On Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite
Parasite is the best explanation I’ve found of the concept of class. It’s a great film: all its parts are precise and profound. Yet unlike other great films, Parasite does not mystify or enchant. The film faithfully depicts today’s changing relationships between the rich, the poor, and those struggling for power. It demonstrates the violent, confusing, and farcical consequences of some people having capital while others do not. Its story shows the complexities of trying to survive today yet it never feels pedantic or preachy. How does this film teach so well?
On the surface, Parasite is a movie about a poor family that cons a rich family. The film’s first hour is straight comedy: if you see it in a theater, you’ll likely laugh with everyone else. The poor family is stereotypical: a group of crude but charming knaves, Robin Hoods more concerned with theft than redistribution. All goes well; the heroes fool the guileless villains. But when the poor family celebrates the success of their con, they discover a horrendous secret that ultimately ruins them. The tale is archetypal, a rags-to-riches-to-filthier-rags story. Yet the film is not only an artfully-directed and tidy story. The conceit of the film is that a poor family pretends to be middle class in order to live like the rich, and most of the film’s action takes place in an expensive, gorgeous, and sinister house. The film is so self-contained yet points so precisely to situations outside of itself that it works like an analogy.
Classes in capitalism today relate to each other like the three families in Parasite relate to each other. The poor can only become middle class by persuading the rich to pay for their comfort. When members of the middle class imagine they have risen from society’s worst state, they discover migrants fleeing a hell who want to share their space. In order to keep up the ruse of being middle class, the middle class is willing to subjugate and torture the poor—to keep them caged out of sight—but they must work up the moral conviction (honesty) needed to kill. Ultimately, the poor (who worship the rich) kill their middle class captors for revenge, not material betterment. Throughout all this, the rich yearn for intimacy without risk (an impossibility), pamper their own, and treat those less powerful than them as means to an end: their unbreached ease and amusement.
Like all analogies, Parasite leaves out some realities of class relations: the rich family isn’t philanthropic; the poorest family, escapees from North Korea, are grotesque in order to help the film shift into the style of a horror movie; the middle class fakers take great pleasure in their cunning. That said, analogies are patterns that simplify unspeakably complex situations into something tolerable and transmittable. With a good analogy we find meaning in our pains. With a good analogy we can live with and against the world with practical knowledge of its workings.
Yet Parasite surpasses the power of analogy. It does this by showing the truths of living today. Here are some: climate crises will kill the poor and comfort the rich (as high ground becomes beachfront property, for example). Being an expert is being a liar. The most reliable way into the middle class is knowing people, not knowing skills. People traumatized by poverty often strive to be rich in order to heal their parents. Poor people are made to emulate cockroaches and insects, not predators. As long as we believe that criminals are immoral, we’ll consign them to hell on Earth. The entire class system is parasitical, meaning that if we want to stop harming each other, we need to do away with classes. Everyone smells like shit to someone (or something).
Parasite is a great film because its style is as surprising and comprehensive as its narrative. The film begins with pace and visuals that fit a social comedy, a comedy of errors: the grubby streets and the family’s tiny apartment are packed with functional yet irrelevant details, the central antagonist is a barely-seen drunk who pisses on stuff, and the invitation into the con is a drunken admission of romance. The film then adopts a slower, less slapstick mode; it becomes a dark comedy premised on cleverness, cruelty, and disguise. We relish the liars and the gullible fools who reward them. We root for the pretenders while they persuade the rich to fire their former employees, somehow in that moment lesser than the film’s heroes. It’s only when one of those employees returns deranged that Parasite combines its comedy with the menacing logic of a horror film. The last quarter of the film abandons most of its jokes and instead stares: stares at an infantilized adult deepthroating a banana because he hasn’t eaten in a week; stares at the rich couple fucking while those they enslave hide under a visual equivalent of the floorboards; stares into the green light of a basement which differs in no substantial way from a solitary confinement cell or interrogation chamber. The cuts no longer emphasize surprise and relief, but instead concisely reveal the characters slinking and skittering around the house and attacking each other, trying to contain those they deem wretched while keeping on their masks. The film’s climactic scene is most disturbing in its simplest, stillest shot: one of the refugees, blood smeared across his face and knife in hand, stands just behind a crowd of beautiful bourgeoisie. They all stand on the same manicured lawn, the same resplendent green. Then the murderer moves—he cuts across the barriers.
It’s never too late to leave the house.
