Back to the movies, and another MFA annotation.
When this movie first came out, it was marketed (to me) primarily as horror, so I didn’t watch it; I don’t like being scared and I’m easily haunted. But it won so many awards, and a friend of mine said it was more thriller than horror, so eventually I watched it, and was blown away (not to mention permanently creeped out by a particular image from the flashback to the night the little boy thought he saw a ghost). It’s a bit of a slow burn, but all in all phenomenal storytelling worth studying.
Irony and Class Struggles in Parasite
Bong Joon Ho’s Academy Award winning film, Parasite, is appropriately billed as a “black comedy thriller,” but it’s also a strong critique of socio-economic systems and an illustration of class struggle in a way that transcends nationality. Bong is able to convey this in various ways, but especially through ironic dialogue. The way the Parks treat the Ki family after they return from camping early is the clearest example of this.
When Yon-Kyo calls the house to tell Chung-Sook they’ll be home in eight minutes, everyone is of course thrown into a mild panic as they try to erase all evidence of their presence. The stakes are high for the Ki family as they race the clock to maintain their jobs and their fake identities, and to silence two major and unpredictable threats to their livelihoods: the old housekeeper, Mun-Kwang, and her hermit husband, Kun-Sae. Once Mun-Kwang and Kun-Sae are relegated to the basement, and the Parks are in their pajamas, we watch Da-Hae sit on the couch right in front of the living room table under which Ki-Tek, Ki-Woo, and Ki-Jung are hiding. As the Park parents try to coax Da-Song back inside and out of the rain, Da-Hae texts a video of her brother to Ki-Woo, “[w]hose phone VIBRATES just a few feet from her” (Bong 98) much to his (and our) chagrin. Lucky for Ki-Woo Chung-Sook covers it with a cough, and fortunately, Da-Hae puts the sound from her mind. While there’s humor in this, there’s also critique; not only is Da-Hae so sure of her station that she ignores the obvious signs something is amiss, but in her continued texts to Ki-Woo, we see how her “problems” pale in comparison to his. She complains, “I hate my brother” and “I miss you,” followed by a request for a selfie from her tutor-boyfriend, which when declined, makes her whine, “Why noooooooot” (99). While we might just read these as “spoiled teenager speak,” and have to laugh when Ki-Woo says “I’m with you right now” in response, that juxtaposition nonetheless makes us aware of the social and emotional distance between the Parks and the Ki family.
When Da-Hae is sent to her room and the Park parents settle onto the couch for the night, we see this distance manifest again with irony. The stage is set for an almost sitcom-like scene in which Ki-Tek, Ki-Woo, and Ki-Jung have to figure out how to escape in front of their bosses, who are snuggled up right above them. But the humor is disrupted when Dong-Ik complains of “Mr. Kim’s smell” (Ki-Tek’s): “Like old people smell?” Yon Kyo asks, to which Dong-Ik responds, “No, no. How should I put it– Maybe the smell of an old radish pickle? Or that smell when you’re washing a dirty rag? … I smell it when I ride the subway sometimes” (101-102). Even though we know the Parks would likely never say something like this to Ki-Tek’s face (and as much as we’d like to say we’ve never spoken poorly of someone behind their back, we all probably have), there’s something about Dong-Ik’s description that just seems to go too far. Yon-Kyo’s reply, “I haven’t ridden the subway in forever” (102), only further serves to distance the Parks from the Ki family in terms of their class experiences, which is accentuated by the irony of how physically close they all are in that moment. We imagine, by way of Ki-Tek, not only being told we smell bad, but being told that by our boss, in front of our children, a level of humiliation I’m sure a parent can only fully appreciate.
Then the Parks start feeling each other up, and the humiliation expands, for us and the characters. Dong-Ik asks Yon-Kyo if she has any underwear like “[t]hose panties that Yun [the old driver] left behind. … Real cheap and tacky,” which Yon-Kyo later calls “horrendous.” As if that weren’t bad enough, Dong-Ik adds, “I get hard thinking about those cheap, trashy pair of underpants” (103). The underwear he refers to, remember, were planted by Ki-Jung to get the old driver fired so her dad could have the job, but in this moment we have to ask, was it worth it? Bong tells us, “Ki-Jung tries to keep a cool face as the rich couple continue to malign her underwear,” and that “Ki-Tek’s more humiliated than she is” (103), but who’s to say? Ki-Tek’s boss just said he smelled bad, while Dong-Ik not only insults Ki-Jung’s undergarments, but practically violates her with his fantasy.
There are many other ways and aspects to analyze Bong Joon Ho’s comments on class in Parasite, but this six-page “Dark Night of the Soul” is rife with metaphors for the social gap between the Parks and the Ki family. While my feature script isn’t designed to be nearly as comedic, nor is the narrative driven by class clashes, there are certainly elements of social status which play into my story, and Parasite offers examples of the ways in which my script might finesse that conversation on class with some subtlety. Irony will also be of use in my film, and seeing it shown through dialogue juxtaposed with certain physical occurrences is helpful.
Work Cited
- Bong, Joon Ho and Han Jin Won. Parasite. Deadline, deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/parasite-script.pdf
Caitlin M.S. Buxbaum 