[Culture Op-Ed] Did state cultural support make Parasite’s Oscar triumph possible?

This is not, in fact, something that received major attention in the Korean media. It was a claim advanced by the Japanese media, which had long been wary of the Korean Wave, after the Korean film *Parasite* won four awards at the Academy Awards on the 10th (local time in Los Angeles): Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. One example was the February 10 article by the online outlet ENCOUNT, “The Challenge That the Korean Film *Parasite*, Which Changed Oscar History, Has Presented to Japan,” which was featured on Yahoo! Japan’s main page the evening of the Oscars and drew nearly 200 comments.

“This film is the fruit of all the efforts of the Korean film industry. In Korea, the production of outstanding films is supported as a matter of national policy. When I covered the Busan International Film Festival in the late 1990s, what surprised me was the generosity of KOFIC (Korean Film Council) in financial and personnel support. Even in Korea, with a population of only 50 million—less than half that of Japan—works with budgets exceeding 1 billion yen were made possible because of this kind of public support.”

It is quite a bizarre interpretation, but there are countless Japanese articles analyzing the “secret” of K-pop and Korean cinema’s success through the logic that “they are excellent because they are state-driven.” In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that this is the dominant line of thinking. It is worse in broadcasting than in print media, and even worse in variety programs. Film critic Tomohiro Machiyama, who was providing live coverage of the Academy Awards on TBS Radio’s *Action*, even laid out claims during the broadcast itself, saying things like, “In Korea, film staff were sent abroad on government scholarships to work for free on Hollywood sets and learn the know-how.”

Naturally, there is no evidence for such claims. Yet, surprisingly, this line of argument has quite a long history. It dates back to February 26, 2011, during the Lee Myung-bak administration, when Taro Kimura, a panelist and former NHK reporter, claimed on Fuji TV’s *Mr. Sunday* that “the Korean Wave was created by the Korean government manipulating YouTube view counts and directing it through an organization called the Presidential Council on Nation Branding.” The matter appeared to end when the Presidential Council on Nation Branding protested and Fuji TV aired an apology. But the logic itself survived and kept mutating into “different versions.” As with the TBS Radio example above, it evolved into variants such as “Hollywood government-sponsored study abroad.”

Despite continued protests and rebuttals from the Korean side, the same logic kept being repeated so stubbornly that it eventually spread beyond Japan. It circulated steadily among K-pop fans in the United States and Europe and was even mentioned in the BBC radio documentary *South Korea: The Quiet Cultural Superpower*, broadcast in two parts on March 23 and 29, 2016. In response, then-Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism Kim Jongdeok appeared in the documentary himself and denied the conventional narrative, saying, “If you think about how the Korean Wave—K-pop and K-culture—came into being, you can see that it was not created by the government. It arose independently from small and medium-sized enterprises and film directors striving to make profits and survive.”

So what is the reality? Even if these claims are baseless, is their underlying “context” at least correct? Let us examine it step by step.

State support has nothing to do with commercial films like *Parasite* or with Academy Awards campaigns

First, let us look at the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s budget items said to support the Korean Wave. Out of the ministry’s 2020 budget of 6.4803 trillion won—expanded significantly beyond both 2011 and 2016—the largest content-related allocation is 87 billion won earmarked for fostering immersive content industries such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). At first glance, this may look like investment in future-oriented entertainment, but in practice it is mainly technology support for applications in public services and industrial science and technology. Another goal is to establish immersive content experience halls at major cultural and tourism hubs such as national and public museums and art galleries. It has no meaningful connection to Korean Wave content.

The situation is not much different for budgets allocated under the name of the “Korean Wave.” These include expanding Korean Wave festivals and dedicated K-pop concert venues, launching “Mokoji Korea” to introduce Korean lifestyle and cultural products overseas, as well as protecting content-related intellectual property, establishing and revising standard contracts for content, encouraging elementary and secondary schools abroad to adopt Korean-language courses, and promoting the establishment of Korean-language departments at foreign universities. Other key budget items include creating a content venture investment fund and expanding guarantees for content companies. None of these have anything to do with the areas the Japanese media are falsely inferring.

