Role Reversal: "Parasite" and Social Hope
Bong Joon-ho | Parasite | 2019
Parasite, according to its director Bong Joon-ho, is a film about capitalism. It has taken up pride of place on the left, in part due to its willingness to depict the horrors of class relations. Yet its ending is a hopeless one, as the film refuses to descend to the level of easy moralizing. The working-class protagonists and antagonists of the film end up duking it out, only turning on their wealthy masters – or if you prefer, hosts – after they have destroyed each other. Everything ends in ruins, and the hero begins almost exactly where he started.
Parasite begins normally enough. The Kim family, who live in poverty in a sub-subterranean apartment, need a break. They get one sure enough, when Ki-woo, the son, is offered a job by his well off and college-educated friend Min-hyuk. Ki-woo takes up Min-hyuk’s job as an English tutor for the wealthy Park family: the first in a series of replacements that come to dominate the film. Ki-woo gets Ki-jung, his sister, a job as an “art therapist” for the Park’s misbehaving young son, Da-song. They get the Park’s driver fired, and put forward their father, Ki-taek as replacement candidate and finally get the housekeeper, Moon-gwang, fired by making the Park family think she is suffering from Tuberculosis, thus allowing their mother, Chung-sook, to be hired in her place.
Roughly a third of the way through the movie , the Kim family are now firmly installed in the Park household. They take a chance to live in it as their own when the Parks go on vacation. It is during this sequence that the film turns from the comic to the tragic. The old housekeeper returns to ‘collect something’ but this something is her husband, Geun-sae. He has been living in a hidden basement in the Parks’ house for four years, hiding from loan sharks. In a first series of replacements, this family replaces the Kims as those who are living in the Park house, before a struggle ensues: the Kims basically beat the shit out of them, just in time to return the house to normal order when the Parks return early, having aborted their trip.
In the penultimate scene, Geun-sae emerges from the basement, bloodied, demon-like and armed with a kitchen knife, and attempts to kill the Kims whilst the Parks are hosting a birthday party for Da-Song. He kills Ki woo’s sister, and in turn Ki-Woo’s father kills him (another replacement). In the confusion Ki-woo’s dad also kills Mr.Park and seeks shelter in the basement where Guan-sae once lived. An entire cycle of replacement ends not with the Kims becoming the Parks, not with the working-class breaking free from their origins but with the working class keeping each other in their former positions: all was for naught.
Parasite’s ending has Ki-woo, on probation for committing fraud, penning a letter to his father. He still watches the Parks’ old house from time to time and has found a morse code message his father is sending him via a light switch. Ki-woo sits in the same place he was at the start of the film, writing this letter to his missing father detailing his dreams of getting rich and purchasing the Parks’ old home. The film depicts these events but closes with the Ki-woo back where he started. The question left to ask being: how can he possibly send this letter to his father? The film ends in a state of hopelessness, an impossible letter and an impossible dream. It is reminiscent of Anton Chekhov’s short story Vanka, in which a child worker attempts to send a letter to his grandfather to release him from his servitude but drops it in the letter box addressed only ‘to grandfather in the village.’
In an interview in Vulture with E. Alex Jung, Bong Joon-ho claims that he intended for the film to hit this grim note. For Bong there is no room for ambiguity here:
“It’s quite cruel and sad, but I thought it was being real and honest with the audience. You know and I know — we all know that this kid isn’t going to be able to buy that house. I just felt that frankness was right for the film, even though it’s sad.”
The films very staging however, the replacement dynamic at its core, betrays this gritty intention. In a pivotal scene, Ki-woo awakens from a coma to find himself confronted by a ‘doctor who does not look like a doctor’ and a ‘police officer who does not look like a police officer’. Ki-woo cannot stop laughing as the perplexed officer attempts to read him his rights.
This scene, which marks the beginning of the final act of the film, a calm coda after the storm of the penultimate backyard scene, is the key to understanding Parasite’s promise. It is the key to understanding that Parasite, precisely in attempting to be a grim parable of modern class relations and capitalist society -a parable of our current world - also betrays an in-built communist hypothesis: that this world is not necessary.
One of the dynamics of the film is an almost circus style sequence of replacements. At first Ki-woo comes to replace Min-hyuk, his friend who has set him up as his replacement in the tutoring of the Park’s daughter, Da-hye. Min-hyuk hints that he has some affections for Da-hye, and that says that he will marry her when she is the appropriate age. Not only does Ki-woo take Min-hyuk’s place as Da-hye’s tutor, but also, later in the film, expresses, word for word, this wish of Min-hyuk.
When the Park family goes on holiday Ki-woo’s family literally install themselves as masters of the house, living in the house, consuming all of the Park family’s goods. It is at this point that Ki-woo says the words that once belonged to Min-hyuk; he has fully adopted his role.
We might stop here to ponder, what the significance of this moment is. What is the difference between Min-hyuk and Ki-woo? Ki-woo seems at the very least equally capable of teaching English as Min-hyuk. What is it then that separates them? As the Kim family sits in the Park’s house, eating their food, living in their space, one wonders if there is any reason other than total contingency that the Kims are poor and the Parks rich.
For those who wish to preserve the status quo, or who believe that this world is necessary, there must be something essential about society and its current distribution of roles. In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke set out a notable conservative theme: that the work one does is somehow reflection of who someone is, that the division of labor either reflects or creates one’s nature, and this nature is hard or impossible to change. He writes:
“The Occupation of a hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honour to any person – to say nothing of a number of more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.”
One cannot rule if one is a hair-dresser, because this occupation – or the person who would hold such an occupation – is, by nature of this occupation unfit to ascend to the status of ruling. The workers can never be the rulers, never take control of their lives in a political sense. This vision of politics and society can be traced back to Plato, who in The Republic argues for a society divided by professions. One is their trade or craft and nothing more.
Already from the opening scene in Parasite, this picture is complicated. The Kim family are unemployed, they have no profession. Parasite, by staging a continual swapping of places in the work and domestic roles of the characters, reveals the lie of society that there is something essential about who one is and that this determines one’s place in society. And it is this notion itself, which is the very basis of radical politics, of what Alain Badiou calls the communist hypothesis, the claim that another world is possible.
In The German Ideology, Karl Marx attacked this essentialized notion of the division of labour, writing that:
“The division of labor offers us the first example of the fact that, as long as the human being remains in naturally evolved society, that is, as long as the cleavage exists between the particular and common interests, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily but naturally divided, the human being’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as long as the division of labor comes into being, each human being has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape…where as in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each has become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, with ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. “
The essentialized role, the one exclusive sphere of activity has no necessity, and to do away with the illusion that it does is to begin to imagine a new and different world.
Thus, when Ki-woo awakens from his coma he realizes that it does not mean anything to look like a doctor, to look like a policeman. There is no essentialization attached to any given role. When he returns home and writes his letter, it does not matter that he cannot send it, because he has already realized that more than just ascending a few rugs on the social ladder of labour, there is no reason he cannot, in fact, transcend it. E. Alex Jung writes of Boon Jong-ha’s movies in general that they end where they begin and “The world appears unchanged, but they [the protagonists] are no longer the same”. For Jung what has changed is that the characters are now full of dread, yet somehow in Parasite, the hopeless parable, Ki-woo ends full of hope. His turn is individualistic, he sees himself and just himself as achieving his goal of reuniting with his father. Yet the very vision of this achievement gives rest to the lie of conservative social philosophy, that what there is is what there must be. In this sense Parasite’s very attempt at realism reveals the unreality of our present situation. It overachieves in its depiction of reality: the truth of capitalism is the truth of horrible working conditions and deprivation but is also the truth that none of this is necessary.