Melodramatic Aesthetics and Ethics in 3 PM on a Rainy Day (1959)

Abstract

A majority of South Korean melodramas produced in the late 1950s are characterized by the “gaps” between clichéd nationalist narrative and exotic international style. This article analyzes 3 PM on a Rainy Day in relation to its cosmopolitan aesthetics and the ethical significance gained from it. The first part of the article examines prior criticism on melodrama and style in order to demonstrate the ways in which melodrama uses style to “speak the unspeakable.” The second part discusses concepts developed by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, such as “the aesthetic regime of art,” “a thwarted fable,” and “impurities” of cinema. Viewing cinema as a truth-seeking singular event, Rancière and Badiou make room for new aisthesis (perception) and thus invite an ethical rethinking of the status quo. 3 PM on a Rainy Day recasts a clash between nationalism and the American-style modernization in postwar Korea within a love triangle between a Korean-American journalist, a Korean veteran, and a Korean woman adored by the two men. The last part argues that the film’s cosmopolitan style packed with western indexes disrupts nationalist narrative and creates a “thwarted fable” which, by unsettling the logical flow of storytelling, reveals the unspeakable: in this film, a cosmopolitan aspiration on the part of the audience consumed by war.