The same is true even if we narrow the focus to film. The way budgets are actually allocated to content has nothing to do with ordinary commercial films like *Parasite*. The overwhelming majority goes to non-commercial content—short films or documentary films—generally referred to as “independent films.” The stated justification is support for content “diversity.” In a sense, if public funds were being given to *Parasite* or BTS, that itself would become controversial even within Korea. The very idea of the state financially supporting industries that are “already doing well” would make little sense.

Naturally, things were not very different in the past either. In the early boom years of K-pop, Korean embassies in some countries helped K-pop idols stage performances in Europe, but once K-pop companies became familiar with local conditions and accumulated know-how, they no longer needed that sort of public assistance. In the end, what actually happened is not much different from former Minister Kim Jongdeok’s explanation above. The Korean Wave was simply “something that arose on its own from companies striving to make profits and survive.”

The same goes for *Parasite*. It was the result of the know-how and accumulated capital of CJ, which endured even after large conglomerates and venture capital fled Chungmuro en masse following the 1997 IMF foreign exchange crisis. There is no element of “national policy” to be found anywhere. Even the capability and investment that led to the Academy Awards win were 100 percent the result of the company’s own efforts. See the February 10, 2020 *Financial News* article, “The Fruits of CJ’s Support for ‘K-Culture’... *Parasite* Becomes the Star of the Academy Awards,” and the same-day Yonhap News article, “How Much Money Does It Take to Win an Oscar?”

“It is said that CJ Group alone spent more than 10 billion won on the ‘Oscar campaign,’ the advance promotional work aimed at winning Academy Awards. Industry sources say that the money spent for promotional purposes targeting the thousands of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members who have voting rights in various Oscar categories is beyond imagination.”

“According to the BBC, film producer and blogger Stephen Follows estimated that the cost a film company typically pours in to win Best Picture at the Oscars comes to around $10 million (about 12.36 billion won). Half of that goes to advertising, while the rest is spent in cash on producing screeners for judges and related parties, holding screenings, paying actors to appear at promotional events, and hiring publicists.”

In other words, only by spending that kind of money can a film finally compete “on the same footing” as other Hollywood films. Winning an Academy Award is not something that can be achieved by having a good film alone; it requires the backing of a solid film company capable of pouring more than 10 billion won into a highly speculative campaign of this kind. It is not something that can be accomplished simply by putting out a single film with state support. That is why non-English-language films that make it as far as Oscar nominations are typically from advanced countries in Europe and similar regions.

The logic of the “state-driven Korean Wave”: we did not create it, but we are feeding it

What is interesting is that even if one grants that the Japanese media’s “state-driven Korean Wave” claim—probably born of jealousy—spreading to other countries was unavoidable, the same claim also found a degree of “agreement” among certain groups in Korea. Demands for “more support” became widespread, mainly among independent filmmakers who receive state support and political forces seeking, in one way or another, to expand areas of contact between the private sector and public institutions.

The actual situation is not that the Korean Wave is “state-driven,” but rather the claim that “it should become state-driven from now on.” Strange as that sounds, this kind of argument is, in fact, fairly common in left-wing political circles. A passage from the March 9, 2007 *OhmyNews* article “Can the Korea-U.S. FTA Really Make Us Happy?”—which emerged amid the controversy over the Korea-U.S. FTA and the reduction of the screen quota—makes the situation easy to understand.

“Hollywood film capital, which controls most of the global film market, cannot be compared with Korean film capital. And it is not just capital. All the world’s top stars are in Hollywood. The Hollywood film *The Passion of the Christ* had a production budget of $25 million. If we assume a budget of 1 billion won per Korean film, that amount could make 25 Korean films. Under these conditions, no matter how talented we are, how could Korean cinema ever be a real competitor? (omitted)

Pressure to reduce the screen quota is like telling us to put kimchi and soybean paste on our dining table for only 73 days of the year, and steak, hamburgers, and cola on it for the other 292 days. Imagine if Korean theaters showed Korean films for only 73 days and American films for 292 days—how dreadful would that be? How much harsher would our lives become? Mexico, where domestic films were once produced and screened as actively as Korean films, has already gone through that experience.”

