Parasite and the disappearing satirical mindset

The Oscar film, directed by Bong Joon-ho, is hilarious and uses black humour to mock social realism

Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’ is social satire of a particularly virulent nature, which makes it surprising that it has won three Oscars at the 2020 Academy Awards, that too Best Picture, Best Director as well as Best Foreign Film.

Satire has generally not been favoured in Hollywood or even as a form and the gradual decline of Mad Magazine some decades ago signaled that satire was not appropriate. Satirists like Stanley Kubrick (Eyes Wide Shut, 1999), Paul Verhoeven (Starship Troopers, 1997), Todd Haynes (Safe, 1995) and David Lynch (Twin Peaks, Season 3, 2019) have therefore had to disguise their key works as thrillers, action or horror films in order to get wider acceptance. The general reason is that satire involves poking fun at people or social types and ‘political correctness’ makes this intolerable.

The protagonists of ‘Parasite’ are the dregs of the South-Korean economic success story. The Kim family — the father Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook, daughter Ki-jeong and son Ki-woo — live in a basement just below road level, and when the film begins, are in despair because their neighbour’s WiFi, which they were using for free, will not be available because he has put in a password.

The members of the family struggle to make ends meet and the house is full of smelly insects (‘stink-bugs’) they cannot get rid of, though the good news is that the fumes from the bug exterminator gets into their apartment and kills off some bugs for free. But one day Min-hyuk, a friend of Ki-woo’s, suggests that, when he leaves to study abroad, Ki-woo should take over his job as an English tutor to the wealthy Park family’s daughter, Da-hye. Ki-jeong forges a degree certificate for her brother and Ki-woo is all set to become Da-hye’s English tutor.

Min-hyuk describes Mrs Park as simple to Ki-woo and Ki-woo immediately finds himself accepted as Da-hye’s English tutor. It is interesting here that while the disadvantaged are shown to be scheming, the rich are gullible and simple. This would be certainly questioned in Indian art film circles where it is the poor who are necessarily simple and the rich who are deceitful, but Bong Joon-ho is proposing that the rich can afford to be ‘nice’ — since they own the ‘system’.

Chung-sook, the mother, in fact compares wealth to an iron that straightens out moral creases. Rather than the Parks, it is the housekeeper Moon-gwang who is scheming. The marginalised evidently need all their wits even to survive.

Once Ki-woo is installed as the English tutor, he convinces Mrs Park that her little son is an artistic wizard. The boy is a spoiled brat who dresses as an ‘American-Indian’ and shoots off arrows; the family has indulgently imported arrows for him. When Ki-jeong (but not as Ki-woo’s sister) is installed as the art-teacher, she uses Google to find out about ‘art-therapy’ and convinces Mrs Park that the boy needs therapy because of a childhood trauma — ‘revealed’ in the horrible faces he draws. The Kims then get rid of the driver and have him replaced by the father Ki-taek while the housekeeper is replaced by the mother Chung-hook.

To all appearances, none of the Kims, all working under one roof, are related, and the whole family is enjoying itself with the food and the expensive liquor in the empty mansion when the Parks are away. The Kims are like ‘parasites’ living off the Parks but the term is not pejorative: that is the only way in which the marginalised can live in a society in which privilege is with others.

The film is hilarious and, to give the reader of the kind of unsparingly black humour it uses, the Kims, the Parks discover, all smell alike and the question for the Kims is what to do about it since they use the same soap; should they buy separate cakes? Another motif is of the secret basement in the Parks’ home that rich people get constructed. It could be for the impending nuclear war with North Korea but the more likely reason is to hide from creditors.

The film may be seeming to laugh at those who only deserve empathy but, in actuality, what it is doing is to satirise the system in which rich and poor are only constituents, each one subsisting on the other, although not equally, or in the same way.

‘Parasite’ is one of the best Oscar winners of all times but this victory would not have been possible if Bong Joon-ho had not ‘compromised’, in some sense. The film reaches an unexpectedly violent climax and then concludes with a sense of hope, that the poor could perhaps aspire to become rich, own similarly lavish houses. My point here is that this ‘hope’ does not follow from anything previously shown in the film. It is the hopelessness of the situation that makes the laughter more savage.

But film festivals in the West impose their own ideological compulsions though prizes. Democratic countries are required to show hope while totalitarian ones must show hopelessness. The Iranians (Asghar Farhadi) and Russians (Andrei Zvyagintsev) have already grasped the latter part and one hopes that Bong Joon-ho has, similarly, not understood the first part, since he has a satirical touch of the highest order.

(The writer is a well-known film critic)