Parasite
2019, directed by Bong Joon-ho
About an hour into Parasite, while the Park family is out camping, Kim Ki-taek describes his boss’s wife as “rich, but still nice.” Chung-sook contradicts him: “She’s not ‘rich but nice’, she’s rich therefore nice. You know? Honestly, if I had all this money, I would be even nicer.” Anyone can recognize her point. Across cultures, the upper classes are bound by a code of politeness that lower classes do not observe as consistently. To be a “lady” or a “gentleman” connotes both economic class and social decorum, but politeness can just as well mask contempt or aggression.
Mrs. Kim’s comments point to an ambiguity in popular perceptions of wealth and poverty. It’s easy to think of rich people as “nice” because of their good manners, or to feel distaste for the poor because their venality is undisguised. Conversely, it’s easy to condemn the rich for their unjust advantages and to find virtue in the poor, whom society exploits and neglects. This same ambiguity is in the title – who exactly is the “parasite”? The film certainly takes sides, but not quite in the usual way that critics perceive.
It’s not enough to say that Parasite is an analysis of economic inequality, or even to say that it describes the entrenched social structures that make inequality so hard to fix. Nor is it enough to say that the film exposes the problems of inequality without demonizing the rich or sanctifying the poor. These insights are all constructive, but they don’t capture the full subversive power of Parasite, which separates the problem of inequality altogether from traditional morality. The Kims are at least as unscrupulous as the Parks, but that has no bearing on the question of economic justice. Not only are moral categories like “good” and “bad” insufficient at describing or rectifying imbalances of wealth; they also perpetuate disparities by oversimplifying reality and distorting our views of people whose circumstances differ from ours.
Cinema has historically – not always, but often enough – reinforced a dominant social morality that reduces people and their actions to good and evil. Typical examples would include the most formulaic crime, war, or Western movies, of which the most emblematic subgenre is the “cowboys & Indians” movie. In Parasite, the Parks’ youngest child Da-song is fascinated by the trappings of Native American culture, but it’s clearly filtered through the stereotypes of movie Westerns – arrows, feathered headdresses, a tipi. It’s an immediate visual reminder of how cinema, in its effort to uphold moral virtue, has been used to dehumanize people and justify violence. Equally significant though is what’s missing. Neither in Da-song’s bedroom nor at the party are there any cowboys or any paraphernalia associated with white settlers in the Old West. Neither in Da-song’s fantasy life nor in the world of Parasite are people framed in customary moralistic categories.
One other thing is curiously missing from Parasite. In a film that owes so much to Claude Chabrol’s The Ceremony, which Bong Joon-ho acknowledges as an inspiration, it’s remarkable that that film’s central object, the television set, is almost entirely absent. There are plenty of phone screens, a few computer monitors, and a screen for the Parks’ doorbell control, but the only television is in the Parks’ upstairs bathroom, and it’s only shown obliquely. Its relegation to the bathtub, where one least expects it, highlights its absence everywhere else, particularly in the living room where it would be expected in any modern home. In The Ceremony, the television is always associated with moral judgment, as it often is in real life as well. TV Westerns were even more complicit than movies in vilifying Native Americans, and many modern television dramas, talk shows, and reality shows derive their dramatic force from moral judgments.
The television set may be missing, but it has a surrogate in each family’s living room, both of whose dominant features are long windows with proportions similar to Parasite‘s aspect ratio. Each window looks out at the world the way a television does, representing a point of view particular to the respective social class. One looks onto a landscaped garden, an idealized worldview, while the other looks onto a dirty street where passers-by urinate or spray bug repellent. Each worldview shapes the family that the respective window belongs to, but not in the obvious way. It’s not that the Kims see the world as dirty and the Parks see it as perfect – rather, each overreacts when the world doesn’t conform to their “window view”. The poor idolize the rich, while the rich, however enlightened they may be, react to the poor with reflexive disgust.
Despite taking advantage of every weakness in their hosts, the Kims and the couple in the bunker show a sincere personal respect toward the Parks. The old housekeeper’s husband Geun-sae worships Mr. Park; Ki-taek defends the Parks as “nice people”; and Ki-woo dreams of marrying the Parks’ daughter. Mr. Park, on the other hand, is charitable toward his employees as long as they don’t “cross the line”. He’s revolted to think of the chauffeur having sex in his car; Mrs. Park is frightened at her housekeeper’s purported tuberculosis; and there are recurring allusions to the Kims’ odor – though it also bears notice that when the Kims first descend into the bunker, they too react with disgust at the smell of someone less privileged.
Once we see how each social class distorts reality – one by idealizing the rich, the other by expecting an idealized world – we can imagine how much greater distortion a moralistic frame would impose. We can speak of the injustice of an unequal society without playing God by blaming that injustice on the purported sins of someone else. Inequality is a problem to be solved, and it’s more productive to approach it from a practical perspective than with moral judgment.
