What’s up Wisecrack, Michael here. If you kept up with all the great films of 2019,
you might have noticed a recurring theme: The have versus the have-nots, the rich vs.
the poor, the fat cats vs the… malnourished cats?
Whether it’s J-Lo and her crew scamming Wall Street lowlifes in Hustlers, underground-dwelling
doppelgangers seeking revenge in Us, or the monstrously unlikable grown-up rich kids in
Knives Out, 2019 was full of movies that explored the gap between rich and poor. And this theme
wasn’t confined to the big screen, as TV shows like The Righteous Gemstones and Succession
depicted families of wealthy jerks regularly screwing over honest folks in order to keep
their mountains of money.
But of course, we’re here to talk about two of 2019’s best poster-children for class
conflict: Joker and Parasite. Two drastically different films, both of which seem eager
to explore social division in modern society. Through people who dream of improving their
lot in life, we get to ask the question: are those dreams destroying us? Let’s find out
in this Wisecrack Edition on Joker and Parasite. And of course, spoilers ahead.
But first, a quick summary of the two films.
Joker tells the origin story of Batman’s least favorite clown, and his pre-villain
persona, Arthur Fleck. Fleck is a mentally unwell clown-for-hire and aspiring comedian
who also must care for his ailing mother, all in a Gotham that clearly mimics the collapsing
New York City of the seventies and eighties. After losing his job, Arthur also loses his
shit and murders a few admittedly-awful finance bros. In the process, he accidentally inspires
the downtrodden Gothamites to don their own clown masks and rise up against… something?
Eventually, Fleck kills his favorite late-night talk show host on live tv and does a blood-stained
victory dance in the chaos-filled streets before being locked up in Arkham asylum. Oh
yeah, and at one point he thinks Thomas Wayne is his dad and pays a creepy visit to his
not-really little brother Bruce.
Fast forward to present-day South Korea, and you get Parasite, a movie about the Kims,
a poor family that scams their way into gainful employment under the very wealthy Park family.
Things go well until they discover that the Park’s former housekeeper has been hiding
her husband in the basement for years. All hell breaks loose, people get stabbed at a
birthday party, and the Kim family ends up far worse off than they started. Capitalism
wins — the end.
While these films feature wildly different settings and tones, and were made in different
languages by filmmakers living on opposite sides of the world, they both pose the same
question: namely, what does class stratification mean for society?
Let’s start with the basics: what exactly is each film trying to say?
Joker is a little bit vague. In an interview, Todd Phillips said he rooted his film in the
all-too-common belief that the system is broken, while also “exploring the consequences of
cutting social services for mental health.”
So, a few interesting things here. As we’ve noted before, the film is obsessed with recognition
and visibility. Arthur dreams of being acknowledged by his comedy role model, he complains that
his social worker is ignoring him , and he argues that, unlike his affluent victims,
nobody would notice nor care if he was lying dead on the street. On a
societal level, the masses raging against Thomas Wayne’s machine are sick of their
needs going unheard, of their suffering being invisible.
But the revolution isn’t all rainbows and drum circles for Todd Phillips. The mass movement
in Joker is excessively cruel, profoundly disorganized, and loosely led by an apolitical
psychotic murderer. As such, the film functions as a kind of warning. It’s not necessarily
an indictment of capitalism, but rather, of the extreme inequality it can breed. The film
imagines what happens when the people at the bottom of the financial ladder are deprived
of the most basic human needs and dignities, and, subsequently, are rallied to violence.
Of course, such a situation is not exclusive to comic book universes. In fact, we can better
understand the revolutionary terror of the Joker by examining the actual Terror during
the French Revolution.
For a quick history refresher: After generations of peasants were trampled upon by the cake-eating
aristocracy, they violently lashed out and reclaimed the country for themselves. And
while this revolution did lots of good things — like emulate the ideals of the American
revolution and, eventually, led to the abolition of slavery in the French colonies — it also
caused some pretty awful stuff, like indiscriminately beheading their political rivals. The violent
“us vs. them” dynamic facilitated by the guillotine is similar to what we see in the
final act of Joker, as the clowns gleefully attack anyone who looks like they have a 401k.
