To me, Parasite is a devastating, brilliant story about the dehumanizing effects and consequences of Capitalism gone to the max. If you have not seen it, I cannot recommend doing so highly enough, and please stop reading here until you do because everything else will be spoilers.
The Plot
Parasite begins by introducing an impoverished family in Seoul – two parents, Mr. and Mrs. Kim, crossing middle-age, and a boy and a girl, Ki-woo and Ki-jung, each about in their early 20’s. The film shows the family scrambling to stay alive by folding thousands of cardboard pizza boxes, and struggling to stay, for lack of a better term, modern, by attempting to find spots in their basement apartment where they can siphon wi-fi from neighboring businesses. Right away, this action creates an interesting effect – the kids’ desperate need to be internet-connected plays to a common stereotype of young people being phone-obsessed and spoiled by the excesses of the web, yet they do live, undeniably, in harsh poverty: hunger is a constant concern; their home is a small basement frequently pissed-on by drunken passers-by; their toilet is crammed in an elevated corner where one needs to crouch to use it even while seated; they leave the windows open during street fumigation to get free pest-extermination, despite breathing the rancid gas themselves. The mother too has an almost childish compulsion to check WeChat. It immediately creates in the film an ambiguity, a set of complications that is never resolved – are we supposed to laugh at these people? Cry for them? Root for them? It seems like all three and certainly the third, though they’re far from the type of Hallmark-perfect poor family one encounters in many dramas.
The opening scenes also draw attention without straining in the slightest to show just how essential technology and access to it is for the survival of people living in poverty. The mother reveals that she wanted to check WeChat because she thought the pizza company was going to message her about folding the boxes for a small amount of money. Though no one says it outright, it seems clear that the pizza box job is extremely important for this family, and that if the kids hadn’t found a source of free wi-fi and gotten the WeChat message, the job would’ve slipped right on by to another just-as-desperate family.
The event that begins the plot of the film is that Ki-Woo’s friend, Min, a college student, comes by before a semester abroad with two gifts: an encyclopedia-sized, jagged rock that is said to bring material wealth to the family in possession of it, and an opportunity for Ki-woo to take over for Min as the English tutor for the high school sophomore daughter of an extremely rich family in the city. Min says that he wants to one day marry the girl, Park Da-hye, and knows that one of his frat-boy college friends would salivate all over her if they were her tutor, but that he knows he can trust Ki-woo. Min also says that the mother is young, beautiful, and naïve – it seems like he is implying that Ki-woo might be able to seduce her, though it’s not stated explicitly. It isn’t ever made clear why Min thinks he can trust Kim-woo not to make a move on Da-hye, the daughter, and indeed he successfully does so almost immediately, but my personal suspicion is that even Min believes there is some intractable divide between the true poor and the true rich, such that even if Ki-woo is pretending to be a middle-class college boy, as he must to get the tutoring job, there is still no real possibility of romantic connection between him and Da-hye. Of course, maybe Min and Ki-woo just have a friendship built on deep trust, but the film does nothing to establish that if it is the case.
With the prospect of a high-paying tutoring job from Min and some forged documents from his technologically gifted and artistically inclined sister, Ki-jung, Ki-woo goes to the rich neighborhood of the Park family for an interview and trial tutoring session. He is greeted through a gate-intercom by the Park’s housekeeper, who opens the gate for him where he sees that there are about a dozen sprinklers in the front yard, designed to make sure every inch of grass receives a perfect sprinkling whenever needed for a perfect lush lawn. The housekeeper comes out and leads Ki-woo through an incredibly opulent and stylish home designed by a fictional architect called “the great Namgoong,” who seems to be the Korean equivalent of Frank Lloyd Wright. The housekeeper has to wake up Mrs. Park, who is dozing in the sunlit yard. Mrs. Park then interviews Kim-woo in the house, saying she doesn’t really care about the documents (expertly forged by Ki-jung) that he’d brought, but puts stock in Min’s recommendation. She notes, however, that if Ki-woo isn’t up to par with Min, he won’t be able to keep the job, and she insists on observing him for his first tutoring session with her daughter. The stakes are thus laid out clearly as Mrs. Park leads Ki-woo upstairs for the session, and as an audience member, I was pulling hard for him: the elegance of the Park home contrasted with the squalor of the Kim basement makes it understood that even a six-hour a week job with the rich family would be life-changing for Ki-woo. It is one of the most exciting and triumphant releases of the film when Ki-woo absolutely crushes the first tutoring session, providing Da-hye with a new, aggressive test-taking philosophy that establishes him as an authority to be respected by both the mother and daughter – so much so that Mrs. Park voluntarily pays him even more than she was paying Min, whom she spoke so highly of that one wonders if he had a romantic relationship with the mother as well.
The exhilarating and comedic rush of Ki-woo’s first tutoring session continues for the next 40 minutes or so of the film as the Kim family unleashes a plot to get all four of themselves on the Park payroll. Immediately after the first tutoring session, Mrs. Park shows Ki-woo some crayon drawings which she calls “paintings” made by her son, Da-song, who’s about nine years old. She expresses an absolute belief, groan-inducing for the audience, that her son is an expressive genius. Ki-woo humors her masterfully and suggests that, with a bit of training, Da-song could become a generational artist. Mrs. Park latches onto the idea, and Ki-woo has an epiphany when he remembers that he has a cousin who went to art school with a girl who had a true gift for cultivating artists, which excites Mrs. Park very much.
