PARASITE: Eat the rich meat of your economic peers

SPOILERS: Parasite, The Host, Snowpiercer

Rating: 🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️🛏️

Sometimes when I’m trying to sleep, I do this thing my mom (or some YouTube video) taught me:

(Please participate.)

I start at the top of my head, and I tense and then relax every little muscle all the way down to my toes. Think about your toes. The idea behind the exercise is that I won’t make it all the way through because the occupation itself will unwittingly lull me to sleep. 

I always make it. 

So there I am—tensing and releasing my toes—wondering if there’s something even lower that I can activate. Eventually, I reach the emptiness below my feet where only abstractions of horror lurk.

Sleep is weird. 

There’s this actor named Song Kang-Ho. The only work of his that I’m familiar with is the four films he’s made with director Bong Joon-Ho. Those films are (in chronological order of release): Memories Of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer, and Parasite. 

Despite the fact that the USA network could probably close a Thursday night run of police procedurals with it, there’s a lot to admire about Bong Joon-Ho’s breakout existential angst vehicle Memories Of Murder. The bleak ponderance of local justice is jabbed through the screen like violence. The masterful ensemble staging got a reverential nod in Tony Zhou’s late YouTube series Every Frame A Painting. Kim Hyung-ku’s cinematography is divine. On top of all that, there’s this deftly delivered—and goddamned needling—idea that poverty creates and supports systemic violence and mistrust. Anyways, look at this title card:

That’s that good shit. 

2006’s The Host has a strange little opening scene. The Wikipedia summary accurately portrays the bluntness: “In 2000, an American military pathologist orders his Korean assistant to dump 200 bottles of formaldehyde down a drain leading into the Han River.” 

That’s it. That’s the whole scene. There’s a little bit of dialogue, but it reveals nothing. When the Korean assistant asks why, the answer is essentially “Because I said so.” 

The movie then moves through time to the present, where we learn that the formaldehyde dump has created a huge bug-like monster that kills people. Eventually, as a last resort to stop the monster, the military deploys a fumigant chemical called “Agent Yellow.”  It’s a metaphor that kind of hits you over the head.

Oh, and Song Kang-ho’s character has a sleeping disorder in this film because he didn’t get enough protein as a child.

Snowpiercer feels like a genre flick, but like, which genre? I guess fantasy? It’s got a hero’s-journey-thing going on, but elements of gory terror and absurdist comedy keep you guessing. 

Bong refers to Snowpiercer as his “hallway” movie. His class metaphor is very left-to-right. There’s the lower class, led by Chris Evans, and they are at the back of the train. They are revolting against the upper class at the front of the train. Life in the very back of the train is horrible. In a disturbing monologue at the end of the film, Evan’s character reveals that him and his cabinmates were at times driven to eat each other’s body parts for food. Whereas life at the front of the train is basically Eyes Wide Shut without the piano accompanist. 

Early in the film, the revolutionaries encounter a genius door security expert (our friend Song Kang-ho). He’s the only one with the intellectual keys to physically advance through the class-based system. The problem is that he likes this drug called “kronole” and keeps falling asleep if he doesn’t get it. 

It’s worth noting that this character is an invention of the film.

Bong Joon-Ho is very good at making movies. What I find most compelling about his films is his incredible control of tone. What sets Bong apart is his talent for cramming humor, terror, angst, melancholy, and existentialism into a single scene. These scenes function like the rug that contains the entire living room color palette. They hold his films together to allow for incredibly wide tonal shifts.

Parasite’s first half is mostly comedic, as the Kim family slowly infiltrates the Park household. Despite the lies and cons deployed to accomplish this, the relationship is more symbiotic than parasitic. The Parks pay the Kims money and—questionable art lessons notwithstanding—receive the services for which they pay. The real losers in the situation are the laborers the Kims have replaced. 

You understand something when watching a story like this: Capitalism creates a zero sum game for the lower class that must consume itself to survive. 

The Kims sit around the living room coffee table enjoying the spoils of their class war and opining about how they would be nicer if they were rich people. They address the fratricidal trespasses they have committed throughout the film’s first half, epiphanizing that they aren’t nicer as a direct result of their economic circumstances. 

You can’t get much more existential. 

Parasite begins in the basement-like apartment of the Kim family. Somewhere in that first scene Song Kang-ho’s character is literally kicked awake by one of his children. It’s the third beat of a sketch Bong has been playing on a meta-level over their two previous collaborations. And for a moment, I thought that was it. A wink. Nice and subtle. A little fan-service, maybe?

Here is where I make it clear that if you have not seen Parasite, I strongly advise you to do so before reading the rest of this (blog? memoir?). I’m going to spoil the hell out of it.

What are your thoughts on the Panama Papers? Did you read them? I didn’t. I read a couple headlines. Is that OK? I think I read maybe one longform piece on The Intercept at some point? I think—without fact checking this—that a bunch of rich folks were avoiding taxes by hiding money in Panamanian banks. This should be infuriating. 

However, I think the first thought I had when I found out about this was, “Why are there so many countries where these rich people can hide their money?” 

The answer to that question is intentionally very complicated and includes the word “colonialism” more than once. But, we don’t have the time or knowledge to fully explore it in this MEMOIR and that’s kind of the point. 

“It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet,” says Arthur Jensen in Network. Money dictates the food we eat (put a little sirloin on those instant noodles). Money dictates whether our house was designed by a renowned architect or flooded by shit literally running downhill. And money dictates how nice we are: 

“Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?”

So Song Kang-ho is kicked awake at the beginning of the film. Flash forward to the film’s midpoint, where the Parks have come home early from their camping trip:

The Kim family has just discovered that there is a basement in this house. The ousted housekeeper’s husband has been living off of scraps down there for years. This further reinforces the vertical class metaphor present in the homes of the film’s two families. The Kims have been forced to hide under the enormous coffee table on the concrete floor and the Parks—blissfully unaware—have taken up a cuddly little spot on the couch to watch their son camp in the yard. It becomes apparent that Song Kang-ho and the Kim children will be forced to sleep in this miserable circumstance. 

But then the rich do what they do best: foreplay. It’s a hilarious scene that’s also pretty sexy. The Parks are wearing silk pajamas and delicately spooning on a deep couch. They both have bodies that look like they can afford personal trainers and salads that actually taste good. Thinking they are alone in the house, the Parks start moaning and breathing heavily and now Song Kang-ho can’t fall asleep!

 Pay attention!

In The Host—where Song’s character has some externally forced form of narcolepsy—there’s a monster murdering victim after victim. In Snowpiercer—where Song’s character has some internally forged form of narcolepsy—the fate of humanity balances on the edge of a blood drenched ax-head. Now, in Parasite, when a single family unit fears its potentially felonious undoing, he can’t close his goddamned eyes. Sleep is weird.

In the character’s last moments on screen, the man from the basement cries out, “Mr. Park! Respect!” Because, no matter what the rich indirectly subject their subservients to, we still fucking respect the way they stunt on us. 

Is poverty a problem? Yes. Or maybe it’s a symptom of the real problem: wealth. Or perhaps they are both side effects of an “international system of currency,” which is itself a component of the primal forces of nature. There is no ethical consumption (and therefore creation, and therefore pontification, and therefore memoirs) under capitalism. It’s all very complex and hard to understand, and sometimes I like to have something metaphorical to help explain complicated things. Even if I have to get hit over the head with it. LIKE THE ROCK IN THE MOVIE. THE METAPHORICAL ROCK. LOOK AT IT.