Soft Power Magnified as a Critique of the Divided Korean Condition in Secretly Greatly

Abstract

Director Jang Cheuol-soo’s blockbuster film Secretly Greatly (2013) harnesses media hybridization of the hallyu phenomenon involving webtoons, K-dramas, and the cinema to criticize the limitations of the divided Korean people by positioning the feared and dreaded North Korean infiltration agents as the reformed chivalric heroes who use their military skills to rescue themselves from North Korean elimination as well as rescuing the neighborhood South Koreans who they come to befriend through their daily interactions. These North Korean agents are doubly marginalized individuals since they undergo involuntarily a brutal training process that dehumanizes them to become expendable monsters for the military reunification of the divided Koreas under the North Korean flag. However, their undercover guises in South Korea require them to become marginalized individuals who are not expected to possess any of their military training. In their Southern guises, they observe the failures of the South Korean national model since their new neighbors are themselves marginalized within society and face a number of unsolvable predicaments that can only be fixed by the North Korean other. Surprisingly, it is Market Granny’s maternal love that rehumanizes the North Koreans infiltration agents who then use their formidable military training to perform their chivalric heroism. Under this narrative twist, it is loyalty to one’s fellow humans, with Market Granny as the exemplar, that becomes more important than loyalty to one’s state. Here, Koreans can just be good to one’s fellow Koreans and South Koreans can have a better daily life because of the existence of a guardian North Korean agent working on their behalf.