He won an Oscar .. How did the movie "Parasite" explain class hatred in capitalist society?

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For many years, Korean director Bong Joon Ho has used to return his films to distant imaginary spaces, taking place in strange worlds, with monsters and unusual creatures in the heart. In his latest film, "Parasite", which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, and recently received an Academy Award, he opted to come back and land on the ground. But who said that reality does not have its own monsters too?

About one of these monsters, the Bong movie is set. You may not see this monster at first sight. One of his most important characteristics is that he hides within the details of every day, until your eyes get used to his ugly characteristics, but if you look closely, he will immediately unfold before you: it is the modern capitalist system itself.

In this system, two families can share the same space, and they inhabit completely different worlds. This is the case of the families of Kim and Park, who are at the heart of the events of the movie "Parasite". In the same city, the Kim family lives in a basement with a low ceiling that the sun only sees from one window, stacked in a small house with no rooms and doors, not far from them. The Park family lives in a two-storey luxury house and a spacious garden designed by a famous decorator .

The distance between the two families becomes smaller and smaller when the Kim family's Ki-taek, by recommendation of his wealthy colleague, can get a job as a tutor for Da-hay, the daughter of the Park family. Then, with a mixture of resourceful and resourceful, the rest of the family succeeds in hiring all of them with the Park family. Ki-jung's sister Ki-tae works as a drawing school for Da-sung's brother, Da-hae, the father replaces Mr. Park's driver, and the mother replaces the family's maid. However, even after the two families inhabited the same house, the gap that capitalist society created between them remained the same.

Upon that chasm, Bong sets his camera, and returns again to the theme of class struggle that he previously discussed in the science fiction movie "Snowpiercer"; but this time he leaves science fiction elements and characters subject to sharp class casts that have fallen into the heart of the conflict, and replaces our reality The pension and his real persons. "In SnowPercer, I was able to communicate my message to people clearly and powerfully," Bong says. "But in" my parasite ", I wanted to approach the issue on another level, I wanted to look through a microscope for every angle of human beings, to see the most comprehensive subjects through the smallest lenses." . [1]

Barriers we do not see

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Bong stated in a previous interview that the idea of ​​"Parasitic" came up during the last stages of the production of "Snowser"; the theme controlling the two is the same, with a great difference in approach. In contrast to Snowpreser's blatant symbols and rigid stereotypes in which the characters put an exploited rich and a poor poor over his command, Pong is found in a "parasite" that takes a quieter direction, making him able to express the class struggle in a deeper and closer to reality.

Just as in our pension reality, the barriers separating the classes in "my parasite" do not appear to be strict; the Kim family managed to penetrate the world of the Park family and cross from the basement of the fleeing house easily. The layers here are not separated by iron doors guarded by gunmen, as is the case in "Snowerser", and then it becomes very easy to cross from one layer to another, right?

not exactly. The Kim family's entry into the world of the Park family does not mean that the barriers between them have disappeared. However, here is the problem that Bong highlights, in the economic conditions that surround the world right now, that the Kim family dreams about to keep their jobs as servants of the Park family. The struggle here, in the first half of the movie, is not between the Kim family and the Park family, but the Park family and other landless and unemployed.

The barriers between the layers have not diminished; they are more present than ever before. But while economic regimes in the past created a rhetoric that views this chasm between classes as an abominable thing that tries to overcome it, today the capitalist system looks to those at the bottom of the class ladder and says: “The stairs are in front of you. Bring them up if you want to have a better life. People with limited intelligence. "

But, and this is what Bong goes to in his movie, asking the poor to climb the stairs in the current situation is not very different from your request from the lame to climb Mount Everest, as Bong himself said in one of the dialogues: “In today's capitalist society, there is hierarchy and class. Concealed on the eye; we always try to hide this hierarchy and turn a blind eye to that class as if things are outdated. But, in reality, the barriers between the classes still exist and it is impossible to cross them. ”[2] [3]

The problem is not in the poor themselves, but in the fact that everything in the capitalist system is designed to judge their endeavors as failures, and after that, he returns to blame them. This is what we see clearly in the events of the film. Ki-taek and Ki-jung are highly intelligent, yet they failed to enroll in college; the mother was an athlete and did not get support to succeed; and the father created many small projects that all failed.

