Parasites
And all the other things that leach our nutrients
Index of Characters:
Kim Ki-taek: Kim patriarch; driver for the Parks
Kim Ki-woo “Kevin”: the Kim’s son and the character first employed by the Parks; Da-hye’s English tutor
Kim Ki-jung “Jennifer”: the Kim’s daughter and Da-song’s art therapy tutor
Kim Choong-sook: Kim matriarch; housekeeper for the Parks
Nathan Park: Park patriarch
Park Yeon-kyo: Park matriarch
Park Da-hye: the Parks daughter; tutored by Ki-woo
Park Da-song: the Parks son; tutored by Ki-jung
Moon-gwang: original housekeeper for the Parks; has been hiding her husband in the Park’s underground basement against their knowledge for the past four years.
Min: Ki-woo’s wealthy friend.
“Parasite,” Bong Joon-ho’s blockbuster class warfare dramedy, is catching fever with audiences worldwide hitting a record $165.4 million for its distributor, NEON. It took over award season, winning both a Golden Globe and the 2019 Palme d’Or while also making history as the first foreign-language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
“Parasite” follows the Kims, an impoverished family in South Korea, become parasites in the house of their wealthy employers and eventual hosts, the Parks. They need to do this in order to get ahead in a system that unfairly devalues them. The Kim clan systematically replaces every member of the previous house staff, including the maid and driver, to make space for themselves. They create fake identities and pose as four employees vaguely connected to one another through word of mouth recommendations—but what starts as an almost playful infiltration ends in something much more sinister.
The film takes a turn when Choong-sook discovers that the former housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jeong-un), has been using the secret basement beneath the Park house to hide her husband from loan sharks. The two families go head-to-head when Moon-gwang captures the Kims on film, proving they’re connected as a family. The Kims trap Moon-gwang’s husband in the basement, and both parties threaten to expose each other to the Parks, leading to the climax of the film at Da-song’s birthday party.
Quick pans and tracking shots build the film’s tension to a breaking point where what began as class conflict devolves into a bloodbath. Moon-gwang’s husband escapes from the basement and stabs Ki-jung (Park So-dam). The Kim patriarch Ki-taek (Kang-Ho Song) then murders Nathan Park (Lee Sun-kyun), the head of the Park household, in a final act of desperation. Ki-taek’s only recourse is to retreat into a life of solitude beneath the Park house waiting for the day he will see his family again. Despite their brief climb up the economic ladder, the Kims are prisoners to their economic class. The remaining family members end the film where they started: in the slums of Seoul, hanging flyers for a pizza parlor, for which they folded boxes at the film’s opening.
The Kims are victims of the parasitic nature of money in this film, but this isn’t the only reference to parasites. Messages about the parasitic relationships between technology and humans, parents and their children, and colonists and indigenous nations crawl beneath the flesh of this story.
The relationship between the Kims and Parks illustrates the power of money on a person’s behavior. The Parks’ wealth makes them gullible and susceptible to the cultivated helplessness that financial security affords them. For the Kims, however, the need for money is insatiable and results in their shared moral corruption. We see this tension escalate throughout the film until the Kims go head to head with Moon-gwang and her husband, who has been hiding in the basement for four years. The metaphor of an economic “upstairs” versus “downstairs” of society is literalized through this relationship. Both families vie for a chance at living among the wealthy even as the help, speaking to the desperation that can stem from the pursuit of money. The Kims are willing to turn on Moon-gwang and her husband—members of their own class—to escape being stuck “downstairs” forever.
When the Kims displaced Moon-gwang, they gained the upper hand on the economic ladder, as well as on the upper floor of the Park house. However, this power is only temporary. Ki-taek’s eventual exile into that same basement illustrates the fleeting nature of economic stability in this environment. It also shows the corruptive pull of money. The opportunity to leach the Parks’ wealth pits the two families animalistically against each other, wrestling on the floor of the Park’s living room.