Ki-jung, Ki-woo’s sister, is, of course, this gifted artist and teacher who studied in the US. She memorizes some biographical information that Ki-woo made up for her, does a bit of research into “art therapy,” and ad libs the rest. Her vibe is quite different from Ki-woo’s when she enters the home. Whereas he was polite and deferential until the tutoring session began, Ki-jung is aloof and commanding right away, giving off an aura of self-confident control. Though Mrs. Park attempts to demand to observe Ki-jung’s first tutoring session with the son, Da-song, Ki-jung shuts her down and says she never tutors in front of parents. Mrs. Park obeys but is obviously unsure if she wants to stick with this new girl. She gets the housekeeper to go up to Da-song’s room to see how things are going – the housekeeper isn’t a parent, after all – but Ki-jung is already done, sitting quietly at a table with the usually wild and unruly Da-song. She then totally convinces Mrs. Park of her genius by asking if something happened to Da-song when he was in first grade, saying she gathered that he’d suffered trauma by a mark in the lower right corner of his drawing, which is where most artists store their trauma. It’s a funny moment for the audience, knowing Ki-jung is just ad-libbing, when Mrs. Park breaks down crying. She says something did indeed happen to Da-song, but doesn’t say what, and agrees to pay Ki-jung whatever she wants to keep leading her son through art therapy.
Ki-jung then sets a trap to get Mr. Park’s driver fired, and she too is waiting with a recommendation for a new hire – who is, unbeknownst to the Park’s, her father. Mr. Kim goes to a luxury car dealership to learn some of the features of such vehicles, meets Mr. Park, and immediately sets to work flattering him. Mr. Kim drives well, garnering a compliment from Mr. Park on his “cornering,” and earns the rich man’s respect by stating that he’s been working as a driver for 30 years – Mr. Park says that he admires a man who sticks to one thing for that length of time, indicating a sort of socio-economic conservatism: Mr. Park likes people to remain in their place, and of course he does, because his own place is so incredibly high.
The last person the Kim family sets out to replace, and the most difficult, is the housekeeper. She was at the house before the Park family even lived there, and does an excellent job – the only complaint is that Mr. Park says she “eats enough for two people,” but a few dollars a day of food is nothing to him. But with impressive ingenuity, the Kim’s manage to convince Mrs. Park that the housekeeper is infected with tuberculosis and must be replaced for the sake of the children’s safety. And sure enough, Mr. Kim knows about an excellent agency that hires out maids and nannies and drivers, and within a few days Mrs. Kim is the Parks’ new live-in housekeeper.
The sequence is funny but still disturbing and tense – at any moment, with any slip-up, it could go wrong and the Kim’s could be back to total poverty, and if everything goes right it still results in the driver and housekeeper being fired by no fault of their own. It’s something the Kim’s wrestle with in a following scene, sitting together, having a celebratory drink in the Park’s living room while the rich family goes away for a weekend camping trip to celebrate Da-song’s birthday. They note that the driver is young and has “a good build” so he will be fine, but they all seem a bit uncomfortable when thinking about the housekeeper, an older woman who’d been working at the house for decades. They quickly pass that by and continue trying to enjoy themselves.
They talk about Ki-woo’s relationship with Da-hye, how much she adores him, and the Kim parents get very excited at the prospect of Ki-woo marrying the rich girl. No one seems to care that they would then have to live the rest of their lives in a constant lie – it would be worth it to have real and permanent access to such wealth. They even discuss hiring actors to play Ki-woo’s parents at the wedding. Ki-woo notes that it’s Ki-jung who really seems to belong in the upper class – the way she luxuriates in the bathtub being his strongest source of data, seemingly observing that the most important trait of the rich is fully and composedly enjoying their riches. The Kim children then note how kind Mrs. Park is. Mrs. Kim, in one of the few explicit acknowledgements of the way wealth influences behavior in the film by its characters, scoffs and says that she’d be nice too if she had that much money – that it’s much easier to be nice when you don’t have to worry about keeping a family fed and housed.
The scene in the living room gets momentarily heated when the family disparages Mr. Kim in comparison to the successful Mr. Park. Mr. Kim throws the liquor glasses off the table and acts as if he’s about to hit his wife for her insult, then bursts out laughing. The whole family laughs, and the audience is relieved, not wanting the family to start fragmenting just as they’ve all made it to a place of seeming stability, with four tethers to the Park family and all the money and comfort they represent.
And then there is a ring at the gate-intercom. Mrs. Kim gets up to answer it, as the only person who should still be in the house at that time. It’s the old housekeeper, saying she really needs to get something out of the basement of the house. Mrs. Kim, in an apparent act of pity towards the older woman, lets her in. The housekeeper looks beat up, aside from being soaked by the pouring rain that becomes an important plot point as the night wears on – already stricken physically by the roughness of joblessness in a harshly capitalistic society.
Mrs. Kim follows the housekeeper into the basement, where the housekeeper is attempting to move a heavy cabinet. With Mrs. Kim’s help, they reveal a secret passageway that the housekeeper says the Park family doesn’t know about – that the architect had built in case of emergency. It’s here that some audience members, who expected a horror movie, asked, “is this where the horror part starts?”
The housekeeper and Mrs. Kim go down multiple flights of stairs to a creepy secret room with a man living in it. The housekeeper embraces him and starts feeding him from a bottle, which he suckles hungrily, having been trapped down there since the housekeeper was fired. It turns out that he is the housekeeper’s husband, and he lives down there because he’s hunted by loan sharks – he attempted to stake out his own living with a “King Castella” cake shop, a food craze that swept Korea and led to a huge glut of shops before the bubble burst and left thousands of hopeful business-owners in massive debt. The man in the basement, Geun-sae, says that even after over four years in that secret room the loan sharks will still try to find him, and will kill him if he doesn’t have their money. So he stays down below, waiting for his wife to bring him food (the reason she “eats for two,” from Mr. Park’s perspective), and thanking Mr. Park with devout reverence for his provisions via Morse code communicated across lamps that wire down to the room, representative of the admiration the poor have for the rich, cultivated largely by a society that makes the poor’s existence contingent on the decisions of the upper class. It’s revealed that the trauma Da-song had suffered in first grade had been “seeing a ghost,” which had been Geun-sae coming upstairs in the middle of the night to get some food.
