트라우마 이후의 삶과 멜로드라마의 ‘관계’ 윤리: [멜로 무비](Netflix, 2025)를 중심으로 = The Ethics of ‘Sustainment’ and Affective Translation: A Study on the Relational Working-through in Melo Movie

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This article examines the “ethics of sustainment” formed by subjects living through the temporality of loss in the aftermath of disaster, focusing on the Netflix original series Melo Movie (2025). Contemporary Korean melodrama is increasingly shifting away from the conventional paradigm of salvation through romantic union and instead foregrounds modes of connection that persist while bearing the weight of traumatic pasts.
Drawing on Dominick LaCapra’s concepts of acting-out and working-through, this study traces the aesthetic and ethical processes through which characters negotiate trauma and establish relational bonds. The self-effacing labor and sacrifice of the older brother, Go-jun, exemplify a form of “acting-out sustainment,” in which one suspends one’s own life in order to secure a place for the other. This operates both as a defensive mechanism that converts the helplessness of disaster into a sense of ethical debt and as an ethics of self-erasure that sustains the present.
In contrast, the shared mourning enacted by the surviving characters, Go-gyeom and Kim Mu-bi, through the translation of each other’s affects, constitutes a “relationality of working-through.” Rather than aiming at complete healing, this process enables a mode of “being-with” by incorporating the other’s pain into one’s own sensory experience.
By redefining loss not as something to be overcome but as a condition that organizes relationality, Melo Movie demonstrates how melodrama can extend beyond a narrative of romantic closure. It functions as a site of communal mourning and a medium for reflecting on post-disaster existence, thereby expanding the ethical horizon of melodrama as a genre.