Table Talk: Parasite (2019)
Parasite is substantial entertainment
Aren: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is the most buzzed-about movie of the year. Since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it won the Palme d’Or, it’s enjoyed universal acclaim from critics and audiences. It’s not the first film of the Korean auteur to make waves in North America—2013’s Snowpiercer drew significant acclaim—but it’s catapulted Bong to a whole other level. Oscar nominations seem a sure thing and Bong will probably join the likes of Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and Ang Lee as a world-famous international director. So what is it about Parasite that has viewers (ourselves included) in rapture? Simply put, it’s because Parasite is damn-good, substantial entertainment.
It and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood seem to belong to that ever-shrinking field of hit film: one that is able to thread the needle elegantly between meaningful commentary and pure entertainment. Both films are impressive formal productions and catnip for cinephiles, but they’re also accessible and always put entertaining the audience first.
On the level of pure narrative, Parasite is a rush.
Anders: I had managed to avoid knowing very much about the film going into it; but I had heard that Parasite was a film that functioned as social commentary, something that came as no surprise, especially given the director’s other films. I’m a fairly big fan of Bong’s work—I’d rank his 2003 film Memories of Murder among the new century’s finest films—but even then I was suprised at how incredibly entertaining Parasite was!
Aren: Same. Even considering that I love Memories of Murder and Mother (2009), and greatly admire Snowpiercer as well, I was still blown away.
Anders: Parasite is a rare film these days in operating at a high level on so many different fronts. It never sacrifices any element of the film in order to prop up one particular area: it is a masterclass of formal and directorial execution (I might argue that Bong is actually underrated for his directing and the way that he tells a story through cinema); it achieves a narrative/thematic wholeness rare in films that also function as parables; and it is a riotous entertainment, as I noted above.
One of the most gratifying elements of the film has been its reception. Audiences seem to be primed for something like this; the audience I saw it with was a packed arthouse crowd of diverse ages and backgrounds, but everyone was reacting to what was happening on screen with visceral and sometimes vocal expression. People laughed when it was funny (and Parasite is often funny), and screeched in horror and winced at the twists and turns as the film brings down the house of cards its characters have built up.
The closest experience I have had in recent cinema was watching Jordan Peele’s Get Out with a packed house on opening weekend. Like Peele’s film, Parasite is first of all a fantastic entertainment, Hitchcockian in its ability to deliver thrills and mystery. Though, when we talk about the film’s central metaphor and parable, perhaps Peele’s most recent film, Us, offers a better analogue and also points to what Parasite does so well.
Aren: The comparisons to Get Out and Us are apt, as I had similar theatrical experiences with those two films as well. The crowds were absolutely eating the films up. With Parasite, the film is functioning on so many different narrative levels simultaneously. There’s the thrill of watching the Kims—father Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), and daughter Ki-jeong (Park So-dam)—insert themselves into the lives of the ultra-wealthy Parks—father Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), mother Choi (Cho Yeo-jeong), daughter Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), and son Da-song (Jung Hyun-joon). For the first half at least, the film is a bit of a con artist picture, with Ki-woo getting a job as Da-hye’s tutor, and then the rest of the family displacing the Park’s servants, the Gooks, to work as their art teacher, driver, and housekeeper.
Anders: I noted earlier that the film never neglects one area of the film, and I just want to point out that the film never lags or stalls. It doesn’t leave one waiting for the “twist,” biding one's time. The grifter plot is given as much care and is delivered as entertainingly as anything that follows. I was entertained and satisfied in the first third as at any point in the film.
Aren: Definitely. But the interest in the film escalates as the twists start to pile up. The main twist happens once the Kims are comfortably ensconced in the Parks’ lives and revelling in their home while the Parks are away camping. The Parks’ old housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), appears out the rain and shows them the bunker underneath the house, where her husband, Geun-sae (Park Myung-hoon), has been living for several years unbeknownst to the Parks. It’s a crazy twist that complicates the dynamic the film has established up to that point. And then things get crazier from there, as these three families—in many ways representing various classes of people—are set on a collision course, leading to bloodshed.
