In my analysis of South Korean cinema, I have shown how key films from 1997 to 2010 depict violence in order to critique the ideological presuppositions that justify its use. We have seen that these presuppositions stem from spectator expectations concerning the dominant mode of popular cinema: melodrama. Typically, the melodramatic mode is deeply rooted in Manichean schemas of good and evil, and of individual virtue, which implicate the viewer in the judgment of fictional on-screen characters. Their embodiment of a moral occult, accessed through reading their expressive faces, in turn secures the certainty of the spectator's humanity. Looking at films by Kim Ki-duk, Hong Sang-soo, Park Chan-wook, and others, we have discussed how their films pose fundamental questions about the ethics of the spectator, observing how the ethics of the other are inextricably linked to neoliberal logics of reification, objectification, and biopower in post-IMF South Korea. The logic of conditional exchange regulates how morally good and evil human characters are to interact with each other. The Korean films analyzed in this book fundamentally problematize this ethical logic, integral to the construction of suffering victim-heroes, taking mythic violence and the sovereign hero that it presupposes to their discursive limits. In the first three chapters, my aim was to demonstrate how millennial Korean cinema brings the ethics of the melodramatic mode to crisis in order to perform a fundamental critique of sovereign violence.

On the other hand, the state of exception that constitutes sovereign violence also makes possible an alternative, redemptive potentiality. In contrast to the vengeful blood thirst of mythic violence, in the latter three chapters of this book we worked through the critique of sovereign violence to pave the way toward another ethics, a divine violence, one that has the power of deposing the idolatry of mythic violence. I have argued that the ostensibly inhumane characters and images of Korean cinema, such as those featured in 3-Iron, LADY VENGEANCE, POETRY, and THIRST, provide discursive strategies for overcoming the epistemological constraints of humanism and its concomitant ethical presuppositions.