The Ghost Comes Out of the Closet
by Douglas Messerli
Bong
Joon-ho and Han Jin-won (screenplay, based on a story by Bong Joon-ho), Bong
Joon-ho (director) Parasite / 2019
The
first winner for South Korea of the Cannes Festival’s Palme d’Or, director Bong
Joon-ho’s 2019 film Parasite has a great many things on its mind.
On one level, perhaps its most charming,
it is a satire of the economic differences (and sometimes surprising similarities)
of the vast population of (10 million and with its outlying suburbs 25 million)
of Seoul. From one perspective, Seoul is one of the most sophisticated and
highly developed cities in Asia, but beneath the towering skyscrapers and
symbols of newly-developed wealth are people living in near poverty, their
lives at the edge, despite their best attempts to scavenge for enough so they
simply might eat.
They get Wi-fi illegally (when they can)
from local cafés. Their only income is from folding pizza boxes for a local
pizzeria, but even the small amount of money they make from that is threatened
when some of their work proves to be shoddy in their attempt to outdo another
local assembler. They hardly have a decent place to bathe, let alone a good
kitchen; but then they hardly can afford food to cook. The best place to tune
the Wi-fi is squatting upon their toilet.
In short, the Kims have found themselves
at the near bottom of a society sprung up beautifully during the last few
decades into a 21st century model of riches and wealth. And in that
sense Bong begins is dark comedy as a kind of naturalist-like treatise, not
unlike Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths.
Fortunately, Bong quickly shifts gears
with a magical appearance of Ki-woo's educated
friend Min-hyuk, who in moving on to a higher education, asks his young friend
to take over his position as English tutor for a wealthy family, the Parks’
daughter, Da-hye. When Ki-woo finds himself somewhat abashed by the offer, his
friend points out to him that Ki-woo has passed the exams several times
(obviously it’s simply money that has prevented the boy to move on a higher
education), suggesting that Min-hyuk is in love with Da-hye and feels Ki-woo
will protect her until she graduates, when his friend plans to marry her.
Suddenly Bong’s film switches to the more
comic mode of a film more akin to Harold Prince’s 1970 American black comedy, Something
for Everyone, wherein the handsome Michael York entering a Bavarian castle
as a servant, sexually ingratiates himself with son, mother, and, later,
daughter.
Except here, the young tutor does not
necessarily use sex as a tool—although Da-hye quickly does romantically fall
for him—but social and political politesse—suggesting that the somewhat
artistic son of the Park family—who comically is completely absorbed in all
things native American Indian, but seems also quite hyper-active and even
mentally disturbed, having witnessed a ghost on one of his young birthdays—might
be helped by art therapy.
Before you can even blink, Mrs. Park (Cho
Yeo-jeong) has hired Ki-woo’s talented sister Ki-jung (after she has Googled “art
therapy”) who appears to successfully quiet down the Park’s son through her
teachings, while hinting that the child may have schizophrenic tendencies.
A ride home with the family’s chauffeur,
who insinuates that he wants to know more about her, results in her taking
revenge by leaving her panties planted near the back seat, where Mr. Park (Lee
Sun-kyun) discovers them the next morning on his way to work. Forced to fire
his handsome chauffeur, fearing he has had sex with a woman in the car and
perhaps even killed her, the two Kims suggest they might know of a man who
might reputably replace him—obviously their own father.
In no time at all, the pater familias
of the Kims has insinuated that their current housekeeper, the loyal Gook Moon-gwang
(Lee Jung-eun) has tuberculosis, and she too is fired, replaced by, you guessed
it, Kim’s wife, a woman he describes as “Jessica.”
Perhaps not so strangely, the talented
Kims return a household in disorder, even while its current tenants live in
luxury, to order—teaching, driving, and cooking quite effortlessly, even if each
night they return to the squalor in which they are forced to exist. It is quite
apparent that they are better equipped to live in this mansion than are the
Parks. In a sense, they are in control of this architectural wonder, while the
Parks, although providing its finances, are truly the squatters.
The slow-learning daughter, their small
would-be Indian son, the half-drugged-out wife, and the haughty businessman
only inhabit it at night, and even then, their son prefers the Indian teepee in
their overly green back yard. And when the Parks determine to go on a camping
excursion, the Kims sleep over, bathe in their golden bathrooms, and drink
themselves into a kind of brooding frenzy.
This half of the film, in itself, would constitute
a wonderful satiric movie, but Bong has deeper motives still, as his work turns
another corner to become a kind of revenge tragedy. For living in a hidden bunker
in the mansion, perhaps even more stark than the Kims’ basement habitation, is
the bankrupt husband of Moon-gwang, hiding for years from bill-collectors in a
kind of safe-house created by the original architect-owner for protection if
ever needed.
The housekeeper comes to feed and,
perhaps “collect” her husband, only to find the Kims in midst of their
celebration. Charging forward, she films the illegal celebrants and threatens
to report their existence to the Parks, as they attempt to steal her cellphone
and to destroy both her and her husband.
Suddenly what was a seemingly righteous inversion
of cultural injustices turns sour, particularly when the Park family calls to
announce they are soon returning home because of heavy rain, and Chung-sook instruced
to cook up ramen while the other members of her family hide throughout the
house, must clean up the mess. In Moon-gwang’s attempt to return to the kitchen
Kim’s wife slams the door back, sending the former housekeeper down the stairs
to her eventual death.
As Bo Seo wrote in a very intelligent
essay in The Atlantic, we can no longer feel either sad or happy for the
Kims.
Though
Parasite is mainly about interclass conflict, its most brutal
scenes depict fights between members of
the working poor. Here,
as in the rest of Bong’s films, violence
is not a path to liberation;
it
instead offers a fleeting catharsis that upholds more of the status
quo than it destroys. For families like
the Kims, advancement
under
capitalism involves beating out their peers for limited
opportunities,
to the extent that parity with others in the working
class begins to feel like failure.
In their attempts to get ahead, the
Kims end up replicating
the abuses of the wealthy—fraud,
conspiracy, blackmail, and
assault—against the poor, whose ranks
they desperately wish to
leave. When Ki-taek wonders about the
fate of the driver his family
schemed to get fired, Ki-jung snaps:
“We’re the ones who need help.
Worry about us, okay?” But unlike the
rich, the Kims cannot hide
their transgressions behind masks of
respectability and institutional
legitimacy. When the basis for their
employment by the Parks is
revealed to be nepotism, a mainstay of
elite consolidation, the news
media and their audiences are
scandalized.
While I generally do not attempt to keep
the plot away from readers, about the final feverish scenes of violence which
end in several deaths, as if right out of a Quentin Tarantino movie, I will
remain mum. Although almost mortally wounded, three of the Kim family survive,
although no one knows to where Mr. Kim himself has disappeared.
The film’s ending might almost seem uplifting,
as Ki-woo, back in his semi-basement hovel, finally determines to finish his
schooling, make a lot of money, and free his semi-imprisoned father by buying
the Park mansion, now owned by a German family.
In
that determination, however, Bong asks his society and us if, in any society
with such class divides, is this simply a pipe dream or might it be possible to
heal the past? The answer, of course, does not lie in the film, but in the determination
of the society to change conditions. I do not feel positive. But dreams are
necessary to make anything happen. If his father, after the family has suffered
a flooding of their own decrepit apartment, suggests that one should never make
“plans,” since they always fail, this young boy is making plans, is imagining a
world outside of that in which he has lived. And any caring person in the world
knows that such “plans” are the only way out.
Los
Angeles, October 23, 2019
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (October 2019).
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