Bong Joon-Ho's tour-de-force black comedy thriller parasite is a careful examination of growing class tensions in
modern society. Through this film, Bong demonstrates his mastery of oral and
visual storytelling. The sleek transitions, irony-laced dialogue and morally ambiguous characters come together to deliver one of the most
riveting movies of the decade The film centers on an abjectly poor family who rely on cunning and manipulation to survive in their harsh society. The narrative begins when the son Ki-Woo is presented with an opportunity to tutor
the daughter of the rich Park family. Due to the trusting and gullible
dispositions of the parks, Ki-woo and his family are able to effectively deceive
their way into obtaining service jobs in the household. However it's not until long that the family discovers they are not the only ones mooching off the Parks In a long and suspenseful
scene reminiscent of Hitchcock it's revealed that the Parks' former
housekeeper has been harbouring her husband in an unknown bunker beneath the
house to escape the violence and coercion of his debt collectors. This scene marks a significant shift in tone and brings to fruition the meaning
behind the film's title. After a long and miserable night in which the poor family essentially kills the former housekeeper in front of her helpless husband and run
home only to discover their semi basement is flooded with sewage water We see how these jobs that the family once enjoyed are now becoming grating and
tiresome This is slipped in through subtle moments and interactions We can glean from these scenes that
there is a new clarity with which the family now views themselves At first glance the title parasite represents the way these members of the lower classes
leech off the good nature and generosity of the park family. But what Bong is
trying to tell us in the aforementioned moments is that the parks are also
leeching off of the lower classes by living comfortably off the backs of
their labour. It's here that the film presents us with a frightening but
important question: In late capitalist society who are the parasites? The difficulty of answering this question can be explained with two concepts
borrowed from the school of cultural studies: cool capitalism and cultural
hegemony. In the coolness of capitalism Jim McGuigan states, "neoliberal
capitalism has constructed popular legitimacy of such a resilient kind that
it goes beyond management ideology and propaganda into the texture and common
sense of everyday life. To support this idea he uses the example of Apple, who
through their sleek and shiny products have become so embedded in Western
culture that we have become blind to the company's very real exploitation of
their outsourced workers This disaffection amongst consumers to
the acute poverty and exploitation of others is what McGuigan calls cool
capitalism. To understand how cool capitalism plays out in Parasite let's
look at the scene from the second act Here, the former housekeepers husband who has been hiding in the bunker for four years
maintains his sanity through a daily routine of hitting the light switches to
illuminate Mr. Parks path as he walks up the stairs at night. Mr. Park, unaware of
the bunker beneath his house, is led to believe that these motion-sensored
lights are a marvel of modern technology This scene distills McGuigan's idea that
Mr. Park is blind to the fact that these luxuries he enjoys in his everyday life
are afforded to him through the hard labor of someone beneath him. It's no
coincidence that the housekeepers husband lives physically beneath the
Parks. This obliviousness towards the suffering and labor of others at times
borders on indifference which is exhibited most clearly in the Parks'
relationships with the poor family. For example, as Ki-Taek drives Mrs. Park home from grocery shopping she exclaims to a friend on the phone that the storm from
the night before was a blessing in disguise, completely ignorant to the fact
that thousands of people in the city were displaced as a result including
Ki-Taek. Another example of this ignorance is how the Park clan displays their
physical aversion to the smell of the poor family. This theme becomes increasingly prevalent throughout the film as their
reactions to smell become more exaggerated. In Purity and Danger, Mary
Douglas suggests that cleanliness and hygiene are social constructs. She states,
"There is no such thing as absolute dirt it exists only in the eyes of the
beholder." In Parasite we see how the Parks' revulsion to the smell of people
like Ki-Taek is actually a revulsion to people they perceive as lesser than
themselves. Their palpable desire to escape these smells like when Mr. Park
plugs his nose as he flees from the mayhem of his garden party signals to
the viewer that those who benefit from capitalism distanced themselves from the
have-nots both metaphorically and physically. In an interview with GQ, Bong
said, "What the parks really want and this is something mr. Park says in the film
is they draw a line over their sophisticated world and they don't let
anyone cross it. They're not interested in the outside world, the subway, and
people who might perhaps smell. They want to push everyone outside of that line
and they want to remain safe behind it Much like how consumers of Apple do not
need to think about the exploitation of Foxconn because its workers live on the
other side of the world, the Parks do not have to worry themselves about the poor
because they are physically isolated from the nearby slums. The smell of
poverty is an ugly reminder to the Parks that suffering is actually nearby. While
the Parks present as well-intentioned and kind-hearted people, they choose to
be ignorant to the extreme poverty that surrounds them because they are
comfortable with the lifestyles accorded to them at the expense of the
impoverished. They recoil from the smell for fear of being confronted with the
reality outside of their privileged bubble Late capitalism and the ever increasing
division between rich and poor is able to persist in our contemporary world
through what Antonio Gramsci calls "cultural hegemony". For Gramsci,
cultural hegemony is achieved through "inducing the consent of the majority of
subaltern or subordinate groups to a given socio-political constellation."
