robin Hood or King Arthur, but I suppose there'll always be someone who thinks legends need a 'real' person behind them.)
In a nutshell, the summary of the original novel goes like thus:
Hong is the illegitimate son of a noble family who's forced out as unwanted/cursed, and becomes a bandit who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, gathering his own personal army of bandits, the Hwal-Bin-Dang (because every hero must have his Merry Men, or in this case, his Kind-hearted Robbers or Poor-Saving Army, depending on translator asked). The king, Yeonsangun, tries many times to capture Hong, branding him a traitor, but despite many adventures never manages to bring Hong in.
Eventually Yeonsangun figures if you can't beat the trickster, you get him to join you, and invites Hong to become the War Minister. Hong goes along with this until realizing the people's situations haven't improved, and he resigns his position and heads out into the world to see if he can find a better solution. Along the way, he defeats demons in a (fictional) country called Yul-do, and that country's people elect him the king of Yul-do. When his father dies, he returns to Korea for three years to observe proper rites for his father (thus displaying his filial piety despite his father's disownment of him), after which he returns to Yul-do to reign in prosperity and peace until his death.
An important detail is that Gil-dong, as the child of a slave, is a slave himself (despite having a noble father), which means the novel illustrates several socially radical points, and therein lies the contemporary noble belief that the novel was intended to foment rebellion (or at least major social reform, which to the average noble seems to have amounted to the same thing). Gil-dong's story effectively argues that a slave can a) become a hero of the people, b) continually out-wit and out-trick all the government forces arrayed against him, and even c) be appointed to a major political position.
The last of which, if you're not aware, has a mandatory requirement of passing the government civil service exam. Slaves didn't qualify to take the exam, so Gil-dong got the position solely due to his on-the-job skills, despite those skills being unsuitable/unallowed for the lowest of social standing (not to mention illegal! hello, bandit!). It had nothing to do with his family name, who he knew, or even who he'd bribed. Talk about seriously threatening the nobility (yangban); if it's true that anyone could gain power just by, y'know, being qualified on a practical level, and they didn't have to bribe or petition the PTB, what's next? The fall of Eastern civilization?
The real kicker is what happens while Gil-dong travels the foreign countryside seeking answers as to why people suffer: he's invited to become the king. It's a double whammy. Not only is he a slave, and thus completely unqualified to do just about anything with responsibility, the people are the ones who choose him.
Korea's pattern of kingship -- like nearly any other major monarchy or imperial family I can think of -- operated on a mandate of heaven: if the leader isn't a god himself (per Japan), he's the one chosen personally by god/heaven. To have a king chosen not by heaven, but by the people (who are at the bottom of this system) is to completely up-end the system. Taken to its logical conclusion, the people are supplanting god/heaven. After all, in choosing their king, they've already preempted the role of god/heaven to place its chosen representative on the throne.
A little about the author's political position/perspective, from AsianInfo.org. (Note that "Ho" seems to be alternate for "Heo", and "Jyun" alternate for "Gyun" -- one thing about Korean is that there seems to be at least three competing ways to romanicize.)
In his popular novel, The Hong Kil-tong chon, Ho Jyun (1569-1618) advocated popular revolt against misrule. His hero, Hong Kil-tong, like the virtuous outlaw Im Kkok-chong, was enraged by governmental corruption and rose up against it. Ho Kyun realized that, if provoked, the lower classes, together with the peasant class, could become a powerful tool in the struggle for social justice.
Like the Renaissance philosophers, he made a bold departure from traditional norms and values, basing his morality on the true nature of man. It was Ho Kyun's conviction, eloquently expressed in his pioneering egalitarian novel, that every man was endowed with particular talents to survive, and ought not to be exploited by others. He found the class-divided, traditional society abominable.
Gil-dong's story takes place during the reign of Yeonsangun, an actual King whose reign ended in 1506 (roughly a hundred years, give or take a decade, before the novel's writing). According to wikipedia: "[Yeonsangun] is often considered the worst tyrant in Joseon Dynasty, notorious for launching two bloody purges of the seonbi [scholarly] elite. He also seized a thousand women from the provinces to serve as palace entertainers, and appropriated the Seonggyungwan [royal university] hall of study as a personal pleasure ground." If you've seen The King and the Clown, you've seen one version of Yeonsangun in action, although that's the scenery-chewing version. I haven't actually found much in (non-fiction) articles that indicates Yeonsangun was what we might call truly mentally ill, so much as just utterly corrupted by the totality of his power. I'm not sure whether the moniker of "mad" in this case is more metaphorical, as subverting divine injunction (to be a Good King) and instead being a tyrant might by definition be a form of madness.
With Yeonsangun as the backdrop, Gil-dong's path is easier: if the King is a really great guy, who'd want to play along with a rebellious bandit fighting the system? Yeonsangun took the crown at age 18 and only ruled for twelve years... and it took the nobles that long to muster the willingness -- and power -- to oust the tyrannical king. The concept of a mandate of heaven is that strong, as it usually is when powering a monarchy: overthrowing the so-called 'rightful' king means not just inciting potential civil war, but also countering directly the will of heaven.
The fear of being struck down by god/heaven or facing eternity in hellfire have been strong deterrents in many cultures. You can't just wake up one morning and say, "look, this guy's no good, let's trade up for a better model" (not to mention the question of whether the new model is automatically better -- after all, Yeonsangun looked good for the first few years, before he descended into total despotic wackiness). Yet at the same time, a ruler's apparent madness/tyranny allows the mandate to be questioned: if heaven were on the right track, why would it have chosen a ruler this bad? A bad king opens the door to questioning heaven, and that's exactly what the literary Kil-tong does.
In the 2008 television version of Hong Gil Dong by HONG Jung-eun and HONG Mi-ran (aka the Hong Sisters), therefore, the King had to be a bad guy. But they chose (and I wonder if the recent glut of movies with scenery-chewing Yeonsanguns may've also played a role) to displace Gil-dong's story to a different time. Or, at least, to appear to transpose the story, but for that to make sense, here's another short history lesson to provide context.
A hundred years after Yeonsangun came King Gwanghae (who incidentally was on the throne when HEO actually published Hong Gil Dong). The series' version of the King's name sounds similar, though various translators have used different transliterations, but for simplicity I'm using Kwang Whe per drama-addict's wiki. The similarity between "Gwanghae" and "Kwang Whe" seems to indicate that we're supposed to see a connection, however superficial. What's most important as a baseline is that Gwanghae's name represents a honorable fairness not unlike how USians see, say, Lincoln: someone who lived in tough times and despite that, did the best he could, and his best was better than expected.