Mrs. Kim is just preparing to call the police, completely unsympathetic to Geun-sae’s predicament if it’s going to threaten her own newfound security, when the rest of the Kim family, who had been spying on the scene from the secret stairway, tumbles into the scene. The housekeeper quickly gathers that they’re a family and deftly records a video of the four and has it ready to send to Mr. Park – all she has to do is press send, and the entire ruse will be up. Using the phone like a gun, she leads everyone upstairs, and she and Geun-sae take the couch that the Kim family had just been seated at, forcing them to kneel on the floor as they consider their next move and enjoy some of the Park family’s food.
The housekeeper loses focus for just a second, and Ki-woo rushes her, knocking the phone from her hands. All six characters begin fighting each other for the phone, Ki-jung even dumps a bag of peaches on the housekeeper, who is fiercely allergic to them – all possible regard for each other stripped away by the stakes of access to the Park family wealth. As the Kim family gets control of the situation, the gate-intercom rings again. Mrs. Kim answers it, and it’s Mrs. Park calling from their car – she says they called off the camping trip because the rain had flooded the campsite, and would be home in eight minutes so could Mrs. Kim please make some Ram-Dan.
In the ensuing chaos, the Kim family attempting to pull off a herculean feat of cooking, cleaning, and brutal suppression of two other people to keep their place in the home, the kids and Mr. Kim wrestle the housekeeper and her husband back down into the basement and sweep the mess that had been made before and during the fight under furniture while Mrs. Kim whips up “Ram-Dan,” a meal she’d never heard of. Just as the Park’s are coming inside, the housekeeper, her feet tied up, comes hopping up the stairs to the kitchen, and Mrs. Kim kicks her down the stairs and shuts the door. The housekeeper falls backwards down the stairs and her head slams against concrete with a sickening thud. The scene cuts back to Mrs. Park sitting down to enjoy the Ram-Dan. It’s only here that it really feels like things have gone too far, that the Kim family has truly allowed greed to overtake them as opposed to simply operating selfishly by necessity. Before Mrs. Kim kicked the housekeeper down the stairs, there was a sense of scrambling “all’s fair in love and war (and late-stage capitalism)” improvisation, stressful but basically justified, a family trying to survive with guts and guile. But despite this sudden sense of change, one is still left without a clear feeling of how and when to have pulled out of the lie – should Mrs. Kim, and would you, audience-member, have allowed the housekeeper to come up into the kitchen? It would have destroyed everything. The Kims would have likely been arrested, in an even worse position than before. Or would you, too, have swiftly and almost mindlessly placed your foot in the chest of the bound woman on the stairs, not even thinking twice about her life to preserve yourself?
There had been a sign before Mrs. Kim kicked the housekeeper down the stairs that something was becoming warped in the Kim family. All four family-members on the Park payroll, they’d been in their basement apartment. Mr. Kim toasted Mr. Park, the family thanking him for his success which allowed them to be so prosperous in turn, never considering that the type of lavish prosperity Mr. Park enjoyed might just be the reason that the norm for so many in their country was desolate poverty. The same drunken man from the beginning of the film starts pissing on their house and the family groans. Instead of just watching, as they had before until Min came along and told the guy off, Ki-woo grabs the rock that Min had given them and starts to go outside. The audience barely has time to wonder if he’s going to scare the guy with the heavy, jagged rock or actually hit him with it, likely killing him, before Mr. Kim gives his son a bottle of water to use instead, diffusing the tension again. But when Mrs. Kim kicks the housekeeper down the stairs, it becomes clear that the struggle to attain comfort and stability in the harshly unequal society has demanded of the Kims not just cleverness and a certain disregard for others well-being, but also a ruthlessness, a brutality towards life itself, and it’s hardened them, this greed that’s come into their lives, symbolized by the rock and encouraged by capitalistic structures.
The Kim’s have to continue to hide in the Park home until the family goes to sleep, but before they do, they hear Mr. and Mrs. Park disparaging the smell of Mr. Kim, comparing it to an odor of boiled rags. It harkens back to another earlier scene, a tense moment when Da-song says that all four of his family’s new workers smell the same. The observation gets laughed off, and later, back at home, Mr. Kim says they need to start using different soap when they shower. Ki-jung says it isn’t the soap that makes them smell the same – it’s living in a shitty basement apartment. The smell that Mr. Kim apparently carries most heavily, the smell the Parks laugh at and make fun of him for and sometimes plug their noses from, is the smell of poverty.
When the Parks go to sleep, Mr. Kim and his kids sneak out of the home and into the still-pouring rain. It’s clear that it must be deep into the a.m. hours by this point, and the sequence from celebrating their infiltration of the Park payroll to the housekeeper’s revelations to successfully maintaining their ruse and escaping the house had been so tense and long that you feel exhausted for the family, these three that didn’t just possibly kill the housekeeper, hoping that they can get home and get some sleep. However, as they get closer and closer to their poor neighborhood, the streets become more flooded. By the time they get near home, they are wading through sewer water, flooding the impoverished. People are using buckets to desperately and fruitlessly try to throw water outside. The Kim’s home is completely flooded, water up to their chests in a claustrophobic scene in which they go inside trying to save a few precious items. Ki-woo grabs the rock Min had given them. Ki-jung gets the envelope in which they’d been keeping their cash earnings, but it’s soaked through. She sits on the toilet, the only thing in the apartment fully above water, sewage belching up against the seat and spilling over, and weeps. It’s a striking image – this girl who just a few scenes previously had been luxuriating in the Park’s jacuzzi tub watching a flat screen television now crying on a shit-covered toilet gurgling over in a flooded basement apartment – and it makes one wonder what exactly the film is trying to say. That lies and greed cannot be kept down, that they will explode to the surface, impossible to salvage or scrub clean – a moral message to apply to the individual? Or that the ills of a nation cannot remain buried, that they are beginning to boil-over, that the horrors of poverty that many wish to forget, including those who have been a part of it, still exist and cannot be ridden of by merely hiding from view – an indictment of society, an illumination of the most horrifically oppressed and ignored?