Bong embodies the tonal slipperiness of New Korean Cinema better than any other director and Parasite is a masterful display of shifting between tones. Certain images are horrifying—the shot of Da-song watching Geun-sae emerge from the basement in the middle of the night is an image ripped straight out of the most disturbing horror movie—but others are genuinely hilarious—the whole sequence where the Kims are hiding beneath the coffee table as the Parks have sex is brilliant slapstick.
Also, Bong knows how to employ Chekov’s gun as well as any director currently working. The peach allergy and the scholar’s rock all come into play in the narrative twists throughout the film.
Everything is “so metaphorical”
Aren: I think a big part of the film’s appeal is that beyond the narrative shifts, there’s a substantial class metaphor at work. The film directly points this out as the characters often remark that occurrences or objects in the film are “so metaphorical”—the scholar’s rock comes to mind—but it’s not cute about using symbolism. It’s merely straightforward in its approach to metaphor, not trying to hide behind the mask of realism. As well, the symbolism and commentary is not reductive; Bong is saying a lot here, much of it complicated.
Anders: I really appreciate that the film never allows symbolism or blunt political commentary to overwhelm its characters or story, but it also never pulls back from overt symbolism or clear-eyed social drama. The repeated motif of how the characters smell is a good example: Dong-ik, the father of the Park family, repeatedly complains about how the poor smell (“Like someone who rides the subway”), and his son, Da-song, observes that all the new house help all smell the same, and this plays into Mr. Kim’s (Song Kang-ho is masterful here) growing sense of aggrievement, and triggers the final outburst of violence.
Aren: The smell is probably the best example of how the symbolism works here. It’s not reductive, as the smell doesn’t stand in for any one literal aspect of being poor. It simply represents the class difference between the Parks and the Kims in a concrete way. It’s an elegant way of exploring this metaphorical concept.
Anders: I think it’s interesting to think about how much attention the film pays to homes and architecture and how homes mediate our relationship with the elements and other people. For instance, the rainstorm for the Parks is something fun to experience (Da-song camps out in the backyard), but for the Kims it destroys their semi-basement home. Likewise, the Kims must put up with drunks urinating outside their basement window, while the Parks’ beautiful modernist home is raised up with castle-like entrances (and a remote secured entrance).
This doesn’t even get into the meaning and function of the hidden safe house under the Parks’ home and how this extravagance and safety net has allowed others to live undiscovered in their house.
Aren: The homes also another symbolic way of showing the class differences. In the most obvious sense, the architectural differences between the Parks’ home and the Kims’ home illustrates their different stations in the world. But the symbolism goes further as the Kims are living in a half-basement apartment, still with a window onto the outer world. They’re poor but they’re not destitute. Geun-sae, on the other hand, lives entirely underground in the bunker, showing that there’s even another underclass beneath the Kims. They can even fall further than the status they currently enjoy. And as the finale shows, Ki-taek even ends up living in the basement, displacing Geun-sae, and taking on his position in the underclass.
Anders: For a film that is in many ways about the way that capitalism and exploitative labour force us to take on various roles and seek to get one over on each other, the film retains a remarkable sympathy for all the characters, even if it’s clear where the film’s (and my) sympathies lie in the end. For instance, the Parks are not one-dimensional monsters, for all their obliviousness.
Aren: That is key here. We’re meant to sympathize with the Kims more than the rest of the characters, but the Parks are not bad people, and the Kims are not good people. In fact, the observation in the film that the Parks are “nice” and that “rich people can afford to be nice” is a really illuminating comment on class and how people relate to each other. It complicates the class portraits here.
Anders: Actually, that’s one of the best lines in the film and key to the success of the film’s parable. The idea that our material wealth gives us the room to be nice, to make mistakes, to not be as ruthless (despite the fact that many rich do behave ruthlessly), is an important one to the film. It means that the film avoids the kind of moralizing that sinks so many films about class struggle. It’s not about the rich being inherently bad, or the “poor” being sentimentalized. It’s frank and straightforward in simply representing the world as Bong sees it.