Gwanghae was the second son of King Seonjo and a rather decent fellow, on the whole, who did his best to bring about peace and restore a lot of the damage done by Yeonsangun's purges. Gwanghae, like his (apparently incompetent) older brother, was the son of one of the King's consorts -- that makes him not entirely royal, and technically illegitimate, but still a prince all the same. When Gwanghae was only 18, Japan decided to conquer Ming, but with Korea geographically in the way, this meant conquering Korea first. (Easier said than done.)
At the first sign of trouble -- also known as "ohshit Toyotomi Hideyoshi just landed" -- King Seonjo fled northward with the court, leaving the Crown Prince Gwanghae in charge of the country's defense. By all reports, Gwanghae might be young (only 18) but already showing signs of brilliance, and a real gift for strategy. During a five year cease-fire in the middle of the Imjin War, Gwanghae didn't sit still, but turned his attention to rebuilding and repairing the infrastructure destroyed in the Japanese attacks. When fighting started up again, the battle turned mostly naval (where Korea didn't just dominate almost unilaterally, it also had Admiral YI Sun-sin in charge), and Japan was sent home with its tail between its legs.
Fast-forward to 1608, when Gwanghae was about 34 years old. He wasn't necessarily the favorite for the throne; that would be his younger brother, Yeongchangdaegun (aka Yeongchang) who was also the only legitimate son; his mother (Queen Inmok) was a royal wife, not a consort. The online articles I've found don't give any ages, but Seonjo's untimely death at age 56 was too soon for Yeongchang (Seonjo's favorite) to achieve the throne, not when Gwanghae was of age and well-seasoned for the role. I'm not sure of the age of majority, but Seonjo was crowned when he was only 16, so I'd guess Yeongchang had to be much younger than that. Regardless, Seonjo did make a royal decree before his death that Gwanghae would inherit.
To no one's surprise, Yeongchang was used as a pawn at an attempt at the throne, failed, and he and his supporters were put to death, but aside from the interfamily strife, Gwanghae's rule had some pretty significant good points. From the wiki page on Gwanghae:
He endeavored to restore the country and sponsored restoration of documents. As a part of reconstruction, he revised land ordinance and redistributed the land to people; he also ordered rebuilding of Changdeok Palace along with several other palaces. ... Since he realized Joseon was unable to compete with the Manchu military power, he tried to keep friendly relationship with the Manchus, while the kingdom was still under the suzerainty of Ming... [When Manchu defeated the Ming] Gwanghaegun negotiated independently for peace with the Manchus and managed to avoid another war. He also restored diplomatic relationship with Japan in 1609 when he reopened trade with Japan through Treaty of Giyu, and he sent his ambassadors to Japan in 1617.
From a Korean article (translated by javabeans at dramabeans.org):
At the time of the Japanese invasion [1592], Kwanghaegun was made the crown prince, and was lauded by the populace. ... He set in motion efforts to reclaim farmland that had been impoverished by war, and exerted much energy into enforcing a Uniform Land Tax Law in order to bring his subjects out of poverty. In addition, the Oriental medical reference book [written by famous doctor of Eastern medicine Heo Jun] “Donguibogam” was also published with Kwanghaegun’s full backing.
Politically, Gwanghae was known as an excellent administrator and brilliant diplomat, but held back by the fact that his mother wasn't the Queen. His illegitimacy meant he operated without full backing from politicians, scholars, and aristocrats -- and their support (especially when it came to the various powerful factions) was absolutely crucial in any kind of kingdom-building (or rebuilding). Eventually one of those factions became the cause of his downfall. The quote from the Korean article (above) gives the usual gloss, but other articles go into more detail, mainly that his continued attempts to unify the various factions eventually resulted in one of those factions getting fed up and deposing him for someone 'more suited' to the throne. (Read: with more loyalty to a specific faction, namely, theirs.)
Additionally -- and this is quite ironic in light of Hong Gil Dong's version -- some articles also mention that Heo Gyun was investigated (or marked for investigation, it's not clear) for fostering anti-government sentiments. Gwanghae either halted the investigation, denied the nobles' petition to prosecute the author, or generally dismissed the nobles' panic that a novel could overturn civilization as we know it. If you consider the fact that Gwanghae himself was hardly considered King-material due to his mother's status, I'd say it's possible that Gwanghae in fact might've enjoyed seeing the nobles all a-twitter over a book that posited that "anyone might become King". Wasn't Gwanghae himself proof of that (even if not quite such an extreme case)?
The only reason I stumbled over this information is because I have, at best, only the barest familiarity with Korean history. Hong Gil Dong was presenting itself as set in a specific historical period, and I went digging to see whether there was a real Kwang Whe or Chang Hwi. What you read above is what I found, and that got me thinking.
I couldn't think of any novels or movies (other than outright alternate-history fiction) in which a major historical figure is false, ie, the story posits a King Robert crowned in the year 1250 when in reality that's the middle of the reign of King Henry III (1215-1272). Of those stories with historical figures as touchstones, I can only come up with examples that (at most) deviate in the middle zone, but all of them end up generally re-merging with the historical record. A few characters may die earlier, or die later, or die in a different way, or be presented as murder (exit stage left) instead of suicide (also an exit) or just curdled milk (still an exit) -- but in the end, where the historical Catherine the Great ends is where the movie ends. There might be a few speeches and a few extra battles (and a few love affairs) that never happened, but even the pretty-boy movie-version of Balian of Ibelin does broker the Treaty of Ramla, ending the Third Crusade and two hours of stupid-movie-hell.
Alternately, a story may posit that there's something we (as regular people) were never told, frex that such-and-such a pope was secretly a woman, or that a certain king was switched at birth (or switched and switched back, as in The Prince and the Pauper). The flip-version is when a reportedly-good historical figure is shown as less-than-good, with any actual goodness resulting from, say, being blackmailed by a third grade teacher, and that if other forces hadn't stepped in, today we'd be drinking chai instead of coffee and driving on the other side of the road.
It's when the audience isn't presumed to be familiar that movies and novels and television shows -- from what I've seen, at least -- get wildly ahistorical to the point of almost ridiculous inaccuracy. You can almost see the imperialist logic behind such pap as The King and I: "Who cares if this is hugely offensive to an entire nation and its people and their ancient history? They're, y'know, way over there, and our audience is here, so we can write whatever we want." (Which, I suspect, was the justification Anna Leonowens probably used herself, in writing her so-called autobiographies that later became the basis for Margaret Landon's The King and I: she could say what she pleased, because what Brits among her audience would know Thailand from Swahili-land, anyway.)