Bong employs certain cinematic elements to convey the overwhelming need for money that brings out the parasitic side of humanity. Bong shows the Kims descending many stairs in the Park house, representing their literal distance from the Parks’ position in the hierarchy of wealth. He shows Ki-woo (Cho Woo-shik) parasitically modelling himself after his wealthy friend Min (Seo-joon Park), repeating some of Min’s earlier lines from the opening of the film, such as “When she enters University, I’ll officially ask her out,” and “Get a fucking grip!”
Most pointedly, however, the Kims’ hunger for money is brought to life through the symbolic “scholar-rock.” The scholar-rock, a gift from Min to Ki-woo, is an object that symbolizes material wealth and prosperity. The rock becomes a recurring motif throughout the film. By the second half, the rock becomes Ki-woo’s only possession when a catastrophic flood ruins the Kims’ home. In a particularly pivotal scene, Ki-woo is seen clutching the rock tightly to his chest as his family sleeps on the floor of a gym, having been displaced by the flood. The rock is a pointed reminder of the lack of stability, or bedrock, that comes with poverty.
The desire for stability through wealth proves to be never ending. Ki-woo seemingly lets go of his craving for wealth by relinquishing the scholar-rock, leaving it in a stream after his father retreats into the basement, seemingly forever. But the audience knows—even if Ki-woo doesn’t—that he will never let it go. Though he’s left the physical rock behind, Ki-woo idealistically holds onto the idea that one day his family will be economically stable. At the close of the film, he writes a letter to his father promising to one day buy the Park house and free him from hiding in the basement. Despite his hope, it is likely that the Kims will remain perpetually stuck in their semi-basement home in Seoul. They exist in a liminal space, halfway between the wealthy surface and the lower-class “basement” of society. All Ki-woo has is false hope.
Another underlying parasitic relationship in the film is between technology and humans. When we are first introduced to the Kims, they’re searching for a neighbor’s Wi-Fi, holding their phones against the windows and ceiling of their semi-basement. They find it on the throne of contemporary phone usage: the toilet. Here, Bong makes light of humans’ dependence on technology. This relationship becomes increasingly ominous as the film progresses—the standout moment is when Moon-gwang holds the video exposing the Kims out in front of her like a gun.
“Parasite” suggests that technology and constant communication have the potential to be life-destroying. As Moon-gwang and her husband hold the Kims hostage by threatening to send the video to Mr. Park, her husband laughs, “Honey, this ‘send’ button is like a missle launcher.” Coupled with the presence of older forms of communication like Morse code, which serve Ki-taek and Ki-woo, this scene sends a message that the technology-obsessed world we live in today may be corrupting humanity with the potential to turn us against one another.
Another parasitic relationship in the film is the one between children and their parents. Both the Park and Kim families have parental figures who rely on their children to a fault. In the Kim family, the father Ki-taek relies on Ki-woo for economic support. Despite being the patriarch, Ki-taek fails to support them, and the children are left to provide for their parents. Ki-taek’s lack of effort to help his family eventually becomes toxic. The introduction to Ki-taek’s character happens when his wife, Choong-sook (Jang Hye-jin) wakes him up where he sleeps on the floor, asking, “What’s your plan?” By the end of the film, it becomes clear that he’d never had one. Ki-woo and his sister treat their parents to a dinner following their first paycheck from the Parks, where he proudly comments “Eat as much as you want kids!”, at which point his wife reminds him, “You didn’t even pay for it!”
In the Park household, Yeon-kyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), the matriarch, is a helicopter parent. She bends over backwards for her ten-year-old child, Da-song (Jeong Hyun-joon). She has Choong-sook, the Kim matriarch, cook him special meals, like ramdan, a courtesy she doesn’t extend to her daughter. She and Mr. Park order him luxury items like walkie talkies, Native American headdresses, bows and arrows, and a massive tipi from the U.S. Following a traumatic incident in which Da-song sees a “ghost” in the house on his birthday a year before the film begins—really Moon-gwang’s husband sneaking upstairs from his basement hideout for food—she plans a camping trip for his birthday to assure he isn’t reminded of the “ghost,” and when the campground is rained out, she arranges a party in their backyard, asking the Kims to work overtime.
