Youngja’s Heydays and the Broken Bodies of Authoritarian Construction

Abstract

Youngja’s Heydays (Yŏngja ŭi chŏnsŏng sidae, directed by Kim Hosŏn 1975) follows the story of a Korean woman named Youngja, as she tries to survive in the harsh environment of metropolitan Seoul. Leaving her countryside home in an effort to eke out a living in the city, she moves from job to job—first as a maid in a wealthy household, then as a bus conductress, and finally as a “hostess” (the euphemistic name for prostitutes in South Korea at this time). The film follows her relationship with Changsu, a laborer who falls in love with Youngja and desperately tries to save her, presumably in pursuit of a middle-class dream (marriage, a home, kids). By simultaneously depicting the abhorrent material circumstances of lower-class laborers in Korea and the melodramatic (and tragic) relationship between Changsu and Youngja, Youngja’s Heydays treads a curiously fine line between reality and its excess. In using stylistic techniques such as point of view shots, muted sounds, and palimpsestic overlay, Youngja’s Heydays employs the aesthetics of excess to emphasize the fractured subjectivity and banality of commodification in an authoritarian, developmental state that comprised South Korea in the 1970s.