Hyperreal Peninsula: North Korea’s Nuclear Cinema and South Korea’s Digital Revolution

Abstract

Drawing from the televisual simulacra of North Korea weapons provocations and projections of regime power, this chapter examines the emergence of a video-mediated nuclear North Korea in the new millennium within the broader frame of networked digital technologies that have facilitated South Korea media flows into the country. Military display and the more recent emergence of the leadership’s nuclear diplomacy can be evaluated as simulation, and is interrogated in the explicit context of a cultural moment when the people of the territorialised and retrenched nation-state of 21st-century North Korea are receptive to South Korean popular culture and neoliberal productions. This chapter highlights the opportunities and constraints of global media and information flows for the newly emerging society of 'transnational Korea' being built on capitalist imperatives and shaping hierarchical relations. Within this configuration, military display simulates state power at a historical moment when South Korea televisual media is the driving force behind prohibited North Korea leisure time. Mediated technologies then, and their capacity to meticulously steer the social, illustrate the uneasy relationship between work and play, state sovereignty and global flow.