This is an absurd amount of effort to exert for a ten-year-old. At the party, the tables for the party are set up in a circle around Da-song’s tipi, symbolizing that he is the center of their universe. The tipi shows up again when the Park parents sleep in the living room to keep an eye on Da-Song after he insists on sleeping outside during the rainstorm.
In one shot, as the Park parents sleep, the tipi is reflected in the large glass window. It takes up most of the shot, reflecting the amount of attention Da-song is given. This image leaves no questions about their priorities.
However, perhaps the most humorous moment of the Parks’ helicopter parenting is the hiring of “Jennifer”—Ki-jung's (Park So-dam) fake identity—as Da-Song’s art therapy tutor. She cons the Park matriarch into believing that her son is seriously ill, which also ties back to the theme of technology: “I Googled art therapy and ad-libbed the rest,” Ki-jung laughs with her family members.
Bong seems to be poking fun at the helicopter parents of the world. Yeon-kyo’s efforts to protect her son from the horrors of the world ultimately fail when he passes out again after coming face-to-face with the “ghost”—Moon-gwang’s husband, who has escaped the basement—at his birthday party.
One of the most perplexing elements of “Parasite” is its abundance of Native American imagery. From Da-Song’s tipi to the Native American costumes the Park and Kim patriarchs wear, Native Americans are uncharacteristically present for a non-American film. Perhaps Bong is drawing our attention to a historically parasitic relationship. When Europeans first colonized indigenous nations, they robbed their hosts of everything they had, much like a parasite. For example, under the Spanish crown, indigenous peoples were robbed of their land, conscripted, and forced to work in silver mines leading to death due to mercury poisoning and harsh conditions. In North America, historical events such as the Trail of Tears—where 60,000 Native Americans were forcibly relocated from their ancestral homeland, leading to the death at the hands of cold hunger and disease—also illustrate the ruthless relationship between the colonists and Indigenous nations.
The way Indigenous people are represented through commodities in this film highlights another way that money is a corrupting force. Additionally, the way the Parks interact with Native American imagery largely correlates to the way they ignore the economic hierarchy they also uphold. At the birthday party, Nathan Park gives Ki-taek instructions on how they will surprise Da-song. Nathan says that both wearing headdresses, “they’ll be a parade with Jessica carrying the cake. Then we jump out and attack Jessica. Just then, Da-song, the good Indian ,will jump in and we’ll do battle. He’ll save Jessica the cake princess and they’ll all cheer.” As an afterthought he adds, “You’re getting paid extra.”
This conversation encapsulates the Parks’ attitude towards the Kims and the United States’ attitude toward our history of colonialism. The Parks use the Kims as a commodity. They ignore the strain that working overtime has on the Kims and the degrading effect that dressing up for someone else’s kid has on Ki-taek. With a simple “you’re getting paid extra,” there is an assumption that it’s all fixed and the economic tension is ignored. In a similar fashion, the Native American imagery in this film is appropriated by the characters to paint themselves as brave and heroic. By commoditizing this history, the United States becomes accountable as well. To a capitalist society, a dark history is simply another beacon to make money, no matter the immorality.
Ultimately, “Parasite” asks us to consider the parasites in our own lives. Mirrors are literally and symbolically present throughout the film to emphasize this idea. The Park and Kim families are mirrors of each other metaphorically, reflecting their opposing roles on the economic hierarchy. Da-song and Ki-woo, among other characters, often find themselves literally contemplating their own reflections mirrored in the grandiose glass wall facing the Park backyard. In the poster for the film, the characters face the viewer, like our own reflections looking back at us in a mirror. Ki-taek is prominent in the foreground facing us head-on. In the background, Ki-woo and Da-song directly face us while the Park couple crane their heads from where they lounge in lawn chairs. Yet, what is most haunting about this image is that the characters’ eyes are crossed out with thick bars. This creates a degree of separation between the characters within the film—these characters are blind to the ways they are parasitic to each other. Bong seems to be asking us, in our own lives, are we?
By Annie Knight
Art by Lauren Hecht
Body Issue | February 2020