사회비판적 ‘K-콘텐츠’는 세상을 바꿀 수 있는가? : <스카이캐슬>, <기생충>, <오징어 게임> 의 분열하는 기호들

초록

This study carefully examined the texts of "Sky Castle," "Parasite," and "Squid Game," which garnered positive reviews while expressing critical viewpoints and discourses on inequality, unfairness, and injustice in contemporary Korean society. We looked at how tense, conflicting, or convoluted the resistance symbols of socially critical pop culture contents are as well as how they function as products of the post-capitalist cultural industry. In particular, it was hoped to demonstrate how text's resistance and the dominating need for intertext resulted in mutual contradiction and conflict, leading to "divided symbols" by examining text-related advertisements and intertexts such as products, events, and media platforms together. Specifically, in the case of <Sky Castle>, the text harshly criticizes inhuman competition and unfairness in Korean education system, but the inter-texts such as advertisements and PPL, products show rather yielding to the current absurd educational system and ironically promoting it. <Parasite> realistically reproduced the harsh daily lives of the lower classes and expressed a sense of problem with the class gap through the hierarchy of space, but once again it dramatically visualized the profound class gap and inequality of capitalism with the award of the US Academy Awards accompanied by conglomerates, sponsored the film. <Squid Game> also allegorically reveals the murderous competition of the ‘winner-takes-all’ system and the deceitfulness of neoliberal freedom and fairness. At the same time, on the Netflix media platform, the governing ideology is reproduced in a self-reproducing manner through cheers for the top ranking and the ambivalence of autonomy and closure in recommendation algorithms. As a result, texts that address numerous social problems and structural concerns and feature discourses of resistance could be considered to be the main form of socially critical popular cultural contents (signifier). However, at the secondary stage of signification, this text (the sign) is incorporated into the intertext as a new signifier, is entangled with other intertexts that have been subsumed or given up to the demands of the capitalist culture industry and the dominant ideology present in that context, and is ultimately divided. The analysis shows a glimpse of capitalism's evolving mythos and recuperation technique from the polarizing nature of this socially critical popular culture, which can also result in discursive differences in contemporary Korean society. Therefore, it's necessary to develop more sophisticated, creative critical thinking, insight, and imagination so that we can produce pop culture more independently and purge it of concealed ideologies.

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