Park So-dam and Choi
Woo-Shik try to find a signal in the midst of poverty in PARASITE.
As
the epigraph to the published edition of her deeply moving play about
reproductive rights and Irish immigration, What a Young Wife Ought to Know,
Hannah Moscovitch quotes political activist Linda Tirado:
Poverty is bleak and cuts off your long-term brain….Whatever
happens in a month is probably going to be just about as indifferent as
whatever happened today or last week. None of it matters. We don’t plan long
term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You
just take what you can get as you spot it.
In the
play, it relates to the plight of Sophie and her husband, who desperately need
to control the number of children they have in a society (1920s Ottawa, though
it could be anywhere in the early 20th century) that keeps all
information about birth control away from the lower classes for fear of cutting
into the pool of servants and unskilled labor.
I
read the quote and the play while flying to New York, and it also applied to
the first play I saw there, Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance, inspired by
E.M. Forster’s Howards End. Henry, a well-off businessman, counsels his
boyfriend and future husband, Eric (the equivalent of the novel’s Margaret
Schlegel), about the need to plan for the future. The concept is alien to Eric.
He’s a social justice worker living hand-to-mouth. Without solid financial
prospects, Eric has no way of planning a future.
A
month later, the quote came back to me again while watching Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite,
my choice for the best picture of 2019. At one point the father (Song Kang-ho)
of a family living a tenuous life in the slums says he has the perfect plan to
solve their problems. That’s no plan at all, “Because life cannot be planned.”
Shortly after that, his wealthy employer (Lee Sun-kyun) tells him about his own
future plans. Like Eric in The Inheritance, Song looks at the scion of
privilege as if he were speaking another language, because to people like Song
and his on-screen family words like “plan” and “future” seem to come from a vocabulary
they never learned.
Yet
planning is so much a part of modern culture it’s almost a conditioned
response, no matter what the class. Song’s family lives in crippling poverty in
Seoul after a series of failed business ventures. Their son, Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik),
has aced all the exams to go to university but can’t afford the tuition. They
leach wifi signals from nearby businesses and fold pizza boxes to make any kind
of money. Then Choi’s university friend asks him to take over a tutoring job
while he’s out of the country. The student and her parents are loaded. Within a
few days, Choi has gotten his sister hired as the younger brother’s art
teacher/therapist. Then they push out the family chauffeur so Song can get his
job and the housekeeper so their mother can take her place, all without letting
on that they’re related to each other.
The
scenes in which Choi and his family move in on their employers are a kick, and
for its first third, the film recalls the best of screwball comedy. In films
like My Man Godfrey (1936) and Easy Living (1937), have-nots move
into the world of the rich and save the haves, who are emotionally crippled by
their privileged lives. The difference here is that Song’s family isn’t trying
to make life better for their employers. The long-term goal is to get
everything from them they can, with Choi even planning to court his student
when she’s old enough. Their opportunism feels liberating, particularly with
the working poor now facing quarantine and unemployment. And the family they move
in on is so foolish they almost cry out to be duped. Lee is narrow-minded and
somewhat vacant about what goes on in his home. His wife (Cho Yeo-jeong) comes
across as something of a ditz. She’s like a younger, prettier Alice Brady, and
the scenes in which she falls for the family’s manipulation are delicious comic
gems.
Of
course, that’s just the first third of the film. As things progress, Choi’s
family makes a few mistakes. Song keeps threatening to overstep his place as
chauffeur, and we gradually come to see just how jealously Lee guards the
social distinctions that tell him he’s better than his servants. Jo’s daffiness
has a harsher side, too. She may be clueless enough to fall for the family’s
manipulations, but she’s also clueless about basic human decency. When the
wealthy family returns unexpectedly from a camping trip, she thinks nothing of
calling the housekeeper to demand a hot cooked meal be ready for them when they
get home in eight minutes. Later, she and her husband just expect the housekeeper
and chauffeur to throw together a birthday party, with no real physical help.
After all, they’re paying them extra.
That’s
just part of the tonal shift that takes place during the film. As it turns out,
the ousted housekeeper has more roots in the house than they’d expected, which
takes the film in a more violent direction. Screwball comedy becomes absurdist
thriller, and once again, the plans of the poor fall apart. Bong pulls off the
transition almost seamlessly. The comic and the serious, after all, are only a
question of point of view. As the stakes rise for Song and his family, the
film’s absurdities grow increasingly dark. In one virtuoso bit of filmmaking
father and children sneak out of their employers’ house in the middle of a
rainstorm. To get back to their basement apartment, they have to descend a
steep flight of stairs (staircases figure heavily in the film as markers of
social distinction). As they go down the steps, things get colder and wetter
until they discover their entire neighborhood is flooded. It’s a horrifying
moment of abjection that underlines just how few resources they have without
the jobs they’ve cheated their way into.
Bong
also loads minor details with meaning. The younger child has been traumatized
by seeing a ghost in the kitchen late one night. That’s why his mother thinks
he needs art therapy. As it turns out, the ghost was the housekeeper’s husband,
who’s been hiding out in the house’s sub-basement since the wealthier family
moved in, because he’s on the run from loan sharks. Like Choi’s family, he’s
one of the dispossessed who literally haunt the world of privilege.
At
the birthday party, Lee and Song hide out wearing dime-store Native-American
headdresses as part of an elaborate scheme to make Lee’s son feel better.
They’re going to attack his sister as she brings in the birthday cake, so the
child can play cowboy and rescue her. The levels of cultural appropriation here
are dizzying. The westernized, wealthy South Koreans are imitating a culture
the West has spent centuries trying to erase and doing so using standard
Western tropes that render the colonized peoples’ reality invisible. They’re
stereotyped right out of existence, much as Song’s family are often invisible
to their colonizing employers. And yet even the wealthy family is, in a sense,
colonized by globalization. Their dreams of opulence are empty as they move
through their sterile mansion (a great piece of art direction) with no sense of
what’s going on around them. They don’t even know where all the rooms in the
house are.
After
his attempts to take over the wealthy family are destroyed, Choi can’t stop
planning. At the end, he fantasizes about going to university and eventually
becoming wealthy enough to move his parents into the house where they once
worked. We see his dreams, which makes them real for us, before we’re pulled
back to the reality of his life and the crushing poverty from which his family
has managed all too briefly to escape. Is this the best Western society has
brought us? Empty dreams of affluence without humanity? Bong depicts a
post-human world, where the poor have no time for anything but survival, and
the rich have no sense of reality. No wonder the picture has struck such chord
with U.S. audiences.
