Seaports as criminal gateways in contemporary South Korean cinema: illicit globalization and marginalized subjects in The Yellow Sea (2010) and New World (2013)

ABSTRACT

This article examines the seaport as a trope in contemporary cinema in relation to notions of spatiality, illicit globalization, and border studies. We analyze how seaports as social and cultural networks of built environment and infrastructure have become gateways to illicit globalization. We then provide a critical analysis that unbundles these spaces in the film genre of neo-noir out of South Korea. Our focus then zooms in on real organized crime, smuggling, human trafficking and black-market transactions as refracted and bounded in the Korean films The Yellow Sea (2010) and New World (2013). Within these cinematic glamorizations of crime, we find transgressive characters contributing to what we dub “dark neoliberal accumulation” of profit through kinds of unremorseful economic predation at two seaports. Criminals and migrants in these films portend audiences to underworld activities of drug and human trafficking to serve their needs or rescue them from peril. In other ways, we scrutinize the material commodities and shipping containers themselves as having symbolic value and thus providing a commentary on the circuits of low-end global trade through transoceanic routes through Korea and worldwide.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the Graduate School of Metaverse Convergence support program (IITP-2024-RS-2022-00156318) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keith B. Wagner

Keith B. Wagner is a Visiting Professor of Global Media Studies in the Department of Media Communication & The College of Convergence Culture & Arts at Sungshin Women’s University. He was formerly an Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies at University College London and a visiting professor at Seoul National University. He is the co-editor of Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (Routledge, 2011), China’s iGeneration: Cinema and Moving Image Culture for the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020), Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory, and Geopolitics in World Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2022) and Global London on Screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and Migratory Visions of a Superdiverse City (Manchester University Press, 2023). His work has also been published in Media, Culture & Society, Radical History Review, Visual Communication, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Globalizations, Race and Class, Journal of Film and Video, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Critical Arts, Labor History, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Third Text as well as in the anthologies Screening China’s Soft Power; World Entertainment Media; Japanese Animation: Transnational Industry and Culture in Asia; Transmedia in Asia and the PacificIndustry, Practice and Transcultural Dialogues; Rediscovering Korean Cinema; Introducing Korean Popular Culture

Michael A. Unger

Michael A. Unger is an Associate Professor of Film at Sogang University’s Graduate School of Metaverse in South Korea. He is a writer, director, and editor of documentaries, shorts, music videos, and experimental work screened and broadcasted in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His latest music video “Not So Fast” featuring MC Meta won the Audience Award at the Berlin Short Film Festival in 2022 and Best Music Video at Tokyo Shorts Festival and the Austin International Art Festival in 2023. His latest documentary Far From Forgotten is part of the permanent collection at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History in Seoul, Korea. He has published work in Journal of Film and Video, The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Visual Communication Journal, Quarterly Film and Video, Studies in Documentary Film, Asian Cinema and other periodicals as well as in two anthologies Global London on Screen and World Entertainment Media: Global Regional and Local Perspectives.