Bourgeois Revenge: New Korean Cinema Remakes Bollywood

• In Event: Cultural Circulation and the “Micro-Import”

Abstract

In the last decade, Bollywood has produced several films - Zinda, Ek Tha Villian, Murder 2, Badlapur - that are either adapted from or liberally-sourced by Korean revenge classics like Oldboy (2003), Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (2005), I Saw the Devil (2010), Nowhere to Hide (2010). Hindi cinema has a long history of appropriating plots, motifs and settings from Hollywood, Hongkong and other global cinemas but these “remakes” were radically transformed by the unique aesthetic and cultural norms of Bollywood. However, Bollywood’s recent turn to South Korean cinema is motivated by a desire to reorient and reformat its existing protocols and aesthetic conventions vis-à-vis the “revenge-plot.” In Hindi popular cinema “revenge” has been the recourse of three types of subjects – the disenfranchised who cannot access the law, the feudal who do not accede to the law, and the underworld that exists outside the law. By contrast, in Korean cinema, ordinary, middle-class citizens in non-violent professions suffer such grave loss/injustice that they transform into the most vicious avenger. It is this motif of bourgeois revenge as the only recourse in a pitiless world and the temporal logic through which it unfolds that comprises Bollywood’s chief cultural import from Korean cinema. My paper will examine this transfer of the revenge plot in terms of structure and style and conclude by suggesting that the adoption of “bourgeois revenge” into India cinema has to be viewed in the context of a middle-class increasingly dis-enchanted with the ongoing process of globalization and its many broken promises.

Author

• Sangita Gopal Iyer, University of Oregon