The dominant paradigm (usually, but not always, the West) is at a distance from both the source material and the foundation (culture) of that material, and thus feels free to appropriate and manipulate the facts as it pleases. The one getting appropriated and manipulated is going to demand historical accuracy, because the alternative is that unfamiliar audiences' first interaction with their culture is going to be via this appropriated and inaccurate representation. The dominant culture's product is always slicker, with a bigger budget and bigger names, and after being mangled by two hours of The King and I, will anyone stick around to see Thailand's own presentation of the true life and times of the historical Mongkut, king of Siam?
If historical revisionism is not also to be historical appropriation, the audience be familiar enough with the original/correct version to understand where the revisions occur (and possibly also parse the storyteller's meaning in the change-from-historical). Lacking familiarity with the true historical record results in simple appropriation per The King and I or any of plenty of other quasi-historical "based [very loosely] on a true story" a la tripe like The Kingdom of Heaven or The Last Samurai. When the story pivots on the audience's own shared-culture history, or is so well-known to the audience as to be practically an additional cultural history (as, I'd argue, dominant USian culture has adopted British history), then the audience are no longer simple spectators in the "let's remix someone else's history with no regard for the truth of what happened." Instead, they're participants in "let's remix our own history to discuss/highlight what might have been."
Hong Gil Dong was only the Hong Sisters' fourth outing for independent, original scripts, and I twigged on a few signs that they were still finding their footing for complex villains. Or perhaps it's that in remixing so much else of the original story with their own ingredients that they couldn't also spare the extra attention to keep Kwang Whe from descending into caricature.
Back on topic: the bottom line is that one of the signs of an uncertainty or distrust in the hero (on the part of the author/s) is the need to make the big bad even badder. The bad guy can't just glare at little old ladies; he must bite the heads off kittens. He can't just threaten to tie up the heroine; he must daily execute a hundred weeping child-actors. He can't just make a bad or short-sighted political decision; he must levy taxes that will clear out thousands by starvation in muddy gutters. The more violent, or crazy, or unethical the bad guy, the more I suspect attempted manipulation on the part of the writers, that they're not convinced I'll go along with the good guy as Really All That, so they have to make his opposite Really Really Not All That.
In fact, if you had no idea of history other than what you see in Hong Gil Dong, you'd probably think Gwanghae/Kwang Whe was little more than a pompous, irrational, lust-crazed, blood-thirsty, superstitious tyrant who lazed in bed and threw temper tantrums when forced to, y'know, actually earn his keep as King. But I also suspect that the Hong Sisters weren't actually meaning Gwanghae by-the-book.
First, the two royal siblings have a surname of Lee, not Yi. (Is this a transliteration thing? A result of the updated romanicization methods? Or an attempt to indicate that the story's "royal family" is not the actual/historical Joseon dynasty of the Yi family?) Second, Chang Hwi may be close to Yeongchang, but only by a syllable, and not even a rare syllable/sound, at that. Third, Khang Whe has a family background with some likeness to the historical Gwanghae, but his characterization, his actions, and his final end have more in common with Yeonsangun. Although one delightful element of the novel, reminiscent of the trickster mind-games between Prince John and Robin Hood, is lacking from the Hong Sisters' version. Turning Khang Whe into a totally unhinged madman means losing the opportunity to see Khang Whe/Yeonsangun's wits at work, matched against Gil-dong/Kil-tong. In fact, there's only one major instance of Gil-dong showing the brilliant flashes of trickster-work that I'm told are in the novel, which is really sad (and, I suspect, indicative that the television series' single instance was possibly an adaptation from the novel, because thematically and stylistically it stands out as very different from the rest of Gil-dong's hijinks.)
Digging further into Yeonsangun's historical record has me re-thinking whether the Hong Sisters' were truly tapping Gwanghae as the sole template for Khang Whe, because Yeonsangun's life contains parallels that match too neatly with the sister's extension and exploration of the legend. Yeonsangun was deposed and replaced by a puppet-king, his younger half-brother Jungjong, who then ruled for thirty-eight years. According to the wiki overview on Jungjong's life:
During the early days of his reign, however, Jungjong could not exert regal authority as he wished because those who put him on the throne exercised immense power. Only when the three main leaders of coup died of old age and natural causes eight years later, Jungjong began to assert his authority and carried out a large-scale reformation of the government with help of Jo Gwang-jo and other Sarim scholars.
Additionally, JO Gwang-jo is himself a rather Gil-dong-like figure, both in the sense of being someone willing to speak truth to power and in the aspect of being framed by opponents for reaching too high. The conflict between the two men neatly parallels the story's conflicts between Chang Hwi and Gil-dong:
After four short years of reformist agenda, Jungjong abruptly abandoned Jo Gwang-jo's programs because he either lost confidence in Jo's programs or feared that Jo was becoming too powerful. While Jungjong and Jo Gwang-jo shared the reformist agenda, Jungjong was also chiefly interested in solidifying royal authority whereas the latter was more concerned with neo-Confucian ideology, according to which those who rule must be a virtuous example to the rest. Finally in November 1519, when conservative officials slandered Jo Gwang-jo to be disloyal by writing "Jo will become the king" (주초위왕, 走肖爲王) with honey on leaves so that caterpillars left behind the same phrase as if in supernatural manifestation, Jungjong executed Jo Gwang-jo on charge of factionalism and exiled many of his followers, abruptly abandoning his reforms. This incident is known as the Third Literati Purge of 1519 or Gimyo massacre of scholars.
Also, from the wiki page about JO Gwang-jo (which is really quite lengthy, compared to the usual entries on Korean kings during the same general time period):
Jo and his supporters then pushed forth a series of radical reforms as they established local self-government system called Hyang'yak to strengthen local autonomy and communal spirit among people. In this system, deference was placed according to senority of villagers rather than their social status. [His] faction also sought to reduce gap between the rich and poor with a land reform that would distribute land to farmers equally and limit amount of land and number of slaves that one could own. This measure also targeted Hungu faction's accumulation of land and wealth...
According to Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, it was said that no official dared to receive a bribe or exploit the populace during this time because of such strict enforcement.[2] He also sought to trim the size of government by reducing the number of bureaucrats and their wages.
Jo also believed that any talented people including slaves should be appointed as officials regardless of social status. He was said to judge people by moral character and did not greet superior officials if he considered them of unworthy characters while he was courteous even to his servants.
Granted, Gil-dong is about as far from a scholarly figure as you can get, but the rest matches up.
An additional parallel that the Hong Sisters might've been tweaking as well: several times, Chang Hwi is treated successfully for near-mortal wounds, by Yi-nok. If Chang Hwi is the fictional counterpart to Jungjong, then Yi-nok might be a nod to Dae Jang-geum, the only female Royal Physician in Korean history. (The real Dae Jang-geum's life is shrouded in mystery, so it seems to be anyone's guess as to where she came from or how she learned her skills.)
