The Sensus Communis of the K-Drama

Image by Amber Lee. Adapted from screenshot taken from episode 8, season 1 of Love Alarm, 2019. 

Love Alarm is a high school romance drama series whose first season was released on Netflix in 2019. It features a conceit that, when read allegorically, sheds light on how technology mediates human affection. Set in contemporary Seoul, the plot to Love Alarm revolves around a mobile phone app called Joalarm, a portmanteau of “choa” (to be good) and “allam” (alarm), that notifies the user when another person harbors feelings of attraction for them. It functions similarly to the “like” button utilized in a wide variety of social media platforms, but Joalarm requires that the one who does the liking be within 10 meters of the person who is liked. The series depicts these moments of attraction through an overhead two-shot, with each body surrounded by three concentric circles that represent the precise distances when the users’ phones may interact. When Joalarm is downloaded for the first time, it prompts the user to “synchronize” their “heart” (“maeum”) with the app. While gathering biometric information, the phone sounds gentle electronic noises as colorful graphics swirl around them.

When the drama’s good-looking male protagonist, Hwang Sun-oh, walks onto Lee Hye-yeong and Kim Jo-jo’s high school campus, his phone repeatedly notifies him with animations and soft chimes. Sun-oh is a model for Seventeen in Korea and his image is already familiar to many of the students at the school. Hye-young has been Sun-oh’s older best friend since childhood but is not a model and does not come from a well-off family. Jo-jo will be their mutual love interest. A short clip posted on Instagram appears on Hye-young’s feed that recorded the moment when Sun-oh’s phone notified him of the affections of his admirers. The mobile phone is key for Love Alarm in manifesting signs of secret feelings of attraction, unspoken and perhaps even unknown to oneself, availing them for perception and scrutiny by others. Throughout the series, a character will peer at their phone in anticipation (or in dread) as another person approaches their vicinity.

Sun-oh walking onto Jo-jo's campus in episode 1, season 1 of Love Alarm 

This premise of the series rests on the production of certainty that is confirmed through a technology that connects users to each other through the circulation of signs of attraction. In a later episode of Love Alarm, a couple marries at a wedding hall and the bride and groom are urged by the guests to confirm their true feelings for each other by holding up their ringing phones to the gathered guests. A K-pop group making a public appearance shows their phone screens to confirm that they are loved by their fans. The mobile device in Love Alarm functions as a technology that, as a kind of prosthetic extension of the body, extends its capacity to express feelings that have not been articulated in speech or through an affectionate gesture. Throughout the series, close-up shots of the Joalarm app, as well as of KakaoTalk, Naver, and other SNS platforms, are incessant, showcasing fingers tapping icons, swiping away notifications, and typing on touch-screen keyboards. These platforms draw their users into a network of shared activity and implicate them in a web of human relations revolving around the politics of liking and being liked.

In the romantic melodrama, the expression of affection typically takes recourse in the performance of sincere words and signals expressed in body language, particularly when the one who loves bares their heart to the beloved. External signs produced by the desiring body, such as tone of voice, demeanor, and countenance, give way to the truth of their desire. The Joalarm app enables these signs to be produced through the means of the cell phone, a technology that has been fully integrated into the activity of embodied human life. The desiring body itself, in the encounter with the beloved other, may be considered a technology of emotional expression. But, staying within what the K-drama might teach us, let me propose that its particular poetics, one that revolves around the solicitation of sympathy and affection from the drama viewer, can be read allegorically in the Joalarm app.

In what I have called the “affective interlude,” I have tried to show that the poetics of K-drama emotion can be found, not in the moments where dialogue and narrative action dominate, but in the moments that seem to suspend the forward movement of the plot. The affective interlude appears at the culmination of key plot points and typically features a character feeling something: affection, loneliness, disappointment, resolve in the face of emotional adversity, heartbreak, quiet wonder, or the “glow” felt by a character who shares chemistry with another. The character’s facial expressions and bodily gestures are made into a spectacle in these moments, facilitated through slight camera movements, rack focus, and slow motion. These elements affirm the sensitivity of a character to the world while putting their heartfelt sentiment on display. In turn, the viewer is solicited to feel something as well. When a beset character expresses emotional hardship in overcoming challenges that are inextricably linked to the consequences of capitalism, the ideological tensions between tradition and modernity, or Korea’s intensely competitive culture, the spectacle of their emotional fragility, of their true, vulnerable self, solicits the viewer to recognize their essential virtue and sympathize with them by shedding tears. The spectacle of Dong-eun’s wounds in The Glory (2022), Hee-do listening to Yi-jin’s voicemail recording in Twenty-Five Twenty-One (2022), or Eun-sang’s recognition of her deaf mother’s sacrifice in The Heirs (2013): these significant moments in the plot showcase the private emotions of a character, as if just for the viewer, through the affective interlude.

