Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) is an upstairs-downstairs tale of contemporary class inequalities, as a poor and a rich family become close. Bong was interested in this as a premise, according to Parasite’s press kit, because he wanted to examine relationships under capitalism and ask whether peaceful co-existence might be possible within them.i (The answer appears to be a resounding no.) It is only recently that such queries could be received in good faith by members of polite society, who just a few years ago were basking in the afterglow of end-of-history market liberalism, backslapping one another from within their boardrooms about the beauty of endless economic growth and the business “win-win”. Now that this world-that-never-was has come crumbling down, Parasite offers a parable on the rot at the foundations of the proverbial house. What allows these two South Korean families to comingle comes by way of the private tutoring industry, which has given many an underemployed millennial with a lack of other skills some semi-steady work. When twenty-something drifter Kim Ki-woo is offered a job teaching English to the teenage daughter of Mr. Park, a celebrated tech entrepreneur, he jumps at the chance. There is definitely something vampiric – parasitic – about the elite tutoring world, which has grown from being a folksy after-school job to a global $96 million-dollar industry: lease your brains and unspool your unspent promise to our wealthy children, young underemployed graduate, because your future is already dead.ii
After Ki-woo ascends a sloping driveway in the rich part of town and enters the Park’s sleek modernist mansion, he is renamed Kevin by his status-conscious employers, stylish young parents who mix their Korean with smatterings of English and offhandedly refer to consumer goods they’ve purchased from the United States. Ki-woo then uses his position to bring the rest of his otherwise unemployed family – his father Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook and chaotically nihilistic sister Ki-jung – to work for the Parks, lifting them out of the crumbling subterranean basement where they live, which is full of stink bugs and spotty Wi-Fi. Ki-jung becomes the new art tutor (or “art therapist”); Ki-taek the new driver; and Chung-sook the new housekeeper. They carefully fashion separate backstories for themselves, lest their new employers realise first, that they are related and secondly, that they are being conned – none of them, save Ki-taek, has the right qualifications for their role. The Park family matriarch, the beautiful and sheltered Yeon-kyo, welcomes their arrival. Finding workers via Ki-Woo’s recommendations is like building “a belt of trust”, she says cheerfully.
Set in the Park’s airy multi-level house with its vertiginous 90-degree corridors and buried secrets, Parasite speaks to how capitalism locks us into a commons of degradation without assuming that the burden of feeling it is equally shared. The rich outsource the work of confronting the violent inequality underlying their lives to their labourers who, when faced with the option of being exploited but paid against not being exploited at all, choose the former. It’s not so much a “belt of trust” as it is a self-cannibalising chain of interdependence that leads them towards mutual destruction. For the Kim family to assume their new jobs, they must depose the old guard: a cheery young driver and an aloof middle-aged maid with a terrible past. They are overthrown in elegantly choreographed spectacles of intra-class violence, with each Kim using their influence – son, sister, and finally father – to ‘recommend’ the next family member into the fold. The clueless Parks have their own chain of labour relations. Mr. Park delegates the task of overseeing ‘petty’ (feminine) household matters to his wife. For an important guy like me to get involved in household servant gossip, he tells her, is unbecoming (there is an irony then, in how his decision to disengage leads quite literally, to his unbecoming). As the story unfolds each individual life with all of its comforts and abjections become more and more tightly bound to the others. Although capitalism is typically seen as a doctrine of individual freedom, an enduring remnant of the Cold War when it was positioned against the communist Soviet Union, no individual succeeds nor fails in this system alone. Despite grand libertarian fantasies of the exceptional individual bootstrapping their way to success, capitalism is rather made possible through a network of interdependencies, many of them violently oppressive and rigidly hierarchical. In the end, very few are able to realise their dreams under this system.
