South Koreans are “the Westerners of Easterners”. Squid Game/Netflix

Lee Jung-jae is in many ways the epitome of South Korean soft power. He has won international fame — and an Emmy this week — with his starring role in the hit Netflix series Squid Game, the dystopian South Korean thriller binge-watched around the world last autumn. He’ll soon take that fame to new heights as a leading man in The Acolyte, the forthcoming Star Wars series from Disney+.
It’s no coincidence that Star Wars’ first prominent east Asian performer is Korean. Americans in particular have by now come to regard South Koreans as what I call “the Westerners of Easterners”, a people more culturally relatable than the Japanese and less geopolitically threatening than the Chinese. This distinction results in large part from the West’s years of exposure to Korean popular culture, thanks to the likes of the Billboard-chart dominating BTS, Bong Joon-ho’s Best Picture-winning Parasite, and of course Squid Game.
This pop-cultural “Korean wave” — or hallyu — began sweeping Asia around the turn of the millennium and reached Western shores in earnest a decade ago, with the surprise global phenomenon that was Psy’s Gangnam Style. A satire of the garish lifestyles led by Seoul’s nouveau riche, that song — and even more so its strenuously absurd music video — showed the Korean entertainment industry that, one way or the other, the West could be won over. Ten years on, it has nearly 4.5 billion views on YouTube and features in the Victoria and Albert museum’s “Hallyu! The Korean Wave” exhibition, which opens next week.
The popular culture exported by Korea today doesn’t much resemble its output in the early days of hallyu. The farther outward the Korean wave spreads, the more its content reflects the pressure to meet the common expectations of ever-wider and more diverse audiences. Squid Game, which tells the story of a life-or-death battle royale between hundreds of down-and-outs for an enormous cash prize, functions with great effectiveness as a delivery system for suspense, intrigue, and ultra-violence: a spectacle cast in the modern Western mould, down to Lee’s scruffily appealing working-class hero.
The show is a cultural hybrid in the manner of many Korean productions lately successful in the West, whose consumers have shown a taste for entertainment foreign on the surface but familiar beneath it. So is Parasite, despite its ostensible dearth of reference to anyone or anything outside Korean society. It does mount an incisive critique of that society, drawing its rich and poor families into a complicatedly duplicitous relationship of mutual dependence that culminates in a bloody denouement. But it also offers a safely displaced means for Westerners, and especially Americans, to consider the grievous socioeconomic troubles of their own societies.
Much the same also occurs, on a smaller scale, in Korean literature, translations of which have drawn more interest from major Western publishers since Han Kang’s novel The Vegetarian, which in Deborah Smith’s English translation won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. The English writer and translator Tim Parks frames The Vegetarian as an example of “global fiction” suited to the current tastes of Western literary-prize committees. “Ideologically, it champions the individual (woman) against an oppressive society (about which we know nothing, except that it seems ‘worse’ than our own),” he writes. “Emotionally, it allows us to feel intense sympathy for a helpless victim, which is always encouraging for our self-esteem.”
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