While the Kim’s salvage a few things from their flooding home, the housekeeper regains consciousness and hops weakly to her husband in the secret room in the Park house. She unties him and repeats Mrs. Kim’s first name, telling him that she is about to die, but wanting him to enact revenge for her. She then fades and dies, the hideous concussion she’d sustained in the fall overtaking her.
In the morning, Mr. Kim and his children are awakening in a cartoonishly crowded gymnasium filled with thousands left homeless by the flood, an image that reminds Americans of Hurricane Katrina news coverage. They all get texts from Mrs. Park about a party that afternoon at the house for Da-song in lieu of the camping trip. Mr. Kim has to go help her buy food and party favors, and Mrs. Park talks about how the rain was irritating but afterwards it’s always nice – how it clears the air of pollution. It’s apparent that Mr. Kim can barely hold back his anger at her privilege: that the rain was just an annoyance to her, when thousands were utterly ruined by it; the cramped homes and few possessions they did have destroyed by the sewage water, by a city that is designed to drain through the poor neighborhoods.
Ki-woo goes to the house and up to Da-hye’s room, where they continue their love affair and afterwards, he looks out over the lawn at all the party guests, how well-dressed and nice and elegant and perfect they seem, and he asks Da-hye if she thinks he could fit in with them. It seems then that Ki-woo’s self-image is running against his dream of breaking, fully, into the upper class. He expresses genuine doubt that he could ever really belong, wondering if his class is something deeper than chance and situation but something immutable, emblazoned on the soul.
With everything set up, Mr. Kim waiting in the bushes with Mr. Park to stage a little skit with Ki-jung when she comes out to the yard with Da-song’s cake, Mrs. Kim finishing the food, Ki-woo heads down to the secret room to, it’s implied, kill the housekeeper and her husband, Geun-sae, with the rock Min gave him. When he gets down there, he sees that the housekeeper is already dead, and then he is ambushed from behind by Geun-sae. Ki-woo nearly escapes up the stairs but Geun-sae catches him in the kitchen and bashes him in the head with the rock. It’s assumed that Ki-woo is dead, killed by the rock that represents material wealth, while everyone else at the party is out in the yard.
Geun-sae wanders outside, the first time in over four years, face bloody, dead-eyed, holding a knife he grabbed from the kitchen, in back of the crowd of clean and smiling rich people, the brutalized lower class emerging into the sunlight to wreak havoc. He sees the daughter carrying the cake and stabs her in the chest in front of everyone, momentarily frozen by confusion – is this the skit? – and then stricken with fear. Da-song has a seizure, seeing the “ghost” again. Geun-sae finds Mrs. Kim, after seeing Mr. Park and yelling, “Respect!”, and attempts to take vengeance for his wife, while Mr. Kim rushes to his daughter, trying to stem the blood. Mr. Park screams at Mr. Kim to drive him and Da-song to the hospital, not caring about Ki-jung, and then screams for Mr. Kim to just throw him the car keys. Mr. Kim does this, but the keys fall short. Mr. Kim sees his son being dragged out of the house by a hysterical Da-hye, a huge gash in his head. His daughter is dying in his arms. His wife has been slashed by Geun-sae before she’d stabbed him with a meat-skewer sword. The keys end up under Geun-sae. Amidst this horror, Mr. Park comes forward to grab the keys on the grass and gags at Geun-sae’s smell, getting too close to that indelible smell of poverty that is so apparently pungent on Mr. Kim as well. The pain of such indignity and callousness, in all this horror and violence, Mr. Park still has the nerve to be disgusted by the smell. It drives Mr. Kim over the edge and he grabs the knife that Geun-sae had used to kill Ki-jung to stab Mr. Park in the chest. The rich guests don’t do anything, they just stand there in absolute horror, paralyzed, having never experienced life-or-death crisis before on any level. Mr. Kim simply walks by and leaves the property.
Mr. Kim’s reaction to Mr. Park’s gag is a curious moment. Just moments earlier, Mr. Park had been quite nice to him – acknowledging that dressing up as a Native American for Da-song’s skit was demeaning but pointing out that he was being paid overtime for it. Geun-sae, of course, has just murdered Mr. Kim’s daughter and, unbeknownst to him, his son, and had attempted to kill his wife. But when Mr. Park expresses his uncontrollable disgust at the smell of the man who had been hidden in the secret room beneath the house, the man who had looked up to Mr. Park with devout reverence, who had said “thank you” to him in Morse Code every night through the light system, the utter disregard by Mr. Park of Geun-sae’s humanity awakens a rage in Mr. Kim. Perhaps what is awakened is a rage of class solidarity. Acknowledging Geun-sae as a brother in a struggle much vaster than any of them had previously recognized, even though on the surface he should hate the basement ghost with his whole being, negating Mrs. Kim’s previous refutation when the housekeeper called her “sister.”