It feels like a missed opportunity, in some ways, and it makes me wonder why the Hong Sisters chose to apparently recast a respected king as a complete despot. What kind of socio-political message were they hoping to convey, by the distortion? Most times I've seen such revisionism, it's either to humanize a previously too-mythic personage (such as the plethora of movies about the young Queen Elizabeth I), or it's to create sympathy for a character previously reviled (ie that controversial film about Hitler as a young art student). It's a lot harder to think of examples where a respected historical figure is recast as completely at odds with his/her reputation, let alone nearly night-and-day as between the historic Gwanghae and the fictional Kwang Whe.
I think the Hong Sisters were expecting the audience to know all of this Gwanghae/Yeonsangun history already, and to see the irony created by the mashup contrast. Except that I also think that a) for once, they overestimated their audience's history knowledge (as opposed to, what I gather elsewhere, is their more usual modus operandi of often underestimating their audience's intelligence). And b) their reliance on "make the bad guy really bad" undermined the potential to see Gil-dong as the counterpart to Kwang Whe (as the illegitimate child who achieves something) instead of as the counterpart/partner to Chang Hwi (the royal child who is the puppet of others).
All this, I think, is why in the last few episodes, there's a flashback to the King's time as Crown Prince, when the series previously had made no real attempt to humanize him. The flashback is loaded with telling, considering it's pretty short: the adviser's words let us know Kwang Whe is still a prince, not yet a king, while Kwang Whe's words let us know he's aware of/sensitive to his illegitimacy via consort-mother, and his determination to prove to the ministers that status of birth has no impact on a man's worth, and that he'll be a good king for his people no matter what the nobles say. But in light of the rest of the show's representation, this minute's worth of a flashback doesn't give the impression that Kwang Whe did achieve things, so much as make it seem as though Kwang Whe might've intended to achieve good things, but unfortunately went completely insane immediately after being crowned.
I find it intriguing that dramabeans posted the article's translation (without credit, so no idea when the article was first published, but I'd bet at least a week or so previous, since javabeans first discussed it with her parents and then had to translate the text prior to posting)... and it's right around the same week as the episode with the flashback. My understanding is that a lot of the scripts are written very close to actual filming date, so it's possible the flashback's addition was meant to respond to and/or allay audience-confusion or misunderstanding about why Kwang Whe, in particular, became the kingly vehicle: basically, to remind the audience that Kwang Whe's own rule pivots on issues about his il/legitimacy.
That highlights the issue with audience knowledge, and the assumption that if one's culture is strong enough, wide-spread enough, and the audience members are relatively well-versed in some basic shared historical understandings of that culture, then you can play with it. If half your audience has never seen a motorcycle before, then a show about hacking a Harley into a ape-hanger duct-taped chopper is probably going to baffle them more than please them.
The inclusion of that flashback makes me suspect that late in the game, the Hong Sisters realized a good chunk of their audience had never seen a motorcycle. The point of using Kwang Whe as the foil had been lost, and a good part of the dramatic gains of the historical revisionism were lost, as well. Or if not lost, at least only partially regained, since it's information that would've made previous points significantly more poignant, if the background were known.
In the dramabeans post about Korean audience's dissatisfaction with Hong Gil Dong's liberal treatment of history, a number of the comments expressed notions like "If you want historical accuracy, you can always watch history/national geographic/discovery channel" and "From the very first scene this drama set itself up as being a very creative and funky re-interpretation of a Korean legend. Why would anyone be surprised when it plays loose with the facts?" and a rather astute "For someone who has NO knowledge of Korean history, I thought Kwang Whe was a made up character since he seems like such a caricature."
Maybe the best way to approach this is to set aside participation in the dominant paradigm (if you are part of it), and find a cultural participation that's of a minority paradigm (whether national, regional, ethnic, or even familial).
First, think of a historical figure -- from your own cultural history (whatever that may be, on whatever level) who's generally respected as someone worthy. Try to pick someone without excessive controversy (or, at least, something we might no longer find controversial, like "she didn't want to get married" or "he wanted a better education"), because the analogy works better when it's someone seen in hindsight as A Pretty Good Leader. For USians, the low-hanging fruit would probably be historical figures like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
Now think about whether respect for this figure is culturally shared. When you see that figure mentioned in pop culture novels or movies or television shows, or even poppier instances like commercials, is the figure treated as an object of fun? Chibified/caricatured, or drawn with dignity? Is the person's name pretty wide-spread, such that you think you could probably say to just about anyone in your culture, "wow, so-and-so was a great guy!" Is the average member of your shared culture likely to not only know the name, but also respect the historical person?
Next, the cultural grounding: in television and movies, is the culture and its members represented accurately, or at least with dignity and respect? Or is it ridiculed, reduced to little more than an ethnic joke, included only for the sake of a token, treated as the object of fun for its crazy customs, its backwards native religion, its strange accents, its funny clothes? Religion-wise: or is the native religion watered-down into barely a shadow, which in turn is commercialized and venerated despite having little to nothing in common with the real thing? Do the people you see in movies and television and books -- that are reportedly people from your culture -- even look like you, talk like you, walk like you, have the same priorities and stories and values as you?
Setting aside how your own culture presents the person, can you think of any representations by other cultures that have been inaccurate or disrespectful? Can you think of any time you've seen this much-loved and/or much-respected character treated -- by other cultures' representations -- as a buffoon, a cheat, a liar, an idiot, a murderer, an insane scenery-eater? Have you ever heard or seen or read a representation of this historical figure that you know is so wrong, so completely off-base, but the dominance of the culture doing the presenting drowns out your protests before you even have a chance to say anything?
Here's an example: the first Twilight movie grossed $192.8 million in North America, and $199.8 million internationally. That's $392.6 million dollars -- a crapload of zeros -- worldwide. The movie also contains characters who are purportedly members of an actual Native nation: the Quileute people. Now, if you were to divide $392.6 million dollars by whatever X would be the average ticket price, that'd still be... well, a whole lot of people. Now imagine if that many people were introduced to your tribe's name, overnight, by way of that one movie. The Quileute have about 750 members total, and I'd bet the proportions are something like for every member of the actual tribe, there are probably five thousand viewers. Maybe more.
There's no way the Quileute could ever muster a voice loud enough to drown out the impressions that so many people, across the planet, now have of them. Yes, the story is fiction -- it's about vampires, for crying out loud -- but it's also got a whole lot of references to things that aren't fictional. Not that I've read the books (I'm masochistic, not stupid, thanks) but I do recall someone mentioning that the author used existing town names in the text, and existing landmarks. If a fan googles a keyword in the book, there's a chance they'll get a hit for the real town/landmark/tribe.
