19, Leo.
김종현, 샤이니
Have such a strong pride that it gets in the way sometimes
It's always the little thing that makes my life great
'Be with me, be my last love'
Some things that I found at the top of my mind as I ate my way through Reborn Rich like a midnight snack I wasn’t hungry for:
A company called JoongAng Holdings, together with JoongAng Ilbo, holds 29.99% of the stake in JTBC, the channel that aired Reborn Rich (whose production house, SLL, made the show). The newspaper JoongAng Ilbo was floated in 1965 by Lee Byeong-cheol, the founder of Samsung, together with a man whose daughter married Lee Byeong-cheol’s third son.
CJ E&M, the entertainment company that has produced some of Korean drama’s biggest hits, is owned by Miky Lee, who got an Oscar for producing Parasite. CJE&M owns TVN, OCN, Studio Dragon and a number of other concerns. Miky Lee is the daughter of Lee Byeong-cheol’s oldest son, Lee Maeng-hee.
In other words, a substantial portion the k-drama you and I get to see on international streaming platforms is made by companies owned or run by the descendants or the in-laws of Lee Byeong-cheol, who started his empire either with a rice mill in Masan (Bruce Cumings, Korea’s Place In The Sun), or a vegetable shop in Daegu (Geoffrey Cain, Samsung Rising) or a truck ferrying supplies during the Korean War (Kim Tae-hee & Jang Eun-jae, Reborn Rich).
Reborn Rich was based on a web-novel. (I don’t know if it was published on a platform that’s connected to Samsung.) I see the appeal of a web-novel, a kind of autarkic form, that gives readers the pleasure of recognising the extremely well-known history of their country’s most famous and troublesome corporation in a family drama skewering its personalities. It’s a form of class comedy — you don’t really want to eat the rich, but you enjoy feeling a certain moral and intellectual superiority over them. It’s ripe to carry over into kdrama, which has always been careful to represent the interests of its audiences without upsetting the interests of its industrialists.
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I’ve read maybe one biography in my life in which the subject co-operated with their writer and helped produce a truly brilliant book. Authorised biopics about famous people are an embarrassment, especially when they’ve very obviously done something shameful but would like to revise public memory about it.
But I think the really creative thing about Reborn Rich is someone, somewhere, recognising that it would get people on their side — that, with the right actors and the right amount of melodrama, they could create a monument to the people it’s about under the guise of criticising them. Because that’s what it is. The power of this family and their wealth isn’t detestable in Reborn Rich. It’s deeply enjoyable. They may relinquish their management rights but they will never let go of their hold of your imagination. We live in capitalism. The capitalists’ power seems inescapable.
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In Reborn Rich a guy has to be in two separate fatal car accidents, get shot in the head and kicked off a tall cliff, then live two separate lives, the memories of both of which he presumably retains, in order to send one guy to jail — for a crime he wasn’t even directly responsible for committing. Lee Jae-yong, Lee Byeong-cheol’s grandson, was convicted of bribery and embezzlement and did time in prison, though he has now been pardoned. The bar for punishment is higher in fiction than it is in life. A chaebol heir can’t simply be corrupt and negligent; they have to be actively involved in the murder of a family member to face retribution.
In fiction, the instruments of popular control, like the courts or government, can’t be seen to compete. Even a righteous prosecutor, with brains and guts and a privileged family on her side, can be no more than second fiddle to the larger trick of fate embodied in Song Joong-ki twice over.
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Until the very end I wasn’t sure why Hyun-woo, who appears only at the beginning and the end of the show, couldn’t be played by an entirely different actor. I think the power of the connection between Do-jun and Hyun-woo is strengthened by the premise that it isn’t supernatural or magical, even if it is meta-physical. The thread should be clear: Yoon Hyun-woo, a servant of the nasty family that tries to bump him off, spends a week in a coma in which he lives the life of a man he unwittingly helped to kill. Do-jun’s death is a function of the accident of his birth; Hyun-woo’s awakening is a function of the literal accident of that death. His last act, to indict himself in that murder, is his apology to Do-jun. His second life as a hopeful, successful man is what he’s owed by a system warped by the sons of rich men, like Do-jun.
Even if the rest of the show was gleefully unbothered about justice, this loop clearly wanted to be about that. Hyun-woo even says at the end that their intertwining lives are about redeeming one another. I think this would have been simpler and stronger to portray than what the show does, which is — I’m not sure what it is, actually. Perhaps it’s because this part wasn’t clear that they needed the signalling value of SJK in both roles.
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I think Samsung should give Lee Sung-min their semiconductors business in thanks for what he’s done for them.
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You know there’s that bit in One: The Woman in which Lee Hanee fakes her own death to get out of her awful chaebol family, and then her plans are upset because a lookalike Lee Hanee gets trapped into the chaebol life in her stead? I wish there’d been a Reborn Rich that was just about Mo Hyeon-min run tormented by her parents’ decision to marry her into the country’s richest clan, disgusted with her in-laws and her sociopathic husband, going into a coma after an “accident” and finding herself reliving her life in a way that allowed her to correct all the mistakes of the past, and coming back to avenge her past and secure her future. Isn’t k-drama supposed to be a woman’s medium? Wouldn’t women like to see this?
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Between the gangster lawyer fluent in multiple foreign languages and the double-role chaebol revenge drama, One: The Woman actually married the plots of two Song Joong-ki blockbuster dramas. If you don’t have the time for 40-50 hours of Song Joong-ki content you could just watch One: The Woman.
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Three characters in the drama play crucial roles in deciding the fates of the Soonyang family members at crucial points. One keeps a recording that helps embarrass a Jin heir at a board meeting. One provides evidence to prosecutors that a Jin heir bribed a presidential candidate. One creates false evidence to target a Jin heir on behalf of another. All of them are management professionals, directors, personal assistants — the secretariat of commoners that keeps the business running. They’re highly paid white-collar professionals even if we’re required to see them in that most cringeingly informal of working-class situations, that of the domestic worker.
Reborn Rich is about their revenge, and only theirs. It is the dream of a labour aristocracy that doesn’t want anything about society to change other than the slight thickening of its own slice of the pie. Hyun-woo pretty much says so to Mason Oh: no one *really* cares about nepotism. Do-jun pretty much assumes so when he sees the debris of ordinary lives shattered by the upheavals of the economy. He doesn’t think I helped create this mess thanks to the games I’m playing with my family. He thinks, I’ve escaped this fate because I’m a nepo baby now. Everyone wants to be a nepo baby.
You don’t have to do the indelicate job of criticising criticise workers if you can just choose to ignore them. You don’t have to imagine justice as anything other than getting yours. You don’t even have to offer an alternative if you simply pretend that none exists. This is all Hyun-woo needs. Hyun-woo wipes down toilets for the ruling family but he’s a senior manager in the hierarchy. A highly paid white-collar professional. Someone who’d like to have had an inheritance.
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A message doesn’t have to be coherent to be powerful. A message can be: we’ve learned our lesson and we are sorry. A message can be: your quarrel with us isn’t fundamental, it’s just a matter of reasonable differences on how to inherit wealth and how to spend it. It can be ‘guess who?’ and ‘spot the difference,’ games that will entertain you more than a factual narrative.
Miky Lee’s father was once called the Sado of Samsung for his erratic behaviour and his father’s punishing disapproval, which denied him the chance to inherit the company. A message can be: we are worthy of Shakespearean contemplation, because our stories are as weighty and sorrowful and complex as those of the kings of yore. Through our tragedies we gain popular legitimacy.
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