A masterpiece of marxist class discourse, charlatanism, socioeconomic naturalism, coup de grâce, sycophantism, home invasion, black comedy, h.joseon, miasma, contrastive juxtapose, & colonialism/imperialism themes in a staircase aesthetic; Best Film Of The 2010’s. 9.8/10.

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Plot Synopsis: Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan.

*Possible Spoilers Ahead*

Official CLC Review

Parasite (n.). Ghastly iconography of Malaria-riddled corpses, tapeworm-guts, or coccidiaic intestinal tracts straight out of sci-fi/horror films or CDC archives come to mind at the mere pronunciation and etymology of the word. The days of mankind’s existential battles with these microscopic-yet-deadly beasts over the centuries number ~fewer by our evolution from biological jungles to urban ones and prairies to penthouses, as well as the miracle of modern medicine. The new structure of society has flipped natural prerequisites and advantages into a socioeconomic landscape wherein the pursuit of fiscal currency drives life and IQ, luck, and privilege trumps brawn: a behavioral divergence still rooted in the same base end-goals of resources, but in a vastly-remixed methodology for achievement. It’s also opened up new avenues for the return of these pesky sycophants, only they’re no longer obscured by the chiaroscuro of microscopia – they’re just as big as you-and-me, yet just as cunning and dangerous in voracious famine for survival: ourselves. Boasting the pedigreed Palme d’Or at Festival du Cannes 2019, Bong Joon-ho’s late-stage project release cinematizes these themes, and is a stunner out of South Korea rocketing year’s and decade’s end best films list into a frenzy. A masterpiece of hierarchical dichotomization, charlatanism, greed, marxist class warfare, coup de grâce, sycophantism, home invasion, black comedy, socioeconomic hell joseon, miasma theory, flipped allegory, contrastive juxtaposition, futility of aspiration, religion, & colonialism/imperialism themes all in a centralized staircase aesthetic, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is the Best Film Of The 2010’s.

We’re introduced to our familial protagonists through a ghastly depiction of impoverished survival amongst the rat-infested slums of a South Korean cityscape. The Kim family lives together in squalor so unconscionably dreadful, they have to distort themselves over grimy public toilets just to get basic internet access leeching off neighboring cafe wi-fis and keep their windows open to toxic street fumigations to rid their apartment of stinkbugs by secondhand-smoke. They struggle daily to make ends-meet, taking whatever paltry jobs they can find like pizza box-folding while but dreaming of bigger and better things they’re more than willing to put in the work on to lift themselves out of this eternal damnation of sustenance-but-not-living, but their class-status cruelly deprives them of in existential crisis. The canvas is a striking one of lower-class filth contextualized in an operatic/tragic panegyric to the proletariat, evoking intense empathization by shock-value of witnessing such a poor way of life extremely accurate and socially-commentative to the real-world dynamic in South Korea. Named ‘hell joseon’, the satirical classification by the youth that’s gone viral refers to how citizens of the nation consociate it to being like living in hell by the high rates of youth unemployment, restrictive demands of higher-education, crisis of home-affordability, and widening socioeconomic gap between classes. Even the lower basement apartments like the one of the Kims and Moon-gwang’s below the later-mansion are realistic to what’s actually found in the country, ones often filled with mold and disease that literally kills its inhabitants painfully and slowly, while giving them sensory revelations of their low-status like the Parks’ smell that becomes such a critical aspect and point of insecurity later on. The lifestyle of the Kims is sharply-juxtaposed like a buzzsaw by its opposite-spectrum depiction of the glamorous, chic, silver-spoon lifestyle of the Park family.

