1980년대 ‘소문자 청년’과 여대생 재현의 문화정치: 〈바보선언〉과 〈고래사냥〉 겹쳐 읽기

초록

Released on the first and last days of March 1984, Lee Jang-ho’s Declaration of Fools and Bae Chang-ho’s Whale Hunting have been canonized as allegories of youth resistance under authoritarian rule. Both films, however, share a narrative grammar: the college girl is displaced by a sex worker before a marginal community can emerge, leaving a triangle that reduces to a male homosocial bond. This article reconstructs the gender politics underlying this narrative grammar from censorship documents, source novels, screenplays, and the period press. Building on a critique of chrononormativity imposed on youth, it distinguishes Cheongnyeon from cheongnyeon. The former denotes the normative figure entrusted with a collective telos at a historical conjuncture; the latter names the lives that fall outside that trajectory, whether through deviation or expulsion. The college girl embodies the promise of the male cheongnyeon’s passage into Cheongnyeon. Once that promise fails, the sex worker—her replacement—becomes the object whose rescue would restore the protagonist’s masculinity. During the final years of the Fourth Motion Picture Law, both films reroute foreclosed political utterance through women’s sexuality, inscribing a single gender code across two formally divergent modes: metacinema and the road movie. Yet neither film fully contains its women within this code. In brief but disruptive moments, their bodies and voices exceed the instrumental roles they are assigned. These excesses, read against the grain, reveal that the canonization of 1980s Korean youth cinema has required not only that its resistant young men be remembered but that the women who make that resistance legible be absented.