#emotionally unavailable cold female lead in media: GIVE ME MORE

[drivingsideways]

in search of a better dream

This is about three pieces of South Korean media that crossed my path recently: the dramas Search WWW and Flower of Evil, and the novel Kim Ji Young, Born 1982.

Disclaimer and context : I'm not Korean, I don't speak the language, and I've watched a very limited set of kdramas. The criticisms I make in this piece are not to single out kdramas, or kdrama fandom,  as what I've described exists in Western and other Asian media and fandoms as well.

 Under the cut for length:

There's a scene in the first episode of the hit 2020 k-drama "Flower of Evil" that made me want to quit watching the show within the first ten minutes. The scene goes like this: our protagonists, Cha Ji Won and Baek Hee Seung meet Baek Hee Seung's parents along with their four year old daughter. The occasion is Baek Hee Seung's birthday, and loving wife Cha Ji Won has set up a special birthday dinner for them. On the way to the restaurant, the daughter has already complained about how she's scared of her grandparents, and they don't like her. When we meet the grandparents, we see the truth of this- they are as cold as the Arctic to all three, but especially to their daughter-in-law and granddaughter. In a bid to smooth out the social awkwardness, Cha Ji Won instructs her daughter to greet her grandparents the way they had "practiced" earlier- a cutesy little greeting where the adorable Eun-ha makes a heart over her head and chirps "I love you grandma and grandpa". When this fails to soften them, Eun-ha retreats, looking scared and disappointed. Not to worry, Cha Ji Won has this completely figured out: if you try harder, she tells her four year old daughter, they'll eventually love you.

Reader, I was, as they say, mad.

We find out soon enough that this stellar bit of parenting follows from an abiding principle in Cha Ji Won's life. Her romance with Baek Hee Seung starts when a handsome oppa walks into the family store, and is a saga of her stalking and pursuing a man who repeatedly tells her he's not interested, until he finally gives in. The power of her persistence pays off when the emotionally distant and abrasive man, in a classic beauty-and-the-beast transition, becomes a loving boyfriend, and then later, husband and father. It's a fantasy- some might even say feminist fantasy come true- he's handsome, supportive, reliable, artistic,  the primary housekeeper and caretaker of their daughter while she pursues her demanding "dream" job as a police officer, and they have enough money to live in a charming and lovingly set up two-storeyed house in ruinously expensive Seoul. This is heterosexual female wish fulfilment at its peak, and it is all made possible because she persevered.

It all threatens to come apart with the discovery of the perfect man's dark past- for a brief period, she's forced to contemplate the idea that he's actually a serial killer who's conned her for the entirety of their relationship of fourteen years; that the perfect life was, in fact, a lie.  

However, since this is written and billed as romance melodrama, this horror is short-lived. As the story progresses through increasingly improbable, violent and sometimes downright hilarious twists and turns, we grow closer to the (inevitable) happy ending. Baek Hee Seung/ Do Hyun Soo is no killer, just a traumatized child with a horrific past. The lies are the result of psychological damage inflicted by a society that unfairly deemed him a monster; the cage of repressed emotions that he'd locked himself in needed only the unshakeable conviction of Cha Ji Won's love to be broken open. "I wish you could see yourself as I see you" she tells him, in one of the show's endless supply of tearfully emotional moments, "I wish you could understand yourself the way I understand you."

This framework continues right to the end, when a bout of short term amnesia (!!) has Do Hyun Soo questioning himself and her: do you know, he asks her, when I'm lying to you, and when I'm not, because I don't.  The show answers that almost immediately- it doesn't matter, because it's her vision of him that he wants to be; in other words, he chooses the version of himself that she wants. The horror of the lie was a red herring, Cha Ji Won was right from the start about her husband- all it took was the power of her love and her perseverance to overcome the lie at the heart of her marriage,  to restore it to its previous shape- quite literally. The dream house they built together, which was destroyed by the villain, is shown in the last shots as unchanged from how it was in the beginning. One of the last shots we have of the couple is of them kissing in the artisan husband's workshop, an almost perfect recreation of the first time we see them. Paradise Regained, and all of us- and Cha Ji Won- can breathe a sigh of relief. You, the twenty-first century woman, are the architect of your own fantasy and can have it all. What could be more powerful than that?