When Ki-woo is offered work tutoring the rich-kid client of a college friend utilizing forged qualifications as he studies abroad for a semester, he is introduced to a breathtaking canvas of wealth and excess that hits harder by the antithetical squalor and subhuman living conditions we just witnessed moments ago and he lives in daily. Award-winning architectural design, stainless steel countertops, football field-sized lawns in the middle of the city looking down on the rooftops below like gods of old, countless bedrooms, & stunning contemporary touches assault our senses and drop our and Ki-woo’s jaw to the floor. The Parks’ ostensible apathy and passionless shoulder-shrugs to their surroundings of pure opulence and luxury make you, along with the Kims, despise them: the kind of dream lifestyle people like the Kims would have to work multiple lifetimes to ever be able to afford, and [literally] kill for. A peripheral sight of an idiosyncratic painting on the wall by the youngest member of the Park clan Da-song hatches a devilish idea: the con to end all cons, bringing in his sister as a “famous art therapist” to help analyze the painting. One-by-one, the entire Kim family self-introduces/manifests as qualified craftsmen in each of the Park’s external duties: veritable wolves in sheep’s clothing siphoning position-after-position under false pseudonyms to latch on and begin the process of moving their client’s money into their pockets like a leech’s or mosquito’s mechanism of sucking life-blood from their host organism. The characters are so archetypal and extrapolatable beyond themselves, even the poster covers their classically-defined character-trait/soul-window eyes [with differing colors again playing on racist and worldly preconceptions of darker colors being somehow ‘lower’ than whiter ones] to show they’re requisitely part of a larger discourse and set of ideas worldwide.

The startling juxtaposition of these massively-paradoxical lifestyles, ruthlessness with which the Marxist proletariat seize the proverbial bourgeoise’s assets, and consistent cons by almost everyone in the film’s canvas coalesce into a film packing a lot of crucial sociological, psychological, and philosophical questions about our civilizational imbroglio. How broken is our system such that some have so much money, they don’t even have to work or know what to do with all their riches: their only concerns being impromptu-garden parties for rich socialite housewives to show off diamonds to their friends, while others willing to work fingers-to-bone on any jobs they can find have to beg, borrow, and steal to even secure enough to survive and feed their families? Is there ever a situation where it’s ethically-acceptable to thieve what isn’t technically-yours? Do those you’re taking from feel the same way? The workers you took the positions from? Why do proletariat in-groups often fight with each other and limit both’s success as the Kims and Moon-gwangs do in the film, instead of solidizing and coming together against their real enemy they could take down together metaphorized by the Parks? Is it really stealing if you’re providing them a service too? Do the ends justify the means? Are qualifications intrinsically-easier to achieve when born into luck-and-privilege? When you excel at the job – like the Kims do – even when your resumé is falsified, do the white-lies told to get to the interview table you would’ve never otherwise been invited to really matter? What does the Kims’ success say about charlatanism, as well as professional restrictions in class, race, gender, etc.? Does the power of money change you as a person – make you ‘nicer because you have it’ or oblivious to the suffering of those around and below you because it no longer affects you? Finally, if everyone’s running their own cons, from housekeepers to tutors, to survive in this concrete jungle – what does that say about how evolved/advanced our society is? Is it?

Parasite is like every classic morality/ethical dilemma you’ve ever heard, combined and on *acid* – a philosophical and existential discourse as depth-filled and thought-provoking as anything out of textbooks or PhD courses. Of rare breed in modern cinema is that it doesn’t present clear answers to its central questions and dilemmas either, refreshingly challenging the viewer to think, analyze, and come to their own conclusions on its mega-complexities open to polysemy, tergiversation, and symbolic allegory. Bong Joon-ho is the man of the hour responsible for bringing this veritable symphony of intellectualism to life – through his brilliant self-written screenplay, storytelling prowess, and directorial virtuosity displaying masterful, surgical attention to detail and the pedigreed control of a filmmaker in full control of his craft. This off-the-rails class-warfare film literally defies genre categorization, blending everything from home-invasion thrills to black comedy to Greek tragic opera to class/family-drama to farcical satire to Hitchcockian normalcy-contextualized horror to Caraxian-meets-Shakespearean doomed cross-class romance for a strikingly-entertaining, batsh*t-crazy, wildly-unpredictable two hours of the movies we will forever cherish as an avant-garde experience like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The film’s unprecedented entertainment-value and originality as a one-of-a-kind piece of bravado, multi-layered, depth-rich, and virtuosic filmmaking extends to the cinematography and score – one of charming minimalistic less-is-more simplicity and voyeurism juxtaposed by synergized orchestration that evolves within in a structural motif of staircases.

