Parasite (new Bong Joon Ho movie)

I liked this overall but was a little put off by ultimately how sympathetic every character was. I'm sure that's appealing to the Academy and yr average viewer, but it leaves the class analysis a little toothless, very "welp that's just the way things are, everyone's trapped in it!" which I don't find particularly enervating or insightful.

just caught this over the weekend as well. i really loved it! Can't get over some of the amazing shots. I'm definitly going to watch it again .

I liked this overall but was a little put off by ultimately how sympathetic every character was. I'm sure that's appealing to the Academy and yr average viewer, but it leaves the class analysis a little toothless, very "welp that's just the way things are, everyone's trapped in it!" which I don't find particularly enervating or insightful.

This is an extremely weird criticism to me. Why should the class of any of the characters have made them inherently unsympathetic?

Yeah, I wonder if one of the things that made this such an across-the-board appealing movie was that it refused to be drawn into the narrative that class inequality necessitates one (or the other) class being maladaptive if not downright evil.

sorry you didn't find it more enervating!

yeah it's good. There were a bunch of moments where I was trying to place what they specifically reminded me of (Hitchcock? Haneke?) and I was failing

Why should the class of any of the characters have made them inherently unsympathetic?

it obscures who really benefits in a very real way from the existing class structure, for one thing. Because, look, the rich suffer too, and are not mean people! But it also engenders a kind of apathy/helplessness - without a villain, or someone either articulating or exemplifying why the class structure is how it is in the first place - it just makes the class system seem insurmountable, something that cannot be fought against or changed. Which, admittedly is tempered a little bit by the delusional hopefulness of the conclusion, indicating that some kind of aspirational hope (even if it is just to become a rich family again) still exists, no matter how unrealistic. But of course poor people having unrealistic dreams of becoming rich is one of those things that helps to keep the class system functioning.

xps

oh I see Eric already said it better :)

xps

like, "Society" this is not. It's portrayal of aspirational poor people is nuanced and insightful (I lol'd at someone calling this Crazy Poor Asians), and probably novel for the Academy, since Hollywood has generally stopped making movies about real people.

this was basically The Class System as a Series of Unfortunate Events

I would be extremely down for someone to remake and improve upon "Society" tbh

film is not without its flaws but omg I love it so

I really just want someone to give it a real ending. keep in the wonderfully revolting practical effects and cartoonish class commentary obv

in the era of rebooted everything/current political climate I could see it working really well but I don't think it's a "property" that has much cachet, unlike other horror franchises, unfortunately.

it's funny to read American reviews of it at the time (ex. Variety) that are all aghast at the disgusting effects and yet curiously make no mention of the sledgehammer obvious class politics. I give Yuzna a huge amount of credit for not pulling any punches in either department.

Idk I could see a Blumhouse type crew picking up the rights for cheap, getting some up and coming arty horror director to gussy it up a bit and leverage the insane premise in advertising--you know what fuck it I'm just gonna write the thing on spec brb

cool, will cobble together a few mil from my production company for ya

quick who's a cheaper tom holland equivalent for the lead

it obscures who really benefits in a very real way from the existing class structure, for one thing. Because, look, the rich suffer too, and are not mean people! But it also engenders a kind of apathy/helplessness - without a villain, or someone either articulating or exemplifying why the class structure is how it is in the first place - it just makes the class system seem insurmountable, something that cannot be fought against or changed. Which, admittedly is tempered a little bit by the delusional hopefulness of the conclusion, indicating that some kind of aspirational hope (even if it is just to become a rich family again) still exists, no matter how unrealistic. But of course poor people having unrealistic dreams of becoming rich is one of those things that helps to keep the class system functioning.

It's established pretty clearly that while the rich family has their own set of issues, they are an entire universe away from the things that both poor families are dealing with. There's nothing threatening the existence of the rich family in the story until the confrontation at the end and their danger is completely driven by the rich father's actions/lack of empathy.

You are treating one of the strongest aspects of this movie (its treatment of all its characters as recognizable, relatable human beings whose motivations were driven as much by personality as by circumstance) as if it was a negative.

that's true, but only because personalized drama tends to not be very useful when it comes to class analysis. So I have no problem praising this movie for the sympathy of its characterizations, which it does very well, just also noting that that kind of emphasis undercuts any meaningful class commentary.