 In Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 , a novel published in 2016, and often credited with kickstarting a new conversation about feminism in South Korea, the eponymous protagonist's story is also one of perseverance. It's a starkly written tale, an everywoman tale, a dryly narrated fact finding mission report complete with citations and references, about a woman born in the late twentieth century into a rigidly patriarchal culture, whose very existence is an aberration- her parents didn’t opt for a sex-selective abortion unlike many of their contemporaries when they found that their second child would also be a girl. Kim Ji Young, like the rest of us, grows up immersed in a misogynist culture. Even before she understands it, she learns to work around it and through it, rationalizing the micro-aggressions, burying the anger at the casual and institutional sexism that permeates her life, compromising and coping with it all, and achieving some semblance of having it all: a job, a decent, loving husband, a child. However, it's when motherhood arrives that it all falls apart- Kim Ji Young, faced with the exhausting carework of having a baby at home and another regular, full time job, does what so many women in her position do- quits her "outside" job for her parenting one. Fighting exhaustion and depression, a casually cruel and misogynist remark from a stranger in a park proves to be the proverbial final straw; Kim Ji Young suffers a mental breakdown, dissociating herself completely from her own life, and "seamlessly, flawlessly" taking on the personalities of other women she's known- her mother, her friend, her colleague. The novel ends with a narrative twist that's both horrifying and appropriate:  we learn that our narrator is actually her male psychiatrist. Kim Ji Young doesn't even get to be the voice of her own story; instead, it is told by a man cocooned in his own privilege, who displays the same paternalistic and misogynist behaviour that he correctly identified as the cause of her breakdown.

There is no escape here for Kim Ji Young save that of a complete break from reality. In the light of the narrative that leads her to that point, it feels both inevitable and even more horrifically, a blessing. This is a horror story told as it is shorn of any hope; the ending is death or insanity.

Reading Kim Ji Young, Born 1982 was to confront the familiar and heart-breaking and horrific neatly distilled into 200 odd pages; it's "fiction", but not really. My only surprise was how similar the culture described there was to my own in specifics; how incidents in Kim Ji Young's life were things I had actually experienced myself or seen other women experience, in a country several thousand miles away.

I read this novel just after watching the 2019's Search WWW, a show with a bit of a cult following, I think. Before I started watching it, one friend assured me that I would love it, that it was made for me; another said that  she dropped it because it "rang false" to her at the time. I've seen the show described several times as a feminist power fantasy, sometimes, if the reviewer wanted to demean it, with the qualifier, unrealistic.

This seemed an odd sort of criticism to me- after all, who turns to k-drama romances or really, any romance, for realism? Female wish fulfilment, which is the cornerstone of romance as a genre, whether in books or film, is still written and recognized as fantasy. So what was particularly unreal about Search WWW?

Well, simply put, it is written like the patriarchy doesn't matter, and has never existed.

The three female protagonists are all in their thirties, in powerful positions in their careers. As such, they are constantly walking into meetings where women speak more than 33% of the time. There are men in the room, but they never outnumber the women, and they don't silence the women.

The interests and decisions and choices  of women in the show- even the lead antagonist, who is an older woman whom we often see casually making beefy young men pose nude for her paintings- matter, not just to domestic and private realms, but to society at large; the antagonist is a power broker whose reach goes right up to the highest echelons of the country's politics; the younger women's ethical choices directly affect the republic's functioning as a democracy.

What about the men? It's not that they've been ignored; it's just that their place in the narrative has been decentered. Do with that what you will, the writer seems to say, as she writes in speaking roles for women wherever possible—every second side character is a woman— I have no time or inclination to justify that choice.

As for romance- it's not just that two of the three romances fall into the "noona romance" category, which is subversive in itself. It's that the power of decision making in these relationships clearly rests with the women.

In the "main" romance track, in a reversal of the usual trope, the woman is the one who is emotionally unavailable, and whom the man has to convince to take a chance on their relationship. What was hugely refreshing was that the reason for her emotional unavailability isn't trauma, that the man has to help her heal from, unlike the gender reversed versions we often see, eg in Flower of Evil. Instead, it's a difference in perspective that has its roots in the years of experience she has compared to him; it's the difference in life perspective of a twenty something man, and an almost-40 woman. She considers the implications and possibilities of entering into a relationship with a man who wants marriage and kids, while she doesn't want either and is unlikely to want them in the future. She thinks through it, and sees the pitfalls of it, perhaps all too clearly. In the end, when she makes a decision to commit, it's with the understanding that she's choosing to live in the moment, that he makes her happy; that they make each other happy and it is worth something, even if it doesn't last.  But both of them understand that her happiness is not centered in him or their relationship being successful. The other two romances end on a similarly open note- the possibility of love with the man you just divorced, but there's no hurry to get there; and a long distance relationship that may or may not last the two years of military conscription the man has to undergo.

The happily ever after in this series is not the perfect heterosexual family unit; it was always going to be the complicated, thorny and intense queerplatonic relationship between the three women, who, in the end, literally drive off along an endless open road under a blue, blue sky, to "a place with no red lights", as one of them describes it.

