To truly understand just how stuck in one’s station in life they are from the time of birth–how utterly irrelevant the myth of “capitalism” is–one no longer needs to study the likes of Adam Smith or John Locke, but merely watch Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. Co-written with Han Jin-won, the nuanced layers of every scene in this sweeping class war epic (clocking in at 132 minutes) offers a no holds barred account of the futility of clawing tooth and nail to become like “them.” The “them” in the us v. them permutation being the rich. Those who stab you in the back with a smile while telling you it’s all part of the job description you’re being paid for (at least the broke asses have the decency to stab you in the front, as very literally evidenced in the film).
For the basement dwellers that comprise the financially flailing Kim family, their existence mimics that of so many down at heel, literally entrenched in the mire of a sewer-like existence, collecting the runoff whenever they can. Case in point, the opening scene featuring the collective familial plight of having their phone services shut off and being desperate like crack fiends to find any trace of wi-fi (the neighbors upstairs have of late decided to add a password to their network)–the tool a person needs most in this life if they want to stay ahead not just in the “social” realm, but in the job game. “Have you tried 123456789?” Ki-jeong (Park So-dam) asks her brother, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), with a tactical and accepting approach to being full-tilt parasitic by way of trying every scheme and scam simply to finagle that which seems to come so easily to others. No luck (and, as Match Point taught us, luck means everything to being successful). No luck at all, in fact, until Ki-woo’s university-attending friend, Min (Park Seo-joon), with his college student’s “vigor” (as evidenced by him telling a pissing drunk to cease spraying it all over near the Kims’ basement window), pays them a visit to their hovel with the gift of a scholar’s rock in tow. As a staple of Korean culture that originally grew popular during the Joseun Dynasty, the sight of these types of landscape rocks were often seen on the study tables of Confucian scholars, thus the nickname.
That the rock comes from a scholar and is met with the balking response from Chung-sook (Chang Hyae-jin), the matriarch of the family, that she wished he had brought food instead speaks instantly to one of the key divides between the well-off and the destitute: the well-off constantly think that a gesture that would be appreciated “at their level” would also be just as appreciated by those “beneath them,” when, in general, things of more practical value hold more weight with those sharing the burdens of the Kim family. A burden that starts to lighten when Min insists that Ki-woo takes over his tutoring position for an affluent adolescent girl named Park Da-hye (Jeong Ji-so). Determined to ask her to be “his” once she’s officially entered university, Min wants to ensure that he doesn’t recommend anyone with lecherous intentions, the ones he’s certain his own more age-appropriate “comrades” will. So it is that Min ends up “talking him into” a job he’s in no position to turn down regardless of the ethicality with which he obtains it. In fact, Ki-woo appears to be the most morally sound of the brood (even if that’s not really saying much), promising his father, Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), that the university documents Ki-jeong has forged will one day be real, as Ki-woo vows to get into college when the time comes. This is just, for all intents and purposes, printing out what is written in the stars ahead of schedule.
In point of fact, with the advent of the scholar’s stone in their lives, not only does their luck seem to change for the better as Ki-woo is able to swiftly bamboozle the matriarch of the wealthy Park family, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), but he also seems to take the rock on as a sign (at one point literally calling out that it’s a metaphor to his family) of hope–hope that he can be responsible for the well-being and happiness of his family after years spent in the gutter. But oh, as in most fairy tales, “gifts” that bring “good fortune” are just as quick to turn on the receiver when they upset a karmic balance. Tamper with a cosmic understanding. In this way, of course, Parasite further makes the point that poverty is a vicious and unbreakable cycle once you’re born into it. To try to “upset the norm” by attempting to climb out of the hole and into the sunlight (also contrasting imagery frequently wielded throughout the film thanks to the design of the Park home–formerly owned by fictional architect Namgoong Hyeonja) is only to essentially beg the natural order of things to give back thrice (yes, a The Craft-ian tenet). And it soon starts to after the Kim family manages to usurp the chauffeur and long-standing housekeeper, Gook Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun), through conniving and reputation-damaging means. It is at this point one gets the sense that Bong Joon-ho is most definitely poking fun at the common trope about rich people loving “exclusive” word-of-mouth recommendations that make them feel more secure in their sense of elitism. Which is exactly why Ki-taek is armed with a sleek business card (of the variety that would make Patrick Bateman sweat) bearing only the name of a company and its number to show his “master,” Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun), when the time comes to nudge Moon-gwang not so gently out of the house to make room for Chung-sook. Intrigued, he passes the card along to his wife, who doesn’t find it at all odd that the other person at the end of the line (naturally, Ki-jeong) asks for the title to her house as a form of proof of her social standing.