This kind of dynamic can easily turn a reasonable group of downtrodden folks into fanatics.
Fanaticism is a term we usually associate with religion, and one that differs from it’s
less violent cousin, enthusiasm. Philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that, during the French
Revolution, the mob-induced terror crossed the line from enthusiasm, which is reasonable,
into fanaticism, which is not. While it’s perfectly moral to enthusiastically campaign
for values like liberty, equality, and fraternity, the same can’t be said for “guillotine-ing
people who you don’t like” - that’s fanaticism. If people like Thomas Wayne treat
the poor as mere objects to be used and discarded, the disenfranchised conversely, and fanatically,
treat the wealthy as objects to be destroyed.
The tension between enthusiasm and fanaticism is what makes Joker such a compelling watch.
In the first act of the film there is room to genuinely empathize with and want the best
for Arthur after he’s been repeatedly wronged. But after he turns to fanaticism, we’re
left mouths agape at how his journey has gone so wrong.
But if the message of Joker is “you better keep the poors happy or else,” the message
of Parasite is oh so much more complicated. Because in Parasite, the bad guy isn’t greedy
rich people or murderous clowns, but a system that forces us to leech off of others to survive.
In Bong Joon Ho’s world, both everyone and no one is a bad guy. In fact, the wealthy
Parks are kind of nice and normal. Sure the wife is weird, but we can’t help but empathize
with a guy trying to go camping with his kid. At the same time, they’re pretty unsympathetic
to and uninterested in the plight of their employees, who they fire without a second
thought the moment they become an inconvenience. The film masterfully frames this obliviousness
by showing how a simple rainstorm affects the families in drastically different ways.
While it ruins the Parks birthday camping plans, it clears the sky, creating a beautiful
day for a birthday party .
This is juxtaposed with the Kim’s experience of the same storm, which turns their toilet
into home-ruining geyser of literal shit.
There is an amazing ambiguity in the film’s title: are the Park’s parasitically living
off the labor of the working class - your traditional Marxist argument - or are the
Kim’s parasitically living off the plenty of their wealthy employers ? Or, obviously,
both.
Unlike the Joker, which imagines terroristic revolution as a reaction to the callous cruelty
of people like Thomas Wayne , Parasite instead imagines how modern day capitalism
turns everyone, rich or poor, into monsters. The Parks objectify their hired help, and
the Kims objectify the Parks as a cushy bank account. But to figure out why, we need a
little help from Communist Santa Claus: Karl Marx, and his writing on alienation.
To understand alienation, we need to understand alienated labor, and to understand that, just
regular labor. Marx outlined his theory of labor and alienation in his Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, coincidentally the same year PBR was first produced. No, really. According
to Marx, labor connects us to the world and to humanity. To over-simplify, and betray
television’s greatest libertarian, there is nothing more life-affirming than to be
Ron Swanson, building a canoe, not for some boss, but for the sheer joy of creation.
Importantly, in laboring we shape the world around us in concert with our fellow human
beings. This affirm what Marx called our “species-being,” or our communal existence as the human race.
But what happens when we labor not for ourselves, but for someone else? In the Kim’s case,
that means folding pizza boxes in the hopes of earning a few dollars to pay for our recently
terminated wifi. We become alienated from our labor, and hence, from our species-being.
And hoo-boy, is that bad. Marx warns that alienated labor turns our perspective inwards,
towards the individual, and away from our species-being. We thus become estranged from
not only the objects we create - like our aforementioned canoe- but from our fellow
humans.
Perhaps nothing encapsulates this better in Parasite than the way the Kims interact with
other members of their class. Rather than showing solidarity for the similarly downtrodden,
or at least, deciding to live and let live, the Kims see other working class people purely
as competition. The family slowly sabotages all of the Park’s servants in order to replace
them with members of their own clan. Like a parasite, the family moves into a host organism,
hijacking its structure for its own ends. But in a grand reveal, they discover: the
former housekeeper’s husband has been living in the Park’s secret basement for years.