Now, think about googling for Quileute and realizing they're an actual nation. Because your first introduction was via fictional distortion -- and because you have no other basis upon which to differentiate 'real' from 'fictional' and because the story already plays with that real/fictional line by using 'other' real, existing places and landmarks -- it's going to be very, very hard to undo the first impressions.
I've seen similar reactions among new-to-anime fans, who take the representation of, say, a Japanese holiday or classroom or street-scene and extrapolate into what (they believe) the 'real' must be like: that all Japanese do X on Y date, that all people in Z city are likely to knife you versus all people in city A who are sweet and friendly. Now think of if it were your culture that's been so badly misrepresented, creating a lasting impression in otherwise ignorant or unknowing minds, that in turns creates a presumption of certain behaviors or values or beliefs. Think about if that representation showed the historical figure you've chosen -- back in the first step -- as someone evil, or stupid, or just plain crazy.
That's the power of stories, but when that power is multiplied by almost 400 million dollars, think of trying to counteract that power. Unless you have the means to compete on the level of so many millions of dollars world-wide, then you're probably -- sad but true -- out of luck. Millions of people are going to be convinced that your beloved and respected King was a bald, pompous fool who insisted everyone had to be shorter than him and wouldn't have known a fork from a spoon if it weren't for some self-righteous bint in a hoopskirt. If the story's popular enough, it could be sixty years down the road and you'll still be forced to deal with complete strangers who assume that their familiarity with this inaccurate, appropriative, fictional history gives them the power to judge your version as false. If sixteen million people believe it's true, then it must be true: Siam was saved by a self-promoting liar, and the Quileute people aren't even really human, or are only barely so.
Now consider what it'd be like if your culture comes instead from a position of dominance. You release a movie or television show or novel about this respected historical figure, and the clout that comes from being the dominant paradigm means audiences will say, "ah, this will form our basic understanding of this event or person or place". It's not an issue of not-knowing reality from fiction; the problem is that you can't tell what's fiction if you don't know the reality. So if you don't know Korean history, how do you know what's been made up... and thus the ground of the power is to be in a position where you can say: the audience does know the reality, to be able to extract which is fiction. But the real power comes from being able to say: and those who don't know will take our word for it, because we're the paradigm whose right-to-present are dominant.
This might be one reason for the reported crankiness from viewers, during HGD's broadcast. When you think of Korea's place on the international stage over the past century, other than the lasting effects of the DMZ and Korea's economic expansion, it's otherwise mostly ignored by the broader dominant cultural paradigm/s. I can't even remember the last time Korea or Koreans (other than, say, USian movies or books about the Korean Conflict) were mentioned in any pop culture story. Japan, sure, and China, of course, but Korea? Hmm, no, not really.
That makes Crazy Kwang Whe into nails on a blackboard: it's presenting a respected figure as someone barely even laughable, and just this side of totally evil. If I felt my culture gets little enough notice or respect anyway (and this is majorly analogous to how I feel about the USian-culture-at-large when it comes to the distorting impact that Gone with the Wind had on the rest of the country's impressions of the Deep South), then like hell would I enjoy a story that basically posits that one of the culture's respected figures should be dismissed as three crayons short of a full set of hangers.
It's a recognition, I suspect -- even if not verbalized in so many words -- that one is not in control of one's own cultural presentations. And since externally-created cultural presentations are almost always shallow at best and disrespectful (even erasing) at worst, creating a cultural representation that's on the same (very low) level would feel like, well... Bluntly, it'd feel like the story sold out, and presented itself through the lens of the dominant external paradigm. For me, it would be like watching a movie created in Alabama, by native Southerners, that take all the stereotypes and sexism and classism and racism and happy-darkies and faux-courtesy crap of GwtW, and amp it up further. It would rankle, and it would feel like my own culture is saying, "yes! when you say we think slow because we talk slow, you're right! when you say Southern men marry their first cousins, when you say a Southern family barely has an entire mouthful's worth of teeth among them, when you say a group of Southern women together have about as much IQ as the front row of a Conway Twitty concert, it's okay, because you're right!"
The risk is that this message won't be taken as satirical (because that's breaking the history, and if you don't own it, you can't do that) but as confirmation of the stereotypes. It risks being interpreted as cultural insiders effectively confirming the stereotypes imposed by cultural outsiders. It's granting permission to reinforce those stereotypes, because the insiders themselves have accepted those stereotypes and in turn presented them as self-produced truth. If you don't have cultural power and a big cultural megaphone, that's the message you give by playing into stereotypes.
If the rest of the world talks down your history and your historical figures (when it even notices that your history even occurred), then I can see how such negative and caricatured representations would make you start spitting nails. At least in my own example, it would make me feel like telling my fellow culture-members: don't do me any favors. Please.
If this post so far seems at some length, I think it's because it's hard to grasp just how radical it is to play with one's history, especially if the culture has previously felt itself outnumbered and out-shouted by outsider interpretations. If we take the position that the historical inaccuracies in Hong Gil Dong are intentional (and not just simple caricature for the sake of laziness or genre), that ahistoricity is, in itself, a pretty radical thing: the Hong Sisters are approaching Korean history from a position of socio-cultural dominance.
By mixing and matching between Gwanghae and Yeonsangun and Jungjong, I think they're expecting the audience to have a shared cultural/historical grounding, and that viewers are mostly comfortable with that shared ground. I think their story-choices are a sign they believe the actual facts to be dispersed and recognized widely enough that no one would be fooled into thinking the real Gwanghe was anything like the scenery-chewing, virgin-chasing, scholar-killing, alcohol-hazed, bare-chested Kwang Whe of the television series. It's like if I were to do a movie in which Lincoln was secretly pro-bowling and cheated at croquet and had an affair with a chicken: I could trust that my audience would say, "this is a fictional, probably satirical, version of Lincoln, but we can laugh because we know the truth." In other words, the reality, and a level of comfort in knowing and accepting that reality, means the audience is not threatened by the satirical or ridiculous or embellished.
Think back to the analogy and consider distortions of the USian Deep South, or of India, or of the Maori: when you can comfortably say that enough people are aware of your (culture's) voice, that your culture has a big enough megaphone, then you have cultural power. You've become the authority of your own culture, representing yourself as the Last Word On How It Was. When you're potentially pitting yourself against juggernauts that rake in millions of dollars at a time, you've either got a serious pair or a really big megaphone -- and you know how to use it. Or use both, for that matter.
It's one thing to get "a little loose" with history for the sake of a story; it's another thing altogether to completely overturn a respected historical figure just to make a socio-political point. The former is the midway step between utter accuracy as defiance against outsider representations; the latter is only possible (or should I say, only comfortable for cultural-insider audiences) once outsider representations are no longer even on the board.
