The public response in support of the film may seem to suggest that many saw it not simply as entertainment but as an intervention into South Korea’s fraught political moment at the time. However, the film’s ideological function is often overlooked, which entraps the past to the confines of sentimental catharsis or convenient moralization. When put into relief against the concurrent political crisis in South Korea, the proliferation of such filmic narratives reveals an urgent truth about the realities they (fail to) represent: that fascist authoritarianism is neither a thing of a bygone past nor an aberration from the norms of the present but consistent with liberal capitalist democracy’s ideological foundations.

Released almost exactly a year prior to Yoon Suk Yeol’s December 2024 martial law declaration, 12.12: The Day is a good example of how cultural production in South Korea, particularly its cinematic representation of national history, abets its contemporary political crises. On the surface, the film offers a cautionary tale about the evil of authoritarianism, portraying Chun and his co-conspirators as ruthless opportunists who orchestrate a military takeover in a single night that would plunge South Korea into yet another authoritarian rule for nearly a decade. The moral dichotomy of its narrative is reinforced through the protagonist, Capital Garrison Commander Lee Tae-shin (a fictionalized version of General Jang Tae-wan), who resists the coup despite overwhelming odds. 

While it claims to tell an “untold story” that transpired unbeknownst to the South Korean public at the time, the film’s narrow historical framing and hero-centric narrative reduces its function to an affective relief by way of ideological containment. Such a reductive narrative approach that indulges in sensationalizing the hypermasculine showdown between the two men in turn collapses history into a spectacle that disavows deeper structural conditions in South Korea—namely, the entrenchment of militarism within liberal democracy, (post-)Cold War US neocolonialism, and the ideological foundations of neoliberal capitalism. In that sense, 12.12: The Day becomes a kind of fetish object through which a shameful, unpalatable past can be exorcised, so to speak, from national consciousness without confronting the structures that produced collective trauma. 

The clear-cut moral dichotomy between “loyal defenders of democracy” and power-hungry usurpers, however, does not simply serve the purpose of easy consumption qua understanding of history; on a more unconscious level, it proselytizes a kind of national consciousness that is premised on an absolution from its past while still being indebted to it. The film performs this almost ritual-like process by propping Chun Doo-gwang (a fictionalized version of Chun Doo-hwan) against the stalwart general Lee Tae-shin and isolating him as a megalomaniac, an incarnation of greed, who hijacked the historical trajectory of the nation that had been otherwise promised to democratize. Their antagonism is established early in the film, notably in Lee’s remark when he confronts Chun about his chivalrous nonconformism vis-à-vis the latter’s secret military faction, Hanahoe: “Everyone in the Korean Army is on the same side.” While this somewhat naive yet backhanded provocation invites a moral identification with Lee who selflessly fights for the good of the republic against all odds, it also betrays a nationalist logic that inadvertently mirrors Chun’s in a way that exposes the ideological slippage between liberal democracy and fascist authoritarian militarism. 

Lee’s statement, which seems to affirm the role of the military as the guardian of an idealized unified nation, is not too different from the kind of logic Chun and his Hanahoe faction exploited to justify their coup. Yoon’s most recent attempt to justify martial law reveals a troubling continuity with such logic. In both Chun’s and Lee’s rhetoric, the nation is imagined as a singular, unified body in need of protection—an idea that lends itself easily to authoritarian control when “unity” is threatened. Despite positioning Lee as the moral antithesis of Chun, the film fails to reckon with the ideological structures that have historically underpinned both fascist authoritarian militarism and liberal democracy in South Korea—namely, the valorization of military discipline, hypermasculinist heroic individualism, and the cult of national homogeneity. These elements form the militarist foundation that liberal democracy disavows rhetorically but depends on structurally, revealing a continuity (if not complicity) rather than a rupture between past authoritarianism and the present political order in South Korea.

This becomes even more evident in the film’s final act, when Lee, in a dramatic display of his unwavering will despite defeat, stumbles over the road barriers and razor wires to declare: “You aren’t worthy as a Korean soldier or even a human being.” The visual staging of this moment—Lee defeated but upright, Chun dumbfounded—casts Lee as a tragic martyr whose moral clarity transcends his loss. Yet this climactic confrontation also reveals how the film reduces the struggle for democracy to a matter of personal virtue and moral judgment, reinforcing the very logic it seeks to critique. Through Lee’s character, the film thus enunciates a liberal nationalist historicization that depicts democracy’s survival as hinging on tragic individual heroism. 

