The Paradoxical Unity of Chicago and Modern Boy

Abstract

This essay investigates how the interconnected nature of popular culture provides apt illustrations to reveal the ambivalent nature of modernity. I argue that the notion of modernity and popular culture emerged together in the early twentieth century in both the cities of Gyeongsung (old name of Seoul, Korea) and Chicago when technology and mass consumer culture were promoted over the world. Also, I examine how popular culture represents a complex of mutually-interdependent perspectives and values that influence society and its institutions in various ways as the image of modernity continues to build in the contemporary era. For this argument, I comparatively consider two movies released in 2002 and 2008 that exemplify the complexities of modernity in Chicago and Gyeongsung of the 1920s and 30s: Chicago and Modern Boy. Ultimately, this essay pays attention to how popular culture devotes itself to other images or narratives instead of referring to the real world and its output revisits the contemporary or past times in other places, being a means to produce and reproduce the accumulated images of the modern which shapes ceaseless simulacra of modernity over complexities of modernity.