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Here, then, is where Parasite takes us: not to the ledge of class war but to a shrug over inequality. The parasitic family members of his film have embraced a long con because the system itself is a con. Yet their suffering, in housing and work, is rationalized by their vulgarity and unscrupulousness. The rich family’s lifestyle, meanwhile, is never questioned. What bothers Bong is not the fact of poverty and unjust distribution; he only wants our social arrangements to feel a bit kinder. Never mind that a truly mixed society would demand slicing off the extremes.
This is not to plead for agitprop. Bong is too good a filmmaker for that. It’s simply to temper our political expectations of Parasite. If anything, his earlier movies offered more in the way of straightforward social critique. The Host, for instance, which introduced him to Western audiences, is a monster flick partly about American militarism and environmental crimes. Caricatures of capitalism and state power run through Snowpiercer, a postapocalyptic allegory set on a segregated train, and Memories of Murder, based on an unsolved string of real-life rapes and killings in a rural area of South Korea. (Last month, the police announced that they located a likely perpetrator in that case.) These films put humor and overstatement to more provocative use.
South Korea’s best filmic interpreter of class and social inequality is not Bong but Lee Chang-dong, who made last year’s elegiac Burning as well as Poetry (2010) and one of my all-time favorites, Peppermint Candy (1999). But Lee is too understated to draw the kinds of audiences that Bong can. Asked about his hopes for Parasite, Bong said that it “is in parts funny, frightening, and sad, and if it makes viewers feel like sharing a drink and talking over all the ideas they had while watching it, I’ll wish for nothing more.” Which ideas does he have in mind? Inequality, betrayal, and a kind of we’re-all-doing-our-best both-sides-ism are most apparent. The film doesn’t push us further—to mull Korea’s crisis of affordable housing, discrimination against the poor, fetishization of English and Western commodities, and glut of overeducated, underemployed youth driving the parasitic family’s scheme.
full: https://www.thenation.com/article/parasite-bong-joon-ho-review/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