(and that concludes this episode of Stalinist Film Criticism)

For once, a recipe post where the introductory story is in fact crucial.

https://thetakeout.com/recipe-how-to-make-ram-don-noodles-from-parasite-movie-1841769317

Also, along the lines of a couple of pieces posted recently upthread:

https://tropicsofmeta.com/2020/02/17/reading-colonialism-in-parasite/

that's true, but only because personalized drama tends to not be very useful when it comes to class analysis. So I have no problem praising this movie for the sympathy of its characterizations, which it does very well, just also noting that that kind of emphasis undercuts any meaningful class commentary.

Making this movie more like a Haenecke film would not improve it.

no disagreement there, I can't stand Haneke

Outis, your response is interesting - it's funny tho, I feel like most of the negative reactions i've heard on the movie (which are not numerous obv) have been to do with finding the class analysis sledgehammer-y in the sense of "poor good, rich bad."

what's fascinating to me is how clearly it's the system which creates the poor/rich gulf that's evil here, and how we see the ways it infects people (parasitically) based on their relative class positions. so yeah, everyone is bad, but the ways they're bad and the kinds of harm they do are specific, and not symmetrical.

"poor good, rich bad."

dunno what movie these people watched tbh! Seemed very nuanced to me. The poors do some shitty things (get people fired, perpetuate fraud, struggle with/murder other poors), the rich do some shitty things (primarily acting snooty and entitled), but every character is given some shading to indicate that there is never much in the way of malice on anyone's part.

Uh, I would say there is a good amount of malice all the way around. The poor families are fully prepared to stomp on each other to get the opportunity to leech off of the rich family and the rich family, aside from the son who is really in his own hyper kid bubble, literally couldn't care less about the humanity or well-being of any of the people working for them; even the relationship between the poor son and rich daughter is shaded by the fact that she had the exact same relationship with the poor son's best friend and was obviously using her tutors as interchangeable relationship bots (which is partially due to the fecklessness of youth but also tied to the fact that she knows it's a temporary dalliance, while the guys in the tutor role are clearly looking at it as "this is my future wife whose inheritance will lift me into the social stratum where I naturally belong")

I didn't read any of that as malice so much as opportunism. There's no cruelty involved, the motive is never to hurt the other - it's to get them out of the way or use them to one's advantage.

Characters that are capable of making poor choices, wanting to do the right thing, being upset at the hand life has dealt them, and being inured to their own privilege. What a shallow cartoon this is!

which is a function of the class system and central to its design and hierarchies - decisions or actions that harm others are framed through the lens of self interest (something everybody is expected to identify with, no matter what their position), and not from an explicit desire to harm others. So when people suffer as a result there's this "don't blame me, I was just looking out for myself, just like you would've done!" excuse.

But up until the mayhem at the end, none of the characters are shown doing anything explicitly to hurt another just for the sake of hurting another.

xps

There's no cruelty involved

The poor family gets the driver fired and triggers a potentially-fatal allergic reaction in the housekeeper so they can take their jobs
The rich father has a protracted conversation with the rich mother about how much the poor father smells like a lower-class person
The poor family's reaction to discovering the old housekeeper's husband in the basement is to try to imprison him down there with his wife
Then there is the aforementioned "love affair" where both parties are blatantly and opportunistically using each other

I'm not sure how any of this goes by on screen and doesn't register to you as even the tiniest bit cruel and malicious.

The poor family gets the driver fired and triggers a potentially-fatal allergic reaction in the housekeeper so they can take their jobs means to an end
The rich father has a protracted conversation with the rich mother about how much the poor father smells like a lower-class person garden variety entitlement
The poor family's reaction to discovering the old housekeeper's husband in the basement is to try to imprison him down there with his wife again, means to an end. they're surprised and desperate
Then there is the aforementioned "love affair" where both parties are blatantly and opportunistically using each other yeah, idk if this counts as cruelty, this is kind of how a lot of relationships function sadly. It's not like there's rape or abuse involved.

My point is that you seem to be the one handwaving and making excuses for the bad behavior, not the movie. In fact, I'd argue that the violent escalation at the end is intended to highlight the passing cruelty everyone was slinging around up to that point of the movie.

xp plug-n-play Morbs' assertion that marriage is an economic institution and nothing at all more here

it's definitely bad behavior, I'm just saying the movie makes it believable and relatable! No one's portrayed as a sadist or a psychopath. Nor is the bad behavior limited to one side of the economic divide or the other.

