KILLING THE HOST Class and Complacency in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite
It is, perhaps, atypical of a Palme d’Or–winning film that among its most resonant images is one of a young woman sitting despondently on a toilet, staring at her phone, as sewage spews out of it like a cursed Willy Wonka contraption. Such is the earthy subversion of Bong Joonho’s Parasite (2019), a chattering social satire of wildly oscillating tones in which a family of hustlers insinuate themselves into the household staff of a renowned South Korean businessman’s bourgeois family.
Bong’s latest excoriation of the ruling class and their attendant power is as cynical as his 2014 film Snowpiercer, which presents a dystopian future vision of humankind’s hierarchy compressed into the grim confines of a looping locomotive. But what distinguishes Parasite is its careful observation of the everyday inhumanity of being counted among the financial Other, and the mundane trickery that the poor must employ merely in order to survive. Critiquing a world marked by an ever-widening gulf between the rich and the underprivileged, skyrocketing costs of living, and ever more drastic impoverishment, Parasite excavates the humour in that inhumanity before exposing economic marginalisation for the deeply melancholic, and potentially soul-rending, experience that it is.
If the film’s conceit is Dickensian in design, Bong’s deconstruction of it is reminiscent of the work of Kurt Vonnegut in its nihilistic absurdism. Small, empty mercies like finding a single bar of free wi-fi in order to access WhatsApp, or the benevolence of a rich friend in gifting the family a scholars’ rock1 that represents wealth, feel akin to Vonnegut’s ideas about the obliterating nature of war – how only birds interrupt the silence following the devastation. ‘And what do the birds say?’ asks Vonnegut’s narrator in Slaughterhouse-Five. ‘All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-weet?”’2
Parasite’s great deception – which is to
