With an intractably fast spread of neoliberalism, along came the free flow of cultural markets. One obvious path of globalization is the export and import of cultures. As much as English has become a lingua franca of money and power, American mass culture, which is often associated with money and power, has become the global culture (Jameson, 1998).
“Hollywood is a place you can’t geographically define. We don’t really know where it is,” John Ford said on BBC in 1964 (Bordwell, 1988). The American dominance of popular culture does not need to be questioned. In 1998, the overseas box office of $6.821 billion equaled the domestic figure of $6.877 billion of the movie industry in the United States. In 2001 and 2002, all top 20 films with the greatest gross revenues in the world were, again, from the United States. The benchmark for a successful Hollywood in India alone has increased almost by 1,000 percent over the past ten years, from $100,000 to $1 million. And Hollywood’s overseas sales
continue to grow. In 2015, global box-office receipts hit 38.3 billion, as international movie ticket sales accounted for about 73 percent of the U.S. box office, which was up from 66 percent in 2010 (Motion Picture Association of America, 2015).
Korea, alongside with China, offers a favorable market to global Hollywood. Imported foreign movies, predominantly American movies, have always been popular and successful in Korea. The number of imported films, mostly from the United States, almost doubled from 27 in 1985 to 50 in 1987. The number increased to 175 in 1988. By 1990, they were taking up to 80 percent of the box office (Rosen, 2003, p. 29). Between 1990 and 1995, Hollywood’s profit grew by 741 percent in Korea, while profits in other countries were not as significantly high: 198 percent in Brazil, 188 percent in Spain, 187 percent in the United Kingdom and Ireland, 144 percent in Switzerland, 133 percent in Italy, 109 percent in France, and 63 percent in Canada (Wagnleitner, 2001).
The success of Hollywood movies in Korea requires further analysis as they have made significant impacts in the transformation of the Korean popular culture. As much as the
American media industry burgeoned on the Korean peninsula, the media market of Korea has also flourished strikingly, marking an explosive growth of cultural exports in the late 20th and the early 21st centuries. Korean soap operas (also known as dramas), films, pop music, fashion, and cuisine have emerged on the surface of the global market and begun to satiate the global cultural appetite. Since 1999, the exports of Korean video games, television dramas, and popular music, also known as the K-Pop, have doubled, generating $1.8 billion in 2008 and validating the significance of “Hallyu,” which translates to the Korean wave (The Economist, 2010).8
The term, “hallyu,” first coined by Chinese journalists in the late 1990s, is one of the most popular research topics
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in academia. Translated as the Korean wave, it expresses the love of Korean cultural products (K.H Kim, 2011).
Although “Hallyu” has been acclaimed for having helped Korea gain its fame in the international entertainment media industry, what has often been undermined is that the media texts of
“Hallyu” often resemble many traits of the corporate-driven, capitalistic, and patriarchal Hollywood industry.
The traits of Hollywood movies are reflected in many contemporary Korean movies.
Hollywood is no longer just a place in California. Hollywood’s recurring themes and plots that have helped them sell have become the global standard. Some of the common themes, plots, and characters that appear repeatedly in many successful Hollywood movies, which generate
significant revenues both at home and abroad, include a simple “good guys” vs. “bad guys” plot, with clear division of appearance and behavior between protagonist and antagonist, “formulaic and emotional” stories with happy endings, obsession with beauty, and hope and optimism (Olson, 2000).
The elements that determine a global context, according to the standards of Hollywood, are as follows: 1. “circular stories,” which refer to tales that begin where they end, or “return to the same equilibrium as existed at the beginning of the tale”; 2. “archetypal characters,”
including familiar stock heroes, villains, and incidental characters that keep storylines “within the comfort zone of audiences”; 3. “open-ended plots,” in which stories lend themselves to
“endless cycling, renovation, and recapitulation”; 4. “inclusion strategies,” which refer to
“devices that pull audiences into action and help them feel involved” with the use of the point-of-view shot, a “standard device in the Hollywood omniscient style”; 5. “negentropy,” the process by which the electronic media assure audiences that life is not “fundamentally chaotic,” but rather, “orderly and purposeful”; 6. “awe,” a spectacle that inspires the audience, using aesthetics
and high production technology and sets; and 7. “omnipresence,” saturation of the human environment by electronic media stimulation, which creates a condition in which being an audience is a “common and frequent experience” in various venues, from shops to restaurants, and through consumerism (Olson, 2000, p. 12).
Many Korean movies, especially the internationally acclaimed ones, share the traits of Hollywood blockbusters, bearing the Hollywood imprint. Korean cinema was originally based 9 on the Western technology of film, which localized to Korea’s socio-political context, which consists of a mixture of colonialism, capitalism, and nationalism: “the history of the [Korean cinema’s] success shows contemporary Korean cinema’s ambivalent state where the national sentiment of haan was encroached upon by globalization, and Hollywood film conventions were absorbed into the Korean national identity” (Jung, 2011, p. 10). Under the globalization led by the United States, Korea “obsessively learned how to completely mimic [American culture, socio-economic system, and lifestyle] and how the whole Korean society could be
Americanized” (G.W. Kim, 2002, p. 27).
There has been a substantial amount of research done on the influence of Hollywood on a global scale. Unfortunately, there has not been much study conducted on the influence of
Hollywood on the Korean audience in Korea. Furthermore, critical media literacy is relatively novel and esoteric in Korea. The need to question and discuss how American movies shape the Korean audience’s minds is more urgent than ever.
Since Shiri (1999), one of the most successful Korean blockbusters a la Hollywood-mode, many Korean movies
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have mimicked Hollywood’s recurring themes and techniques. Needless to say, the power of Hollywood remains ubiquitous.