The denouement is narrated by Ki-woo, who survived the blow to his head after an extended coma. When he wakes up, he can’t stop laughing, despite the fact that he and his mother are back to poverty, his father is missing, and his sister is dead. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the entire movie is seeing Ki-jung’s grave – a cubby, like one might have had in grade-school, amongst thousands of others in a cramped basement, with a picture of her and a few small personal belongings: even in death, the poor get the bare minimum amount of space, just enough for the rest of society to be able to say, “here you go, now shut up.”
The only time Ki-woo doesn’t laugh is when he watches news coverage of the murder of Mr. Park and the disappearance of the killer. The only time he can’t laugh is when he sees the events sucked into a larger narrative – the innocent rich, slaughtered by the evil, jealous poor.
Ki-woo goes up on the hill over the Parks’ old home, now housing a German family who didn’t know about the murders that occurred there. He sees the light flickering, the light that Geun-sae had used to thank Mr. Park in Morse code. Ki-woo writes down the sequence of dashes and dots and translates the message – it turns out, his father had went right back inside the Park house after killing the patriarch, down into hiding in the secret room. Ki-woo vows to get rich – he daydreams about overcoming his class, making it all on his own, earning enough money to buy the house – his father walking upstairs and embracing him, going out in the yard, parents and son, triumphant and freed, into the sunlight. Then the scene cuts back to Ki-woo’s reality – back in the basement apartment, in the poverty where the movie began, and ends.
Class and Self-Image
The thing that struck me most about Parasite was the distortive effects that the intensely capitalistic society presented has on people’s perception of themselves and of others. One of the most obvious examples is when Ki-woo doubts he could ever belong in the upper class, standing in Da-hye’s room overlooking the assembling party in the yard. This doubt comes after weeks or months of lies and the previous night’s fight with the housekeeper and Geun-sae, after wading through sewage water in his flooded home and spending the morning in an overcrowded gymnasium full of refugees, after hearing his father’s resigned speech about the futility of making plans – a striking comment on the sense of instability and impermanency that suffuses the lives of the working poor. Ki-woo seems to see himself as a stained person, in comparison to the rich visitors to the party. Just the night prior, he had observed how nice Mrs. Park is. Of course, and as his mother pointed out, the wealthy people don’t need to scratch and claw for every bit of comfort in their lives. They are never faced with the choices and situations that have constantly come up in the Kim family’s lives – between being ruthless or being broke, between being duplicitous and violent or being hungry and homeless. When such choices and situations are a part of one’s life, virtually everyone will become stained in the same way Ki-woo seems to see himself; they’ll get the smell on them like Mr. Kim; they’ll have to do things that the higher society would say are immoral, but that the higher society can avoid at far lower stakes.
When morality and decency are divorced from consciousness of a society that makes adherence to individual values infinitely more difficult for the lower class, the people within that society will view it as a series of individual failures rather than a systemic failure when people in the lower class are systematically more likely to fall short of those values than those in the upper class. This distortion comes from both the rich and the poor – from Ki-woo wondering if the rich are simply, immutably, better than he is, and from Mr. and Mrs. Park having no awareness that the smell of Mr. Kim might be due to anything other than his own individual grossness. It’s part of the same distortion that leads to the Kim family and Geun-sae repeatedly thanking Mr. Park for amassing such great wealth that they can siphon a tiny piece from it to support themselves, never considering that the fact of his ability to have such inordinate wealth might be the reason they need to siphon in the first place.
Early in the film, when Min comes by and stops the drunken man from peeing on the Kim household, Mr. Kim states that college students have “vigor,” apparently unpossessed by the less educated. Perhaps this too is a product of distortion, a sense put into the minds of the more privileged that a home is not something to be pissed on, but a sense withheld from the impoverished, because their place and their comfort and their recognition is always contingent upon what is most convenient for the more powerful classes (take Ki-jung’s grave-cubby as an example), and the society doesn’t want to give them any sense of entitlement whatsoever, even if it’s just entitlement to a home not covered in bodily waste; everything must be demanded, fought for – even charity isn’t possible when the would-be recipients are rendered invisible.
In this society which both favors the upper class, allowing them to be divorced from the material concerns of the rest of the population – for instance, the rain which flooded the poor neighborhoods but only posed a minor annoyance for the Parks – and leads to the distorted view that the rich are inherently better than the poor, lower-class fragmentation is an inevitable result. The fight between the Kim family and the housekeeper and her husband is a fight for who gets to have a spot on the Park payroll – which of these poor families is more worthy to have a piece of what the Parks, in both families’ minds, rightfully own? It is the poor who are each other’s enemies, by necessity. From the very start, the film shows that there is little room for empathy within the lower class and the hard-scrabble lives they are forced to lead. The girl who runs the pizza van that the Kim family folds boxes for probably has barely more wiggle room than they do, and so she must be tough on them, unsympathetic, dock their pay for a sub-par job. The Kim family gives little consideration to the driver and housekeeper they replace and Mrs. Kim, when she finds out about Geun-sae in the basement, was going to call the police – the Kim’s recognize empathy towards the other working poor as a threat to the stable income they are fighting for. The housekeeper even calls Mrs. Kim “sister,” appealing to solidarity, to common understanding of what it’s like to struggle, but Mrs. Kim, so nascently a part of the middle class, refuses this gesture. Attempting solidarity with the rich is more immediately profitable than solidarity with the other poor, and the situation of the poor is dire.
