Why so few heroines in Korean films now?

By Song Young-ju

“Master,” “Will You Be There?” “My Annoying Brother,” “Derailed,” and so on. There is no single female protagonist among these new movies screened recently. Most of them have two or three male leading actors, and some of them do not even have a supporting actress.

Son Ye-jin, one of the most beloved actresses in Korea, said in her interview with the Asia Business Daily in 2014 that female actors do not have many opportunities to choose their parts with their roles becoming limited. The dwindling status of actresses is not something that started just recently, and this tendency comes to the fore with the application of the Bechdel Test.

The test, which first appeared in 1985 in Alison Bechdel’s comic strip “Dykes to watch out for,” is used as an indicator for the active presence of females in movies and other fictions. To pass the Bechdel Test, a film needs to satisfy the following requirements:

1. The movie has to have at least two women in it.

2. They should talk to each other.

3. And they need to talk about something besides a man.

These simple three standards seem quite easy to fill, and lots of people doubt the possibility of failure of this test. Surprisingly, the majority of cultural works do not correspond to it, and Korean films are no exceptions.

Among the top 10 successful films in 2016 that the Korean Film Commission announced, only four passed the Bechdel Test; “Train to Busan,” “The Handmaiden,” “The Last Princess” and “Spirit’s Homecoming.” Besides “A Violent Prosecutor,” the most successful domestic movie of this year, does not pass even the first criteria _ having two female characters with names in it. In the case of 2015, only “Assassination” and “Detective K: Secret of the Lost Island” passed these standards.

This test cannot evaluate the content with the criteria of gender equality, and just indicates the presence of women in films. There are the possibility that some good movies cannot fulfill the standards because of their time periods and settings. Also, a movie that passes the test might contain sexist values or derogation of women. It is one of the attempts at the quantitative analysis of works and not a totally required condition for good movie.

However, these unfortunate results in Korea do represent the gender-biased structure of its film industry. This tendency to exclude female protagonists affects directly to the diversity of domestic movies and lets some genres disappear from theaters. We cannot find many romantic comedies, melodramatic films, or horror movies anymore. Furthermore, this trend has standardized the domestic film industry.

There are correlations between culture and society. Culture projects the tendency of its community and exerts influence on social members in some direct and indirect ways. The Korean society is rapidly changing, and the participation of women in society is prevalent more than ever before.

However, the film industry goes against the stream of the time, and the position of female actors is shrinking as days go by. For the development of the movie industry and the progress of society, filmmakers and directors need to discard their gender bias.

The writer is a senior majoring in English literature and linguistics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. Her email address is youngjusong.93@gmail.com.