Every so often there comes a work of art that taps into a universal feeling of the human condition.The last few years has seen the growing stratification of society along class lines and almost astronomical levels of wealth inequality. This is a problem throughout the world, but South Korea has the fastest growing rate of economic and social inequality in East Asia. Furthermore, the economic juggernaut that is the K-Pop industry (which is partly subsidized by the state) pushes a culture of absolute consumerism in line with the late-stage capitalism of the times. While the overall poverty rate in South Korea is low, the country has the among the highest poverty rate for the elderly in the world. The myth of the "American Dream" has been super-charged in South Korea . Out of this environment, Bong Joon-ho ('Bong' is his surname) decided to make a movie…
Parasite is a tale of two families, one at the bottom and one at the top of the stairway to heaven (Bong described it as a upstairs/downstairs movie). There are no heroes in this movie—everyone is a parasite in this movie because they live in a system that rewards them for being so. When the small parasites get a chance to prey on big parasites, we see it all unfold in hilarious then tragic ways. As a satire, Parasite reminds me of Four Lions (2010) in the way it uses comedy and tragedy to tell a story about society. The way Parasite keeps revealing twists and making you question what you are seeing till the bitter-end is amazing. The old neo-Confucianism combined with the economics of modern capitalism to make the idea of empathy and modern welfare almost in illusion in this society according to this movie. The film's ending was almost a foregone conclusion when such an extreme imbalance is allowed to go uncheck for so long; all pretense to morality is easily tossed out the window very fast like in Bresson's L'Argent (1983), though the true spiritual predecessor to this film is Akia Kurosawa's High and Low (1963) which Parasite takes a lot of visual and plot references from (the most obvious being the position of the wealthy house to that of the slums).
This movie won nearly 60% of the awards it was nominated for. No matter what demographic you are from, this movie touched a nerve. There seems to be quite a few people who are fed-up (including myself, naturally) and this movie spoke to them—spoke to us. I get the same feeling from this film that I got when watching Charles Burnett's The Final Insult (1997). That movie and this one deal with the raw intensity–and offer a strong critique–of wealth inequality. All of us feel like we are in the basement trying to signal for help.
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