In substituting a glorified representation of a national hero (albeit defeated) for structural critiques of power, the film erases the broader conditions that made the coup possible in the first place—namely, the institutional complicity of the military and judiciary, the continuity of authoritarian logics within liberal democratic structures, and the tacit support of Cold War allies like the United States. Rather than implicating these forces, the film arrogates historical responsibility onto a single villain, thus absolving the present order by recasting the past as a moral aberration. In doing so, it offers catharsis in place of critique and substitutes symbolic redemption for political reckoning.

This omission of the role of the US government and military is particularly striking given that they were not entirely unaware of the possibility that Chun could make such a move. The film adumbrates the extent of the US government and military’s role in a brief scene when the spineless Minister of National Defense takes cover at the US Embassy, where the American Ambassador merely informs him that there is nothing they can do for him since there’s no indication of an imminent North Korean invasion. While official records remain limited and classified, it is known that Jimmy Carter was briefed on the situation and opted for non-intervention, citing the concurrent Iran hostage crisis.¹ But to characterize this as simply “hands-off” would be misleading since 12.12: The Day sidesteps the issue entirely, presenting the coup as an internal struggle among Korean military elites rather than part of a broader history of US Cold War imperialism in pursuit of strategic interests in the region. 

This choice reflects more than narrative convenience, which, given the current martial law crisis, could function as reassuring the audience that authoritarianism is a result of bad individual actors rather than stemming from the geopolitical entanglements in which South Korea remains embedded. By displacing these realities onto a narrative of moral resolution, the film absorbs anxieties about backsliding democracy into the horrors of its authoritarian past. 

The film’s liberal reception further reveals its ideological function. Despite—or precisely because of—critical omissions and aestheticization, viewers and critics alike praised it for “exposing” Chun’s crimes. Its popularity was widely interpreted as a sign of the South Korean public’s enduring commitment to democracy. Following Yoon’s martial law debacle, its striking timeliness has been highlighted in several articles and interviews with director Kim Sung-su, in which he attributes the film’s success not only to the failed martial law but also to the South Korean audience’s strong moral values and political awareness. Yet this very framing reflects what Ugo Palheta describes as the liberal inability to recognize fascism’s recurrence within democratic regimes. Palheta critiques the tendency to treat fascism as a historical aberration rather than a structural possibility within neoliberal capitalism itself. To his point, 12.12: The Day presents Chun’s dictatorship as an exceptional rupture rather than an outgrowth of Cold War authoritarianism, which continues to shape South Korean politics today.

At the same time, Kim’s initial concerns about whether the film would break even, given its large budget during the pandemic, is also revealing. That the investors doubled their profits through this film is telling: the commercial success of 12.12: The Day is not entirely incidental but reflects a broader market-driven trend within the cultural logic of South Korea’s neoliberal economic regime. Since the 1990s, state-backed venture capital and foreign investment—particularly from Hollywood and more recently American streaming platforms like Netflix—have played a consequential role in shaping South Korea’s cultural productions and discourses that prioritize mass appeal among both domestic and global audiences (a similar strategy behind the global advent of K-pop). The film’s reductivism can be then seen more as operating within and according to the larger cultural logic that dilutes national trauma to a spectacular commodity via the trope of the tragic national hero. The emblematic neoliberal ideology of “meritocratic” individualism is very much inscribed in the film’s depiction of Lee Tae-shin as that “real soldier” (as described by the Martial Law Commander Chung Sang-ho), who alone resists against corrupt forces, reinforcing the illusion that democracy hinges on exceptional individuals rather than collective political struggle.²

This is not to say that films should abide by a doctrine of historical realism, faithfully representing every bit of detail. But eschewing nuances, 12.12: The Day prioritizes narrative convenience that translates into marketability for an audience eager and ready to condemn an easy evil. It doesn’t quite lend itself to anything other than gratuitous catharsis that obviates genuine grappling with the historical content being portrayed. At best, it lends a vaguely sentimental aftertaste of cliché patriotism (“never forget”) and a diminutive sense of moral conviction, not unlike the kind of uneasy attachment liberals harbor toward nationalism. 

