Parasite: Notes from the Underground

Often described as South Korea’s Steven Spielberg—a crowd-pleasing filmmaker who has enjoyed wide critical acclaim and astronomical box-office success—Bong is an artist remarkably at ease in an array of tones and registers, and is boyishly gleeful in mixing them to unnerving ends. Despite his genial public appearances, it’s easy to take the director at his word when he describes himself as a weirdo and a misfit, as he often does in interviews. After spending part of his childhood in conservative Daegu, in southeastern South Korea, he moved with his family to Seoul and then became a university student there in the late 1980s, and soon a left-leaning, pro-democracy activist—one who would also occasionally abandon a protest in order to go watch a movie. With tear gas unleashed on his campus just about every day during his first two years of college, Bong, a sociology student at the time, became well acquainted with the violence with which unjust systems often defend themselves.

In the early nineties, Bong dedicated himself to film, and after a decade of odd jobs in the South Korean film industry, he shot to the top of the field with three consecutive masterpieces: Memories of Murder (2003), a deglamorized serial-killer mystery that uncomfortably confounds expectations; The Host (2006), a searing, Godzilla-inspired political satire that became Bong’s international breakthrough; and Mother (2009), another formula-eschewing procedural that doubles as a study of social vulnerability, about a late-middle-aged woman determined to exonerate her intellectually disabled son from a homicide charge. As it happens, the closest antecedent to Parasite is the similarly titled The Host, with both films using familial tragedy to launch larger political critiques.

Then came his international projects, with big budgets, big stars (like Chris Evans, in 2013’s dystopian sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer), and instant worldwide distribution through the likes of Netflix, which released the E.T.-esque animal-rights action adventure Okja (2017). Ironic, then, that it was his homecoming film, Parasite—his first fully South Korean–set feature in a decade—that really seized the world’s attention, winning Bong his country’s first Palme d’Or, as well as the first-ever best picture Academy Award for a non-English-language movie.

Parasite stands out in Bong’s filmography for the severity of its conclusion, but in most ways it is the apotheosis of the auteur’s signature concerns and techniques. Like many of his compatriot directors, Bong is preoccupied with the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. (Despite his towering status in the South Korean film industry even before Parasite’s four Oscar wins, his ideological convictions got him temporarily blacklisted, along with more than nine thousand other writers and artists, from receiving state subsidies by the conservative administration of since-impeached president Park Geun-hye. Korean audiences apparently missed him; Parasite was a notable critical hit and reportedly seen by a fifth of the country.) But Bong seldom lets his proles rest easy in their righteous victimhood. In many of his films, the downtrodden bully the abject, their valid resentments blinding them to their own exploitations of power. In Parasite, it’s not the wealthy Parks who pose the greatest danger to Moon-gwang and her bunker-dwelling husband (Park Myung Hoon) but rather the hardscrabble Kims. In fact, the Parks don’t know—may never know—how viciously the two struggling families have to vie with each other for steady paychecks. Wealth buys the Parks an ignorance of hardship—and a kind of untested virtue. After Mr. Kim notes that Mrs. Park is “rich but still nice,” he is swiftly corrected by his wife. Mrs. Park is “nice because she’s rich,” explains Mrs. Kim; she hasn’t ever had to harden herself. Forget her three Birkin bags; Mrs. Park’s gullibility is the film’s ultimate status symbol.

What is new to Bong’s analyses of class friction in Parasite is the film’s disillusionment with the promise of social mobility, particularly for young adults—as symbolized by the scholar’s stone, a talisman that was gifted to the Kims and is meant to bring wealth to its possessor, to which Ki-woo displays an irrational attachment. (Burning, the 2018 Lee Chang-dong thriller about a twentysomething deliveryman who suspects that a deep-pocketed acquaintance has killed for sport the woman they were competing to romance, also channels this kind of economic rage.) It is perhaps precisely this naked despair about a vanished social ladder that has found such resonance with American audiences, whose faith in their institutions continues to reach new lows. Hollywood movies are still largely built around exceptional individuals who can overcome any obstacle in their path. Bong’s protagonists, in contrast, seldom get to fulfill their cinematic destinies: the cops don’t catch the bad guy, the everydad doesn’t rescue his kidnapped daughter. Parasite lets Ki-woo dream that he, too, can be a film protagonist, the heroic anomaly—then exposes his self-delusion for what it is. 

Bong found the one actor who could match his virtuosic elasticity two decades ago, near the start of his career. Song Kang Ho—whose first film with Bong was Memories of Murder, in which he plays a provincial detective—has since starred in the majority of the director’s films, always in common-man roles that undermine traditional masculine authority without sacrificing the characters’ dignity. In Parasite, he plays his darkest Bong character—the Kim family member least able to muster up sympathy for the bunker couple, and the one who ends up taking their place.

If genre blueprints make certain story beats feel predestined, Bong’s unique gift lies in making the prediction-defying swerves in his films feel like new inevitabilities. That’s never truer than in his continued reimagining of the cinematic underdog. Parasite is clear-eyed about the illusions that inequality needs in order to perpetuate itself, and about the many systems that shield one-percenters like the Parks from having to get their own hands dirty while engaged in the project of oppression. But it also reveals the Kims, as sympathetic and unfairly treated as they are, as utterly capable of the banality of evil, in part because of their own overidentification with underdogs, and the inherent goodness they assume they can lay claim to. The layers of self-deception build on top of one another until, finally, it all comes crashing down.