Abstract

This paper examines two films featuring the cultural icon of the so-called “national first love”—Once Upon a Time in High School: The Spirit of Jeet Kune Do (Maljukgeori Janh oksa, dir. Lee Yong-ju, 2004) and Architecture 101 (Geonchukhakgaeron, dir. Yoo Ha, 2012)—focusing on how they narrativize the failure of first love as a crucial rite of passage for “becoming a man.” Through an analysis of the basic narrative structure common to these films, this study demonstrates that they are structured around the “fall” from “sacred” heterosexual relation—spiritual and romantic—to “profane” heterosexual relation—carnal and erotic. These narratives presuppose a split of heterosexual practices that corresponds to the division of women according to the Madonna-whore dichotomy. While these films ostensibly narrate heterosexual romance, they are in fact stories about male homosocial dynamics. In this regard, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of a split structure within male homosociality that connects to the dichotomy of women and heterosexual desires: “heterosexual-desire-distributing” male homosociality and “heterosexual-desire-sharing” male homosociality. By analyzing the male characters in these films through this conceptual framework, this study argues that while the male subject becomes constituted through male homosocial relations, homosocial significations are translated into heterosexual signs; that the originary event of “becoming a man” is in fact retrospectively and retroactively imagined; and that the creation of such “translated stories of imagined origin” constitutes the very mechanism of male subjectification.