President Donald Trump says he can’t understand how a Korean movie won the Oscars. But he, of all people, ought to understand very well. The same social, economic, technological and political developments that enabled him to become POTUS also enabled “Parasite” to rise to the top of the cinema world.
I don’t mean he is an example of the parasites of the movie, as some people have claimed. Rather, it is because the way to be famous and powerful now is not to own land and grow crops, or build factories and manufacture goods, or even to process information. Rather, fame and power now resides in those who know how to create and share dreams. And he knows.
While myth-makers and story-tellers have always played important social roles since the emergence of homo sapiens, the primal importance of dreams is a relatively new phenomenon, and the first country officially to recognize that was Korea. How was that possible? Unlike Japan, Korea had no long history in these areas, and in fact, officially had been generally hostile to them.
However, in an article in The Washington Post in response to Trump’s reaction to “Parasite,” Euny Hong pointed out that as early as “May 1994, Korea’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology published a report suggesting that the film “Jurassic Park” could make as much in a single year as the combined sales of 1.5 million Hyundai automobiles.”
And so, from the late 1990s, something called, “The Korean Wave” (Hallyu) — a tsunami of soap operas, electronic games, anime, and boy/girl bands (K-Pop) — began sweeping Asia and Africa — and Hawaii, too, via the Korean language TV station, KBFD. Seemingly out of nowhere, Korea was replacing Japan, the U.S., Europe and Hong Kong, as the favorite producer of world-class popular culture.
In 2004, Seo Yongseok and I wrote a paper about this titled, “Korea as the Wave of a Future: The Emerging Dream Society of Icons and Aesthetic Experience.” Our paper was reprinted several times, and widely quoted. I was frequently invited to Korea to talk about the Dream Society concept. I spoke to several groups in Hawaii, too.
It is my contention that the political economy of Hawaii is already based on dreams — those of a tourist paradise on the one hand, and of Hawaiian and/or local identity on the other — and we ought to move affirmatively into other areas fit for a community that excels at talk-story.
Instead of continuing to over- emphasize reading, writing and arithmetic in our educational systems, we should facilitate cutting-edge media literacy. Some such programs were instigated — but only timidly and almost apologetically. My grandson took advantage of one at Kapiolani Community College and now supervises 50 artists who produce powerful visualizations of car crashes and crime scenes in courts of law — in Denver.
The triumph of “Parasite” is only one example of the triumph of the Korean Wave in general, and of the wisdom of the Korean government in understanding (if only dimly) the transformation from an industrial or information society, into a society of dreams.
I said at the outset that the election of Trump was itself enabled by the transcendence of dreams over reality. A Dream Society, like all social systems, has dark sides as well as bright sides, and the bright sides will by no means necessarily be dominant without careful attention. Nonetheless, I regret that the various Powers that Be, or Wannabe, in Hawaii (like the POTUS), do not take more seriously the potentialities and challenges of the engulfing metamorphosis here.
Jim Dator is a professor and former director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.
Correction: A previous version of this story misidentified Jim Dator as the director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Dator was the former director.
