41 Comments

Did anyone else watch the black & white version? Having seen the film a couple of times already I watched that version this time. It's an interesting experience. Overall I prefer the color version and I'm not sure the B&W version was _necessary_, but some images, like the sun hitting the Parks house and especially the shot of Song Kang-ho seething while wearing the Native American headdress, are really striking in B&W.

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Where does one see this version? I can't imagine I'd like this movie better that way (Bong is just too skilled w/ color IMO to take that off the table) but still, pretty intrigued!

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It played theaters briefly and it can now be found on the Criterion edition, where it gets a whole disc to itself (apart from some special features).

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“Know your place. Be a shoe.”

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I can't believe neither of you mentioned Jessica's jingle, which is amazing.

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The reaction to this Parasite and Snowpiercer annoy me. I think they're both terrific films, but they have a very nuanced take on class relationships and they're decidedly not a proletariat's call to arms (S) or EAT THE RICH (P).

In both films, Bong is sympathetic to the working class, but to a point. In Parasite they're basically vermin. They are manipulative, ignoble and selfish (though we understand why) and happily insinuate themselves into the lives of the rich family as much as they can by whatever means necessary. Their employers are a bit out of touch but by no means bad people who deserve to die. They also have no sympathy whatsoever for their fellow low-class sufferers, which always gets chalked up to "Oh the upper class sows discord among the lower," but I think Bong is noticing more that everyone likes having power over others. Regardless, no question the rich family are the nicest people in the movie.

And then in Snowpiercer, the world in the train was harsh but the balance (a deliberate one, as we learn at the end) kept as many people alive as possible. The revolution upends the balance and kills them all.

I know people will see whatever they want to see in a movie, but Bong's themes are far more complex than a lot of people want to acknowledge.

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Reminds me of the ending to the musical Urinetown, where the do-gooder revolutionaries triumph but destroy civilization by wasting too much water.

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Meet the new pee....same as the old pee

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I had the same thought watching Triangle of Sadness (spoilers for the last third).

Most of the commentary I saw focused on the over the top excesses of the yacht, but the society that gets built on the island is essentially the same structure as before, with different people at the top for different reasons. It's not suddenly a socialist utopia because Abigail wants to live in a more just and equitable world. She sees an opportunity to be on the top for once and takes it (not a criticism! it's human nature). Even the models find themselves in the same basic position, leveraging their beauty for comfort- though the marketplace has changed with a straight woman in charge instead of straight men.

I agree that it's a much more interesting insight than RICH BAD POOR GOOD!

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Exactly. The new society isn't a matriarchal wonderland and it's one she (spoilers) KILLS TO MAINTAIN.

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The complexity of the problems also makes the solutions harder/more ambiguous. If the problem is the yacht, you crash the yacht and voila... everything's fixed. If the problem is human nature and the social structures we replicate over and over, then the solution is suddenly very complicated, if it even exists.

Typing this out, I'm not surprised that the internet ignored a lot of the nuance here. My friend and I have a running joke about all the problems that people attribute to capitalism that have been present in human society basically for as long as we've had written records- that basically any THANKS, CAPITALISM! response should really be THANKS, AGRICULTURE ENABLING US TO FORM COMPLEX SOCIETIES! Don't get me wrong, capitalism exacerbates a lot of problems and clearly there are things we can/should do to regulate the worst excesses. But pretending the problem is capitalism alone is simplistic.

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All great points, and underlines the specific virtue of that third act in TOS, which is this novella-length feature where society remakes itself with familiar hierarchies. Human nature, as you say.

The thing I like about the very end of Parasite is that it does seem to comment on the particular promise that capitalist societies like to make-- that you can work hard and level up and realize your dreams, no matter how humble your starting point. In Bong's telling, that's a very distant fantasy.

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Ms. Kite I very much like the way you see things, and it echoes my observations as well. I think capitalism is like democracy in the famous Churchill quote - it's the worst system, except for all the others. And like democracy, the idea should be to address its flaws and weaknesses rather than go back to the other CLEARLY WORSE systems humanity has used over the millennia .