When the Kims dare to dream of the future their hopes are quickly put to death. In the film’s denouement, a disgraced and devastated Ki-taek slips into hiding, his hands stained with blood. Macbeth famously allegorised the blood-stained hand as a symbol of an individual’s inability to truly divest oneself from one’s crimes (Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood/Clean from my hand?” our antihero gasps after killing the king), but in Parasite, the blood-stained hand takes on a more communal, social character. We see not only the deadly action, or his guilt, but also the impossible weight of being so dependent on another for money or grace and the slow-burning pain of living in a world which insists you could be so much more than you currently are, with the hidden clause being if only you were born to someone else. Chung-Sook’s observation about her matriarch counterpart Yeon-kyo – “She’s not rich but nice; she’s nice because she’s rich. Hell, if I had all this money, I’d be nice too!” – makes the point that to remain psychically unscathed in a violent world is a question of what one can afford. Yeon-kyo is the sweet, personable face of the rich family, a foil to Mr. Park’s haughtiness. But we aren’t invited to enjoy her niceness but rather laugh at her naivety, and then to speculate as to what her generosity, wrapped up in aspirational upper-class young femininity, can be weaponised to mystify. Besides, being nice is different from being kind. Nice does not require you to care about other people; nice has a lot more to do with self-regard. Capitalism, the multi-storied house in which we all live, is impersonal and amoral; it does not abhor humanity so much as it sees it as incidental to the broader mission of squeezing profit out of every inch of human (and non-human) life. It is natural then, that this unremarkable sociopathy shapes its subjects, who are rewarded not for being good and kind to others but rather for being faithful growth-oriented disciples of the market. Niceness, then, can simply mean an unthinking acceptance of a social contract that mandates someone else suffer so that you can be punch-drunk with virtue. Evil here results not so often from moustache-twirling villainy than the uncomplicated calculus of valuing one’s own comfort over someone else’s freedom.iii This casual disinterest in someone else’s suffering is typified in Mr. Park’s self-admitted weakness: he cannot stand employees who ‘cross the line’ and forget their lowlier station.
At a recent Q&A session in London, Bong was asked about the “grey moral area” of Parasite’s characters. He responded noting that yes, no one is either truly evil or wholly good in the film, which demonstrates the complexities of navigating life in an economically harsh world. But is this the most interesting thing that he’s doing? Literature scholar Alison Shonkwiler notes in her work on literary realism under contemporary capital, the growing abstraction of late forms of capitalism calls for changes to traditional approaches to individual agency, evil and goodness.iv What does it mean for fiction to mine the virtues and crimes of the particularised self at a time when every inch of personhood is now shaped by immaterial markets that do not care for people at all? Gary Indiana writes in his 2007 survey of Bong’s early films that the director “finds little place for authentic human feeling”. Indiana says this not to indict Bong, but rather to tease out the director’s critical orientation: “Bong’s fictions record moments of a civilization in flux”, a confused civilisation in which the vast majority are left in dead-end jobs (if they’re lucky) and human life and collective feeling are constrained by institutions and structural forces that alienate us first from ourselves, and then from each other. In the West, rising anticapitalist sentiment continues to be articulated in a world shaped by postwar liberalism, an ideology that celebrated the self-possessed individual moulding the world through the strength of their convictions, reasoned debate, and wilful actions. Attempts at structural critique, then, are often filtered through these individualist categories of agency and complicity, and consequently defanged: the resultant narratives, which hone in on one’s feelings, internal richness, and persistent guilt at being part of these systems may be interesting to ourselves, but are not useful tool with which to confront the world.v Bong’s cinema goes beyond the question of good and evil intentions to vacate us of our over-mined interiority and point the way to a more depressing but more truthful account of the self as it exists against history.