Non-diegetic music and sound design are key for understanding the aesthetics of the K-drama in their seeming ubiquity and function in punctuating emotional moments in the narrative action. In this sense, the K-drama may be likened to opera. Sparse piano chords, a series of plucked guitar strings, and ostinato patterns give time for and choreograph the rhythm of viewers’ emotions. Music provides color to expressive moments throughout the drama and, especially during the affective interlude, operates as a kind of leitmotiv that is not intended to be listened to critically but simply felt. This flow of feeling perhaps helps us understand the emotional comprehension that K-drama viewers, particularly those not familiar with the language, claim to possess when watching their beloved series. The interlude allows the Korean language to be heard like an aria, sung as if directly from the heart. What matters is a sensitivity to the rhythms and timbre of the language as if one were listening to a melody. During the affective interlude, image and sound work in consort with the sentimental emotions felt by a character, moving fluidly between interiority and expression, while soliciting viewers to feel the same, like one note inspiring another to vibrate in sympathy.

In making emotion legible through the means of popular moving-image narrative, K-dramas function like the love alarm technology in Love Alarm, mediating feelings of attraction between individuals while publicizing and radiating these feelings out to viewers, soliciting them to feel sympathetically. In this sense, Love Alarm can be read reflexively to provide insight into its own aesthetics. If there is such a thing as a poetics of K-drama, if a specific aesthetics can be identified in Korean serial television, we might look to how its entire formal and narrative structure seems to culminate in these interludes.

Further, these interludes consolidate a community of K-drama lovers who are dispersed throughout the world. These are viewers who stream Korean dramas on their personal screens, distanced from each other and geographically far from Korea. Love Alarm, ranked the sixth most-watched K-drama on Netflix in 2021, has provided this platform’s over 220 million subscribers with the opportunity to observe how young Koreans engage in romance and express affection for each other. But it also provides the opportunity for global viewers to become interested in Korea and Koreanness and be drawn into a network of K-drama audiences, like the users of the Joalarm app, who are engaged in the circulation of affectionate feeling.

For the past several summers, I have had the pleasure of teaching Korean cinema to college students in the Yonsei International Summer School in Seoul. Hundreds of young people, who hail from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and the US, participate in the program and learn about Korean history, study the language, and experience the culture. Many have at least a bit of Korean language fluency. For some of them, this is the first time that they are traveling outside of their home countries. My class meets four days a week for 100 minutes each day, so when the opportunity to chat with students arises before or after class, I often come back to the same question: what inspired you to travel all this way to learn about Korea? Their responses vary, though they typically revolve around previous encounters with popular culture and media. When I started teaching Korean cinema at Yonsei, students would often mention specific films like Oldboy (2003) or auteurs like Hong Sang-soo. These days, however, their knowledge of K-cinema tends to be sparse. Many of them have seen Bong Joon-ho’s acclaimed Parasite (2019), but not much else. When students cite aspects of Korean culture that sparked their desire to spend six weeks in Seoul, during the sweltering month of July, many confess a keen interest in K-pop and K-drama. And when I inquire further, I quickly discover that some students command a knowledge of idols, groups, and television series that rivals that of my colleagues in Korean Studies.

I, too, harbor a passion for Korean dramas. These often moving television serials, typically spanning 16 to 24 episodes, have made up the bulk of my current Korean media consumption. While shows like Signal (2016), Tunnel (2017), and Penthouse (2020–2022) can be considered unrealistic in their conceits, cloying in their sentimentality, and outrageous in their plot twists, they have remained guilty pleasures for me nonetheless and can be deeply engrossing, precisely because of their brazen expression of emotion. Indeed, the sincerity and wholesomeness of their stories and characters stand in contrast to the excessive cynicism and irony that characterize some American serial television today. At a key moment in the first season of Stranger (2017), I sympathized with Han Yeo-jin’s profound disappointment when she realizes that justice will not be served because of corruption that has implicated leaders within the National Police Agency and her own Office of Prosecution. In episode five of Because This Is My First Life (2017), I was moved when Yoon Ji-ho, at her sham wedding, reads a letter that her unconditionally loving mother addressed to the groom, in which she requests that he allow the new bride to continue her profession as a K-drama writer. These strongly emotional moments are made up of audiovisual elements that I identified in Love Alarm: close-up shots of Ji-ho’s face and the pages of a photo album, a slow tracking image of Yeo-jin on the verge of tears as she becomes disillusioned, flashbacks to moments from earlier episodes, a mother’s assuring voice-over, and gushing music. These interludes are some of the reasons why so many fans are drawn to K-dramas in their power to compel audiences to sympathize when characters experience profound gratitude, crushing disappointment, or quiet joy. Sentimental emotion appears in television and movies of other nations, but in its emphasis on emotional moments like these, the K-drama proves exemplary in highlighting the capacity of audiovisual aesthetics to solicit spectator sympathy in all popular moving-image narrative.

