David Tizzard is a professor at Seoul Women’s University, holds a PhD in Korean Studies, and hosts the Korea Deconstructed podcast. He has lived and worked in Seoul for more than two decades. Reach him at datizzard@swu.ac.kr.
Hyun Bin is outrageously handsome
Actor Hyun Bin / Courtesy of Walt Disney Company Korea
By David A. Tizzard
I love Korean history. And I really love it when Korean film, drama, and literature stop trying to polish it and instead let it bleed. I love post-liberation Korea: the mess of it, the brutality, the improvisation, the uneasy marriage of capitalism and authoritarianism. This period is one of the best narrative sources in modern cinema and art. What I don’t love are those saccharine Joseon fantasies where everyone looks like they just stepped out of a skincare commercial, the women styled with twenty-first-century makeup techniques, the men built like personal trainers, and the past rendered as a kind of nationalist mood board. Too much of that stuff feels less like history and more like branding.
No! Give me curfews. Give me dictatorship. Give me the sound of forbidden music bleeding out of cheap radios under military rule. Give me sex, fear, ambition, corruption, and the kind of loud, boisterous energy that only exists when people are surviving under pressure. These things happened right here, on these streets, to the woman rolling my kimbap, to my father-in-law, to my wife when she was young. I want "minjung" stories. Student protests. Collaborators. Opportunists. The men who turned an economic backwater into a juggernaut and crushed anyone who didn’t move fast enough to get out of the way.
I want to watch Lee Chang Dong’s fantastic "Peppermint Candy" (1999) and be shown the nuances of national reconciliation and historical trauma. I also want to read his short stories as compiled in the "Snowy Day" collection and see that these events didn’t always end in triumph for the underdog but rather with a sad and all too believable victory for power.
I want to read Hwang Sok-yong’s tales of the moon villages (dal-dongnae), the low-income houses with all their narrow alleys, limited infrastructure, and poverty. The moldy basements. The sober tales of people doing their best to get by in an unforgiving modern society. I want to hear the poetry of Park No-hae, the poet sentenced to life imprisonment by the government for having the temerity to detail the lives of the working class in his collection “Dawn of Labor.”
I want to watch "Aimless Bullet" (1961) – which like Park Nohae’s work was also originally banned – and see a man struggle with life. His sister becoming a prostitute for American soldiers. Families holding on to whatever illusion they can to keep from falling apart. To watch Bong Joon-ho’s best movie, "Memories of Murder" (2003), and see the cops fail to create a happy ending as the reality of an underdeveloped Korea rears its ugly head.
These are the stories that Korea tells so well. When it stares at it past without flinching and tells you something uncomfortable: darkness didn’t just exist, it often prevailed. That’s the punchline!
And so, with this, I approached Disney’s latest blockbuster "Made in Korea" with some trepidation. I knew nothing about it but was immediately greeted with the sight of Hyun Bin looking like he could kill any man and sleep with any woman. This was masculinity with an edge again, the kind that has been mostly ironed out of contemporary Korean pop culture, where so many male stars feel like they’ve been designed and “written by a woman.” This is particularly true of the modern K-pop idols. But Hyun Bin here isn’t trying to reassure you or sell you back your own fetishized desires of androgynous Asian men. Instead he commands the screen. He dominates it. He owns it. Unapologetically.
As I watched it, I constantly heard from my wife and her sister, “Ya. Hyun Bin jinjja meo-sitta!” They gazed at the screen longingly, repeating their chant, probably wondering why the weird guy who sat on the sofa didn’t have the looks and personality of this superstar. To be fair, very few do. He smoked cigarettes. He was polite to women. He beats the hell out of Japanese gangsters. He moves through society with a quiet, almost Bond-like calculation, slowly realizing that if you don’t have power, you will be crushed. So he decides not to be the victim. If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re on the menu. That’s the movie.
And the genius is that Hyun Bin plays him so cool you stop worrying about whether he’s good or bad. He’s compelling. That’s enough. It’s Tarantino-level charisma, the kind where a man in a suit can make you laugh, then kill you, then light a cigarette like it’s punctuation.
Opposite him is Jung Woo-sung as the prosecutor, and this is inspired casting. Jung, a former heartthrob himself, comes in as the inverse: rumpled, bespectacled, emotionally volatile, prone to wild laughter and shouting fits. Yin and yang. Two stars. Two modes of masculinity. And every time they’re on screen together, the show crackles like it could burn you. You want Heat. You want De Niro and Pacino in a diner. You want the irresistible force and the immovable object circling each other. Two genuine heavyweights going at it on screen in the most unadulteratedly masculine way possible.
And for a while, you almost get it. They chase. They talk. They smoke. They fight. It’s great. The problem is everything else. The political infighting in Cheongwadae. The wooden American soldiers. The cartoonish Yakuza straight out of a manga panel. All of it feels like noise. How do you compete with Hyun Bin and Jung Woo-sung locked into a duel? You don’t. You get out of the way.
The only one that really adds any substance is the arrival of Cho Yeo-jung’s character in episode 3. This episode works because it’s essentially a standalone episode that focuses almost entirely on her. And she deserves it. Probably best known for her role in "Parasite" (2019), Cho is gorgeous in this. The episode becomes a vehicle for her ability to play the femme fatale to perfection. She is alluring, sexual, devious, and unknowable in the best possible way. That she disappears from the story as soon as she arrives is testament to how good she is. And, once more, it reminds us that everything else is not really necessary.
There’s the genre shifting, the comedy, the fights that seem like something straight out of "Extreme Job" (2019), and there’s the unnecessary sexual tension between the prosecutor and the female cop. The Busan dialects are strong to the point of being caricatured. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. What absolutely works are the historical digressions at the start of each episode: Park Chung-hee, military rule, anti-communist paranoia, cultural suppression. That stuff is gold. I wanted more. Season one runs about seven hours. It should have been a hard, ruthless three-hour movie.
And then there’s the ending. Like all the best explorations of post-liberation Korea, power wins. The oppressed are trodden on. The minjung are beautiful in their desires but unsuccessful in their aims. That’s how this all finishes. The just man is beaten. His sister captured. And the truth is covered up. The corrupt official wins. Smoking his cigar and utilizing all the power of the state to take down a single individual.
Yes. Let’s go!! I actually took photos of the screen at the end because we watch Hyun Bin in black and white smoking that cigar. Admittedly it looks like an advert but god-damn it looks so cool.
Here’s the problem: there’s going to be a season two. And somehow the prosecutor will win. And the corrupt official will fall. And Disney will make sure the machine corrects itself. And that’s the real tragedy. Because for a moment, Made in Korea had the courage to let darkness win. And that’s when it was great.