Such fetishization of history in cultural representation reflects a similar process of ideological containment in contemporary political discourse, especially those deployed by the far-right (notably the ruling People Power Party) in South Korea and abroad. These discourses evacuate cultural narratives of historical and political content, offering fascist justifications for power that obscure the material conditions underpinning them—especially class antagonisms. Perversions of categorical distinctions now abound, lending fascist rhetoric an air of universality that makes it increasingly difficult to challenge. The liberal Democratic Party is not entirely exempt from criticism for they are also largely complicit in the neocolonial paradigm of American-backed finance capitalism. 

Despite their seeming differences, liberal democracy and fascism are but a double expression of the same crisis: the bourgeois domination in the late stage of capitalism. Their apparent contradictions—between rule by consent and rule by coercion, individual rights and collective submission, inclusivity and exclusion—conceals a deeper structural continuity. Fascism on one hand is not as “anti-systemic” as it initially presents itself but a reactionary ideological mechanism that emerges to defend capital accumulation by deflecting class antagonism onto race, gender, and minority issues. This ideological muddling serves to maintain capitalist hegemony, particularly in a period of chronic economic depression, where excess capital and surplus labor generate structural instability on a global scale. Fascism emerges precisely when liberal democratic governance, with its emphasis on free market and individual rights, can no longer reconcile social contradictions endemic to capitalism through consent alone, resulting in a crisis of representation where coercion becomes the primary means of rule. It therefore preys upon both the malcontent and impotence of the atomized, vulnerable masses with the chimerical allure of its rhetoric that attracts them like moths to a flame.

When liberal democracy along with its pretenses begins to collapse upon itself, what emerges from its decaying body is the fascist underside that manipulates economic anxieties through expansionist means. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that Trump is now explicitly calling for land grabs—Canada, Greenland, Ukraine, Gaza, etc.—for oil, gas, and rare minerals under the logic of national security. The collapse of liberalism into explicit imperial aggression is not a departure but a logical culmination of the system’s internal contradictions.

12.12: The Day exemplifies how this ideological sleight-of-hand is enacted through the soft power of cultural production. Its omission of US complicity in Chun’s coup, the tragic hero narrative, and the subtle ideological slippages are not incidental but reflect the structural imperatives of a neoliberal cultural economy that necessitates depoliticization to serve the ideological needs of both the South Korean state and global capital. The film’s success then is symptomatic of a political moment where neoliberalism’s failures compels a (re)turn toward nationalist mythmaking, thereby contributing, however faintly, to the very fascist authoritarian tendencies it ostensibly condemns.

In that sense, the spring as suggested by the Korean title of the film (Spring in Seoul) never did arrive; it has been disavowed time and time again, just like the other “springs” or “liberation spaces” (haebangkonggan) that emerged from the interstices between regimes—authoritarian, liberal democratic or fascist. If the current situation in South Korea is not reckoned with in these terms, the momentum of popular protests that has gained traction in the wake of the short-lived martial law could fall back onto what Tosaka Jun called “sentimental liberalism” or “a politically impotent ‘cultural liberalism’ that… [has] abandoned politics and economics and confine[s] itself to the aesthetic and cultural realism.”³ Art in this case could only be a pseudo-religious fetish object through which we absolve ourselves of an indelible guilt—the nature of which we do not dare contemplate. Or, in more secular terms, art is reduced to a sanitation device with which we wash our history of the contaminants that pose threats to the planetarium of mythical images we have built around ourselves, in which we mistake our “values” for our virtues. 

In an unprecedented show of solidarity, recent Nobel laureate Han Kang has joined other prominent South Korean writers in a public petition urging the Constitutional Court to promptly deliver its long-delayed ruling on Yoon Suk Yeol’s impeachment. The political crisis South Korea faces, alarming as it may be, presents an opening to imagine once over an afterlife of capitalism, to reconfigure the coordinates of the possible from within. Perhaps it is then a matter of realizing how long we believe we can afford to disavow the feeling—more widely felt than ever—that something is terribly wrong; but also remembering anew, in pursuing that thread, that even though (or precisely because) the past cannot be obliterated, what we do from here on out is our collective responsibility.