I would like to give a couple negative thoughts I had whenever I tried to search for this film online, before I start talking about my academic opinion on it:
First, Stephenie Meyer, really? Why'd you have to go and name your novel The Host after the release of a highly successful movie (at least nationwide) with the same name? Just typing in "The Host" on the search engine of Google gives me link after link on Hollywood's The Host, based on her creation, even though it's clear that the Korean film The Host achieved more success.
Second, the original title is Gwoemul, which means "monster". So "The Host" as a title can be quite misleading, but it does seem to sound like a sci-fi work, so I'll let it pass.
Now, onto my academic response...
Lee's article mentioned how this film had reached the top spot in the box office nationwide before James Cameron's Avatar was released, thus taking up the coveted spot for about three years since its debut in 2006. I was able to watch The Host in a cinema in Seoul back in 2006, and I remember how crowded the room was. From the moment I saw the scene where a US military officer had bottles of toxic liquid poured into the Han River, which the monster would claim as its domain, and especially with the hesitation of the accompanying Korean military officer, I was thinking that this film seemed to resonate an anti-American sentiment. Lee could have translated this anti-American quality to a certain "ambivalence toward Hollywood that lies at the heart of the South Korean film industry" (46). It sort of gives the impression that perhaps Korea does not need the help or inspiration of American entertainment makers to achieve success in whatever forms of art. Even if that was not among the public images conceived, there was a nationalistic tone, however subtle. As a reader, do you think this blockbuster was capitalizing on national pride or nationalist sentiments? Or to take it one step further, was the director purposely using nationalist sentiments in the hope of attracting more Korean audience members? This could be a possibility after I read this statement by Lee on a case study of Korean film industry's attack on Hollywood: "One of the essential conditions for inculcation of nationalist values among the Korean public is the domestic film industry's projection of Hollywood as a monster trying to devour Korean national cinema" (52). So here she is positing the monster as a symbol of Hollywood that Korean films want to eliminate in order to cultivate an independent platform that would more accurately portray Korean society and culture.
But instead of the monster being a symbol of America or Hollywood, I prefer to think of it as a hideous experiment gone wrong due to the consumption of Western-style capitalism in Korea. When the monster invaded the shores on the Han River, it could be equivalent to the invasion of the Korean economy by capitalism. Think about which jobs appear to be more widely respected by ethnic Koreans nowadays. Most of them are associated with large, corporate, and privately-owned companies. Many college/university graduates tend to gravitate toward the companies with renowned names and numerous branches. Think about highly powerful and influential characters in several Korean dramas. They often are businessmen who are making lots of money in some private company. They may even be the CEOs. And sometimes, they seek flings which eventually turn into love, and so forth. When you think in those terms, this monster-standing-in-for-capitalism theory may appear to be a practical approach.
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