International audiences probably know filmmaker Bong Joon-ho from the Oscar-winning thriller Parasite. Yet, rather than simply an individual success, his work unmasks the relationship between South Korean and American cinema, writes Cold War scholar Christina Klein. That’s as Bong “stakes a claim to two genres strongly identified with America: the crime film and the monster movie”—but goes on to tweak Hollywood conventions to address South Korean issues. With this strategy, he “reveals himself heir to the culturally and stylistically hybrid films of Korea’s Golden Age cinema of the 1950s and 1960s,” Klein argues.

Modern South Korean culture has been shaped by the country’s militarized relationship with the United States, which occupied the south of the partitioned peninsula from 1945 to 1948. Although South Korean cinema enjoyed a heyday from the mid-1950s to the late 1960s, the scene is still overshadowed by American influences, as Hollywood releases dominate the market.

“Bong’s film education was shaped by this ambivalent relationship to both the United States and Hollywood,” writes Klein, who notes that the Seoul-born auteur grew up in the 1970s and 1980s as a fan of household names including Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola. At the same time, Bong also came out strongly against a Hollywood-backed push that reduced the number of days each year Korean cinemas are required to screen local productions.

“Bong’s nationalist protest against the trade pact with Washington thus embodies a relationship of conceptual dependence on the United States at least as profound as the material one it critiques,” Klein writes.

In Bong’s own words, “I have a real love and hate feeling toward American genre movies.” Klein finds this sentiment throughout his work, including the 2003 crime film Memories of Murder. Inspired by a set of unsolved serial killings in the 1980s, the film “conforms to many of the narrative conventions of the police procedural subgenre,” Klein observes. And it sets up an explicit hierarchy between Korean and American policing: The local detective “identifies himself with instinct, custom, and tradition” and even turns to a shaman for help, while the case detective who is sent from Seoul believes only in forensic methods like DNA testing.

Yet the American approach is eventually shown to be wanting, since Memories of Murder breaks with convention—“as when the killer remains unknown at the end, as he was in reality, or when rural people unfamiliar with the legal requirements of evidence accidentally corrupt crime scenes.”

More innovation comes in unexpected scenes of slapstick comedy, which Klein proposes “can [be] read as a cultural expression of Korea’s half-respectful, half-resentful attitude toward the United States,” even though Koreans might be out of place in a Hollywood crime film.

“Slowly the viewer realizes that the true subject of the film is not the serial murders and the detectives’ investigation, but rather daily life in the late 1980s—that is, during the darkest years of Korea’s military dictatorship,” Klein explains. “The deep crimes revealed during the course of investigating the surface crime include the corruption and abuse of police power, the casual disregard of civil rights, and the government-stimulated fear of North Korea as a means to keep the civilian population in check.”

Bong’s 2006 creature feature, The Host, also draws on American monster movies. In it, a mutated beast living in Seoul’s Han River captures a working-class schoolgirl, Hyun-seo, and a homeless boy. Hyun-seo’s family, thwarted by a government cover-up, launches their own rescue attempt.

Here, Klein finds that Bong “continues his earlier strategy of arranging the genre’s ‘Lego pieces’ in a way that opens up a space for Korean realities”—most notably, in the film’s climax, where Hyun-seo’s uncle and aunt attack the gasoline-doused monster with a Molotov cocktail and a fiery arrow.

“[T]he means of assault in this scene are distinctly Korean,” notes Klein, who associates the Molotov cocktail with a decades-long history of pro-democracy and anti-American protests and archery with Korean Olympic athletes.

“Given the monster’s association with the United States, this scene can be read as an assertion of the Korean national against the global American other,” she adds. “Yet this is an alternative version of the national, in which Koreanness is expressed via figures of social and economic marginality and failure”—like the uncle, a disillusioned former radical.

So, “[w]hile the Korean title of the film, Gwoemul, simply means ‘creature,’ the English-language title of the film suggests…that Korea has let itself become a ‘host’ to a parasitic United States.” In this way, “Korean cinema allows us to think about the global circulation of US popular culture in a more comprehensive way,” Klein argues. These smash hits don’t merely ape a dominant Hollywood form, but “embody multiple, and sometimes contradictory, relationships with the United States” as well.

“Bong’s films, given their thematic concerns, mode of production, and market performance, can rightfully be understood as works of Korean national cinema,” concludes Klein. “But they are also inescapably works of transnational cinema, products of a complex textual engagement and negotiation with Hollywood.”

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