Parasite

How a Korean Film About Class Became the Most Important Movie of the 21st Century

THE FILM THAT BROKE EVERY BARRIER 🏆

When Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite" won the Academy Award for Best Picture in February 2020 it became the first non-English language film to receive that honor in the ninety-two year history of the Academy Awards, and this barrier-breaking achievement was appropriate for a film whose entire thesis is about barriers, specifically the invisible but impenetrable barriers between economic classes that allow wealthy and poor people to live in the same city, sometimes in the same building, while inhabiting entirely different realities separated by walls and staircases and the fundamental asymmetry of a system where some people's comfort depends on other people's labor and where proximity does not create understanding but rather amplifies the gulf between those who have and those who serve those who have 🌍

The plot which Bong Joon-ho specifically asked audiences not to spoil because the film's escalating surprises are essential to its impact follows the Kim family, four unemployed people living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul where they steal wifi from neighbors, fold pizza boxes for cash, and endure the indignities of urban poverty including flooding, fumigation, and the constant awareness that they exist at the bottom of a social hierarchy that views them as invisible at best and parasitic at worst, and when the son Ki-woo receives an opportunity to tutor the daughter of the wealthy Park family he gradually infiltrates his entire family into the Park household as employees, each family member assuming a false identity and a fake resume to secure positions as tutor, art therapist, driver, and housekeeper, and this infiltration which begins as comic caper gradually darkens into something much more disturbing as the economic violence that the class system inflicts on the poor becomes visible through the contrast between the Kim family's desperate performance of respectability and the Park family's casual oblivious consumption 💰

THE STAIRCASE AS METAPHOR 🪜

The film's most powerful visual metaphor is the staircase, and Bong uses stairs throughout the film to represent the vertical hierarchy of Korean society with the Parks living literally above the Kims in a modernist hilltop mansion designed by a famous architect while the Kims live literally below ground in a semi-basement that floods during heavy rain, and the journey between these two spaces involves climbing and descending staircases that represent the effort required to move between classes, effort that is physical and exhausting for the Kims who climb to reach the Parks' world and who descend back to their own with the weariness of people who spend their lives performing adequacy for people who take adequacy for granted 📐

The moment that crystallizes the film's thesis occurs during a devastating rainstorm when the Kim family's semi-basement floods and they spend the night in a gymnasium shelter among other displaced poor families while the Parks sleep comfortably in their hilltop house that is too elevated to be affected by the same rain, and the parallel editing between the Parks' peaceful sleep and the Kims' displacement demonstrates with visual economy what sociological papers require thousands of words to explain: that the same event affects different classes differently because wealth is not just money but insulation from the consequences that poverty magnifies, and the rain does not discriminate but the architecture does, and the people who built the houses on the hills are protected from the water that flows downward into the basements where the poor live 🌧️

THE SMELL THAT WON'T WASH OFF 👃

The most devastating recurring motif in the film involves the Park family's perception that the Kim family members who serve them share a common smell, a smell they describe as the smell of the subway, the smell of people who ride public transportation and live in small damp spaces, and this smell which the Kims are aware of and ashamed of but cannot eliminate because it comes from their living conditions rather than from their hygiene represents the one thing about poverty that cannot be faked or hidden through the performances that have otherwise allowed the Kims to pass as middle-class professionals, and the Parks' disgust at this smell which they express casually and without awareness that their employees can hear them reveals the deepest truth about class relations: that the wealthy do not hate the poor but rather find them physically repulsive in a way that no amount of proximity or service can overcome because the smell of poverty is the smell of a different world that the wealthy prefer not to acknowledge exists 😤

The Kim father's response to overhearing this criticism, a response that builds slowly through the film's second half, represents one of the most powerful portrayals of class rage in cinema because it is not a single explosion but a slow burn of humiliation and resentment that accumulates through repeated small indignities until the cumulative weight produces violence that is simultaneously completely understandable and completely devastating, and Bong's genius is in making the audience empathize with this violence without endorsing it, understanding the systemic conditions that produced it while recognizing that individual violence against individual wealthy people does not change the system but rather reinforces the narrative that the poor are dangerous and that the barriers between classes exist for the wealthy's protection rather than for everyone's imprisonment 💔

WHY PARASITE MATTERS BEYOND CINEMA 🌟

"Parasite" matters beyond its artistic achievement because it made visible the invisible architecture of economic inequality in a way that resonated globally, with audiences in Seoul, New York, Mumbai, London, Lagos, and São Paulo recognizing their own cities' versions of the Kim-Park dynamic because the vertical geography of wealth and poverty that the film depicts is universal, with wealthy neighborhoods literally above poor neighborhoods in most cities around the world, and the specific humiliations and performances that the Kims endure are experienced by service workers everywhere who maintain the comfortable lives of wealthy employers while their own lives remain precarious and hidden 🏙️

The film's title "Parasite" is deliberately ambiguous about who the actual parasite is: the Kim family who infiltrate and exploit the Parks' household, or the Park family whose comfortable existence depends on the cheap labor of people they simultaneously need and despise, or the economic system itself that creates symbiotic dependencies between classes while distributing the benefits and costs of that symbiosis so unevenly that calling it parasitic is accurate regardless of which direction you believe the exploitation flows, and this ambiguity is the film's most radical statement because it refuses to assign blame to individuals and instead indicts the system that positions human beings as either hosts or parasites based on the accident of birth 💛🪜✨