The cinematic translation of this Grand Canyon-sized class divide is accomplished first and foremost rhythmically and sensorily by Hong Gyeong-Pyo’s crisp, classically-Asian, parabolic cinematography – painted in a leitmotif of staircases and levels. First and foremost is the difference between sunlight-levels: the almost-deprivation of it in the basements of South Korea topographically against the natural light-bursting, open-space, wide-windowed opulence of light in the Park’s mansion. The contrastive, diametric opposition highlights the hierarchical dynamics and differences: the dark, grimy underworld of poverty juxtaposed to the bright, exalted, clean, heaven-like one of wealth we have aspirations to one-day be able to ascend to by stair-like mechanism extrapolatable to religion. The eye-level and seismographic difference is noteworthy too, with the poor being in small, cramped spaces at a physically-lower altitude and eye-level – having to watch grisly and unpleasant class-synergized sites like fumigation, garbage trucks, and drunk men pissing on the streets by their windows, while the rich get to enjoy entire veritable forests of peace, privacy, space, and seclusion as well as penthouses far above [both metaphorically and physically] the problems below – king-of-the-world status that dehumanizes people to the ants they appear to be from so high up and their problems as of no consequence/worry to them. Elements are also interestingly-utilized in Parasite: water being its biggest one. It comes down in the lightest pitter-patters of rain in the Park’s house: being almost a romantic experience still light and gentle enough for kids to go camping outside in and the parents to make love to. The rich have even managed to buy and take ownership over the nature that once managed to reign supreme over all of us by elevating to places beyond its elemental disasters. Meanwhile, the Kim’s house gets flooded by the same element in bludgeoning force – water mixed with sewage for an added layer of discongruous representation that decimates their family compound.

The naturalistic bases of this can also be found throughout history and the animal kingdom: alpha males more often than not rising to power by dumb-luck blessings like physical strength, reaction-quickness, or tool-making command the most power, influence, resources, and size-clans as a prototypical rough-draft of what is now fiscal currency in mankind’s society. This and the film’s events beg to question a central theme of religion: why the poor and not as fortunate are constantly-punished like the Kims are by an angry deity presence that seems ~masochistic on their anguish, while bestowing on the rich the ability to get richer and richer against the core promises of many world religions of world inheritance by the meek and the pretext of philanthropic and social-improvement moralistic prerequisite of wealth it’s almost-never actually used for. Indeed, people have done the math that billionaires and Fortune 500 CEO’s are so wealthy, they make thousands of times more than even their highest employees’ salary and the combined salaries of their entire companies. They could single-handedly solve the world’s biggest problems like hunger with their money and still have enough for a lifetime left, but instead choose to buy sixth $100M homes, twentieth $1M hypercars, and second mega-yachts nobody needs as people die by bare necessities around them every day. Gyeong-Pyo’s innovative traversal of cinematography technique along with aciculate editing employs everything from overheads to tracking shots to whip-pans to superimposition to sharp cuts, cycled through with seamless finesse in bringing these visual aesthetics and themes to life. The ocular canvas is also one that echoes classically-Asian themes of orderliness and cleanliness in conjunction with its classism themes: beautiful, sterilized hyper-cleanliness by work of maids is found in every room of the Parks’ geometrically-symmetrical & architectural masterpiece home that exemplifies its culture and demographic’s highest level of perceived excellence/perfection. This is, of course, balanced by the dirty, blunt-lined, coffin-small residence of the Kim clan in one of the most peculiar and intelligent visual landscapes of all-time. The composed, muted, organized style of Parasite’s visuals is anything but the style composer Jung Jae-il chooses for its score. Bombastic, flamboyant, dramatic orchestration is born of classical symphonic refinement and minimalism – highlighting the old-wealth elegance of the film’s characters and progressively [together with its screenplay] twisting the dreamscape into a nightmare of phantasmoria mired in realism.