Throughout the film Mr. Park speaks often about a line he draws between
himself and his employees. This line of course connotes a level of
professionalism that Mr. Park expects of his employees, but what it also
represents as a division he has established to maintain his status as a
superior. Mr. Park expresses his satisfaction with the former housekeeper
because she never oversteps her boundaries, but Ki-Taek on the other hand
is always teetering on the edge of this line. In this sense the former
housekeeper consents to her status as a subordinate whereas Ki-Taek, who
eventually revolts against this subjugation by killing Mr. Park, becomes
increasingly conscious of his class and the hegemonic social order that keeps
them there. The poor characters have deep feelings of admiration and reverence
towards the Park family. For example in the same scene, each member of the poor
family in spite of themselves goes around discussing what they like about
the Parks. This admiration runs even deeper with the housekeepers husband
whose masochistic head-banging is his version of paying respect to the man who
he believes has saved him Cultural hegemony which favors
the ideology of the ruling classes teaches anyone who falls outside the
dominant worldview that the dominant culture is something to aspire to. This
can take place in many forms: The prevailing standard of Eurocentric beauty has
compelled women around the world to alter their appearances in an effort to
achieve this conception of normality Democracy has become such a dominant
standard for a fair and just society the countries are now ranked on an index
based on how democratic they are. And the list goes on. With the case of late
capitalism, the ruling class is the wealthy and in Parasite Ki-Woo and his
family alter their appearances in overall dispositions to fit into the
mold of higher status individuals their reverence for the people they are using
reflects an innate yearning to become them both economically and socially. Bong
tricks the viewer into thinking there will be a happy ending as we watch
Ki-Taek, who has been hiding in the bunker after killing Mr. Park, reunite with his
family who have now made enough money to buy the Parks' house. However this momentary happiness is dissolved as it's revealed that the
scene is only an aspiration written by Ki-Woo in a letter to his father. In an
interview, Bong reveals that it would take five hundred and sixty four years
for Ki-Woo to save enough money to buy the house. This directly contradicts the
mantra of contemporary capitalism, which has attempted to convince people that
with a little hard work and determination anyone can achieve higher
economic status. The reality is that through cultural hegemony, the rich are
able to stay rich by manufacturing the consent of the masses while creating the
illusion of social mobility. Ironically the poor daughter, Ki-Jeung is regarded as the only member of the family who fits into the wealthy
environment but she is also the only member of the
family to be killed. when all is said and done the rich family is able to escape
the horror of their situation while the poor family is trapped in it. neoliberal
capitalism takes economic responsibility away from the government and places it
into the hands of free-market institutions and private individuals. In
this type of society, your value as a person is weighed upon your ability to
sell your labor for a wage. What it boils down to is a massive disparity in wealth
that regards the wealthy as winners and the poor as losers in the free-market
game. This is where we see things like hostile architecture, that prioritizes
the needs and aesthetics of corporate enterprises over the needs of the hungry
and homeless. These defensive strategies become mechanisms for hiding the
indigent out of sight, for fear of disrupting the wealthy social order. The
great fallacy of this system is that every individual starts off with equal
access to opportunity and can therefore compete on an equal playing field, which
is simply not the truth. And when we look at the poor characters in parasite
fighting amongst themselves, vying to maintain their subordinate positions, we
see that there is no attempt or even ability to overthrow the prevailing
system of domination but rather it's a competition between the poor of who can
be the least destitute. In a capitalist society the prevailing conservative
argument is that social democracy, higher taxes, and budget deficits only serve to
extract from the hard-earned pockets of the rich and put this money into the
hands of the lazy and deceitful poor. But what Parasite astutely points out is
that the relationship between the rich and poor is largely parasitic in the
opposite direction. The poor are often poor because capitalistic enterprises
are unwilling to compensate fairly for their labor in order to maximize a
profit. while the jobs occupied by Ki-Woo's family offer them proximity to
wealth at the end of the day their wages do not
provide them enough means to escape destitution. rather the degrading and
emotional labor they provide for the parks only truly benefits the Parks. At the end of the film, with Ki-Taek left to an uncertain fate in the bunker and Ki-Woo relegated to his basement, we're left with the bleak reality that the
current capitalistic order is unyielding and unforgiving. What's more, this cruel
system can be easily normalized. After all, the greatest trick late capitalism
ever pulled was to convince the world it doesn't exist. This is the harsh reality
of the world we now live in and that this is why Parasite should terrify us
all