You can really only play with history when you have the power over that history. You have to own it, before you can break it. The more the Hong Sisters messed with the historical record in their story (or at least masked the origins under misnomer-names and red herrings), the more power they're claiming on a cultural level. To break the history is to say not only that one has the public/global-culture right to remix history for the sake of a story; to break the history is the next evolutionary step.
I say, "own it before you can break it," but perhaps that's not quite it. Maybe it's more that you can only play (with the history) when you're no longer standing over it with a weapon in a defensive position (though admittedly the first version is catchier, and shorter). As long as the general-you -- the creators and consumers of a cultural product -- are in defensive mode against appropriation, there's no room to play. Only once all appropriative/intrusive cultural-outsiders have been beaten off and/or overthrown, can the culture begin to play with the question of what might have been, because the what really happened is settled and under the control of all culture-members.
There are plenty of other kdramas that play fast and loose with history, but I've yet to come across one that seems to have hit the hot buttons while doing so. I think that's mostly because of the insertion of Gwanghae elements into Yeonsangun's story, reinforced by the too-alike name. But on the other hand, I wonder also if the Hong Sisters didn't fully intend to trip the cultural hotwires, to force people to consider that it's time to move away from staunchly defending a pristine version and limiting historical manipulations to slight details... and to recognize or begin to accept the cultural dominance implied in the act of playing with, and breaking, your own history for the sake of a fun story.
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Date: 23 Oct 2010 10:25 pm (UTC)--- I thought Yi might be = Lee, but I'm finding that even in the same source there'll be alternate forms of romanicizing, and I didn't want to just assume it's the same. (Which means I err in the opposite direction, but hey.) I'm used to Wade-Giles and Pinyin for chinese, and I'm aware there are two versions for Korean as well, but without any significant study (yet) to learn the differences, I don't know when it's one or the other or should be one or the other.
[tangent: means that sometimes I may prevaricate on similarities -- like does "kwang" really sound that similar to "gwang"? Korean romanicization reminds me of pinyin, in that it doesn't seem to indicate where things are aspirated, but when I listen to someone speaking, it's like... there's a lot more 'sound' in there than two or three simple letters would indicate. It actually reminds me of how hsing 'reads' to me more like the actual sound, but xing (the pinyin version) doesn't. Or ts... I mean, hell, I'm still baffled as to whether it's ohhh-pah or aahh-pa, since some actresses say the latter and some the former, and here I've spent the past two years thinking it's ahh-paa because of that double-consonant+vowel rule in English and assuming the transliteration is using that to let me know how it's supposed to read. AAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH. This would be a lot easier if the fansubbers would actually include the honorifics/nicknames, instead of dropping them completely -- or else how do I know whether I should listen for that key-word that could tell me about the relationship?]
--- About Jang-geum: from a historian's standpoint, you're right. From a writer's standpoint, I can see how "woman taking care of prince" is going to act as a quiet dog-whistle for "other famous women who've taken care of princes" of which it appears there's only one on record. So it's not necessarily that Yi-nok is meant to 'represent' so much as -- I think, as a writer -- that she's meant to nod in that general direction. I just thought it was a rather nice touch, actually (especially since it wasn't entirely necessary, seeing how Yi-nok is otherwise so completely treated like an idiot/fool that it wouldn't have been a surprise had she professed complete ignorance of what to actually do with the medicines she sells).
--- Unfortunately, it's really hard to find adequate comparisons between USian history and monarchies. The most you can do is kind of in passing, because Presidents are only around for 4-8 years, and there's only been 43 of them -- how can we compare (except on the lightest of rough analogy levels) to a king who ruled for, oh, thirty years? Lincoln just happens to be easy, is all. (I didn't think most USians would actually have a very complete awareness of the connotations if I instead used Andrew Jackson as comparison... which probably works in its own right as illustration that even in a shared-culture, there can be gaps and if an author misjudges them, you're back to square one with audience responses.)
That said about shallow comparisons, I could only go on the information I found not just in wiki but in several Korean Times articles and a few academic articles, like Korea Journal and some of the university-history-department articles I found. There was mention of Gwanghae (wait, Gwanghae-sun? uhm. long day. sorry.) having been deposed, but it looks like at some point after his death, someone started to reconsider whether he was really all that bad, or if he was just the inevitable fall-guy for an inter-faction rivalry. Most of the articles do mention that despite being deposed and having no posthumous title, that in recent decades historians have reconsidered his reign and begun a kind of very belated restoration of his reputation. Though I do wonder whether events of the 20th century have given some historians a little, shall we say, incentive for being able to have a Good Example of a past situation where the ruler beat off invaders... so there's always that "are we seeing this guy as good, now, solely because we want to be able to use the events of his reign in a good light"? Or maybe I'm cynical, having seen that done to enough other historical figures who -- when you get down to it, weren't necessarily totally bad but were hardly paragons, either. Then again, no one is, really. Restoration of historical figures is always rife with political reasons for doing so, just as much as reasons for taking them down in the first place are almost always wrapped up in politics, too.
--- I didn't even know much of the specific histories in question and I pinpointed Yeonsan-gun at ten paces. He's gotten a lot of press, or maybe he's just been lucky to have been done in several recent blockbuster dramas/movies that have turned him into an easily-recognizable name once you've scoured more than a handful of kdrama sites/articles. I mean, the second he's introduced and says something about sending virgins to the capital (or some such), my first reaction was, wait, I thought the king who did that had a name that started with Y, or E, something like that... who's this guy? So for the first few episodes, I was going along with "Kwang Hwe is a loose amalgamation of a historical figure, a mix-and-match of several, with the purpose of making some socio-political point about current events (that I'm probably missing)" and I was fine with that. Learning there was controversy over the use of Gwanghae's name, though, turned that upside down and made me start digging into history... but I suspect (as a writer) that my first reaction -- "this guy is really several kings put together, as a kind of every-[bad]-king" -- may've been closer to the reaction the creators wanted. I don't know for sure, of course, but as a writer... that's my suspicion, because it's far more freeing for a writer when your readers are able to deal with a quasi-historical character on an archetypal level. You can do more things, and you aren't hamstrung or hampered by some twit in the background going, "but that's not how it happened!", y'know what I mean?
--- Beats me about outrage. I can only quote what was translated from the article, and my impressions based off what the article chose to represent. (It's also possible it was thoroughly slanted to create more press/noise for the series -- the whole 'no news is bad news' -- but I figured getting into that can o' publicizing worms wasn't really on-topic for the post.)
