One of the prominent changes in the Korean film industry since 2000 is a reassertion of the directoral authority in the production and consumption of blockbuster films. Marking a departure from the frist generation of author theory which emphasized the artistic vision, the new author is more of a cultural and social construction than of textual traits. As in the case of Park Chan-wook whose revenge trilogy coincides with the emergence of his status as author director, the need of international recognition in the area of film festivals for the marketing purpose as well as the digitalization of cinema occurring with an effect of diversifying cinematic platforms customed to personalized viewing are behind the author director Park Chan-wook. Named as the brand author and theorized by Timothy Corrigan, this hybrid of promotional catch-phrase and the French tradition of auteur policy provides an access point for Park’s texts, even though it departs conceptually from the author as artistic vision realized through textual distinction.
To put the brand author in a context of the Field Theory by Broudieu, it becomes clear that the brand author is a place where two competing forces meet. Bourdieu argues that a field, whether it be economic or cultural, has its own structure and symbolic capital. A field cannot be reduced to other. In other words, a cultural field that works on its own structural order cannot be explained in terms of an economic one and vice versa. A diversified society consists of multiple fields. However, combined with Scott Lash’s theory on culture as phenomenon that should be experienced and moves through phases, for instance, from an arena of culture to marketing activities, the field theory provides a powerful tool to understand culture such as the understanding of cinematic text to be a part of field activity that works its own structure but that transforms in relation to a neighbouring field. In this sense, one can argue that the brand author is a field that stands on the past of the auteur theory but transforms in relations to the marketing needs in the age of cinematic digitalization. As a field, the brand author explains that signification of cinematic text, no longer confined in a cultural domain, is a norm constructed culturally and socially that has a possibility to transform into another set of rules and structure.