KOREAN FINANCIAL THRILLERS: NEO-LIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY IN DEFAULT AND BLACK MONEY

This essay surveys Korean financial thrillers produced in the late 2010s, particularly Default (Kook-hee Choi, 2018) and Black Money ( Ji-yeong Jeong, 2019). These two films expose the dark underbelly of financial capitalism not only by revealing existing predicaments and challenges caused by the credit crisis, but also by analyzing the current neoliberal social order. Neo-liberalism developed in Korea after the 1997 Asian financial crisis and was justified by the IMF bailout fund received by the Korean government to escape sovereign default. Korean financial thrillers scrutinize global capitalism from a nationalist perspective, considering the neo-liberal social formation as a type of colonial rule by developing an anti-colonial narrative. Nonetheless, their views are not limited to a nationalist scope, and they define the current exploitative logic as a distinctive one that deviates from that of former colonial relationships. They understand the neo-liberal economy as a governmentality that can displace national sovereignty, and they explore potential contre-conduites against it.