For a week after watching Search WWW, I wandered around in a daze. How did this show get written, I kept asking myself? How did it get produced? Aired??? What magic was worked to put it in my eyeballs, and how can it keep happening?

That feeling intensified when I read Kim Ji Young, Born 1982. But the book also provided the answer, at least to the first question. Because it is Kim Ji Young's voice in Search WWW. This is the fantasy that Kim Ji Young would have wanted to live in; a society and a life where she's seen as a person, entire, and it's not something she has to fight every day for. The gigantic leap of imagination that the writer of Search WWW took was only because that fantasy has been yearned for, in a way only a person growing up in Kim Ji Young's world- our world- could.

"Flower of Evil"- and other dramas like it— are also, undeniably, products of this world. It's unsurprising to me that in many ways, Cha Ji Won's little fantasy domestic world in Flower of Evil, on the surface, looks exactly like a post-feminist world. If the real revolution is men doing housework and childcare, then that fantasy has already been achieved on the individual level for Cha Ji Won. Sure, she's the only female member on her squad, and maybe the entire police force, for all you see women in her workplace. Sure, the other female characters with speaking roles exist mostly to be tortured for manpain by the narrative or literally by men as part of the plot. She seems to have no friends outside of work, which means that all her friends are men. As for relationships with other women, except her mother, who exists mostly to share the burden of childcare, and her mom-in- law who turns out to be an evil sort herself, there are none. When she meets her sister-in-law, the entire scene gives off a strange catfight vibe- her sister in law is the only other woman who can legitimately be said to have a claim on knowing the real Do Hyun Soo, and Cha Ji Won's reaction is to deny that claim and tell her to buzz off, basically. "I'm his family now" she tells her sister in law, "He has a wife"; firmly establishing the primacy of a heterosexual romantic relationship over all others.

Her "dream" job means nothing much despite the work she has put in to get it; for most part of the narrative she ends up betraying every professional ethic and her squad- her only friends. Of course, she is easily forgiven for it, without doing any of the work to earn that forgiveness, but that's really because who has the narrative time to develop those relationships which do not matter, like her work, which is shown up for the narrative prop it is, just like her daughter?  Even her sociopath (but not really, poor baby) husband ends the series with a tentative sort of friendship with a person he's not married to, but not Cha Ji Won, whose entire world by the end of the series has narrowed down to the four walls of her perfect little house and her perfectly-rescued husband. "I can't be happy if he's not happy," she tells her mother, who suggests that maybe it's time she let go of her not-so-perfect husband. "So please accept him."

In the end, the fantasy is based on this : self-improvement as the winning strategy, not structural change. Try hard enough and you'll get what you want. In the fine print, easily ignored: as long as what you want falls within the bounds of heteronormative patriarchal standards. It's an attitude that is passed down to the next generation; Cha Ji Won's early conversation with her daughter is an example.

The writer's vision is clear- what could have been an interesting and intimate look at our deepest fears in a relationship- that the other person will see us for who we are and horror-struck, leave; or even a deconstruction of the heterosexual woman's fantasy of The Perfect Man, is instead a tired repetition of the Beauty-and-the-Beast trope. You can dress it up and put a gun-toting, career woman wig on it, but that disguise falls apart pretty quickly. Cha Ji Won openly states not once, but several times, that she would rather live the comfortable lie; it's only when even that isn't an option- and not because of her choice or agency, but circumstances and the man coming to a decision, that she begins to let go. But only for a little while- barely ten minutes in show time- because ultimately, this is a female wish fulfilment fantasy, isn't it? Her longsuffering perseverance is rewarded when he decides to mould himself to her fantasy version of him, and the past is erased, and time reset, complete with soft lighting and soaring soundtrack.

Some love stories are horror stories, but others are horror stories masquerading as love stories. Why are we so often sold the latter, and so accepting of the narrative gaslighting? When I look at the popularity of Search WWW vs Flower of Evil, I feel bitter despair and quite a lot of anger. Why do so many women- and it is women, who are producing this work, for women, primarily (I mean, romance, as a genre)- settle for so little? It's the twenty first century, I think, why are we still here, I rage, gnashing my teeth, and indulging in the vicious satisfaction of giving Flower of Evil a single star rating that will make not a dent in its popularity. If we can't demand and aspire to a better class of fantasy, what hope do we have? As you dream, so you will do.

I often think that these days feminism is made toothless because we're shaping it into something that will validate every little feeling of ours;  we don't want to be made uncomfortable by it. But feminism is not meant to make anyone comfortable; interrogating your own desires and pleasures is as much a part of smashing the patriarchy as fighting for fundamental human rights like bodily autonomy.

I guess, in the end, what I want to say is this: for the love of sanity, dream better.