--- The flashback is really the sort of thing where as a writer I have one response, and as a viewer I have another. As a viewer, it felt like it was badly timed in some way, like it needed to be just a little earlier. As a writer, I suspect this is because the lack of foreshadowing (ie the total lack of any concrete justification for such loyalty to the king by Hong senior) meant that when I did get the pay-off, the 'incompleteness' or the 'bad timing' was because something else was missing or off-balance. But then, that's when the episodes were starting to feel awfully... rushed, despite being twenty to thirty minutes longer than the previous episodes. It was kinda wierd, actually, because I'm not used to the pacing being that incredibly uneven. The first half was uneven, but not unbearable, but those last four or five episodes... sheesh. I have no idea, writer-wise, what was going down, there. That didn't help the flashback's weight, because it was piled in with the growing drag in the story overall.
--- I do know that fundamentally most cultures ultimately consider the people's will to be the final say in things, and that any notion of a mandate is... gee, it's awfully handy how the mandate can change if you get enough politicians or scholars or lords on your side, y'know? The corruption in the system, any system, is so very human. However (and I didn't really get into it here, because I decided that was less of a historical thing and more of just my analysis/reactions to the events as I saw them) it did strike me that the final four episodes or so, the so-called mandate is given almost total precedent over the people, to the point that it was as though everyone was operating on the assumption that the people's will exists only to get the king near the throne, but you've got to have that mandate (or the equivalent, which would be "support from the privileged/powerful") to actually have the right to be on the throne, and once on the throne, the people could be dismissed. I very much agree that I think the point was that this king or that king, in the end, makes little difference, that it's the system itself that's the problem.
(But then again, I spent nearly the entire series wanting to smack that look off Chang Hwi's face, and maybe smack it again a few times if it'd get him to emote. By the final episodes, I only glanced at the screen to catch the subtitles while he was talking, and waited to re-invest once someone else showed up on-screen. It makes it kind of hard to root for a character when you find the actor's skills totally below par for giving that character depth... and it also muddies up my reactions to Chang Hwi, which I haven't fully dissected yet. I mean, is it possible that with another actor of Kang's or Jo's calibre that I would've reacted to Chang Hwi differently? I think so, and that's frustrating, because it means my boredom with a flat performance has colored my reaction to the story itself -- though I guess that's one risk of live-action where the author just can't control everything, eh.)
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Date: 24 Oct 2010 04:15 am (UTC)E.g. "kwang" versus "gwang"--광 usually sounds more like "gwang" although it sounds slightly closer to "kwang" when it starts a word (as opposed to being in the middle of the word). The confusing part is that there is 쾅, which is the aspirated form of the consonant and can only really be represented as "kwang". In McCune-Reischauer, 광 is "kwang" and 쾅 is "k'wang" and in Reformed, it's "gwang" and "kwang" respectively.
Oppa/오빠 is the word for "older brother/close male friend", whereas appa/아빠 is the word for "Dad" or "Papa". But yes, it's easy to miss the relationships when all the honorifics are dropped! I wonder how much I miss out in Japanese sources that way...>>;;;
Ahh, I see what you meant about Yi-nok. Well, you could be right; I definitely wouldn't have associated her with Jang-geum specifically, but I see what you mean about a nod to former strong characters.
I find that when my parents' interpretation of history differs from other Koreans, it often has to do with the region/families they come from. So I'm kind of wondering if that has anything to do with the restoration of Gwanghae-gun's reputation as well. (I mean, for me, the first thing I ever learned about the guy was that he was the other king who got deposed and that he had Heo Gyun killed, so obviously I got the most negative side of the story first.) Gwanghae-gun's mother's family, the Gimhae Gim (more commonly romanized as Kim), is one of the largest clans, and a lot of politicians/people in power belong to it, so I wouldn't be surprised if that has something to do with it. (I don't know how many of those people actually are real descendants; servants, who had no last names up until fairly late in Joseon period, would take on the last names of their masters.)
Nod, I guess the Yeonsan-gun connection seemed obvious to me because I knew just enough about the original story by cultural osmosis to assume that Gwang-hwi's character was mostly based on Yeonsan-gun, but I can definitely see how it would have been hard to make the connection otherwise. (Yeonsan-gun appears in a lot of K-dramas, either directly or indirectly. He's the bad king who has Jang-geum's father executed for example because Jang-geum's father was one of the guards who fed poison to Yeonsan-gun's mother.)
You're definitely right about the timing; while I think the authors' intentions were to surprise the audience, I completely agree that they could have executed it better. I'm more inclined to forgive Hong Gil-dong for its pacing because while the middle episodes dragged, I still preferred the rushed ending episodes to the long drawn-out endings seen in so many other series. A matter of what expectations one brings to the table I suppose. I still think that it was interesting to turn the tables on the black-and-white setup but perhaps they should have done it earlier or with more foreshadowing to have it really be effective.
It's kind of what makes me want to actually read fanfiction for the series. Hong-panseo, Gildong's father, is a character that I think is worth exploring, since the series indicated his complexity without really developing it.
Ah, I think we are in agreement about the Mandate of Heaven then. You're right that the reality is very different from the ideal, and the nice thing about this K-drama is that it points that out. I do think though that the common conception of Mandate of Heaven is supposed to be empowering for the common people, even though historically, it's really just a convenient excuse. And well, I feel that this strain of populism is very much part of the Korean ethos, despite its failure to live out in reality? I mean, you see it in the political rhetoric all throughout the 20th century and in today's politics. Like, the dominant discourse in the U.S. seems to be that poor people ought to help themselves, whereas the dominant discourse in Korea seems to be that rich people are living off the backs of the poor, and the government's job is to protect the poor from the rich--except when it doesn't, which leads to scandals and public disgrace.
I'm not sure what to think about Chang-hwi. I didn't like his character very much either until towards the end. I agree with you about the acting but I wonder if a better actor really could have done more with the character; he is kind of inherently frustrating because of his narrow-mindedness and self-absorption. I actually started liking him better towards the end, when he stopped being so, well, two-dimensional.
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Date: 25 Oct 2010 03:44 am (UTC)Ahaha! Enlightenment! Well... mostly. The reason I noticed was actually because I seem to recall one of the characters in, hrm, Delightful Girl, I think, says something that sounds a lot like aaaaah-pah when she's speaking to an older male classmate. Could that be an accent issue confusing me?
Comparing kdrama-subs with anime-subs: when I first started getting fansubs, honorifics were rare. They slowly started becoming more acceptable (and I wonder if that was due to the rising popularity of anime + studying Japanese, such that more true-to-original fansubs, or fansubs with more untranslated stuff, appealed to students of the language). Now I don't actually even need the honorifics, because I've learned to hear the various verb endings, the different forms of I/you, and so on -- but the honorifics were the first things I picked up, and the credit for that is really that the subtitles would contain -sama or -kun, alerting me to the fact that I should be listening for the sound. Ah, and the other thing I've noticed is that many fansub groups have become more literal in terms of I/you translations, like when a character always refers to himself/herself as "this one" or by name (instead of by pronoun).
