Hey.
So have you heard about this movie Parasite?
Pretty good, right?
Well, I’ve got a really hot take about it.
Are you ready?
The movie is about class.
I know!
I’m totally blowing your mind right now.
In all seriousness, Parasite is probably my favourite movie of last year.
It’s wickedly entertaining and efficient filmmaking.
It is also a pretty blunt allegory about inequality, and I don’t think you have to do a lot of
digging to get what director Bong Joon-ho is trying to tell you.
So if the broad strokes of what Parasite is about are clear, what am I doing here?
Well, I wanted to dive deeper into this movie and figure out what it was about, so I went back
and watched all seven films that Bong Joon-ho has written and directed.
And I think something really interesting happens when you look at Parasite in the context of
his entire filmography.
Here’s what I found.
Part One: Nice BECAUSE She’s Rich
Many other critics have pointed out that 2019 was The Year of Class Warfare on Film.
Between Knives Out, Us, Joker, Hustlers, Uncut Gems, and Ready or Not, it felt like writers
were falling over each other to say:
READY OR NOT: Fucking Rich People.
But Bong Joon-ho has been on this beat for twenty years.
His first movie came out in 2000 and is… well his only not good movie… the rest of
them are all classics in their genre, but Barking Dogs Never Bite is pretty stilted.
It’s also very uncomfortable given that it’s main character keeps killing dogs.
But I mention it because right from the beginning of his career, Bong Joon-ho was interested
in writing stories about class and how poverty changes people.
In Parasite, there’s a moment when the parents of the poor family make this observation.
Father: She’s so naive, and so nice.
Rich but still nice.
Mother: Not “Rich but still nice.”
Nice because she’s rich.
Hell if I had all this money, I’d be nice too.
Even nicer.
Father: That’s true, your mom’s right.
Rich people are naive.
No resentments.
No creases on them.
Mother: It all gets ironed out.
Money is an iron.
Those creases all get smoothed out.
Barking Dogs is Bong Joon-ho trying to explore the creases.
Much of the film centers on the main character's deteriorating relationship with his wife,
and how their lack of money tears at them.
Husband: Who do you think you are.
I’m desperate for pennies, and you bought that dog?
And eat walnuts all the time.
At one point in Mother we learn that the titular character once considered killing herself
and her child because of their extreme poverty.
And in Snowpiercer, otherwise heroic characters are revealed to have resorted to cannibalism
when they ran out of food.
In fact, all of Bong Joon-ho’s protagonists are poor.
So… alright.
Bong Joon-ho has a topic that he is fixated on and which crops up in his movies, but what's interesting is that he
doesn’t always portray it in the same way.
Part Two: Class Solidarity
In Parasite, it’s easy to be nice if you’re rich.
But if you’re poor, it’s a dog-eat-dog world.
This is the idea that dooms the Kim family.
It’s the reason they can’t make any actual substantive change to their situation.
None of the poor characters in the film show any sense of class solidarity.
There’s this moment at the center of the film where everything pivots.
Up until this point, we’ve seen a poor family of four con their way into working for a rich
family of four.
The son becomes their tutor, the mother their housekeeper, ect.
Doing this involves getting their existing housekeeper fired, but then the former-housekeeper
shows up in the middle of the night and reveals that there is a secret subbasement beneath
the rich family’s home.
There they learn that the housekeeper’s husband had been living in secret to avoid
debt-collectors.
The housekeeper begs for the mother’s help to keep him concealed and she makes a direct
appeal to the idea that they belong to the same class and should look out for one another. But the mother declines
Then, when the housekeeper gets the upper hand, it’s the mother's turn to beg for mercy
on the grounds of solidarity, calling the housekeeper “sis.”
Both characters ought to realize that their interests were aligned from the start.
But they’re not rich, so they can’t be nice.
The rest of the movie involves one poor family trying to dominate the other poor family,
while the rich family is oblivious to their life or death struggle (at least until the
end).
Lower class solidarity is absent from Parasite.
It’s also absent from another one of Bong Joon-ho’s films, Mother, about a poor mother
trying to prove that her mentally disabled son isn’t guilty of killing a local girl.
As the director himself has said, “in Mother, you see the have nots and needy clawing at
each other and hurting one another.”
