Visible environment, invisible politics: An ecocinema reading of popular Korean film and television

Abstract

This study examines how the environment and climate change appear in globally popular South Korean films and K-dramas (2020–2024). Grounded in ecocinema and drawing on Foucault, we analyze 15 K-dramas and 14 films (∼287 h), combining computational scene detection with human coding and qualitative close readings. Environmental reference is scarce, filling 0.36% of running time across 40 scenes, and explicit climate change reference is scarcer still: two scenes in one film name climate change, while the rest concern recycling, weather events, local development, everyday eco-friendly conduct, and the pandemic. Where environmental issues appear, they are depoliticized as individual virtue, local dispute, or private misfortune, and the disasters carrying a climate resonance are never attributed to climate change. Reading film and television together reveals industry-wide marginalization rather than format-specific trends. The study contributes to ecocinema by extending it to popular scripted television and to a non-Western screen industry long overlooked in environmental media research.