Whereas the kdrama sub-groups don't just frequently not include honorifics at all, what really annoys me is when they put [character name] when in fact the word used was [nuna] or [hyung] or whatever. To be honest, it turns watching into a headache-threatening ordeal, simply because my ears can't parse any of it. Having something in there that makes sense, at least every six or seven syllables, relieves my brain from the stress of constantly trying to turn the not-sensical-to-me sounds into something manageable. Or at least, something where I don't feel like I'm so completely out of my depth I might as well turn the sound off. (Though some of the soundtracks have made "turn off sound" very very tempting, and I'm looking at you, HGD, for that emo tripe used as Chang Hwi's theme song -- I don't even known Korean and I could tell that song has got to be the emotastic emoing that's ever been emoed.)
As for the Gim/Kim family... ayup, defamation (of a historical person) is often political, and so is rehabilitation. Someone must stand to gain from having the public opinion changed. Well, okay, to be not entirely cynical, it could also be a historian did his/her thesis on that king, and as a result, got the idea that modern opinion of the king is unfair in light of the good things he did (even if he was deposed). But still, no one pays attention or promotes the rehabilitation unless there's politics or money involved. Yes, I know that means I just said historians can't change public/popular opinion on their own, but... heh.
I still think that it was interesting to turn the tables on the black-and-white setup but perhaps they should have done it earlier or with more foreshadowing to have it really be effective.
My response to that ties into your next line -- that Hong Senior didn't get explored half so much as his character really would've been worth. (I think it also speaks to just how damn good that actor was, too, that he could create nuance and implication in what might've been a blindly loyal, if strong-minded, character.) The foreshadowing for the king's actual background, I think, would've been resolved if the script had just given some justification for why Hong-panseo (that's = senior? or = father?) was so incredibly loyal, even sacrificed himself for the king as he would for a child. Just that alone raised a ton of questions about the backstory, and motivations, and without even a hint here or there of why, undid the poignancy of the later reveal.
As for Chang Hwi... oi. He would've been a tough character to play, even for an actor with a decent range, but a lot of him is under the surface (as opposed to Gil-dong's on-the-surface noise). It would've required a lot of subtlety, but JGS didn't have the chops, so instead we just get a lot of sullenness interspersed with smirks. Problem is, he's a character who doesn't act, but he does think, and in that sense, he is Gil-dong's foil, as someone who acts first and thinks second (well, not always, but he is hot-headed). So he spend the first three quarters of the series as a puppet who's just thinky, thinky, thinky... and the last quarter he's supposed to act (and as a non-puppet, at that). That extreme transformation from being held back, to moving forward at top speed, is a tough transition to make without coming across as a character who simply did sudden and radical personality transplant. JGS just didn't have the chops to manage that sudden change of gears.
That might've been why I suddenly found him even less bearable at the very point that he became remotely active, because I hadn't really invested much in him previously. That kind of change is always a difficult one, because it requires major depth of characterization (such that audiences can say, yeah, I saw hints of that possibility in this episode or that episode). The crazy thing is that the character who got challenged possibly the most in terms of conflicting and multi-layered emotions (on a thinking as well as showing level) was the guy who played HGD's brother. After watching him -- and sure, I didn't like his character all that much, but the fact that I liked him even a little speaks to the actor's major skills -- I really think he could've pulled off Chang Hwi, and we would've had a really nuanced and poignant tragic fall for CH just as he's supposed to be rising.
Eh, the requirement that there be "a pretty face" in a lead role (and who cares about whether he can do anything) seems to be universal. Gotta have that face on the movie poster!
Hrmm, and lastly: it could also be that, like with SYR, there was hope he'd "grow" as an actor over teh course of the series, and would be ready for the final intense episodes where he'd really be worked hard. It didn't happen, though it did with SYR (and she got hit with the hard parts even sooner than Chang Hwi's role, really) -- and maybe the reason I'm harder on JGS' perceived failures is because he also suffers by comparison, seeing how he's trying to hold his own against actors who are either top-calibre from the very start, or actors who're getting there.
Oh -- the dominant discourse things. That whole thing about "do it yourself" and the old stupid bootstraps is a big part of the USian mythos, and is possibly one of our most destructive mythos, even if it looks awfully pro-people on the face of it. What you describe as Korean is the approach I've found among friends from, well, just about anywhere that isn't the US... but within the US, that "govt protect the people from the predatory rich" is very much taken as a form of, or damn near the same thing as, socialism. Which pisses me off, because there are days I would really love to have a government that protects me from the predatory rich. And predatory companies. And predatory insurance policies. And predatory health care plans. And... you get the idea. (Heh.)
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Date: 25 Oct 2010 05:34 pm (UTC)Don't know if it helps but I put up a primer on LJ a while ago that covered very basic Korean honorifics (the DW import can be seen here). I want to do a chart of all the terms for family relationships someday, especially the in-law terms, so I can get them straight in my head.
Panseo is Hong Senior's position in government (it translates to "minister").
Seong Yuri reaaaaaally surprised me with how well she grew into her role! I had previously seen her in a couple of episodes of Snow Queen where she looked positively wooden even at the most emotional moments, but she really managed to step it up in Hong Gil-dong where it was necessary. I usually don't like that style of bumbling character, but Yi-nok remains the exception to the rule.
What you describe as Korean is the approach I've found among friends from, well, just about anywhere that isn't the US... but within the US, that "govt protect the people from the predatory rich" is very much taken as a form of, or damn near the same thing as, socialism.
Nod, I agree it's not specifically Korean (most of the discourse was borrowed from China, after all). I do think that most Korean historical fiction tends to have a strong anti-aristocratic and populist streak in it to a pretty marked degree (hard to think of a sageuk where it wasn't a major theme of some sort); I like to ponder on how much of it is actually historical legacy and how much of it is the result of recent circumstances.
In fact, it kind of ties into Queen Seondeok--Mishil is the antagonist but I think the writing tends to portray her as an immoral but good leader while she still manages to possess the common people's support. She can only be overthrown when the protagonists figure out how to take away that support for themselves, which is why I think the drama was critical of Deokman's father and grandfather (they lost power because they lost that support). Granted, the K-drama gets rather elitist and cynical by implying that the masses are easily deceived/manipulated and whatnot, but Deokman can only become a better ruler than Mishil by learning what she did right (winning people's love and trust) but going a step further (doing it not by trickery but by transparency).