This kind of defeatism, fearmongering, and calls for expanded public support based on the two has, at some point, become almost a constant presence in popular culture circles. It is therefore not uncommon to see attempts to somehow cement the Japanese media’s fabricated logic as “fact,” even by manipulating data. In particular, when K-pop temporarily faltered in the Japanese market—which until the early 2010s accounted for over 70 percent of K-pop’s overseas market—calls for “increased government support” poured out. Then when the Chinese market expanded, those calls quickly subsided; when China imposed the Korean Wave ban and profits fell, they resurfaced; when the U.S. market newly opened up thanks to BTS, they faded again. It has shown a peculiar consistency of raising its voice whenever there is a “crisis.”

In that sense, perhaps the tenacious vitality of the “state-driven Korean Wave” claim has been sustained not by the Japanese media, but by the Korean side itself. Every year, under one pretext or another, the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism’s budget keeps increasing, and attempts to broaden points of contact with the private sector, even slightly, also continue steadily. In that sense, the logic of the “state-driven Korean Wave” may be seen as a monster “we did not create, but are feeding.”

Over the past quarter century, Korean cinema has succeeded and grown precisely because it was “not state-driven”

Finally, let us point out one more noteworthy aspect of the *Parasite* triumph. As mentioned, when the Japanese media once again repeated the claim that the secret of this Academy Awards success was “national policy,” there was backlash in Korea as well. This was especially true among younger people. It was seen as a denigration of Koreans’ artistic ability on nationalist grounds, and it provoked outrage. The problem, however, was that it was also awkward to argue that *Parasite* had nothing at all to do with state support.

That is because such an argument could be read as implying that “state support will not be necessary in the future either.” Given that most online communities are dominated by users with left-leaning tendencies, the prevailing mood was that people did not want to make “that kind of argument” either. So how could one refute the Japanese logic while at the same time leaving “state support” untouched? The “solution” they came up with is remarkable. Below is part of a post that spread like wildfire across various online communities on February 11, the very next day after the Japanese media reports appeared, under the title: “Articles useful to reference when rebutting Japan’s fabrication that director Bong Joon-ho and the achievements of the Korean film industry were the result of national policy.”

“‘Through documents released earlier from the Lee Myung-bak government, it has been confirmed that there was a scenario for “eradicating leftists in the cultural sector,” and signs that a concrete blacklist was drawn up and carried out. (omitted) This is what film producer A said: “Especially now that the government has changed, they are saying that reds like Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook will no longer be allowed to make films.”’”

“‘The *Washington Post* said that not only Bong Joon-ho and Song Kang-ho but also Miky Lee, vice chairwoman of CJ Group, had been put on the blacklist, adding that “*Parasite*, a film depicting the contradictions of capitalism, teaches an important lesson about how vital a free society is to art.”’”

This was roughly the line of argument. State support for the cultural and arts sector itself is “not a bad thing,” but in any case *Parasite* was not a film born that way, and the reason is that the director and company executives were people placed on the “cultural blacklist” under the conservative government. In an instant, CJ Vice Chairwoman Miky Lee—who had always been portrayed as “the chief culprit destroying Korean cinema and an evil of capitalism” because of issues such as screen monopolization and vertical integration—was transformed into a “persecuted democratic activist.”

Of course, the truth is different. The truth is that *Parasite*, and indeed the achievements of Korean cinema over the past quarter century, owe much to the struggle of companies like CJ and Lotte, which entered the film industry after 1995, while state support played no role at all. Furthermore, the Korean film directors now best known around the world—Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook, Lee Chang-dong, Kim Ki-duk, Hong Sang-soo, and others—all developed and grew during a period when that “state support” was effectively nonexistent. On the contrary, as state support has increased, more and more people have preferred not to leave the independent film world, where they can remain “comfortable and free from box-office pressure” by relying on it.

In many respects, one could say that Korean cinema as it exists today succeeded precisely because it was “not state-driven,” because there was “virtually no state support.” *Parasite* was born that way, and so too will be other films that achieve comparable success in the future. In this sense, the “state-driven disparagement” of the Korean Wave that began in Japan is instead becoming an opportunity to better understand the actual reality we face.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] <기생충> 아카데미상 쾌거는 국가 문화지원 덕택이다?

Author: Moon-won Lee

Date: 2020-02-17

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=10&idx=22389