The opening and ending, along with all of Parasite‘s plays on high and low (the long stairway to the bunker, the Kims’ relentless descent through Seoul on their way home, the Parks’ house introduced next to the sun, etc.) reinforce the notion that inequality is a structural problem requiring structural solutions. Ki-woo speaks the first line of dialogue: “We’re screwed.” He’s talking about their wi-fi, but his words describe the position of his economic class, whose hard work and clever enterprise prove fruitless. His sister suggests a password: ”Did you try 123456789?” “Yes, no luck.” “Try 987654321, then.” “I tried that too.” The sequence of digits is like a shorthand for “everything”. The family can try everything within their power, forwards and backwards, and it still won’t work. That proves to be the story of Parasite. Neither Ki-woo’s elaborate plans nor his father’s willful lack of planning brings any progress.
The great undoing begins during Da-song’s birthday party when the scholar’s stone, an idealized landscape element like the Parks’ garden, the sole token of wealth in the Kim family, slips from Ki-woo’s hands as if the family’s hopes were also slipping away. The bunker, which is introduced exactly halfway through Parasite, is the stone’s counterpart, a sunken home like the Kims’ apartment and the sole token of poverty in the Park home. When the stone falls into the bunker, the two symbols meet – the Kims’ aspirations and the Parks’ nightmare – and the resulting bloodbath cancels them out while taking one person from each family.
The Kims and the Parks are thus equivalent in numerous ways: their family composition, their long windows, their losses at the birthday party, and their willingness to take advantage of the other family. There is no moral distinction between them. Each is a kind of parasite, and in nature a parasite is simply a creature in a non-symbiotic relationship with its host. There’s no moral stigma to a ringworm, but it’s not an attractive model for human relationships.
A comparison between The Ceremony and Parasite reveals two films close in spirit, each concerned with justice, but one focused on the effects of judgment and the other on the widening economic rift of the early 21st century. A comparison with Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) shows equally close parallels, but it’s their contrast that’s enlightening. Both are centered around an architecturally minimalist mansion perched high above a working class district; both venture into an underworld even lower than the proletarian’s station; and characters in each film hide under the mansion’s coffee table – but one parallel is more revealing than the rest. In High and Low, the industrialist’s son dresses up like a sheriff in a cowboy hat, and his friend plays an outlaw until they switch costumes. Unlike Da-song’s Sioux attire, the two boys represent a moral polarity, and that’s exactly where the two films differ. Kurosawa’s film is relentlessly moralistic, populated with greedy businessmen, unimpeachable detectives, innocent children, a criminal twisted with envy, and Toshiro Mifune’s heroic protagonist who forsakes his self-interest to do the right thing.
It’s hard to find any evidence that cinema’s steady diet of upright heroes and hateful villains has produced a better society, increased empathy, or diminished selfishness. On the contrary, moralizing constraints like the Hays Code have closed off possibilities of analyzing society without judgments. It doesn’t matter much to what extent Bong Joon-ho set out to free our thinking from the limitations of morality, although the Native American touches and the allusion to Henri Bergson in Da-hye’s practice test hint at a possible intention. It’s enough, rather, that Parasite describes the modern neoliberal world order in living terms that permit insights into worsening disparities of wealth.
It’s essential to Parasite that the Kim family is sympathetic not for their virtue, but despite their dishonesty. What makes the film so exciting is that their scheme is always on the verge of being discovered. The greater the deception, the greater the anticipated reckoning, and it hardly matters that the film cannot possibly deliver a payoff as great as the viewer imagines – after all, the human face can only register so much shock. The important thing, at least for the film’s argument, is that the plot constantly foregrounds the characters’ lack of virtue, so that we can consider the injustices of extreme inequality without the sentimental or moralistic consideration of what anyone might deserve. The goal of any solution to inequality should not be to distribute wealth according to some estimation of merit (which is beyond the compass of human judgment), but simply to ensure that everyone has at least enough for their basic needs.
CONNECTIONS:
Ladies in Retirement – Servant(s) gradually take over a household by inviting family inside; set in a house with a secret compartment or chamber
The Exterminating Angel – Politeness masks contempt in the upper class
The Big City – High and low positioning as a metaphor for social mobility or immobility
La cérémonie – Servant(s) turn tables on a rich family; ambiguity as to who is at fault; cathartic ending set to operatic music; family pays its employee a higher than usual wage; intercutting between scenes of clothing
REFERENCES:
The following video gives a thorough analysis of Parasite‘s settings, including the long windows in each house and the use of high and low to illustrate economic inequality:
Video: The Visual Architecture of Parasite by Thomas Flight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvO8-925Edc
This second video makes the important point that Parasite points to the unequal effects of climate change. While a rainstorm floods the Kims’ neighborhood, driving them into a shelter, the same storm is a minor inconvenience and then a “blessing in disguise” for the Parks:
Video: The Ending of Parasite Explained | Pop Culture Decoded on the Insider YouTube channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kx-gSK2C2Q