It is their situation that systematically forces the lower class to unscrupulousness, and the effects of this near-necessary behavior are felt by others in the lower class. The effect is that the offenses people in the lower class recognize most directly are the ones enacted by each other, while the much larger oppressions carried out anonymously by the rich are diffuse and imperceptible. It is like war: soldiers see the ones shooting at them as their enemies, because they are the immediate and visceral threat; they do not recognize that those people shooting at them don’t want to be shooting any more than they do, don’t have any more stake in it than they do; they don’t recognize that the people with a real interest in the outcome, who can profit by it, are nowhere nearby; that we see our enemies across from us when we should be looking up.
The distortive effects of class – the way wretched lives lead to wretched self-image, and good lives lead to the self- and external-perception of goodness, that all are getting what they deserve, is also brought to light through the very fact that the Kim family, especially Ki-woo and Ki-jung, have to lie about their credentials. Ki-woo, who aspires to go to college one day if he can save enough money, is a legitimately good English tutor – the fact that he isn’t actually a college student has no bearing on that. Ki-jung, posing as “Jessica,” a Korean-native who studied art and art therapy in Chicago, is extremely talented with art and digital media and is also the only character in the movie who appears able to control the unruly and bratty Da-song, despite being, really, an untrained girl from a poor family. Both know that the Park’s would never give them a job if they knew the truth of where they came from, regardless of their actual abilities, of their actual merit. Just as the movie presents the way that class distorts peoples’ perception of themselves and what they deserve, it also shows the harsh truth that for those below a certain station, there is little opportunity to demonstrate any higher level of deservedness. They feel shame about where they come from and want to earn their way out, but to do that they have to lie, hid their true lives, which makes them feel shame as well. There is a harsh paradox just on the edge of formation here – that for the poor to prove their worth, they will have to do things that will make them feel unworthy, or at least as though they are not living honestly.
The parents too are good at their jobs. Mrs. Kim is an able housekeeper and an excellent cook. When Mrs. Park calls and asks her to make “Ram-Dam,” a dish she’d never heard of, she makes a bowl in just eight minutes that Mrs. Park eats with satisfaction. Mr. Kim gets a compliment from Mr. Park for his “cornering” as a driver (though he turns his whole body to look at the person he is driving in the backseat). Throughout the film we see evidence like this that the station of the poor is not explainable by lack of ability or intelligence. This comes in comparison to the portrayal of the Park family. Da-hye seems like an ordinary, angsty teen; Da-song seems like a pretty ordinary young boy – his parents’ absolute belief in his brilliance is used as a joke, but what that joke might represent is that misguided, even delusional belief in one’s exceptionality can be used to justify one’s place. Mrs. Park is beautiful and sweet but brings little else to the table, as all characters seem to recognize, including her. Mr. Park is authoritative but we never really get any indication whether he is actually good at his job, value-producing as a CEO, or is simply in control of capital and must therefore be bowed to. To sum, the movie effectively portrays a situation in which, if there is actually a difference in ability between the rich family and the poor one, that difference is dwarfed by that of their comparative wealth, refuting perhaps the most pernicious myth of capitalist ideology: that our station in life is reflective of our deservedness; that the way things fall in “the market” are just and unquestionable. That’s prosperity-gospel bullshit, and Parasite puts it right in the forefront how that ideology justifies the position of the wealthy and the poor, and how it convinces people in both groups to believe it.
Crossing the Line
Another compliment Mr. Park, speaking to his wife, gives Mr. Kim is that he never “crosses the line,” though he sometimes comes close. We are never told exactly what crossing the line means, but there is one scene while Mr. Kim is driving Mr. Park which provides insight: Mr. Park says something about his wife, and Mr. Kim says, “but you love her, of course” (paraphrasing – I can’t remember the exact line). Mr. Park’s mood darkens a bit and he narrows his eyes at his driver’s head before he allows the moment to pass. Adding this scene to Mr. Park’s statement that Mr. Kim’s smell does cross the line, and we can build a hypothesis about what “crossing the line” is: things that threaten the illusion; that call into question the flawlessness of Mr. Park’s life or offend his taste; that, consciously or inadvertently or without any control on Mr. Kim’s part whatsoever, draw attention to any of the many realities constantly concealed by his wealth: that the Park’s marriage might be based more on money and beauty than love; that underneath that money and beauty might be emptiness; that poverty and suffering and death and that awful smell exist while Mr. Park lives in a massive and immaculate hilltop home and feeds his dogs Japanese crab meat.
The theme of suppressing poverty, hiding it from the rest of society, is a constant and powerful one in Parasite. When Ki-jung first gets her job tutoring Da-song, Mr. Park has his driver take her home. The audience understands that he mustn’t see where she lives or the ruse will be up – he’ll tell Mr. Park she isn’t actually a successful art teacher. Geun-sae is hiding in the basement of the rich family, and though he is no imposition on them down there, he still must be kept a secret – the housekeeper knows they would want him gone if they knew he was there. Mrs. Park appears completely unaware of the thousands left homeless by the flooding when she comments on how the rain is nice because it clears up pollution – indicating that the media chooses not to bother its wealthier patronage with bad news about the poor.
The suppressed emerging from below is foreshadowed by the image of Ki-jung sitting on the toilet as sewage spills out into her flooded home. The following day at the Park house, Geun-sae comes out of the basement to have his revenge – but his revenge, of course, is not on the loan sharks that forced him into hiding or the capitalist system that led him to invest his life in the “King Castella” cake market bubble. How could it be? Enemies within this society become more abstract and diffuse and unfightable as they become more powerful and consequential. But the Kim family, the matriarch of which killed his wife in a flash-panic mindless kick of self-preservation, is flesh and blood and right there. And Geun-sae walks out into the sunlight, face wretched with his own dried blood, eyes betraying his madness, and kills Ki-jung in front of the horrified partygoers.
