Face value
Rather than digging deeply into the economic and political influences that had to be in place in order for the Wave to take shape, I would like to take a look at a far more obvious, far more immediate quality apparent in recent Korean entertainment: Its aesthetics. More specifically, I want to examine the image more responsible than any other for selling Korean culture to nations around the world: the face of Bae Yong-joon.
In 1955, the French critic Roland Barthes wrote "The Face of Garbo," an essay that would became a touchstone for all studies of movie star images that followed. In a transformation straight out of a Hollywood movie script, Greta Gustaffson, an unassuming young woman from Sweden, became Greta Garbo, the Divine, an icon of beauty and desire, and a symbol of the magnetism of motion pictures.
Although other stars achieved notable success in the years that followed, none inspired the same hypnotic fascination that Garbo did. Barthes suggests that this is because Garbo appeared at a particular moment when the cinema still held a kind of religious or mystical quality. Garbo became a symbol of the magic of the movies.
However, despite her legendary popularity, Garbo's reign was brief, lasting less than two decades. By the late 1930s, she had gone into self-imposed exile, choosing anonymity over being forced to grow old in the public eye. At the same time, the technological advances that brought with them the introduction of sound and color to motion pictures changed films forever, replacing the ecstatic, devotional quality of the silent film experience with a more action-driven mode of spectatorship, making it all but impossible for a star to represent the kind of abstract idea that Garbo once did.
Some might find it surprising that a latter-day counterpart to Garbo would ever emerge at all, let alone, from anywhere other than Hollywood, and not from the cinema, but from television, but this is exactly what has happened in Korea. However, whereas Garbo's face was the symbol of an era in which cinema, an art created by the marriage of technology and industrialization, eased the shift from the traditional to modern, Bae Yong-joon's face represents a movement in the opposite direction, a longing, nostalgic glance back at a bygone era from one in which entertainment has become little more than empty repetition and in which every action, every emotion is telegraphed to the viewer.
If Garbo, for Barthes, represented an "idea," then the face of Bae Yong-joon is something even more basic: It is a medium -- the canvas onto which the idea may be represented. Like Garbo, he is at once unique and univer