Rough Draft 1

Song 1 Politics of Sexuality and Nation in the Melodrama Love Rain Exported to twelve different countries and regions including China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Cambodia, the Americas and Europe, the Korean melodrama, Love Rain, was immensely popular when first began airing in Korea in 2012. Love Rain depicts a 1970’s pure love and a love from the present day at the same time. It shows how the children of a previous ill-fated couple, who met in the 1970s, managed to meet and fall in love. In-Ha and Yoon-Hee, an art student who is very shy, met and fell in love with each other during their college years in the 1970s but unfortunately their love was never achieved. Now in the present 21st Century, In-Ha’s son, Joon, a liberal photographer, meets and falls in love with the daughter of Yoon-Hee, Hana, a cheerful girl whose personality is very different from her mother’s. Baldacchino views K-dramas as a “refractory process that expresses the dilemmas engendered by end-of-the-century attitudes towards romantic love” (Baldacchino 2014: 6). He notes how he noticed that many young Korean women tend to make reference to K-dramas when describing their own dilemmas they had to go through in their daily lives. Scene from Love Rain To analyze this particular melodrama “Love is like the rain. Both happiness and sadness.” in more depth, I research the history Yoon-Hee and In-Ha encountered their first love after 30 of representations of romantic love, years. incest, and femininity. In the article “In Sickness and in Love?” Jean-Paul Baldacchino analyzes the relationship between romantic love and illness by referring to one particular Korean melodrama called Autumn in My Heart (2000). This article is relevant for an analysis of Love Rain because both Love Rain and Autumn in My Heart express “the moral tension between romantic love and kinship, and the ways this morality is embodied in melodramatic causal explanations of illness” (Baldacchino 2014: 22). This implies that it is extremely common for K-dramas to have some kind of tragic elements to the plot “that centers on the desirability of romantic love, which results in a seemingly inevitable disaster” (Baldacchino 2014: 7). Both Autumn in My Heart and Love Rain sharing the genre of melodrama, they are often portrayed as the “antithesis of realism and tragedy” revealing “personal life being dominated by dramatic conflict and catastrophes” (Baldacchino 2014: 11). Directed by the same director, Seok-Ho Yoon, as Autumn in My Heart, Love Rain is a perfect example of a melodrama in which it addresses the issues that come up from the expression of romantic love in modernity. While Autumn in My Heart puts a strong emphasis on illness brought on by beol (a punishment), Page !1 of !7 Song 2 Love Rain mainly focuses on the theme of incest and the importance of happiness of one’s kin/ loved ones. The genre of melodrama is politically relevant, “the ‘pure relationship’ that represents the ideals of romantic love in modern society is built on an assertion of individualism and freedom as supreme values” (Baldacchino 2014: 15). Individualism can be defined as privileging the individual over the community. Sometimes we humans are conflicted between going with the person we love (individually/alone) and staying Scene from Love Rain with our family/community/society/other-friends. Hana and Joon (younger couple) are going When you have this conflict, it makes us sick. through the ‘conflict’, experiencing Thus, individualism in representations of romance ‘individualism’. makes people sick because of the conflict. The desire for one’s love is individualism, and that is the connection between romance and sickness in Korean dramas. In Love Rain, the conflict between the individual and community values is represented by each character’s individual desire for one another and the community’s incest taboo. In the article “Incestuous Experience Among Korean Adolescents: Prevalence, Family Problems, Perceived Family Dynamics, and Psychological Characteristics” Hyun-Sil Kim and Hun-Soo Kim analyze the prevalence of incest among Korean adolescents and draw analysis on how all kinds of family problems and/or psychological consequences are associated with incest in South Korea, by compiling data from surveys given to recruited participants. This article is relevant when analyzing Love Rain because Love Rain represents a prohibition against step siblings being in a sexual relationship. According to the article, “incest has been defined as sexual intercourse between participants who are related by some formal or informal bond of kinship that is culturally regard as a bar to sexual relations” (Kaplan & Sadock 1998: 474). In Love Rain, the younger couple, Joon Scene from Love Rain and Hana, sacrifices their relationship so that In-Ha (older couple) realizes that his son’s their parents can have a relationship that they girlfriend is the daughter of his love, Yoon- could not achieve thirty years ago. Ever Hee. Page !2 of !7 Song 3 Joon and Hana hugging for the last time before letting each other go, sacrificing themselves for their parents’ happiness. since Joon and Hana realized that either them or their parents need to give up one another, they encountered serious dilemma. Kim and Kim note that “families in which incest occurred showed significantly higher levels of psychotic disorders, depression, criminal acts, and alcoholism” (Kim and Kim 2005: 477). Hana began to lose her appetite and was always in a depressed mood, and Joon started drinking heavily and became both physically and emotionally weak. The incest taboo has been one of the most widespread of all cultural taboos. Kim and Kim says, “Taboo associated with incest means that both victims and health professionals are frequently reluctant to explore incestuous histories” (Kim and Kim 2005: 480). They add on by noting that “incest victims may fear that catastrophic consequences will follow disclosure of the abuse or may feel intensely loyal to the perpetrator” (Kim and Kim 2005: 480). According to Freud’s article, Totem and Taboo, Freud quotes from Cameron, saying, “In Australia, the regular penalty for sexual intercourse with a person with a forbidden clan is death. (Quoted from Cameron 1885: 351). Freud also states that “since the same severe punishment is inflicted in the case of passing love-affairs which have not resulted in any children, it seems unlikely that the reasons for the prohibition are of a practical nature” (Freud 1913: 6). In addition to Freud, in the article “The Notion of Expenditure” Bataille states, “the goal of the latter [utility or efficiency] is, theoretically, pleasure - but only in a moderate form, since violent pleasure is seen as pathological” (Bataille 1985: 116). In Love Rain, the characters’ attitudes towards incest are portrayed as a pathological (sick) pleasure. Both the older and younger couples sacrifice here and there in order for their children or for their parents to achieve their ‘happiness’. Thus it is their struggle against pain that brings them ‘sick’ pleasure. So it is not just pleasure that motivates the audience. The expenditure is happening in this case. People are working through these issues like the issue of taboo sexuality. Freud explains how repeating things for pathological reasons is a sign of working-through trauma. He states, “One must allow the patient time to become more Page !3 of !7 Song 4 conversant with this resistance with which he has now become acquainted, to work though it to overcome it, by continuing, in defiance of it, the analytic work according to the fundamental rule of analysis” (Freud 1914: 156). He also adds on by saying that this working- through is a “part of the work which effects the greatest changes in the patient and which distinguishes analytic treatment from any kind of treatment by suggestion” (Frued 1914: 156). Hana going through a hard time, trying to forget all Characters in Love Rain are working- the memories of Joon. through a trauma (of proper romance) that reflects the audience’s motivation to watch Love Rain. Thus the audience is working-through these issues by watching this drama. In the article “South Korean Film Melodrama and the Question of National Cinema” Kathleen A. McHugh analyzes the differences between Classical Hollywood cinema and the Golden Age of South Korean cinema primarily focusing on femininity under the genre of melodrama. McHugh defines Golden Age as “a period whose creative vitality fueled by Korea’s liberation from the Japanese Occupation and colonial rule” and she adds that during this period, the South Korean film industry produced a “vibrant and exciting cinema whose narratives explicitly or implicitly grappled with the effects of colonialism, national division, war, poverty, social upheaval, and the profound influence of the US and the West on South Korea” (McHugh 2001: 2). This article is relevant for the analysis of Love Rain because Love Rain features a strong female protagonist, bringing up femininity to the public, while covering both the 1970s and the present 21st Century. McHugh notes by saying, “A predominant number of films have female protagonists, frequently with children, whose husbands are: absent” (McHugh 2001: 5). She also takes note of how the lack of strong male characters provides the context in which women take up “economic agency” (McHugh 2001: 5). In Love Rain, Hana (from younger couple) is portrayed as being raised by a single mother, Yoon-Hee (from older couple). The drama does not provide any more details besides that her father has passed away when Scene from Love Rain Hana was very young. Throughout numbers of Not yet realizing Hana’s boyfriend is Seo- episodes, Hana talks about how her mother worked Jun, Yoon-Hee is happy for herself and for extremely hard to raise her and that she has dedicated her daughter, Hana, for meeting with her entire life to make Hana ‘happy’ as best as she someone they love.

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