hedonism on a budget

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

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For younger generations who did not possess memories of the colonial era, it was feared that Japanese popular culture’s salacious allure could exert a corruptive influence (41). This vulgarity implicated one particular “color” associated with Japanese cinema: pinku eiga (pink film), or ultra-low-budget, quickly produced pornographic productions intended only for release in adult theaters. As a result of a Japanese government strategy to tolerate and even encourage the “three S’s” of “sports, screen, and sex”56 to distract from political issues and compete with Hollywood’s increasing eroticization, pink film proliferated while the rest of the Japanese cinema industry flagged, accounting for 40 percent of domestic production by 1965.57 These cheap productions proved so lucrative that major companies with significantly wider distribution adopted the same strategy of eroticization. In 1971, Japan’s oldest film studio, Nikkatsu, began to devote production resources to its Roman Porno line of feature-length erotic cinema. As seen in the previously discussed case of In the Realm of the Senses, the elevation of a once-lowly genre reinvigorated Japanese cinema’s international reputation and amplified Japanese New Wave’s treatment of taboo themes.58 South Korean audiences and policymakers simultaneously feared the influence of Japanese erotic productions, interpreted as a sign of Japanese cinema’s decadent decline, while registering the market benefits of cultural liberalization. Following strict censorship codes on sexual depiction in the 1970s, the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan (1980 – 88) imitated the Japanese “three S’s” model, using popular media to distract from questions of political discontent and encourage market liberalization.59 The eighties — the years of Park’s early adulthood — thus saw the proliferation of ero film (a loanword from the Japanese abbreviation ero, from the English adjective erotic). Significantly less explicit than their Japanese counterparts, ero film’s portrayal of subjugated women violated by non-Korean men deployed sexual themes as national allegory.60 The imbricated and imitative relations between the two national-erotic film industries and the occlusion of such relations on the part of both state censorship and national cinema paradigms form another level of reference for The Handmaiden’s depictions of colonial fetish. In pink and ero film, we find a kind of proliferation that echoes Kouzuki’s library of imitations: for example, the French New Wave erotic film Emmanuelle (dir. Just Jaeckin, France, 1974) inspired both the Japanese production Tokyo Emmanuelle (dir. Akira Kato¯, Japan, 1975) and the later South Korean version Madame Aema (dir. Jeong In-yeob, South Korea, 1982). These historical threads expose the manner in which the dual taboos of explicit erotic depiction and Japanese visuality were, for postcolonial South Korean authorities and audiences alike, often in parallel or even palimpsestic relation. In tandem with the latent eroticization of Japanese visuality (perceived as attractive and seductive) was the association of erotic cinema with Japaneseness. The Handmaiden’s extensive inclusion of Japanese language and Japanese visuals thus coincide with its sex scenes’ excessive visualization of flesh as a coupling of visual taboos.

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