Jae-il punctuates austere piano keys with percussive gentility in one scene, excerpts from Handel’s opera Rodelinda the next, and the 1964 Morandi italia-ballad In Ginocchio Da Te the next to create a high-strung atmosphere of choked tension and as much violent-volatility as its screenplay. This is nowhere more obvious than the garden party finale: one of the craziest scenes in cinematic history, left open to speculative interpretation as well. Why father Kim did what he did (perhaps socialite-jealousy or becoming fed up with condescension), why no attendee stopped the madman with a knife [furthering the naturalistic discourse by positing rich people lose some of their edge and animalistic drive/survival instincts by the comfort and dilutive power of money], the ambition of a young Ki-woo planning out ways to get rich even against the nihilistic prophecies of his father, and futility of aspiration by a fate often unconcerned with fairness if you’re poor and setting up intricate mouse-traps for them are all themes weighed by the finale – one that forsakes a happy ending for a dark, grim, realistic, grounded one. There are also colonialist and imperialism themes: the film plays out within the context of capitalism begun and upheld by colonial occupations in Korea. The use of English as a language on resumés also denotes prestige in the film, and young Da-song is obsessed with (the wrongly-named ‘indian’) Native Americans – showing he was never correctly taught and a beautiful culture of depth, history, tradition, and tragic experiences of genocide has been reduced to a child’s play-thing and fashionable superficial accessory in rich families like the Park. The colonialism themes are also reversed geniusly by the screenplay; if we classically-define natives as the people there first before being invaded [as Native Americans were here in America before the first immigrants in whites came and brought disease and genocidal destruction on their entire civilization], then in the film, the Parks are the natives invaded by the Kims who bring parasites for which they have no immunity. This masterful subversion is also further connected to the film’s themes in smell – bringing to mind the historical concept of miasmic theory [that Natives became infected by smelling the air colonizers brought with them from exotic lands – basically a precursor to the germ theory of disease]. The performances to bring these complex characters to life are absolutely sublime – crescendoing the question of why foreign actors like these are rarely, if ever, heard of before & afterwards in larger acting contexts.

Ash Is Purest White, Birds Of Passage, Tigers Are Not Afraid, Roma; it seems like every year, the best films coming out are nearly-all ‘international’.. yet get glossed over as ‘foreign’ and thus lesser by Hollywood and worldwide audiences like the Kims are sociologically in this film. Choi Woo-Shik steals the show as lead Ki-woo, Park So-Dam is femme fatale-ish as the sneaky con artist Ki-jung (complete with a ‘Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago’ moment that will likely become a new viral meme), Cho Yeo-Jung plays a perfect gullible privileged housewife Yeon-kyo, Lee Jyeong-Eun’s Moon-Gwang is a soothing presence who gets fired up when she figures out the Kims’ con, etc. As an Asian [South Asian/Indian] and Person of Color myself writing this, Parasite can – and hopefully will – be the film that breaks through the barrier and glass-ceiling placed on international films in anything but international categories, making history with a clean sweep of the Oscars and deafening awards-resumé that would have to start turning the right heads. [Update: PARASITE SWEPT THE OSCARS! This is the most groundbreaking event in cinematic history outside of Citizen Kane’s release, and can hopefully inaugurate a new age of cinematic globalism and convince the world there is just as much filmmaking talent outside 90210 as inside]. There are no flaws in Parasite.