Someone beat them to their own grift. Rather than feeling compassion, the Kims maintain
a cutthroat ethos that is necessary to survive modern day South Korea. For Marx, this kind
of perversion is built into alienated labor. Everywhere it creates beauty, while deforming
the workers who built that beauty. “It produces palaces - but for the worker, hovels… It
produces intelligence -- but for the worker, stupidity, cretinism.”
Whereas Arthur lashes out violently and without logic to his social situation, almost everything
the Kims do is a necessary strategy for survival. The fact that surviving under capitalism can
turn a person cruel is noted by Mrs. Kim, as she muses that she, too, would be nice
if only she were rich. In other words, compassion is a luxury for those with enough money to
know which professional chef is cooking their next meal.
Like Joker, though, Parasite culminates in a brutal murder. Mr. Park is disgusted by
the smell of Mr. Kim, which is a pretty unavoidable part of living with our aforementioned shit
geyser. When Mr. Park shows similar disgust towards Mr. Kim’s recently murdered, basement-dwelling
rival, Kim loses it. In both cases, the downtrodden men react violently to the class divide imposed
by modern day society, in a misplaced attempt to reclaim a piece of their humanity.
Now, some of this alienation is explored by Joker. But in a much more general way. Sure,
Gotham’s economy has produced a palace for the Waynes and a hovel for Arthur, and sure,
there’s the sense that the working class has been estranged from the benefits of the
world they have labored to build. It’s also worth noting the very intentional scene where
we see a bunch of caviar-eating rich people blissfully enjoying Charlie Chaplin’s Modern
Times - a film about the alienating and dehumanizing nature of early 20th century factory work.
But let’s talk about perhaps one of the biggest differences between the films. Joker
shows the calamity that ensues when the dream of upward mobility is no longer believed by
the masses. Parasite shows the calamity that ensues from the believing in it.
The two films really parallel each other here. The Kim’s are gifted a scholar’s rock,
an item that, according to the film, is supposed to bring prosperity to its owner. They dream
of escaping their basement, of attaining the kind of wealth the Parks have. But this symbol
of wealth, becomes a cursed object used to bash in Ki-Woo’s skull. Even after his dreams
backfire, Ki-Woo dreams of being rich and successful enough to purchase the Park home,
and thereby rescue his father from his basement exile -- a situation, of course, created first
and foremost by their relentless hustle
There is no mystical rock in the Joker, but there are plenty of bad jokes. That’s because
Arthur daydreams not necessarily of becoming rich but of becoming a successful comedian.
But Arthur’s burden is his inability to be recognized, to be taken seriously. For
the clowns he inspires, their burden is their poverty.
For Joker, people are burdened by the societal inequality that leaves them disenfranchised
and voiceless. They dream, or at least rage, for a better world. They just happen to do
it in all the wrong ways. But for Parasite, the burden is the dream itself.
So what, if anything, are these films trying to say about class antagonism? It’s important
to note, while the Kims only seek to improve their own lot in an unfriendly system, the
masses in Joker agitate to burn down the system that’s hurt them.
It seems like Philips is providing more of a warning than a model for change. Philips
is basically cautioning us about the anarchy and violence that could hypothetically come
if people desperately gravitate towards violent, radical movements.
With Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho seems to be saying something a bit more nuanced about the world
we live in, as the violence in this film doesn’t exist as some anarchic and terrifying exception
to the system -- rather, it’s a direct function of the system itself. There are no inherent
heros or villians in capitalism, or in this film. There are just two different types of
people shaped by their own positions in society. And this is what makes the conclusion of the
film so sad. The Kim’s son dreams of reuniting his family by getting rich, but as the audience
we know that he has about as good of a chance transcending his social class as Arthur does
of landing an HBO special.
So what do you think, Wisecrack? Is it better to start a revolution or scam a nice rich
family? Let us know in the comments. Thanks to our amazing patrons for supporting the
channel and our podcasts. Hit that subscribe button, the only thing you have to lose is
your chains. Thanks for watching.