I don’t, as a rule, put much faith in the Oscars. I’ve seen too many films I consider to be less than the best win Best Picture. Likewise, I remember being oh-so-pleasantly surprised when I saw Parasite in a theater, to the point where it was my favorite film of 2019. But I just didn’t not for a minute believe it was going to win Best Picture even when it got nominated. First off, the Academy never picks my favorite film–not that they consult me or anything, I just tend to like things that they don’t–and second, when had the Academy ever selected a film that wasn’t in English? Oh, and then it did win, and I distinctly remember then-President Trump complaining that a foreign film won Best Picture.
Man, if he saw it and realized the film was also against the wealthy, he might have been even more upset.
Now, I recall the first time I saw Parasite that I was actively wondering who exactly the “parasite” of the title was. Knowing a little (but admittedly not much) of writer/director Bong Joon-ho’s work, my best guess would be the wealthy Park family would be the parasites. They’re wealthy and seem to live off the toil and misery of others after all, even if the Kims at first think they are nice people. Likewise, the Kims are sponging off the Park’s wealth after they one-by-one scam their way into working for the Parks. There’s even a case to be made for the third family, the middle aged couple that initially are the Parks’ previous housekeeper and her husband who is hiding in the Parks’ basement from creditors. Are they the parasite? Are all of them parasites?
Since then, though, I’ve seen a couple more of Bong Joon-ho’s films, plus a few other South Korean works (notably Squid Game), and if there’s one thing that seems to be a frequent occurrence in modern South Korean stories, it’s a general awareness of the vast gap between the super-rich and the working class/poor. The Kims are hustling the Parks to get those jobs, but at the same time, the Kims actually love and care for each other. Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-jeong) is too vapid a person to hold much real affection for anything aside from maybe her dogs while Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun), whenever asked by Kim patriarch Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho) if Park does indeed love his wife, can only at best say after a pause that that’s a good enough way to describe how he feels about her as any. There’s no question the Kims care for each other. Arguably, their intricate scheme to get them all hired by the Parks one-by-one only works if they do.
The Kims, of course, are used to having to hustle for everything. They make plans, though Ki-taek at one point says his plan is always to have none because that way he can adapt to whenever a bad thing hits like a sudden flood of their cramped basement apartment. But the Kims show genuine affection for each other. Do the Parks? Mrs. Park worries. Mr. Park seems interested in sex with his wife, but won’t say he loves her. The two Park children, I’m not even sure they even really speak to each other much in the film if at all. But what have the Parks contributed to the society? Even the house they live in, with its symbollic staircases all over the place, wasn’t even designed or built by them. They just bought it while the Kims seem to think they’re good people.
Then again, Mrs. Kim (Jang Hye-jin) seems to think the only thing that makes the foolish Mrs. Park “nice” is that she can afford to be.
Now, maybe it’s just being more aware now than I was in 2019 about how the superwealthy operate, but the “buy not build” concept fits the Parks perfectly. Everything they do, they do on the assumption that their money can buy them what they need, and the only thing that really sours Ki-taek is he hears what the Parks really think of them during a moment when Mr. Park speaks about how the Kims all seem to have the same unpleasant odor. What is this odor? The Kims don’t seem to know, but the facial expressions on Mr. Kim’s face do say it all as he finally realizes what these people really are. I personally tend to like a good film that can mix-and-match genres successfully, and Bong Joon-ho pulls that off here. The Kims’ efforts to get employed is the work of good comedy. The film shows them worm their way inside with some elaborate stories, and the only real twinge of guilt for the audience might be how the Kims get the original housekeeper fired by playing up the older woman’s peach allergy with Mrs. Park’s general fear that her wild son might get sick. The film doesn’t seem to worry about the chauffeur the Kims get fired, but the housekeeper is another story for a good reason, especially since that woman’s return is what sets the whole film headed in a completely unexpected direction as it becomes less a comedy and more of a thriller. There’s actually still some comedy here, but it’s a lot darker in tone now.
But the message here is that, ultimately, people like the Parks don’t really care about people like the Kims, people that both Mr. and Mrs. Park think they can just order around and even rob of their dignity if they just pay them a little extra. Does that mean making all four attend a child’s hastily thrown-together birthday party where Mr. Kim and Mr. Park will don Indian costumes because the youngest Park is obsessed with Native Americans? Sure. Let’s add cultural appropriation to the list of things the Parks just try to buy. But it all comes down to a crazed man stabbing the Kim daughter Ki-jung (Park So-dam), the one member of the Kim family that actually seems to fit into the Park’s world, for Mr. Kim to finally snap, and even then, it comes more from Mr. Park’s look at revulsion over the crazed man’s smell as Park demands Kim rush his son (who just fainted) to the hospital while ignoring Ki-jung’s potentially bleeding out in his back yard.
The film ends in a melancholy way. Ki-jung dies. So does Mr. Park. Mr. Kim goes into hiding (presumably) in the Park’s basement where the housekeeper’s husband hid for four years to avoid creditors. Mrs. Kim and her son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) manage to avoid serious jail time as the brain damaged Ki-woo is probably lucky to be alive. Ki-woo plans to earn enough money to buy the house some day to let his father out, but that seems like a highly improbable action. Even if having a plan violates his father’s advice to never have one, how this poor boy who at the start of the film was scrounging for free wi-fi while folding pizza boxes for what little money he had is going to be able to buy that house seems like something that can’t happen, but I suppose the boy can dream. Then again, dreaming the family could actually move up in the system they lived in to be something of peers to the Parks was never going to happen anyway, but that’s the real trick of the system: it makes people at the bottom think getting to the top is somehow even possible while the people at the top can pick them out just by their smells.
NEXT: Well, if I want to talk mixing and matching of genres, that’s not something you’d see much from a 1950s musical, but I think 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain might actually come close considering it works as both a lighthearted romance and a critique of Hollywood’s system.
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