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The Unending Korean War in Film: From The Bridges at Toko-Ri to Welcome to Dongmakgol

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2017

JOHN R. EPERJESI
JOHN R. EPERJESI*
Affiliation:
School of English, Kyung Hee University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Korean War films from the US and South Korea provide one cultural site through which scholar–teachers working in American studies, and the humanities in general, can intervene in the unending Korean War. An emergent peace movement has organized around term unending Korean War in order to educate the public both about the history of the three-year period of active combat, and about the repercussions of the fact that the Armistice Agreement, signed on 27 July 1953, stopped the shooting but did not end the war. In the US context, the Korean War is described as a forgotten war. When the war is remembered, it has often been interpreted as a limited, defensive, or static war – a war fought in the trenches – a perspective that tends to occlude the air war. Through a comparative study of the Hollywood film The Bridges at Toko-Ri (Mark Robson, 1954) and the South Korean film Welcome to Dongmakgol (Park Kwang-hyun, 2005), I explore conflicting ways of representing and remembering the air war: as limited to an interdiction campaign in the former, as the cause of civilian casualties in the latter. The friction that results from viewing Welcome to Dongmakgol against the grain of The Bridges at Toko-Ri provides one starting point for a discussion of the unending Korean War, a discussion which has yet to appear in the field of transnational American studies. My hope is that greater understanding of the devastating air war can contribute to the struggle for peace on the Korean peninsula.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 787 - 809
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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44 There is a real village named Dongmakgol in the central part of South Korea, and Dongmakgol valley is located near Suraksan, north of Seoul.

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