Cultural Construction, Performance and Audience in Radio Dayz

One prominent theme in Ha Ki-Ho’s 2008 film Radio Dayz is role-playing. Most obviously, the actors in the radio drama “The Flames of Love” perform in several scenes over the course of the film. However, every prominent character in the film plays at least one role. Lloyd performs the role of the obedient radio director to his Japanese superiors; Mr. Noh acts as the competent and successful writer (when in fact he is incapable of writing endings and all of his works have been flops); the revolutionary “K” masquerades as a sound engineer. The characters each construct these roles, and each character’s personal struggles throughout the film revolve around how and when they should perform.

Perhaps this tension with performance and role-playing mirrors the efforts of Korean-language broadcasting to construct a national Korean identity during the the colonial period. Michael Robinson speaks about this struggle at length in his chapter of Colonial Modernity in Korea. He says, “the story of Korean radio was more than one of a single Korean culture resisting Japanese assimilation. It was also a space of intra-Korean elite struggle over how their culture should evolve in modern form, a debate decisively shaped by the cultural and political structures of colonialism” (69). He explains in detail struggles over Korean content on the airwaves, and points out that there was much debate among Koreans over what should and should not be allowed on the radio, and thus, what should be representative of Korean culture.

The film seems to struggle with this notion of national culture as well. We see frequent tension between Marie and Myung-wol, the two leading women of “The Flames of Love” who represent the modern “new woman” and the traditional Korean feminine ideal, respectively. K’s revolutionary team struggles to find a purpose as an old political group in a modernizing world, and tries (perhaps in vain) to be taken seriously in the context of the oppressive Japanese colonial empire. Finally, Mr. Noh and Lloyd struggle to end the radio drama in a way that will satisfy their Korean audience. And yet, each character approaches their external struggles with cultural construction from a manufactured, performed perspective.

The film acknowledges this in its unique credits sequence, when the actors/characters perform a choreographed dance on a stage, complete with anachronistic electric guitars and stage lights. This scene casts doubt on the authenticity of the characters throughout the film, suggesting that perhaps the film itself was dramatized. Moreover, the film questions the nature of performance itself, asking us if a dramatized fiction is still authentic in the impact it has on its audience. Throughout the film, this audience is shown as the colonial Korean people; however, the credits sequence forces us to look at ourselves as audience members. In this way, the film questions cultural construction in general. What does it mean to perform national culture, and what should the audience take away from this performance?