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I'm enjoying this conversation, too! It's helped me articulate to myself why films like The Menu left me cold. Nuance >>> simplistic extremism. A nice antidote to many corners of the internet.

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I'm with you. Parasite treats the sr. Park's murder as justified. He's just watched his son get attacked, and would do what just about any parent would in that situation. Yet in the rhythm of the film it felt right.

I thought on it for a while, and what I came up with was that his fatal flaw was just cluelessness. He enabled and fostered everything that went on the house. He could have pieced together what was happening, but was completely incurious. Even in the end he may not have understood why his servant killed him. Its not the gravest sin ever seen in cinema, but it effectively incriminates the audience. To what degree are we clueless about the workings of the world and our place in maintaining its hierarchy? Will one day we have to answer for a system we enabled?

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I have no idea whether this applies to the Academy voters, but at least for some in The Industry (sorry), there’s a very real sense that even if they ended up like the Parks they could have ended up like the Kims—people who did odd jobs who’d still be doing odd jobs without the big break, finding success while very talented people in their acting classes or film school languish. You might live like the Parks, but you can easily imagine being a Kim even if you don’t treat the actual Kims of your life with much empathy.

People of immense privilege investing in politics threaten their privilege is nothing new, either. I don’t know how Engels would react to Parasite—well, the Kims are lumpen, he’d flat-out dislike them (Ki-Woo wanting the house would be indicative of the lumpen lack of class politics)—but I’m curious how he reacted to literature of his own time that criticized his position in a more visceral way, without the “science” of dialectical materialism.

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I believe my scream of delight that night of the Academy Awards might have awoken a few of my neighbors. As a Korean American, I can't even tell you how proud I was of this movie and its win. Never did I think it had a chance to win Best Picture, since like everybody else, I thought the international would be its award. I also remember it fondly because it was the last Oscars in the Before Times. I miss the Before Times...

Two things about Parasite:

1) While watching this movie and understanding about 70% of the dialogue without subtitles made me appreciate how lucky I am to understand my native tongue. That letter the son writes to his father at the end is composed in the formal conjugation, full of respect and longing. It makes the juxtaposition between his fantasy (buying the house) and reality (dreaming from their dingy basement apartment) in the final scene that much more heartbreaking.

2) Like many American surnames, the last names of Koreans have meaning. It's ironic that the thieves are the Kims - that last name means gold. The rich folks are the Parks - that means gourd... Which floats quite well in water, in a flood...

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Excellent comment here. You do always wonder about all the things you miss in films made outside your own country-- nuances of language, cultural and political references, etc. Nice to get a piece of that from you here.

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Localization of that sort is so fascinating to me. It happens more in games but I'm always tickled when something comes up that's literally untranslatable because the way it works is exclusive to a language (ie, a lot of Japanese puns)

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Excellent write up. A few thoughts (and spoilers!)

Bong Joon-ho is definitely the Spielberg of this great class of Korean directors, but at this point he seems to have formed a tradesmark verging on cliche where he produces a "perfect girl" and then kills her off in film's climax. This pops up in Mother, Memories of Murder that the victim(s) are not just women but either highly talented or high status. In both The Host and Parasite the eldest daughter is by far the most talented and adept in their families. The former is an Olympic-level athlete, and the latter is shown to be skilled at forgery and is the only family member who doesn't need a training montage to fool the Parks. I groaned in the theater when I realized that once again Joon-ho was going to make a sacrifice of this character. I guess Snowpiercer breaks this trend by having the talented daughter survive to see the credits, but I'd still like to see him drop this trope for a few films.

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There was a big cultural appropriation/exchange debate over a planned Americanized, HBO version of the film. Put me in the camp that's enthusiastic for such a thing! So much of Parasite's plot is rooted in Korean culture. I want to see what these things translate to in America. What's our version of the river stone? The art therapist? What's a job that could connect the classes like "English Tutor".

If done well, Parasite could be like "The Office", where the totems change for whatever culture its set in.

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Finally, what's the significance of the Park's son's Native American obsession? That one I haven't been able to piece together nor have read any good analysis.