Working in conversation with Bong’s other films
Aren: Many critics have been quick to compare the film to two other celebrated East Asian films from last year: Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. The focus on a poor family and how they make their way in the world has obvious connections to Shoplifters, while the film’s preoccupation with class and class rage clearly aligns with some of the interests of Burning. However, it’s probably more fruitful to explore Parasite within the context of Bong’s own work.
Throughout most of his films, Bong is exploring family and class issues. Memories of Murder and Mother explore the urban/rural class divide, while The Host and Mother both explore family. Snowpiercer is Bong’s most explicit class metaphor, with its construction of the train segmented into different strata of society. Parasite merges these interests, exploring family and class within one picture.
There are also deliberate callbacks to his previous films. The bumbling detectives here recall the characters of Memories of Murder—one of the detective even pratfalls similar to during the tracking shot in the field in Memories of Murder where the cops are slipping down the muddy shoulder of the road—while the title of the film itself recalls The Host: as in, host and parasite.
Anders: That is an interesting pairing of titles. Of course, each title also can be interpreted in several ways. The Host is in many ways Korea, and the monster is a result of their allowing a continued American presence in Seoul. But it’s also the monster, of course.
Parasite is more challenging to define what it means, as there is no literal creature or monster in the film. Is the parasite, the “hanger on,” the rich or the poor? Both? I think regardless of how one is inclined to read the film’s title, it suggests a certain interconnectedness in society, even if some groups are more oblivious to their impact than others.
Aren: It’s impossible to view one family as more definitively a parasite than the other here. The Kims are literal hangers-on of the Parks, but the Parks benefit from their social class—which criticism of capital will term social parasitism. But then the introduction of Geun-sae brings into play a more literal parasitic relationship: he eats the actual food of the Parks and lives within the bowels of their home much as a parasite lives in a human stomach.
Anders: As you note, the most obvious comparison is to Bong’s recent explicitly social issue films: the train-bound class allegory of Snowpiercer and animal exploitation of Okja. Both of those are the least successful Bong films in my estimation, and I think Bong benefits from returning to the particularity of South Korean society in Parasite after the English in his last two films.
Like Memories of Murder, Parasite never displaces its social commentary from the realities of Korean society. There is a particularity to each film, observing the way communities relate and even the specifics of work and labour in society today. For instance, it is the system of tutors and the high expectations of Korean schools that gives the Kims their first foothold into the Parks’ lives, when Ki-woo’s friend Min (Park Seo-joon) offers him the job of tutoring Da-hye. One can’t quite imagine this film being exactly the same in another part of the world. One would need to approach an adaptation (which I’m sure some are already contemplating) as Scorsese did with the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, using the transposition to another place to explore the particularity of that new locale, as in The Departed.
Earlier, you mentioned the “tonal slipperiness” of Bong, and the New Korean Cinema in general, which some viewers find either off-putting or exotic in its seeming move between genres. Parasite has some of this, with its combination of comedy, melodrama, and horror, but I do think that the tonal variation works so well here that it achieves a unity of purpose at times that is really special.
Ultimately, the reason that Parasite is making waves with audiences around the world is that, as Bong has said, ““I think that’s because, while on the surface the film features very Korean characters and details, in the end it’s as if we’re all living in this one country of capitalism.” I think this says it very well and suggests to me something that I’ve come to believe about art, which is that it is only with an eye to the particular, to nuance, to specificity that you will find something truly universal, which is an experience of the human. That might be a grand thing to say about a film, but in this case I think it’s true.
Parasite (2019, South Korea)
Directed by Bong Joon-ho; written by Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-won; starring Song Kang-ho, Jang Hye-jin, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Jung Ji-so, Jung Hyun-joon, Lee Jung-eun, Park Myung-hoon.