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Conclusion

Overall, Parasite is not only the best film of 2019 and the 2010’s; it might just be the best film of millennium and one of the Greatest Of All-Time. The film is a volatile chemical-mix and magic-trick that pugnaciously rebukes genre-classification, three-act structures, or any of the rules/preconceptions of cinema. Parasite is a black comedy, greek tragic opera, class-warfare film, family-drama, Caraxian/Shakespearen doomed-romance, Hitchcockian home-invasion horror/thriller, and farcical satire.. all at the same-time by a writer/director Bong Joon-ho in surgical, master-auter control of his craft weaving often-antithetical genres seamlessly and perfectly. The ghastly iconography of malaria corpses, tapeworm-guts, and coccidiac intestines at the mention of the eponymous title has evolved to new contexts, as mankind has from real jungles we fought daily battles with the microscopic beasts in to urban jungles we still fight them in, only they’re no longer hidden to the eye by the chiaroscuro of size. They now hide in plain sight amongst ourselves in the contextualization of money – one that’s shifted lenses to fiscal classism and capitalism, but is still rooted in the same ancient animalistic urges and resources to show both how far and little we’ve come. Survival is just as brutal as ever for the 99% – and, by contrastive-juxtaposition, Parasite explores the fundamental tenets of Marxism’s proletariat [The Kims] & bourgeoisie [The Parks]. The grisly depiction of impoverished, bug-infested, toxic-fumed basement-life the poor Kims live is sharply-antithesized by the limitless wealth, avarice, excess, architectural pedigree, and physical altitude of the rich-yet-apathetic Parks. This is brought to life by classically-Asian cinematography of geometrical orderliness, composed demeanor, muteded chromas, and cleanliness in conjunction with a score of further-synergized minimalistic piano keys and percussive gentility that progressively crescendoes and vivacissimoes along with its screenplay’s wild twists-and-turns to a climax finale. What does it say about our society that rich socialite housewives have more money than could ever be spendable in a lifetime without having to work, their only worry being impromptu garden-parties to show off to friends while society’s hardest blue-collar workers spend their lives struggling to make enough to even survive and feed their families? The working class are also caught by intrinsic class-warfare within their own ranks: symbolized by how the Kims and Moon-gwang’s family destroy themselves instead of unionizing/solidizing against their common-enemy in the Parks. Alternative themes in Parasite are handled perfectly and connected in an ecosystem. Religion & God is evoked by the elemental divergence and cruelty across the film: water, for example, being used as a light pitter-patter paintbrush romantically and gently on Park windows to symbolize the rich having now even bought and taken ownership of nature, being able to elevate beyond its once-supreme elemental reign while it flood the Kims with sewage-mixed floods by a deity punishing the already-punished. A masochistic, hypocritical God false pretenses like the meek’s inheritance of world and compulsive philanthropic moralistic prerequisites by a wealthy who rarely ever does so, but somehow escapes punishment to even being continually rewarded. Stairs/elevation are another major theme, from the film being structured as a staircase to the differential experiences in light, views etc. by the poor’s basements to rich’s penthouses obscuring people as ants and their problems as inconsequential, as well as capitalism’s central driving force we spend our lives in pursuit of being trying to reach the objectively-better top stair metaphorical of heaven from the underworld depths of poverty many perish along the journey up from. There are also colonialism/imperialism themes: capitalistic practices begun and were upheld in Korea by colonization presences and Native American culture’s depth, history, tradition, and genocidal tragedies are reduced to a child’s [wrongly-taught by the fact he calls them ‘indians’] superficial play-toy accessory by the rich Parks – whom the film brilliantly allegorically-flips to them being the natives destroyed by invaders bringing parasites: the Kims. This is done through miasma theory [that native american genocide by colonizers was catalyzed by noxious odors and exotic smells – basically a precursor to the now-accepted germ theory of disease] to synergize even further with the film’s overarching theme of smell being denotive of class identity, work, and shame. Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece film’s events and characterization-canvas are multi-dimensionalized by top-tier performances of game-changing diversity potential and classical talent commanding recognition by a Hollywood and world movie landscape frequently denigrating/subjugating international films as ‘lower’ just like the world does the Kims. A masterpiece of hierarchical dichotomization, charlatanism, greed, marxist class warfare, coup de grâce, sycophantism, home invasion, black comedy, socioeconomic hell joseon, miasma theory, flipped allegory, contrastive juxtaposition, futility of aspiration, religion, & colonialism/imperialism themes all in a centralized staircase aesthetic, Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is the Best Film Of The 2010’s.

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