For example, in one scene, the Mother is selling herbs to a customer, who threatens to turn
her into the police for conducting acupuncture without a license just so she can get a better
price on the herbs.
In another, when the mother goes to the school of the murdered girl, she is violently thrown
out for asking questions about the incident.
We don’t really see an upper class in that movie, but the world it depicts is a harsh
one where the poor do not help each other.
This is the case in Bong Joon-ho’s more grounded and realistic films, but in his fantastical
genre films, there IS a sense of class solidarity.
In some sense, the idea of the lower classes showing solidarity IS fantastical.
In the monster movie, “The Host,” the main characters are a family who run a small
kiosk on the Han river.
They are working class and, even though they begin the film a dysfunctional family, as
Bong says, “you see the solidarity between them, they save each other and they gather
their strengths together.”
At the end of the movie, the family teams up with a homeless man to kill the beast.
At the same time, a protest movement forms to oppose the government’s use of toxic
chemicals.
So class solidarity exists in spades in The Host and it is what allows them to defeat the monster.
It also exists in his dystopian sci-fi action movie, Snowpiercer.
In that movie, the lower classes are trapped in the rear cars of a train.
They are oppressed by a totalitarian regime, but work together to improve their situation.
But in The Host and Snowpiercer, the threat is obvious.
The people at the back of the train in Snowpiercer are intimately aware that they are the lower
class, and that there are basically no legitimate means of upward (horizontal?) mobility.
Tilda Swinton: A hat belongs on the head. I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on the head. You belong on the foot.
The lower classes are stuck.
And while their conditions are materially worse than the characters of Parasite, the
fact that they are worse offers them clarity.
They know that they must fight together.
The same is true in The Host: when a big crazy sea monster is eating people, it’s pretty
obvious that people need to unite.
The lines are blurrier in Parasite.
The classes aren’t physically segregated like they are in Snowpiercer.
A poor person can “infiltrate” a rich person’s home.
But they can’t become one of them as Ki-woo, the son, so desperately wants.
There is an invisible line that separates them.
The rich father constantly reminds us of this.
Mr. Park: Never cross the line (2 clips).
This is what Karl Marx called class consciousness, an awareness of one’s position in a class
system.
The protagonists in Snowpiercer have class consciousness.
The Kim family in Parasite, on the other hand, specifically the son, suffers from
a form of “false consciousness.”
Now like any good film critic, I determine what the themes of a movie are by looking
it up on Wikipedia, and according to the Parasite Wikipedia page, “The film uses staircases
to represent the positions of the Kim and Park families as well as those of Moon-gwong.”
Yup, that’s it.
That’s all the themes in the movie.
Okay, but yeah the movie uses where the characters live vertically as a signifier of their class
position.
The characters walk uphill to get to the Park’s big and beautiful house that has wide open
windows that fill it with sunlight.
The man who represents the lowest class lives in a basement devoid of light.
The Kims however live in an in-between state, a half-basement, a kind of apartment that
is common in Korea.
So while they live underground like the housekeeper’s husband, they get some light through the window,
like the rich family.
As Bong says, it’s a house that “wants to believe it’s above the ground.” This
is why the opening and closing shots of the movie emphasize that window before moving
down to show the subterranean characters.
The fact that they have that window, that ability to see out to a better life, provides
them with hope.
But it’s that hope that is also stopping them from recognizing the reality of their
situation, which is what the fancy term false consciousness means.
It deludes them into thinking that they are above Moon-gwong and her husband, that they
are not part of the same class.
And it deludes them into continuing to try and move up inside a system where that is
impossible for them.
That’s what Friedrich Engles called false consciousness.
This is all communicated in the final shots of the film.
After learning that his father is now trapped in the rich family’s basement, Ki-woo fantasizes
about becoming rich enough to buy the house and his father’s freedom, of winning at
capitalism and saving his family.
We see his fantasy and almost believe it is real.
But it is not.
As Bong Joon-ho says: “Maybe if the movie ended where they hug and fades out, the audience
can imagine, ‘Oh, it’s impossible to buy that house, but the camera goes down to that
half-basement.
It’s quite cruel and sad, but I thought it was being real and honest with the audience.
You know and I know — we all know that this kid isn’t going to able to buy that house.”