The rich person’s willingness to allow themselves to be “fed upon” in the parasitic way referred to in the title is part and parcel of a statement made by Chung-sook after her daughter comments that Yeon-gyo is a nice rich person. Chung-sook retorts, “She’s nice because she’s rich. If I was rich I’d be as nice as her too. Nicer!” This notion that people are able to let more roll off their back with the happiness that comes with wealth (because yes, like Ari noted, “Whoever said money can’t solve your problems/Must’ve not had enough money to solve ‘em) is a key aspect to why they’re more open to being taken advantage of. A phenomenon that naturally occurs the more one hires people to do basic day-to-day tasks for them. For the more a rich person opens up his home to “help,” the more susceptible it becomes to getting pillaged. And oh, the Kims feel no compunction about pillaging it one weekend when the Parks are away on a camping trip to celebrate Da-song’s (Jung Hyeon-jun) birthday. Getting drunk and musing on what life would be like for them if they were to take up residence in the house (so clearly their rather plebeian dream lacking much ambition behind it), lightning strikes before a thunderstorm hits, one that brings back Moon-gwang to insist on collecting something she left in the basement. How it always seems to go back to the basement in this movie, an emblem of what it means to “belong” somewhere–at a specific low level–when you are poor. Chock full of horror movie vibes as she descends, goading Chung-sook when she asks her what she left down there, “You want to come see?”
Eventually, she does go and see, for Moon-gwang is gone for a suspicious amount of time. What she does see down there is Moon-gwang’s husband, Geun-sae (Park Myung-hoon), who has been hiding in this highly sequestered, secreted underground apartment for the very purpose it was once built for in Korea: to hide from the fallout of a nuclear bomb a.k.a. creditors. Unable to avoid the doggedly persistent loan sharks still after him, Geun-sae has spent years in this lightless place undetected. Unmissed by anyone else on the outside except for his wife. While no one cares about or respects him, he, in turn treats Dong-ik like the god who bestows upon him all of the necessities, bowing down by turning the lights on as Dong-ik walks up the stairs via the switches in front of him (sometimes communicating in Morse code with Da-song, who has participated in the Cub Scouts, therefore knows how to understand it). With Moon-gwang now aware of the dastardly con the Kims have committed after the rest of Chung-sook’s family rolls down the stairs while spying on the conversation, a power struggle between two groups of broke asses ensues, each group just vying for the position of remaining in the Parks’ favor.
After trapping them both in the basement, Ki-taek, Ki-woo and Ki-jeong are forced to hide when Chung-sook gets a call announcing the Parks eight minutes away and that Yeon-gyo wants some ram-don ready when she gets there for Da-song. Frantic–enmeshed in the peril of losing the sweetest gig they ever had–they manage to pull it together in time, which includes Chung-sook kicking Moon-gwang down the stairs when she tries to come up again. The poor are so flickable even to others in their class, evidently. While the trio hides under the coffee table, Dong-ik and Yeon-gyo end up sleeping on the couch, but not before a little dissection of Ki-taek’s “old radish” smell (the smell of poverty, as it were, also likened to a rag that’s been boiled) followed by some hanky panky involving Dong-ik suggesting that his wife go put on the “cheap panties” found in the Dong-ik’s car before (the ones planted by Ki-jeong to get the driver fired). Because nothing gets the rich off like the fantasy of a cheap ho, as all people who wear underwear made of multiple synthetics clearly must be.