Da-song has a seizure at the sight of Geun-sae, the ghost that had appeared to him a few years before. I don’t think it’s a stretch to see this as a comment on the fragility of the upper class’s sensibilities, the way they are protected, by their own class’s design, from knowledge of the reality of the impoverished, the suppressed, the buried. Da-song, this spoiled boy, adored to the point of near-worship by his rich parents, was traumatized by the mere sight of this person that lives in the shadows of his home. When he sees Geun-sae in the full light of day, he immediately begins convulsing.
As Ki-jung is dying in her father’s arms after Geun-sae stabbed her, Mr. Park commands Mr. Kim to drive Da-song to the hospital. Even at the doorstep of death, the expectation is that the needs and demands of the rich will trump over those of everyone else. Mr. Kim is driven into a rage by the immediately following indignity of Mr. Park gagging when he smells Geun-sae: at this climax, Ki-jung taking her dying breaths, Ki-woo appearing already dead as Da-hye and others carry him past, Mr. Park still had the nerve to express his disgust of this unwashable attribute of poverty. Even if Mr. Park didn’t mean to gag, Geun-sae doesn’t mean to have the smell, and neither does Mr. Kim, and Mr. Park had joked about it earlier, quite on purpose and unnecessarily. In this moment of terror, the poor men still didn’t have the privilege of just being people; they had to be, Mr. Park had to let him know they were, also, poor, old, disgusting. To see Mr. Park gagging at the offense of his own sensibilities in this most humanity-shattering of moments – believing his children to both be dead or dying – was too much for Mr. Kim, and he lashed out, killing Mr. Park – and the news would say, nobody knew why.
Mr. Kim goes back underground, taking Geun-sae’s place in the basement of the next rich family. The symbolism is direct: for such wealth to exist as that in the immaculate home, there must be something below, struggling to survive, on the verge of starvation, miserable, unseen. I think Mr. Kim recognizes this symbolism. It’s why he goes down there. He killed Mr. Park in a moment that seems like it could be one of sudden and complete class solidarity gone violent. Recognizing a solidarity with the lower class, something his son misses, Mr. Kim takes position down below to wait – probably for the rest of his life.
The Delusion
We conclude with Ki-woo’s promise to become rich and buy the house and free his father. The scene illustrates the perniciousness of capitalist dogma. Ki-woo has hope that he can make it in the system – and likely, that hope is misplaced, and he will work himself to the bone to the profit of those above him. But perhaps he will become rich. Perhaps he will make it – some always do. Because just as Geun-sae is replaced in the secret basement with Mr. Kim, so the Park family is replaced by the German family: in capitalism, there must always be capitalists; there must always be haves and have-nots, and there’s always the chance (or at least the illusion of one) of becoming one who has, otherwise the system would collapse in the blink of an eye. But it’s that very hope that prevents so many of the have nots from collectivizing their power, recognizing that their holistic interest is in changing the power structure rather than participating in the rat race which will reward a tiny few of them but many many more of those that come into the society from a place of high privilege, as Da-hye and Da-song will. Perhaps even more sinister is the side of the dogma that says that success will come to those who work hard enough – if you end up poor, hungry, with unstable shelter and no opportunities, it’s because you didn’t work hard enough, and that’s proven by the fact that there are likely to be some people who succeed who came from a similar station. If Ki-woo succeeds in his plan, he will become justification for the continuation of the same societal structure which led to his sister’s death, to his father’s imprisonment, to his own and his mother’s destitution, to the desperation that plagued the family throughout the film. If he fails, it’s because he just didn’t work hard enough or didn’t have The Right Stuff ™.
Ki-woo’s plan and the daydream of it succeeding comes shortly after his father telling him that making plans is pointless. Mr. Kim, who so many times throughout the film beforehand had advocated for having a plan, is psychologically broken – or, one might argue, realizes the basic truth – after the flood. He comes to believe that with poverty comes powerlessness, and plans only have value if one has some power to enact them and reap from their reward. He does not. His family does not. The lower class does not. Ki-woo seems to feel bad for his father when he says this – Ki-woo still believes, still has hope. Even after his sister is dead and his father is locked away, Ki-woo still has hope. Perhaps it’s simply youth. Mr. Kim has suffered through poverty for much, much longer – tried to escape it many times fruitlessly. And with this latest horror – the money they’d saved and their home being destroyed by flooding – he finally accepts that poverty is inescapable. And in a sense, he is right – within capitalism, at least as it is practiced in the film and arguably most of the modern world, poverty is essential to the system – scarcity drives demand, drives profit, and just as wealth concentrates in a few, so does scarcity concentrate in a significant minority, defining their lives, their health, even their deaths.
Maybe it’s Mr. Kim’s acceptance of this fact that makes his smell grow stronger – at least, the Parks seem to react to his smell more strongly after he comes to this belief. It’s a belief rancid to those who would seek to justify and embrace the ideology of capitalism. Or maybe the smell is worse because he spent the night wading through chest-deep shit-water. Who’s to say?
I think Ki-woo doesn’t come to his father’s understanding even after the horrors he’s gone through by the end of the movie because of his head injury, the physical trauma that leaves him laughing at virtually everything. It was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers to end with a shot of Ki-woo’s reality, sitting in his family’s half-basement, in the same cyclical poverty where he was introduced, rather than in the triumphantly hopeful scene at the Park house, hugging his emergent father in the sunlight. It’s a hammering home of reality – Ki-woo will NOT escape his poverty. Not because he is dumb or inept or lazy, clearly, based on the events of the film thus far, but because he IS poor in a steeply hierarchical, late-stage capitalist society. He’s fucked. And even if (God, the perniciousness of hope) he does somehow make it out of the struggle and instability, most like him will not, they cannot, it is impossible for them to do so because of the structure of the society. The stomach-drop moment of the film is not the shot of Ki-woo back in his basement, a statement that he will almost certainly fail; it’s Ki-woo sharing his dream of becoming rich. That is the end of real hope. We see then that Ki-woo is dead; we all saw it: we all saw the jagged rock smash against his head; Ki-woo was murdered by the rock, murdered by materialism: what’s left is a puppet, a parasite in his body.