Since its debut at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, where it won the Palme d’Or, Parasite has continued to command critical adoration. Its tour through the American awards circuit has also served as an opportunity to meditate on the many inanities of American culture: its pathological parochialism and aversion to subtitled films; its impulse to immediately centre itself as the protagonist of the world; or its desire to run anything successful into the ground. Yet it also received America’s highest honour by receiving the Oscar for best picture, the first foreign film to win the category. High profile fans there include Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Christine Teigen. What, if anything, to make of a film ostensibly dedicated to satirising the rich being praised so extensively by the very individuals and institutions in whose interest it is to uphold this order? There are many possible answers: that Parasite’s knife is not solely angled at the rich; or that its playful, safe-for-work tone – epitomised, as Kelley Dong writes, by its pyjamas-on sex scene – allows for a pop-friendly stylisation contra the grittiness of other class warfare stories;vi or that it ends, after a blood-spattered, violent climax, not by imagining a world where capitalism is overcome, but rather one in which it keeps a vampiric hold over public life, dooming our protagonists to subsist on emotive flights of fantasy that will never be realised in earnest.
For my part, I keep returning to critic Inkoo Kang’s profile of Bong as South Korea’s “Hollywood kid”.vii He is a director, she writes, with a complicated relationship to American blockbuster-style cinema who both has one foot in its mythic legend and another outside it. (I am aware that I am doing what I earlier mocked: the relentless centring of America in everything). If Bong embellishes his films with genre trappings of high-octane thrills, he also maintains a self-aware resistance. The American blockbuster of today, particularly of the Marvel and DC variety, mostly involves good-looking, extremely well-paid actor-superheroes laying out and executing a seemingly convoluted but ultimately simple plan. After a CGI-heavy battle with the villain, the world is thereby saved. Sometimes these plans are thwarted, but frustrations are mostly temporary; the characters hurtle towards their necessary conclusions. No one goes to a blockbuster for an exercise in unmet gratification. Or so one thinks. The first half of Parasite serves as an ode to the well-executed plan. The Kim’s schemes to usurp their rivals unfurl elegantly in a closed universe full of rich, visual signifiers: de-fuzzed fresh peaches; blood red ketchup artfully splattered onto crumpled tissues; and Confucian scholar’s rocks that are – as Ki-woo puts it – “so metaphorical”. But then a disaster happens. “There’s nothing in the plan for this,” the Kims hiss at each other when an evening at the Parks is interrupted by a surprise visitor. The moment things go off-script their plans unravel quickly. The Kims must resort to the one that “never fails”, as Ki-taek tells his son in a devastating conversation: “No plan.” They never work in real life, he says. Having no plan means that if everything goes to hell, nothing matters.
The first time I watched that scene, I was moved. But by my third viewing, now more detached from the intimate family drama, I also heard the same playful meta-voice that creeps in when Ki-woo proselytises on the very metaphorical nature of the scholar’s rock, or the very metaphorical nature of eating at a drivers’ canteen while planning how to fire the Park’s original chauffeur. The Kims, left with no plan, are thrown into the terrifying grasp of another: Bong’s master plan. This is a plan that titillates the audience, playing with their emotions by tipping comedy swiftly into tragedy, violence into release, and hopeful endings into wretched reality. It gestures towards meaning while also foreclosing and lampshading it by reminding you that this is also all a metaphor and that, despite Ki-taek’s personal devastations, it is not “real life”. The Hollywood blockbuster of today is overburdened with meaning that it doesn’t deserve, brow-beating its audience into capitulating to the importance of its message or carefully rebalancing scenes of disaster-spectacle with sentimental redemption. Parasite refuses to offer you this absolution, letting you know it means something, but also nothing, at the same time. “The key to converting disaster into entertainment is uplift,” J. Hoberman once observed;viii Parasite refuses this directive, doubling down and locking its characters into a deeper hell. Its refusal to see out the contract of the blockbuster and deliver the world-saving (and audience-saving) plan offers a curious, welcome release for the audience, rich and poor alike: Parasite takes you into an abyss that is also your abyss but tells you that it will not deliver you. Despite the high liberal fantasies that storytelling will inevitably engender empathy, which will engender solidarity, which will in turn engender change, fiction is not a roadmap to salvation. What can it do? I recently happened across an old essay by Vivian Gornick on W. G. Sebald. One passage struck me:
