Content area
Full Text
Though a ubiquitous figure in South Korean public media and television dramas, the chaebol son—heir to the family-owned chaebol conglomerates that helped propel South Korea to wealth and modernity in the second part of the twentieth century—is relatively absent from its cinema. Seemingly aware of this absence, Im Sang-soo portrays a corrupt chaebol family and its voracious appetites in Ton ŭi Mat (The Taste of Money; Im Sang-soo, 2012), which self-consciously pulls the chaebol son out of obscurity and onto the cinema screen. At the beginning of the film there is an arrest warrant out for the chaebol son Yun Ch'ŏl, who is in hiding; to repair the situation, his father, Chairman Yun, pays off a prosecutor with suitcases full of "untraceable" cash to ensure the heir's release, on the condition that he voluntarily come out of hiding. Our first glimpse of Ch'ŏl thus is from the perspective of the media at the press conference following his release—he is a televised image captured in a TV camera's viewfinder, framed and disseminated by the media. This media mobility is further foregrounded when we see his image broadcast on a television screen that turns out to be mounted to the seat of a vehicle. The viewer of the image in this case is the son's American business partner Robert Altman (surely a reference to the American film director, played by the film critic Darcy Paquet), who is being chauffeured to meet Ch'ŏl at the chaebol family's residence.
This trajectory of Ch'ŏl's "release"—which moves from literal hiding and figurative containment within the medium the chaebol son is usually associated with (television) to exposure on the film screen—coincides with the transport of the son as signifier of (corrupt) global economic capital from the socioeconomic realm and to the domestic sphere of the family home. That domestic sphere becomes not the site of privacy, in opposition to the more public economic sphere, but an ambiguous space in which economic and personal concerns become intertwined. The process of inversion and interiorization is signaled by a final shot of the press conference, this time looking onto the press from behind Ch'ŏl and transitioning to a shot of his shadowed face in a dark room with a circular window of light—it...