Watching K-Dramas
Like pornography, sentimentality undoes us.
You will read a novel with a silly premise—boss asks secretary to pretend to be his fiancée; woman is blackmailed into an affair because of her father’s debt; someone loses a bet and has to marry someone else—and the premise is augmented by bland dialogue and flat characters and predictable plots. And, still, you find yourself wiping away tears when the flat characters confess they love each other after enduring trials and tribulations. Most commonly, one character will catch a flu and be at death’s door, at which point declarations of love will be made.
Or, you will watch a series that features beautiful people but has terrible acting and even worse dialogue. The plot is predictable, and not even the sex between beautiful people is enough to redeem the assault on your taste and intellect. (I’m sorry, Noah’s Arc, but you are an aesthetic disaster.) Yet, the moment certain declarations happen—I love you; you own my heart; I cannot imagine my life without you; you are every beat of my heart—and the predictable violins swell, you are sobbing.
Sentimentality moves us, despite ourselves. Arbiters of what used to be called high culture despise this aspect of sentimentality, calling it cheap and exploitative. They resent the things that produce tears—most often, tears—but do not, they claim, fundamentally change our social relations or our intellectual practices or political stances. If we are to be moved by art, they say, it should be art that elevates us, that forces us to ask questions and confront the world and rethink our philosophies and reimagine our relations. Art that simply gives us a good cry or a good laugh or some kind of easy relief does not participate in these world-changing things. In fact, art that provides easy tears and easy laughs is un-art, un-aesthetic, unworthy.
I’m getting to the k-dramas, I promise.
The comparison to pornography is not simply gratuitous. Pornography undoes us. We catch a glimpse on someone’s device in public and we blush. We are moved in some way. Shocked. Aroused. Disgusted. Entranced. We look away. We want to look more. We worry it will reveal something about our secret passions. About what we want or don’t want, what we’ve done or haven’t, what we’ve been forced to do and what we hoped might happen. We are caught between what we profess to be and all our unacknowledged and unresolved desires. Perhaps this is psychoanalysis lite.
Netflix describes the k-dramas I’ve been watching as “swoonworthy.” They feature extraordinarily attractive people—Kan Tae-oh, Kang Ki-young, Park Min-young, Park See-joon, Lee Tae-hwan. The ones I’ve watched—What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim?, Her Private Life, Forecasting Love and Weather, all featuring Park Min-young—run for 16 episodes. They feel like reading a Mills & Boon or Harlequin, each episode a chapter. The characters gaze at each other a little too long. I blush. They confess their most intimate feelings with too much sincerity: “I like you,” “you fulfill me,” “your smile makes me happy,” “I always want to make you smile,” “every breath honors you,” “you transform me.” It’s the kind of dialogue sentimentality excels in. It’s a kind of painful sincerity.
Perhaps I find it refreshing because of the calculation and cynicism that seems to attend so much contemporary dating life. By contemporary, I mean at least the past 30 years. Calculations of compatibility based on income or potential income, one’s rank in the market of desirability, the cruel ethnonationalisms that dominate sex-love in Kenya, the notion of “leagues” and staying within or reaching beyond one’s league, the casualness with which so many Kenyan couples accept that their partners are cheating or will cheat—Kenya is hard on romance. The arbitrary rules about who contacts the other and when and how often. The miserly way affection is demonstrated and policed. Sincerity is rare. Painful sincerity even more so.
In romance, love is resolution and promise. A wild choice and deep commitment. A reward for reckless honesty. The most cutting pain. And a miraculous salve.
“I love you” is supposed to repair and heal, to erase harm when that harm has barely been acknowledged.
Actors in romances must believe in the most absurd premises and remain within a narrow range of gestures and emotions. We know that there are more ways of smiling than we can catalogue, yet, the romance actor is bound to about five types of smiles: shy, coy, bright, warm, happy. Sorry, those are not good ways to describe the smiles, but they are all I can come up with. The sly smile is rarely permitted, the seductive smile almost never, the vengeful smile absolutely not. Similarly, the actors’ eyes are limited in their emotional range: happy, sad, confused, affectionate, surprised. Women are given the eyes and the smiles. Men are given broad shoulders and the occasional tear.
It takes great skill to act within these limited emotions, to convey, over 16 episodes, how relationships grow and change across five different smiles. And to believe, somehow, that those five smiles convey the ultimate in feeling. They must have the power to cut through dialogue and to move audiences. We watch these dramas for their smiles and tears. We do not have drinking games based on each time a character smiles. Instead, we sigh, longingly, blush a little, and then tell all our friends that these dramas are absurd.
We keep watching.
While I find the lack of chemistry—a complicated term—in Hallmark films hilarious, as people who have mostly acted like siblings decide to transform their lives and to get married, I find the same lack of chemistry in k-dramas intriguing. Chemistry is a strange term. In many U.S. tv shows, it means characters have sex within the first 37 seconds of a series and, only later, do they discover they are coworkers. It is very boring. In the k-dramas I’ve watched, the characters have sex later in a series and we do not see anything that even seems explicit. A closed door. Rumpled sheets. People waking up next to each other. Suggestion. I find this relaxing. Even comforting. Perhaps because it positions sex as a choice made to explore something, not as an uncontrollable urge caused by too much drinking.
I find these shows relaxing. Even comforting. I’m glad to be watching them.