Welcome to Dongmakgol

Similar to Brotherhood of War, Welcome to Dongmakgol is a film about the Korean War which blurs the line of ideological division.  Before the loosening of censorship laws, movies addressing the Korean War were used by the government to shape the audience’s views of the war.  As Bevan quotes from Bruce Cummings, “the narrative of Korean history has been manipulated by both the Northern and Southern regimes to promote their argument that they are the legitimate government of the Korean people (51 [Cummings 2005: 139-140]).There was a specific affect the earlier movies were supposed to produce within the audience.  These two movies do the opposite, attempting to leave the audience with a less black and white, more complex opinion on the war, the effects it had on soldiers and citizens from both sides of the 38th parallel, and the relationship between these people. The specific movies Bevan chose to analyze had an “incredibly favorable reception” because they dealt with the topic of national division, implying a much wider public engagement with the subject (Bevan 48 [but taken from Min et al. 2003: 23]).  This also illustrates that even with generations not alive during the war, not personally effected, the war resonates loudly.  In the case of Welcome to Dongmakgol, what was particularly interesting was watching the effects of the war and the actions of the soldiers unfold upon villagers who were completely oblivious to the conflict occurring in their own country. They even think guns are “sticks” and grenades are possibly “potatoes.” 

While reading Bevan’s piece, what really stood out to me was the anti-American sentiment in the movie and its impact on Koreans today. Welcome to Dongmakgol does a good job of sort of equalizing the North Korean and South Korean soldiers, showing that each has their guilts, and each will do anything to protect the innocent civilians of Dongmakgol from the American enemy who completely disregards the lives of the villagers. This was portrayed clearly during the invasion of the American troops, when they “[cast] off their military uniforms and [integrated] themselves into the village” (Bevan 53). The New Korean Cinema has see a rise in anti-Americanism (Bevan 55). Bevans quotes a poll undertaken in South Korea, which revealed that “’75 percent of South Koreans in their 20’s had a negative view of the United States, compared with only 26 percent of Korean over 50, the generation that lived through the Korean War’” (55 [Brooke 2003]). I find this fact extremely interesting.  The trend of anti-Americanism has been so powerful that many more young Koreans negatively view the US compared to those who actually experienced the war.  Does this mean the movies are vilifying the US too harshly, or does this mean that those who experienced the war were unaware of the actual role of the US?