Their callous vivisection of Ki-taek’s “personage”–representative of all “lowly” people–further extends to Dong-ik telling Yeon-gyo that Ki-taek knows never to cross the invisible, unspoken line. That line being the one between master and slave, bourgeois and plebe. He remains friendly, without being too invasive. Personable, with a business-like air. Just how Dong-ik prefers it. The perfect obsequious servant. A mongrel yet docile dog that returns to his alley at night after receiving scraps. With this perspective in mind, it should come as no surprise to the rich who employ “help” when they “bite the hand that feeds.” Since, in the minds of the rich, just because you’re paying someone, it entitles you to abuse them in insidious ways (like getting them to dress up as an “Indian” a.k.a. Native American at your kid’s birthday party). But the “docile animal” is never really as such, prone to snap at any moment if provoked the wrong way. Something the Parks are blithely unaware of as they parade their faux problems in front of the Kims, unaware that, in particular, it is going to push Ki-taek to his brink, only able to endure being treated like a parasite for so long until he finally starts embracing the role he’s been pigeonholed into for so long. And as Yeon-gyo puts her feet up in the backseat so that they’re close enough for Ki-taek to smell, she has the audacity to make the gesture of having detected a foul scent (the “old radish” comment having stuck with her), as though being rich makes her immune to herself emanating an odor. As she does so, she talks to a friend on the phone about how they’ve “turned lemons into lemonade” by having an impromptu backyard birthday party in the wake of the rainstorm that ruined her son’s initial birthday plans for camping all weekend. Her rich bitch complaints pale in comparison to the bitter lemons the entire Kim family must swallow as they figure out how to keep the bodies (whether dead or alive) in the Park basement at bay so that they might maintain the small advancement in station that they’ve made. Indeed, Yeon-gyo literally has the audacity to say that a ruined camping trip being repurposed into garden party is turning lemons into lemonade when there are so many other actual problems occurring right under her dainty nose (not to mention in the world).
Her oblivion is a synecdoche for most power structures, all of which are driven by vast sums of money changing hands in order to achieve clout. This is precisely why Ki-taek tells his son after their basement apartment floods (making for numerous iconic scenes including Ki-jeong wading through the shit-filled bathroom as the toilet spews at her so that she can grab her cigarettes from the crawl space above and sit on the overly expressive lid to smoke them, comfortable in the filth she’s used to), “You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned… You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?” The underscored tacit point being that nobody cares what happens to “their kind.” This is best evinced during a moment when Ki-woo is on the inside looking out at the garden party before him, commenting to Da-hye that they look so polished and effortless despite having been told about the event so last-minute. That everything, no matter what, is easy for them. The only person in his family who he thought inherently belonged–fit in–to such a scenario was Ki-jeong. Undeniably, the movie poster (some versions featuring black bars on the eyes of the family’s faces, the family being blurred out, or the two families being upside down flipsides to one another) indicates a certain sentiment that, if the circumstances of fortune were reversed, the Kims could just as easily be the Parks and vice versa. Fortune is arbitrary in this life and under this economic system.
And as the movie draws to its incredibly climactic close, one is left to ask himself: who is to blame in the perpetual dynamic of how the poor are treated by the rich? How can the poor avoid anything other than being “parasitic” when as R. Kelly once said, they’re “fighting for [their] fucking life.” And it’s every man for himself in this endeavor. The one thing the rich seem very clearly to lack in that battle is the relentless street smarts of people like the Kims, who have learned how to cut corners with the ruthlessness required to survive. That the rich know only how to live and not survive is the other grand distinction that makes the desperate aura of the poor stand out to them so much (and not just “stench-wise”). So maybe it can be said that the Kims are parasites, that it was wrong for them to extend their con to such a grand scale when even having just one child work in the Park household would have been enough to improve their economic situation. Yet who can blame them–least of all the rich–when greed is the Achilles’ heel at any class level? The notion of increasing one’s wealth as much as possible at every turn is the hope that keeps so many fires burning in the hearts of those whose are filled with nothing but cold, overused coal.
This is, in point of fact, the very eventuality that concludes the movie, with Ki-woo’s hope for buying the house so that he might be reunited with his father–which is nothing but a foolhardy fantasy, just as it is for most people who think that they can be that one in a million person who breaks the cycle of poverty. The one that turns them into “parasites”–whether they want to be or not. That is what the rich renders everyone beneath them. With parasitism being defined as “a relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives on or in another organism, the host, causing it some harm, and is adapted structurally to this way of life,” it becomes quite a literal definition by the end of the film. And one that can’t be avoided in this broken economic system, in Korea or otherwise. Because, as Billy Wilder once wrote in the script for One, Two, Three, “Capitalism is like a dead herring in the moonlight. It shines, but it stinks!”