Even the violence at the end - the audience has been led by the hand to understand what led up to that moment, that the characters that lash out snap out of grief and frustration and desperation. These are not Haneke's sociopaths from Funny Games or the upper class predators of "Society".

So... why does making it believable and relatable undercut the social commentary about class disparity? You are making an assertion and not really providing any argument beyond "because it does"

the class system clearly benefits the upper class and is explicitly designed to do so. A more polemical film would have emphasized this by painting a more traditional "poors good/rich bad" dichotomy. But as Doc Casino notes, ultimately the *system* is revealed as the true evil, rather than the people who are at the top of it. And the filmmakers were clearly not interested in a "eat the rich" sort of screed. Making everybody on either side of the divide believable and relatable means that no single group (apart from the Americans, who are implicated more by our absence and the use of English) comes out as deserving blame for the situation.

So in the sense that a class-conscious film involves motivating people to undo the class system... this doesn't really do that. There's no villain, there's no readily identifiable obstacle to be overcome, everyone's just kinda trapped.

just like real life

you could behead every capitalist and not end capitalism!

stop bumming me out!

I'll try to dig up some of the recent writing on the film I ran across but it's amazing how the one thing that's taken for granted by most audiences in these parts is how much American imperialism permeates the film's atmosphere and there's subtle and not-so-subtle commentary on it!

good piece linked by Ned upthread about that

you have nothing to lose but your heads

Understandable, he can't read.#Parasite #BestPicture #Bong2020 https://t.co/lNqGJkUrDP

— NEON (@neonrated) February 21, 2020

He hasn't seen Gone With The Wind (too long) but his Klan Dad rated it.

Gotta love how all of Trump's cultural reference points seem to be from the 1930s.

Anyway, it's interesting to see the breadth of reactions people have had to this movie. I for one did not find the Parks sympathetic at all. They're not cartoon villains, but they're clearly characterized as cluelessly entitled (the wife) or callously manipulative (the husband). The brilliant thing is that Bong makes the Kims sympathetic even though they're ruthless to the point of near-sociopathy. You want them to succeed, even though their success must be predicated on the dispossession of others.

this remains an exceptionally strange and bewildering timeline

Gotta love how all of Trump's cultural reference points seem to be from the 1930s.

Sunset Blvd (1950) mentioned last night...

about a lone megalomaniac who used to be big, and DOES get arrested when she shoots somebody near her swimming pool.

It's tempting to think about what Billy Wilder would say about him.

Caught this last night - in the cinema, which is a rare treat at the moment. I've seen a few Jong-Ho films so had a bunch of references but I'd managed to avoid any spoilers at all (apart from that it had a 'gory ending'). I loved it.

My initial feeling was that it was a caper film and that the Kims were veteran con artists: even with the pizza box shambles, there was something so slick about their performances that they must have done this, or something like it, before. It wasn't really until the visitation from the former housekeeper that it became apparent they were grifters and from there it all started to come apart. I did find the ending a little chaotic but I felt expertly corralled and was egging on the Kims and dungeon guy.

I keep thinking about the suseok and its grand metaphorical resonance. One way of thinking about it is as an avatar of the old ways; a remnant of real nature. Nature's only presence in the film is as a part of the grand architecture of the house - and is only experienced in a spectacular form, through the massive screen of the window. It seemed to be part of a grander narrative of capital supplanting and commodifying nature. Even the rain seemed allegorical and couldn't eradicate the 'real' of the suseok.

Anyway, ill-thought-through babble aside, what a film to win the Oscar.

the more i think about it, the less unlikely i find its oscar win to be--as a domestic drama of sorts that tragically boils over into violence, it doesn't feel like it's part of an unfamiliar prestige cinema mode beyond how stylized it is.

it's a pretty good movie. i wish it had more breathing room but my sense is that bong wants his movies to be sewn up pretty tight as far as what you're supposed to get out of them. there were some scenes in the back half of the middle that dragged. the epilogue stuff sucked if i'm being honest. but the characterizations were great and it was well-acted and well-observed.

I think it is astonishing that Parasite won the best picture oscar