PARASITE: Who Can Afford a Future?

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 20^th 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.