Oof... heartbreaking
Bong Joon-ho’s recent movies have ended on shots that echo the endings of his previous
movies.
In Snowpiercer, two people head out into the wilderness to an uncertain future, just like
in Barking Dogs Never Bite.
In Okja, Mija and her grandfather sit down for a meal, their family unit restored after
a traumatic experience, just like in the Host.
And in Parasite, the boy stares directly into camera and sighs.
It’s a repetition of the ending to Memories of Murder.
In that movie, we follow a cop trying to catch a serial killer.
At the start, he claims he has the ability to determine someone’s guilt by making eye
contact with them.
Over the course of the movie, his confidence in his ability wavers until it breaks entirely.
In the coda of the movie, he revisits the first crime scene years after the fact and
learns that the culprit had likely also returned to the spot recently.
He then turns his eye contact method on the audience, looking directly into the camera,
as if searching for the culprit among us, asking us what we know that he doesn't.
In the last shot of Parasite, he too shares a look with us.
While the letter he writes his father is filled with the hope of someday rescuing him, his
expression is saddened and fatigued.
And yet we know that he's going to try, that he's going to work within the system to try and beat the system.
But we know just how unlikely he is to succeed. Or maybe we don't?
Maybe we believe the same things he does. And that's why this movie cuts so deeply.
But that’s just what this movie is saying. I'm not exactly sure it's what Bong Joon-ho believes.
Throughout his filmography, Bong Joon-ho keeps coming back to this problem of what the oppressed
can do to better their situation.
And he’s come to several conflicting answers.
In Snow-piercer, Curtis believes they can liberate themselves by moving forward, up
to the front of the train. That if they can get to the front, they'll be free.
But there, he learns that he is wrong.
That his revolution will only perpetuate the hierarchy that leaves so many with nothing.
Only Minsoo, a character who lives on the only part of the train with windows, realizes
that the only way for them to win is to go outside the train, to blow up the system,
But doing that causes a near total destruction of the train and everyone on it.
There are only two survivors that we know about who head out into an uncertain wilderness
to hopefully restart the human race and avoid the mistakes of the past.
But even that is not a given.
Unlike the son in Parasite, they are not deluded into thinking they can win inside the system…
but outside the train isn’t that great either is it?
Is there another solution?
In Okja, we get a somewhat optimistic ending.
The film is about a young Korean farm-girl who is trying to save her pet superpig from
getting sent to an American slaughterhouse.
At the climax of the movie, Mija has tracked Okja to the slaughterhouse where she pleads
with the CEO of the corporation to spare Okja’s life, but the CEO is immovable.
She only responds to money not to emotion.
Finally, Okja remembers she has a golden pig statuette and offers that in exchange for
the real pig, and the CEO accepts.
So no real change has been made to the system here.
Mija has to play by the rules of capital to accomplish her goals.
And even then, the film makes abundantly clear that it is only a small victory.
Okja and one other pig are saved.
But we watch in horror as the rest are herded to the slaughterhouse.
It’s a small story taking place inside a big system.
The happy ending is only achieved by making a personal choice to live outside of that
system.
So we have three different endings here: one where the system comes crashing down, one
where characters leave the system unchanged, and another where the system is unchanged,
but remain trapped within it.
Bong Joon-ho movies are great at confronting and depicting the horrifying effects of economic
systems, but they don’t provide easy answers or solutions.
There is no fully heartwarming victory to be found.
His last three films are, in one sense, straightforward allegories. They are very different from his earlier films.
But the fact that they don’t necessarily agree with one another
adds a texture to each of them.
In brief, his movies consistently portray lower class characters.
Sometimes those characters show solidarity with other people within their class, and
sometimes they do not, but solidarity is always recognized as something that is needed.
But when it comes to how to actually change the systems that are creating their problems,
his films find answers that are incompatible with one another.
They are variations on a theme, a director digging for answers to the central unsolvable
problem of our current social and economic stratification.
Individually, they can feel didactic.
Collectively, they feel inquisitive.
Parasite is a phenomenal standalone film.
It’s even better as the culmination of an incredible career.
Bong Joon-ho’s films are stuffed with political messages, but they also have wonderful, fully
fully-formed characters.
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