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I suppose you could say that Park's son (due to his age) and the old world Native American societies (due to their geographic isolation) existed in a prelapsarian state - neither had yet been forced to internalize a capitalist mindset. I have no idea if that was the intent, however.

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I'd say it's a nod to the United States's cultural domination over even upper-class citizens of other developed nations. Not only are the Parks pursuing the Western capitalist ideal of success, they have to imitate the cultural signifiers of the Western upper class (in this case, appropriation of Native American totems to retain a sense of <i>having an authentic culture</i>, since capitalism has erased their link to their own cultural heritage.)

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Apologies for being a stickler but I think your foreign-language Best Picture count missed at least Drive My Car and (ugh) All Quiet on the Western Front.

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D’oh! You’re right. I think my source must have been a few years old.

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I mean how you could have possibly forgotten the grand statement that was All Quiet on the Western Front is a mystery to me.

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Seriously. Remember when the WAR was about to END but then the EVIL MUSTACHIOED PRUSSIAN BARON wanted more WAR so our main character DIED.

That was so deep.

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You know, I thought that film opened well with that trip through the war machinery and that the score was a bold choice. And then the same damn theme played out over the rest of the movie (musically and otherwise).

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Agreed. Opening scene is terrific

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A father brought his 9-year-old son to my screening, which makes him either the best or worst dad

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I felt the same way in the moment, but then I thought about it, and the fact that they were super nerdy about having the ceasefire begin on "the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" surely did get a bunch of people killed for absolutely no reason.

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Not in the absurd way the movie presents. The armies kept up artillery fire until the very end to ensure they didn’t lose positioning in the event the ceasefire fell through, but the last minute trench attack in the movie up to the very minute is as silly and made up as it feels

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War is BAD. Bad and SAD. Makes me MAD, Never GLAD. Worst thing I ever HAD. https://twitter.com/archiehench/status/1202582787972325376?s=20

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Love this discussion, love this movie, and love Bong. I think I brought up something about Okja and the pitmaster on a recent call to The Next Picture Show...

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One detail I love that reinforces Mr Park's obliviousness:

Geun-sae manually turns on the stair lights when Mr Park comes home to honor him, and Mr Park has no idea that Geun-sae exists and almost certainly assumes (if he thinks of it at all) that the lights are automatic. They turn on and he never thinks about it at all.

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I don't have much to say on this one - I enjoyed it, but I seem to enjoy it less than other people.

Its presence did make me wonder how many Oscar best picture winners actually showed up in the top 100. Parasite, Moonlight, and The Godfather off the top of my head. Then looking down the list, Casablanca, The Apartment, and possibly Sunrise (I think there's some asterisk with there being two first BP winners. I'm not an Oscars' person nor Oscars' trivia person).

Which I guess means... something.

(Honestly, that was two or three more winners than I was expecting)

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Hmmm... should I now see how many Best Foreign Language Film winners are on the list?

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Okay, I'm doing it: Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon, 8 1/2 and Parasite, though All About My Mother is knocking at the door and I think Drive My Car will be in the running next time.

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To this day, one of my most memorable moviegoing experiences has been seeing this at a film festival and reaching the halfway point. I'd been following it from Cannes and from various screenshots and reviews, I had thought it must've switched into some sort of sci-fi or horror thing (which... it kind of is) and was absolutely NOT expecting anything. funny enough, one of the other memorable viewings was Knives Out at that same festival.

But you guys are totally right on the staging after; I mentioned in a review for my college paper at the time how expertly it rides those multiple sources of tension when the Parks unexpectedly come back. I also think the main reason it works so well is that the Parks themselves are oblivious more than outright villains. Arguably that makes them even worse because the indicators of their poverty are so blatant and yet they choose to ignore it, while everyone ends up fighting each other. Of course it's also just entertaining as hell.

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This was an excellent discussion to read. And as much as I enjoyed Parasite (and was happy for its Oscar win), I always thought that Bong's Memories of Murder should've been the one to earn an Oscar nom and potential win since I believe that's his best film, which was kinda ahead of its time. Not to mention that his direction (and the masterful cinematography of it) was peak Bong that established him as an outstanding and visionary filmmaker 20 years ago.

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