NORTH KOREAN DRAMA

Having finished the curious not-so-historical (and sometimes completely hilarious**) KD, The Divine Hero, and pondering the grand themes that might lurk in a TV drama based on a high-tech comic book hero, I watched with some interest the apparent transfer of power process happening in real time in Pyongyang.

The Dear Leader, (son of the Supreme Leader, no divine hero, really, though appointed "eternal president") who has the worst fashion sense of any head of state in the world, seems to have appointed his pudgy youngest son to carry forward the communist autocratic patrilineal monarchy in North Korea.

My observation was that perhaps The Divine Hero is a subtle political statement as much as a mindless sexy action thriller (accented with grand themes of justice, revenge, filial piety, "grobal" economic power, and romantic love). The fictional drama is about a gang of four corrupt businessmen, military and judicial friends who 25 years earlier stumbled into an arms and drug deal and made a huge amount of money, securing themselves in powerful positions in the economy and government. To protect their interests they tried to kill the family of the policeman who was a threat to their plans, succeeding in mom and dad's demise in a house fire, but unbeknownst to them, the children survived. The Divine Hero (played by the divine Song Il-guk, who is himself the grandson of a well-respected Korean general and recently married to a high court judge), carries out a revenge mission because the system was never going to bring the bad guys to justice. Their own children have been charged, in a Confucian way, to maintain their position and get rid of the the troublemaker. By keeping the power in the family, the tradition and the money remain intact.

Oddly, it's the daughters who help, unwittingly, to bring down the empire. One of them (a cop) discovers, too late, that in fact she is the Divine Hero's sister; another (a reporter) that she is the daughter of one of the bad guys. One lives and one dies. And not who you expect.

The Divine Hero, who has some serious issues with violence and taking the law into his own hands, is not exactly excused. At the conclusion of the drama, the reporter who discovered her father was one of the corrupt businessman, observes that if a legal system is inadequate, people will seek their own revenge and justice.

I'm wondering now if The Divine Hero has some subtle meaning in Korean. One of the tycoons is a pudgy guy with an even pudgier son who is basically stupid and, lacking any kung-fu, surrounds himself with martial artists (including a particularly amoral and deadly guy acquired from the family's casino in Las Vegas, closest to a serious threat to SIG's more skilled character.) The other target of Song Il-guk's revenge is a retired general (whose hair style is vaguely reminiscent of the former Prime Minister of Japan's) and whose son is as calculating as the other's is dumb.

They all appear to be archetypes in a corrupt economy and I would think some of these points would not go unnoticed by frustrated folks in Seoul who send care packages of ballpoint pens and plastic bags to impoverished relatives on the north side of the DMZ.

That the avenger actually comes through Hawaii is also ironic. Was it only a year ago that the Dear Leader of North Korea alluded to blowing the Aloha State out of the water?

**Subtitles and heavily accented English provide surely unintended entertainment. At one point in the story, Vivian, a gorgeous woman, yin to SIG's yang, who plays the Korean-Hawaiian connection, asks the hero, whom she has betrayed badly, "to have mercy on her soil." Also, she invites some businessmen anticipating high "levenues" (leveraged revenues?) from her project, on a tour of the planned island real estate development. "We can go up to the deck and then have a little butt cruise," she purrs in heavily accented English. Not making this up.