Running Man

Excerpt from my published co-authored article on Korean TV show Running man:

The existence of an empathetic identification that commonly binds China and Korea does not necessarily diffuse the deep-seated anxiety that had been worrisome for many Chinese who have seen the rise of Korean cultural content and hallyu as a threat to their national identity. Of course, the general public’s support of the hallyu ban, reported among Chinese during the recent THAAD protests, is an exemplary showcase of this anxiety. Remakes, whether in television or film format, have never escaped media criticism, for they cannot bypass the scrutiny of the critic whose job is to compare them to the original. When Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, a remake of the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs, opened in theaters in 2006, Mahnola Dargis wrote in the New York Times: “Fine as Mr. DiCaprio and Mr. Damon are, neither is strong enough to usurp memories of the actors who played the same roles in the original—Tony Leung as the good guy, Andy Lau as the bad—both of whom register with more adult assurance.”[1] Such wholesale critical condemnation unequivocally highlights the adult valence of the source film (Infernal Affairs), while the remake (The Departed) is belittled as an infantile distraction. While in the debate over international remakes, it was the critics of the source film who made the accusation of “cultural imperialism” against countries like the United States, who are notorious for their remakes,[2] in the case of Chinese remakes of original Korean content, the most vociferous protesters against the transnational adaptation are not from Korea, whose original material is being appropriated and whose authorship is de-centered, but from China, the country that is responsible for the remake. While the Chinese remake Hurry up, Brother obscures its status as an import by featuring Chinese celebrities and transporting viewers to places and situations that are familiar to Chinese viewers, which even keeps many Chinese audiences from noticing that they are watching a remake, controversies among Chinese audiences and experts have nonetheless arisen. Well before the United States’ THAAD deployment on Korean soil, China’s Economic Observer tweeted a passage from Beijing Daily on Weibo regarding the Chinese audience’s response to the series of remakes of Korean shows:

Nearly half of the entertainment shows in China now have Korean

DNA. . . . A huge wave of entertainment TV shows pour out to TV screens

this week, and each of the shows carries Korean DNA without exceptions—

either adapted from original Korean version, or collaboratively

produced by Korea and China. Audiences sarcastically comment that the

smell of kimchi is increasingly getting stronger.[3]

Feng Xiaogang, the renowned Chinese Fifth Generation film director, harshly criticized this “smell of kimchi” and its popularity among Chinese audiences. His comments were tweeted widely on Weibo:

On February 15, 2015, Feng Xiaogang criticizes the Chinese entertainment

circle’s craze for Korean and Japanese popular culture. Korean and Japanese celebrities’ marriages and suicides always occupy enormous space on our news. However, why do the Korean and Japanese media not care about reporting the news on Chinese celebrities? Is it degrading? Chinese actors and singers are copying Koreans, and Koreans copied

from Americans, so the songs are third hand or fourth hand by the time

when they come to China.[4]

In the context of globalization, the transcultural process of cross-national and cross-industrial collaborative remakes of Running Man and other shows of Korean origin has incited questions around the crisis of national identity in China. Though no one has explicitly mentioned “cultural imperialism” in these tweets, it is difficult not to acknowledge them as instances of decrying cultural imperialism against Korea. The transnational exchange of remakes between China and Korea is quite different compared to, for instance, France and the United States, where French critics and filmmakers have, as early as the days of André Bazin, condemned Hollywood’s practice of remaking films as a debasement of the French “original” and as a form of vulgar American commercialism. In this prevailing argument, the “one-way, vertical trajectory from the high art of the French ‘original’ to the popular commercialism of the American ‘copy’”[5] is often deeply rooted in the binary distinction between French high culture and crass American popular culture. In the case of Chinese remakes of Korean cultural content, the potential degradation of Korean culture by the wealthier Chinese media entrepreneurs who are appropriating and purchasing shows like RM as remake properties is seldom brought up as a threat by either Korean or Chinese critics. On the contrary, the opposite has been argued…

[1] Mahnola Dargis, “Scorsese’s Hall of Mirrors, Littered with Bloody Deceit,” New

York Times, October 6, 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/movies/06depa.html.

[2] Lucy Mazdon reports when Luc Besson’s French action film Nikita was remade

into an English-language film entitled The Assassin, the prolific British film critic Barry

Norman penned these words: “Another example of Hollywood’s unfortunate tendency to

remake fine Continental fare and turn it into sensationalist pap.” Lucy Mazdon, Encore

Hollywood: Remaking French Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2000), p. 1.

[3] “Sina Visitor System,” Economic Observer, April 4, 2015.

[4] “Sina Visitor System,” Vista Kan Tianxia, February 15, 2015.

[5] Mazdon, Encore Hollywood, p. 5.

Please see the full article in

Kyung Hyun Kim with Tian Li, Running Man:The Korean Television Variety Program on the Transnational, Affective Run,Telos 184 (Fall 2018): Korea: Modernity and Culture

http://www.telospress.com/telos-184-fall-2018-korea-modernity-and-culture/