<엑시트>에서 <콘크리트 유토피아>로 —팬데믹 이후 한국 재난 영화에 나타난 세계 인식의 변화에 관한 연구

초록

This study examines the transformation of Korean disaster films before and after the pandemic through a comparative analysis of Exit (Lee Sang-geun, 2019) and Concrete Utopia (Um Tae-hwa, 2023), and explores how these changes relate to the structural transformations of the media environment accelerated in the post-pandemic era. Exit, produced before the pandemic, presents a clear threat in the form of toxic gas dispersed by terrorists and technical-physical processes of overcoming it through rock climbing skills, thereby maintaining an optimistic worldview that presupposes the ‘legibility’ of the world and the possibility of restoring social systems even in disaster situations. In contrast, Concrete Utopia coldly depicts conflicts and exclusion among survivors in the Hwanggung Apartment complex set against the backdrop of ruined Seoul, foregrounding uncertainty, mutual distrust, and the rampage of exclusive communities, thereby revealing fundamental fractures in world perception. This transformation in disaster narratives is closely connected to changes in contemporary media conditions accelerated by the pandemic: the formation of algorithmic subjectivity, non-narrative image experiences based on short-form platforms, and the fragmentation of attention. This signifies an epistemological turn in the fundamental ways human subjects understand the world, beyond mere changes in media consumption patterns, demonstrating the structural impossibility of Fredric Jameson’s ‘cognitive mapping.’ However, Concrete Utopia also presents the possibility of alternative solidarity through the horizontal community formed in the 90-degree collapsed apartment. This suggests new ethical-political possibilities that embrace uncertainty rather than recovering certainty, showing that genuine alternative solidarity after disaster can only be pursued when the impossibility of totality is presupposed.

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