Here, with limited opportunities, or in the sense of their absence, the only way for the Kim family to ascend even a small step on the class scale is to drag those who stand on that step down, which they do without hesitation. The father occupies the position of Mr. Park's driver and the mother is the housekeeper, after the Kim family conspired and succeeded in catching the ex-driver and mastermind and disposing them to replace them. In order for the Kim family to rise to a level, one of them had to drop grades. From here, the series of class struggles arises in the film, in which violence and blood inevitably enter.

You might pause to ask after the end, who is guilty here? Like any real-life filmmaker, Bong's answer comes to "my parasite": no one. Away from the stereotypes of the oppressed rich and the poor provided by filmmakers in those cases - and Bong himself introduced them in "Snowbearser" - we find rich Park family members, and poor Kim family members, like any two random families you might meet while walking through the streets of your city: not demons Nor with angels.

As Bong himself says about his movie in one of the dialogues: “Even if there is no evil, disasters can always happen.” [4] And if you are determined to find the real villain, you do not have to look any further than the monster Bong chose to put in the heart of the movie "My Parasite," the contemporary capitalist system, the one who sentenced the members of the Kim family to their ultimate dreams to live life like life, and not leave them One straight path to reach their goal, and they found in front of them only the behavior of the dark alleys paved with fraud and contaminated with blood.

All of those ideas that Bong Joon Ho included in his "parasite" are good and consistent with each other. But since we are in front of an artistic and not an intellectual work, we still have to wonder: How can he use his cinematic tools to express them with aesthetics that distance from direct?

Smells destroy everything

In the hands of a director less sensitive than Pong, perhaps "Parasitic" might have ended up as a pure artwork in which thought overwhelms art and turns public speaking. However, as we stand before an accomplished director, Bong hired all elements of his image to serve the meaning he wanted in a calm and profound way that enters the core of meanings without surrounding them with rhetoric and hollow phrases.

We find this clearly in Bong's choice of the families of the two families. The Kim family lives in an underground cellar, and the Kim family lives in a house on top of a hill. Hence, Bong sets out to make his cinematic picture, which tells us, without a word, how each of the two families lives in two worlds, sharing the same city, and on the opposite ends of everything.

The Kim family cellar is solid, with no doors or windows except for a small, dirty window, overlooking a dilapidated neighborhood and an alley where a drunkard urinates every day, and then we find lighting in their house, overwhelmed by darkness. The Park family home has clear glass overlooking a wide garden in which the sun shines throughout the morning and floods it with white light. Reflecting the narrowness of the Kim family’s low-ceilinged house, they often share the same frame sitting or lying on the ground, portrayed by Pong from a low angle to medium shots. In the Kim’s large house, Bong chooses to shoot from higher angles.

In choosing the geography of the place, deep metaphors are played by Bong in his events and dialogues. Poor people are always hidden, like rats under the ground, away from the eyes of the wealthy, who soon forget their existence and are harmed by the least thing that reminds them of them. The poor, in turn, are keen on seeing the rich get rid of all manifestations of poverty, so the Kim family members appear in front of the Park family as engineers, dressed in clean and sometimes elegant clothes. One thing they can't get rid of and reveals their modest living; it's the smell.

The smell of poverty emanates from them, the smell of poverty, housing underground, and the transportation in public transportation are stacked among hundreds of thousands, the smell of not being able to get clean water and buy new clothes. It is the smell that does not escape from it, which destroys every illusion of the collapse of class barriers, and makes some ashamed of his body and what comes from it, while others twist their face in resentment.

The Kim and Park families share the same space, but their separate worlds make each one their own scent. The rain falls on everyone in the city, but in the neighborhoods of the wealthy they wash the streets and clean the gardens whose scents smell air, and in the alleys of the poor that the state did not care about, providing them with an infrastructure, mixing with wastewater and flooding everything. The rain itself rains on the two worlds, but it cleans one and drowns the other farther and farther into the depths of poverty, humiliation and need. And just like the sewage that overflowed everything, the most important moment of escalation came in the movie, when the poor were fed up with everything, and the twisting of the face of a wealthy became accustomed to the smell of poverty enough to kill.

The wealthy family left and replaced it with another, and the ghost of the poor vault passed away and replaced it with another, but the system that put each of those in its place remained revolving, to uphold the importance of some, while others grind to a extent that no one knows, as the philosopher Slavoy Cicek said: "It is easier to imagine The end of the world is to imagine the end of capitalism. ”[5]