“Every instinct for literature that I possess tells me that his is the odd but striking voice of a nonfictionist writing to puzzle out a position that will let him include himself in what he experiences as a ghost-ridden universe, at whose wavering edge he stands, alternately staring out at the emptiness beyond, and back at the silence of a world now peculiarly motionless… If bleakness is what we have inherited, then bleakness is what we must engage. We are here, this writing tells us, not to mourn lost worlds but to see things as they are: to take in the is-ness of what is. Consciousness is our only salvation.”ix
Gornick was responding to a question on the task of literature and criticism today. If bleakness is what we have inherited, then bleakness is what we must engage. Against calls for fiction to evince the redemptive utopias we’d like to see in real life, or for its characters to be – as Phoebe Chen noted in her review of Roma – “avatars for praxis”, is it a real, critical consciousness that can save our ghost-ridden world? This would ask us to look at ourselves, our relations, and the terrible price of our lives, the global, metaphorical sub-basement, without pity or sentiment. Thinking very metaphorically may not lead to our salvation, but the consciousness it induces just might.
i Bong writes “It is increasingly the case in this sad world that humane relationships based on co-existence or symbiosis cannot hold, and one group is pushed into a parasitic relationship with another… We are living in an era when capitalism is the reigning order, and we have no other alternative.” ii This metaphor is literalised in the $28 billion dollar blood plasma industry, which offers the young and the poor thousands for their fresh blood plasma, to be taken up by presumably older, wealthier customers. One ad campaign, targeted to students in America shows a young healthy-looking college student against the words: “Need books? No worries. Donate plasma.” iii That the “moral grey zone” is still considered an interesting feature in mass media speaks to the inability of our popular narratives to guide us through the swampy ethical morass of the world as it exists. It has real stakes. This persistent undeveloped, cartoonish notion of ‘evil’ allows so many consultancies, tech firms, and other gilded corporates (employers of many Park family types) that work for the worst people – and the profit motive – to dignify their mercenary projects with inane ‘mission statements’ about making the world a better place, developing solutions to urgent problems, connecting people and growing markets, etcetera etcetera. The road to hell is paved with good disruptions. iv Shonkwiler writes of the early “economic novels” of the 1930s by William Dean Howells, Henry James and Theodore Dreiser that “the persistent focus on personhood, even as novels demonstrate the very conditions that make apparent the formal problems in developing the truly ‘coherent and incisive’ critique of capitalism that critics […] sought to locate in the economic novel. Alison Shonkwiler, The Financial Imaginary: Economic Mystification and the Limits of Realist Fiction, University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp.4-5 v Georgie Carr writes of Little Women that “Gerwig’s adaptation adds stylistically to the canon by introducing a knowing exploration of the limitations placed on women, caricaturing the economic and cultural constraints placed on female creativity. But in the end this self-aware capitulation is arguably more damaging than the historically bounded determinism of the original.” vi “The ensemble of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite certainly does not near such heights of corruption [of its predecessors]: Its measly peak of naughtiness occurs when the Parks attempt to have sex on the couch, only to fall asleep after some rushed fondling— a “metaphor” for the film’s yo-yoing drive.” vii This is not to say that Bong himself is wholly influenced by Hollywood cinema. Crucially, he has cited Korean auteur Kim Ki-young, Taiwanese directors Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Filipino Lino Brocka as inspirations. Nevertheless, the spectre of Hollywood and Kang’s profile provides a useful heuristic for me, a hopelessly Westernised running dog of American imperialism. viii J. Hoberman, Film After Film (Or, What Became of 21st Century Cinema?) 2012. p. 159 ix Vivian Gornick, ‘Memoir and Criticism’ in n+1, Issue 4, Spring 2006.
Rebecca Liu is a staff writer at Another Gaze
