Parasite: An analysis
Does the Korean film ‘Parasite’, which has won four Oscars in a row, really worth the honor it enjoys? What’s so good about this film? [it is recommended to read this after you have watched Parasite!]
Characters List:
Kim Ki-taek (Father of the poor family)
Park Dong-ik (Father of the rich family)
When we talk about the biggest winners of the Oscars in 2020, we cannot leave out the ground-breaking Korean film, Parasite. To a certain extent, the success of Parasite is not a coincidence, but an inevitable and well-deserved one.
Parasite is a 2019 South Korean black comedy thriller film directed by Bong Joon-ho, who co-wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won. The film follows a poor family who schemes to become employed by a wealthy family and infiltrate their household by posing as unrelated, highly qualified individuals.
Parasite touches on class, the most sensitive issue in human society, and demonstrates the extremes of this social problem. The title alone immediately gives us a certain level of curiosity: Who is the host and who is the parasite? The brilliance of the movie is that it only tells stories without telling the answers, because everyone might have different interpretations and standards of measurement in their own minds - we don’t always get tidy answers.
In Parasite, we see many in-depth descriptions of the word poverty, but I think one of the most interesting details about poverty is the substantialization of the concept of smell. Back in the 1980s, American neuroscientists discovered that smell possesses a poetic ability, which is the "Proust effect": Humans have a deeper impression of smell than of words and pictures, and they can unlock and awaken long-forgotten emotional memories through smell. As we all know: Clothing and accent can distinguish classes in our society. However, in Parasite, Bong Jo-hoo shows us that, actually, dressing and language can be disguised. Smell, however, cannot. The poor family is almost outed for the first time because the rich family’s son is extremely sensitive to smells. He notes that the four new employees all have the same smell. At the same time, in the later stage of the film, the rich wife opens the car window because she dislikes the smell of the driver[Mr.Kim]. These details all inadvertently reflect the ironic reality: the poor can wash away the sweaty smell of clothes, but they can't wash away the musty smell in the basement home they live in. I realized, after seeing this, that those smells, just like class, exist even if we don’t always notice them. And these smells carry the poor's deep sense of inferiority towards their identity. Therefore, when the rich father, at a critical moment, reacts to the stench of the poor rather than the violence that has just occurred, his repulsion acts like a fuse, sending the poor husband into a blind rage.
Through Parasite, the director showed us a real Korean society through his eyes, a society with huge gaps between the rich and poor. The upper class is always considered to be hypocritical and indifferent, but are the people at the bottom necessarily innocent? The director also emphasized the comparison of the intimacy between family members in the two families. In the film, the poor family obviously love and help each other more, while the wealthy family seem to be separated as family members rarely appear in one frame. Although the wealthy couple have taken a series of help to their son who had a psychological shadow since childhood, in the process, not only did not help their son, but also because of the excessive attention to the son, the daughter was also psychologically imbalanced. Is this due to the family itself, or is this a common occurrence in every rich family? We don’t know. The uncertainty of this question matches the uncertainty of reality.
Another significant element is the Kim family’s attitude towards planning. At the start of the film, they made lots of positive expectations towards their future: they wished that the family could get more money to escape from their current poor conditions - that the mother and the father can get jobs, and the son and the daughter can go to prestigious colleges. As the story develops, the Kim family is getting richer, but their ambitions are also increasing: they treasure the short-term benefits and what is in front of them. And this short view made them lose what they have. Until the last moment, Mr. Kim broke all the psyche-locks, the plans no longer exist or possible to achieve. The cost, for his actions, is the death of his daughter, and harmings to all the people around him. If we consider the personality change of Mr.Kim - from the cowardice in the beginning, to gradually breaking the repression, and finally killing the rich president Mr. Park as his driver, we may interpret that it is not President Park that Driver Kim resists, but a whole set of social class and order that has been oppressing and restraining him for a long time. Mr. Kim did not kill Mr. Park based on emotional hatred, nor did he kill Mr. Park based on rational logic, because he was not even prepared for what happened in front of him. All the plots of the entire movie "Parasite" are paving the way for this scene, which is to deliberately create this kind of unsensual, emotionless, irrational and subconsciously driven attack - "instinctive killing", just like a person tickling and yawning, it is very likely that something has already happened before you even realized it. For this poor family, planning never worked for them, but ‘with no plan, nothing can go wrong’.
Ironically, in order to save his father, Mr. Kim’s son tied all the psyche-locks broken by his father again to himself, and was once again immersed himself back into plannings without real futures. There seems to be no solutions for the problem. Everything is like a closed loop that cannot be broken or escaped. There may be changes, but the final results are still the same no matter how hard people try, or we finally find that there is no other way out even after breaking it. Therefore the only choice for us is to go back to the starting point and start again.
Overall, these vivid characters fabricated this film into a symphony of social morbid fables. When we first look at the film, we might think it was trying to explore something simple: the problem of these poor people who become parasites of a rich family. But if we think from a different perspective, the oppression and indifference toward the poor might also be a kind of parasitism. The rich live off the poor, so why wouldn’t the poor live off the rich? I think Bong Joo-ho showed us some great questions, and to my delight, he left the answers wide open.
Bong Joon-ho has calculated how long it will take to buy the mansion in the film. If calculated by the current per capita income in South Korea, it may take 547 years. In my opinion, this feeling of powerlessness and sadness is the subject he wants to explore.
1) Psychological shadow refers to a kind of mental illness that is deeply traumatized by something that happened to oneself or people around them in the past, which is unforgettable. People with psychological shadows may be afraid and react abnormally if they see or hear the actions and words of related matters.
2) spiritual bondage, it is a mental barrier an individual sets to himself/herself, it is usually a very challenging thing and it could be anything, e.g. step out from their comfort zone.
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