Ki-woo’s dream shows that he is looking right past the systemic inequities all around him at the golden image of utter prosperity beyond. He is looking right past all the others like him, all the other Kim families subjugated and oppressed and hidden, and if he gets a lick of power and wealth he will do nothing to attempt to bring justice to the system; he will give no regard to those in the position he came from; just as his mother rebuffed the housekeeper’s plea for solidarity in calling her “sister,” Ki-woo sees himself as a man on an individual’s journey, divorced from broader consciousness. He’s brain-damaged, socket-blown, delusional, completely sold on the ideology of inequity, of the dream and the hope that keeps moving capitalism towards complete domination by the few over the many until the many actually join together and demand change.
There was hope until Ki-woo shared his dream. Hope that the horrors he’s seen caused by wealth disparity would light a fire in him to fight to shrink it. But no, he wants to live above, in full knowledge that there will have to be others hidden, starving, suffering below. If he makes it, he will abandon the overwhelming majority of the poor like him. But he won’t make it, because he is poor.
The Parasite
As I’ve already noted, I think the film’s title could refer to Ki-woo’s state at the end: animated by the hollow spirit of materialist dreams and pseudo self-elevation, the base of the ideology that keeps capitalism, as it is practiced in the film, alive. Parasite could also most obviously refer to the Kim family, leeching off of Mr. Park’s wealth. But that doesn’t seem quite right – the Kim’s are good at their jobs. They haven’t caused any harm to the Park’s, other than perhaps Da-song’s art lessons being semi-fraudulent (though Ki-jung at least gets him to behave). The Kim’s only caused harm to the Park family’s former driver and housekeeper, but that doesn’t seem a parasitical relationship, rather, a traitorous one. Parasite could refer to Geun-sae, and then Mr. Kim, living in the basement off another family’s food. That seems like a decent interpretation – they’re not doing any work for the Parks when they’re down there, and they’re eating some of their food (a lot of there/their/they’re in that sentence – very risky). But really, what’s a few pieces of fruit or whatever to the Parks? It’s nothing. So if that is the Parasite, it’s not really a danger to its host.
The Parasite could also be the rich. It could be the Park family. They own huge homes that are pieces of art (and the housekeeper says they don’t even appreciate it) built by renowned architects while many of the essential workers of the city live in tiny half-basements; they have a dozen sprinklers watering their lawn; they demand the time and obedience of those of a lesser station; they feed their dogs Japanese crab meat while many others in the city struggle to afford decent food themselves. And what did they do to deserve so exponentially much more than those others? What will Da-hye and Da-song have done to deserve it? The Park’s live luxuriously and spaciously atop a hill overlooking the rest of Seoul, where the people essential to the creation of their wealth and the material goods they buy with it live below, many in near-squalor, in unstable conditions, the little they earn with their work subject to the whims of the forces around them. When the rainstorm comes, to the Parks, it clears the air – to the poor, it destroys their homes and all they had saved. The comfort of the rich comes upon the backs and toil of the essential millions beneath them. When Mr. Kim stabs Mr. Park, perhaps that was a moment of the host lashing out against its leech. “Parasite” could be a description of a system in which advantage is perpetually increased, more blood continually taken, until the host takes notice and claws at it; demands restructuring, revolution.
Conclusion
Walking out of the theater, one of the people I watched the movie with commented, “It just kept getting worse and worse for them (the Kim family). It made me want to grab everyone and scream, ‘can we just stoppp?!’” I think that’s exactly right, exactly what the film should do. From the high point of the Kims’ position, sitting in the Park living room at the start of what should have been a weekend celebrating their new life, to the end, things just keep getting worse and worse. And it all makes sense: it all goes so terribly, logically wrong, and believably so. Of course the Kim family doesn’t get to keep having money; of course they fall even farther than they began; of course they are met with violence and death and despair; of course the family is ripped apart; of course Ki-woo doesn’t even take the right message from all of it, meaning the cycle will continue. When it’s laid out as clearly and poignantly as it is in Parasite, you do want to dive into the screen and make everyone stop hurting each other, killing each other, letting each other be hungry and homeless, lying and keeping secrets, recoiling at Mr. Kim’s smell, beg them to, beg them to just treat each other as goddamn human beings, is that so fucking much? You really want it all to just stop, and you see how inequality is a runaway train towards destruction, compared to when you’re in it it’s made to just seem like the status quo. The question is, can we make that impulse last? Can we keep that consciousness, that vision, that empathy? Can it survive the daily toil of our own lives, now that we’ve watched Ki-woo get shattered by the jagged rock? Can we avoid letting ourselves and our own perceptions be warped by class? Can our humanity survive when the jagged rocks are everywhere, all around us, being thrown at our heads by so many who benefit from what it represents?
In the hours and days after watching Parasite, it seems clear what we must do. We must denounce greed, denounce the myth that, in a wealthy society, poverty is justified by worth; we must come to Mr. Kim’s realization that a person’s gagging in disgust of the poor is truly disgust of humanity, an impulse towards insulation from the lives of others. We must come together in empathy, and not lose sight of each other in dreams of individual elevation. In this sense, the film is art as wisdom – learn from the mistakes of the characters on screen so our own real-life crucible won’t have to be so soul-crushing. It took death and horror and misery for Mr. Kim to learn this lesson: what will it take for us?