BY CASEY ROEPKE ’21
Hollywood tends to favor genre films; directors sink their teeth into the tropes, stylistic choices and plot conventions that dictate an entire class of movie. Every few years, a genre-bender comes along, breaking some of those conventions but maintaining the essential ethos of that genre. “Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho’s haunting depiction of class struggle in South Korea, doesn’t fit into either category — the film neither conforms to nor breaks free of genre convention. Instead, Joon-ho’s latest thriller is indubitably a masterful genre-melding exercise, gaining the audience’s trust and comfort only to shatter the carefully constructed world later on.
In tracing the tonal maze of “Parasite,” it’s safe to say that it begins as a family movie. The opening sequence features the Kim family, poor and residing in a basement-level apartment. They earn a living by folding pizza boxes — and they are bad at it. Despite their poverty, the Kims are a collective force to be reckoned with, as demonstrated in a shot where the Kims crowd their boss to try and manipulate their way into a marginally better job, which foreshadows the driving plot of the film. When Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), the Kims’ son, gains access to work as a tutor, he seizes the opportunity through deceit and Photoshop, and the metaphorically parasitic relationship between the Kim and the Park families begins.
Joon-ho is heavy-handed in his portrayal of rich versus poor, Parks versus Kims. One of the key tactics that Joon-ho uses to craft this dynamic is the Parks’ house, which was actually designed and built specifically for the movie. The thoroughly-modern and angular building is sleek, with one particularly notable feature: a huge window that divides the living room from the grassy backyard. Although the house appears untarnished and pristine, it hides horrors and secrets within its gray walls.
Once Ki-woo gains entry to the Parks’ home, he quickly ingratiates the rest of his family members with the Parks through increasingly nefarious schemes. But Joon-ho employs a major twist just when the audience settles into enjoying the family’s morally bankrupt but comedic hi-jinks, completely rupturing the tone of the movie, shifting and mutating it into something darker.
Joon-ho expects the audience to pick up on his early thematic hints: for example, the film’s title, “Parasite,” refers to the Kim family lying their way into employment and therefore feeding off of the Parks. The Kims soon come to realize, however, that they may not be only parasites feeding on this host, as the house acts as a home for all sorts of sinister behavior. But Joon-ho does not hold back, twisting the knife a little further and testing the bounds of his audience’s understanding.
He suggests that, in a way, the Parks may be parasites, too. They are not Joon-ho’s quintessential evil wealth-hoarders — they are far too oblivious for that — but they too feed off of society in a starkly bloodsucking way.
“They are rich, but still nice,” Ki-taek, the schlubby patriarch of the Kim family says. “They are nice because they are rich,” retorts his wife, and in this brief dialogue lies Joon-ho’s thesis: class inequality pervades every crevice of life, for all of us. No level of self-awareness or lack thereof can stop the exploitation of the working class.
It is difficult to name the cinematic crux of Joonho’s argument — is it the Park father’s nose-wrinkling when he smells the Kims’ low-grade laundry detergent mixed with subway smell? Is it the gullibility of the Park mother, who pays big sums for meaningless services? Is it Ki-jeong, the Kim daughter, smoking a cigarette while her family’s apartment floods with dirty water?
What makes Joon-ho’s wildly ambitious film so relevant to American audiences? A simple fact: We are all complicit. We are all parasites.