Ji-ho crying over her mother's heartfelt letter in episode 5 of Because This Is My First Life

I sympathize with my students in their passion for K-dramas and hearing them talk about what they are watching is infectious. Clearly, they have traveled far to assuage the pining left by their favorite dramas and to become closer to the culture and language depicted in them. In an essay about Hallyu tourism and transnational intimacy, Min Joo Lee describes the K-drama as a technology that “ferries” emotion across geographic and cultural boundaries. Viewers, of course, do not embrace and touch the actors within the diegesis, yet drama fans feel profoundly touched by these stories taking place in a country and in a language far away from their own. In depicting dialogue and action, the K-drama excels in presenting emotion through a myriad of means within the shot and around it: not just the almost ritualistic emphasis on facial expression and meaningful objects, but also narratively decisive flashback moments, beautiful cinematography, and meticulous mise-en-scène. Language in the K-drama does not simply signify meaning, it also manifests an illocutionary force, constituted through the performance of sound and gesture that figures the comportment of the speaker in relation to the listener. Words “do things” when uttered in specific contexts and depending on who says them. All languages carry this force of the illocutionary, of course, but the K-drama shows us how the performative utterance always already implicates an ethics of the other. Affect, a measure of intentionality by the speaker, is generated in these speech acts, guided by norms of courtesy and etiquette within the Korean language, and signaled through honorific language and the use of titles. Interestingly, in her article Lee describes some K-drama fans whose lack of fluency in Korean “did not hinder their viewing pleasures because what mattered more were their ‘emotional’ comprehensions of the drama.” It seems that the visual and sound design alone were enough to allow some K-drama lovers to become fond of the drama’s characters and emotionally invest in its stories. These fans attest to the power of dramas to draw non-Korean viewers into Korean worlds of feeling and being. The students in my cinema classes arrive in Seoul, perhaps in this vein, to rediscover the emotions they felt when streaming their favorite dramas and K-pop videos in their home countries. They then make new waves when they participate on discussion platforms, create supercuts, record vlogs, and create TikTok videos about their favorite moments.

At the beginning of episode eight of Love Alarm, the last of the first season, Hye-yeong and Jo-jo approach each other on a school soccer field. She tells him to stand at a distance and thanks him for expressing his love for her. They turn on their Joalarm apps and two concentric circles appear around their bodies like ripples of light. The young lovers walk toward each other once more and, when the circles indicate that they are within 10 meters of each other, Jo-jo’s love alarm rings. They both smile, Hye-yeong mounts his bicycle, and the drama enters into an interlude while he rides around her with his phone held up high, intersecting her 10-meter circle multiple times in joy. An anthemic song by Tearliner, “A Man for All Seasons,” plays on the soundtrack. Its lyrics mention the “ringing heart” as the singer falls in love. This affective interlude is wholesome and sincere, so much so that the expressed emotions may come off as maudlin and, as my students might say, “cringey.”

Hye-yeong and Jo-jo confirming their feelings for each other through the Joalarm app in episode 8, season 1 of Love Alarm

As Hye-young and Jo-jo become more intimate, the interlude solicits intimacy from the lover of the K-drama. It consolidates a community of viewers through a kind of common sense and sensation, a Kantian sensus communis comprised of sympathetic feeling that invites viewers to imagine others in the world far away who ought to feel similarly. The Joalarm app similarly encourages its users to think of themselves as belonging to a community of lovers, drawn together through the intimate, but also very public, experience of affect and sympathy, even as the app holds them physically apart.

Issues of distance and proximity are integral to the mediation of feeling. Technology mediates these distances, not just between lovers in the drama and between Korea and the K-drama viewer, but also between individuals in the global community of K-drama lovers. Desire and sympathy cannot grow without this separation and the technologies that ferry emotion from faraway places. Representations of technology play this out within the K-drama plot, each of them allegorically shedding light on what the K-drama does. Like the walkie-talkie in Signal, the AI assistant in My Holo Love (2020), the audio surveillance app in My Mister (2018), or the Joalarm app in Love Alarm, technological devices bring individuals into relation, disclosing that the precondition for the ferrying of emotion lies in the mediation of feeling across gaps that subtend affecting and affected, embodied individuals. If the discourse of the heart longing for the beloved is contingent upon distance, the viewer who loves the K-drama also knows that this love is contingent upon the distance between themselves and the worlds of Korean affect depicted through sound and image. The perception of emotion, made legible through the ubiquitous appearance and use of smartphones and CCTV surveillance devices in the contemporary K-drama, inspires dramatic narrative plotlines but also emotional effects that ripple from characters to viewers, like a stone thrown in still water that moves leaves and other objects floating in its vicinity.  Ə