After a very long hiatus, I am back on the site, excited to sink my teeth into Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite.
The movie is heavily metaphorical, crafted with incredible detailing, and it is quite a surreal experience to watch it.
The Film Reel Blog Review suggests it is a cyclical metaphor, that everything in the movie is a metaphor, and the movie title is a metaphor, and the relationship of the movie to the audience is also parasitical. Can a movie live on as a parasite in you and start growing?
Parasite delves into deep exploration of humankind and it’s systems in a very Tarantino-isque style. The questions it poses relates to human biology, neuroscience, political systems, society in broad strokes of questions. We could then extend the pattern of questions to earth, animals, climate change, and space exploration. How far you go with the questioning and understanding is upto you. If you are a good host, the movie ‘Parasite’ could go a long way in giving you guilt induced sleepless nights.
Almost all the big ticket films this season delve quite deeply and re-assuredly into the most pressing of current issues faced by mankind. Which surprisingly enough are all same as those faced repeatedly by us at every turn of the century perhaps. Relationships, social justice and the colossal state of the human condition. Excepting climate change, I feel we are adequately covered.
Coming back to the movie, director Bong Joon-Ho, takes us all on a ride to remember. It starts innocuously enough, as we slowly enter the world of the Kims. The representative for the disenfranchised section of the world. Who are forever partitioned by a glass window, from the comfort of richness. They are not unhappy but far from it, they do not realise that the depths of poverty they live in cannot be just their fault, that the world owes them something. Some kind of dignity, some kind of social security, some kind of health system. But poverty is a hard cross to bear. More than that it feels like a personal cross to bear. So it is that the Kims don’t delve deeply or at all into why they are exactly in this state. And how they could get out of it, except to fight for fair price for their shoddy work of folding pizza boxes for a local shop. We get to see how they finagle themselves out of a pay cut by using every trick in the book. For less than 10 dollars of pay cut. This is a precursor to what is to follow. As a family, they gang up and try to bully. As is associated with the lowest echelons of society, that they over imbibe, are not too smart, do not have a good work ethic, they do not have a good personal hygiene, and are not to be trusted. We have seen how our past history is littered with such assumptions of the weakest. Colonisation is based on this of course. And civilisation or civilised behaviour has long been the bastion of the rich. The Kims embody every one of these characteristics. They represent every despised and abhorred set of people possible.
The rich are represented by the Park family, well, actually not the very rich, but a comfortable upper middle class. If we were still talking a tale of colonisation, we would be talking about the settlers, the east India Company etc not the monarchy or the parliament which took the main decisions. The Park family is an unsuspecting victim, the quasi rich who are leading a life of privileges without any real hand in the system except to being silently complicit while enjoying the status quo. Their depiction in the movie is also true to form, they lead an unsuspecting life, enjoying the wealth which looks to most part as self earned but of course propelled by inheritance of course. The Park husband works in a high paying job, his wife takes care of the young and growing household with the help of one housekeeper and a driver. This is the extent of their immediate circle. They live without knowing anything about the system, or people working around them, they are bystanders as their lives are impinged on, they can only look on. They are in some ways as helpless as the Kims, and as happy or unhappy as them. So both the families are somewhat the same and on same footing. The director does not give us the relief of hating them. They are as much victims of a ‘system’ or ‘fate’ or ‘writer’ of course.
The house they live in is stupendously beautiful, on top of a hill, with a beautiful living room which is so crucial in the movie that it could have gotten a cast credit. We are repeatedly told that the house was built by a famous architect with great attention to detail. It is implied by the first housekeeper in the beginning itself that Parks probably with their new money were themselves not quite suitable enough to live there. The only reference which equates the Parks and Kims of the world as squabblers reaching above themselves. The ladder of a system we are all climbing.
The first half of the movie shows us how the Kims finagle themselves into the Park household. Just before the intermission, the Kim family is relaxing in the beautiful living room of the Parks’ with some alcohol, short eats from the kitchen, lying around in filth as is characteristic of a parasite’s normal environment. But also something we all indulge in once in a while. Here comes another interesting moment, the Kim husband lifts his hand as if to hit the Kim wife, the Kim siblings watch suspended in time, the wife almost cowers with fear, but then he brings down is hand and laughs, happy with how he fooled everyone. The wife also somewhat recovers, saying how she would never take that somewhat unsurely. The violence that exists in the lowest classes, especially domestic violence is not present in the Kim family but very uncomfortably we are made aware of the power dynamics if Kim husband was not the benign person he mostly decides to be.
Shortly after, on the same couch we are made aware of the power dynamics of the Park couple. Again showing us some of the similarities of the Kim and the Park family.
But before that, the Kim family accidentally discovers a most absurd secret of the previous housekeeper who arrives a bit roughed up unannounced in the rain. There is very heavy rain that night. The kind that can flush out all manners of life living under the kitchen sink apparently.
This secret turns everything on its head in the movie. It forces the plot into a free fall tumble and some quick reversals to finally end in a glory of guts and blood.
The movie turns into bizarre territory soon after the intermission and leans heavily into genre tropes of being macabre, violent and scary in turns. This movie beats classification and is closest to Bong Joon-Ho’s earlier movie ‘The Host’. It seems like Bong Joon-Ho is creating a movie category of his own, befitting an auteur.
The randomness of the last 20 minutes of the movie, entirely dependant on happenstance and the quickest of the turn of emotions leaves us undecided if we should rally against a system or fate. If it is a tragedy based on the principles of cause and effect, which then implies we can and should correct it, or if it is an accidental train wreck of a tragedy that nobody can really do anything about.
Increasingly after a certain incubation time though it does feel as if the tragedy was not the last 20 minutes of the movie, but the first 2 hours of it. And that tragedy is indeed a cause and effect one and we all are a bit of Kim and a bit of Park family in that one. But indeed the movie itself gives you no clear route to follow. Which could be the genius of it or an accident.
Do you get the cyclical metaphors yet? Is it exhausting?
Here is a very interesting take from the New Yorker.
Richard Brody Review for New Yorker
My own review of Memories of murder here
Excerpts from a Bong Joon-Ho interview from the blog here
ireview 