Of Parasites and Their Hosts: Bong Joon-ho’s Gisaengchung (2019)

One of the ways in which Parasite differs from many more naturalistic movies about urban poverty is that access to mediated experience is shown to be a function of opportunity rather than internal identity and a positive source of agency rather than a symptom of alienation. Given the opportunity, all four members of the Kim family are readily able to perform the roles required of them by the Park household: Ki-woo as an English tutor, Ki-jung as an art therapist, Ki-taek as a chauffeur, and Chung-sook as a housekeeper. Similarly, all four rely on expertise with translocal technology in order to enable their performances: the phones, Internet, and software that permit them to be accessible to their employers, to create a fictitious high-class domestic employment agency, to learn how to be an art therapist, to forge a diploma from a prestigious university, to find out in an instant how to cook “ram-don.” And given the opportunity, they are just as able to step into and play the role of wealthy homeowners as the Park family has been shown to be. Both high society and low society are permeated by global technology; however, the Kims appear to have successfully appropriated its techniques for their own necessities while the Parks seem more like hapless victims of ideology: asked by her husband if the teepee-tent will keep their son dry, Yeon-kyo replies, “Of course it will, I ordered it from the United States.”

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[NOTE: Spoilers abound.]

In one of the few external sequences of Parasite, Kim Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song) and his teenaged children Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) and Ki-jung (So-dam Park) have fled the house of their employers through a diluvial rain to discover their low-lying neighborhood is heavily flooded. Stay back, the father warns them, it’s all sewer water. In a classic gesture of paternal love, Ki-taek’s first impulse is to protect his children from the risk of infection by waste-borne parasites. They follow him anyway, and soon after we see Ki-woo nearly electrocuted by a live wire in the water and Ki-jung seated precariously atop a toilet spewing fecal sludge, smoking a cigarette and clutching her phone. This is the only moment in the film in which its title can be taken literally as well as figuratively,1 and this scene, like the subsequent sequence in which the same trio appear among hundreds of refugees packed on the floor of a school gym converted into an impromptu shelter, reminds us that one of the ways life is different when you’re poor is that metaphors are a luxury when you’re constantly exposed physically to the thing itself. One of the fascinations of Parasite as a film is the many ways it works the sharp but unstable divide between literal and figurative, between the conventions of cinematic realism and those of genre fictions, and between domestic forces and concerns and the translocal forces and images that so often structure their meanings. Literally, there is nothing more intimately local than a parasite physically infiltrating a body; figuratively, this formative relationship radiates outward through the film’s intricate network of social and spatial relationships.

A Host of Metaphors

Bong first introduces the storm to us through the mediation of the spectacular picture window of the Parks’ modernist show home. Ki-taek, his wife Chung-sook (Hyae Jin Chang), and the two children have taken possession of the house while the family that employs them is away for a weekend of camping to celebrate the birthday of their young son Da-song (Hyun-jun Jung). As the four sit in a line looking outside, Ki-taek toasts the idyllic pleasure of drinking whiskey inside while watching the rain fall in the garden. Following this moment of reflective contentment, Bong slowly insinuates rain into the house’s sanctuary and conflict into the plot. First, Moon-gwang (Jeong-eun Lee), the long-serving live-in domestic worker they had displaced on fabricated charges of having tuberculosis, appears on the video intercom, rain dripping down her face, begging to be let in. Then the campers return early, sabotaged by flooding from the rain. And later, Ki-taek and his children escape into the rain. The house provides not only shelter from the elements but also a space for mediated reflection; the experience beyond its encoded boundaries can either be sodden misery and risk of infection or, for the Parks, a brief adventure. Their return was delayed because Da-song loves the rain (especially when wearing his camping raincoat); he pitches his imported waterproof teepee-tent in the backyard rain; his parents, in matching pajamas, trek out barefoot to check on him beneath a giant umbrella.

The flooding motif is introduced earlier in two forms. First, the fumigating truck sends a moist and toxic cloud into the apartment after Ki-taek insists on leaving open the windows to cull the half-basement apartment’s stinkbug invasion. Next, a repeated scene of drunken men urinating in the alley corner that doubles as the apartment’s only access to light and air, leading to a soaking from a bottle and a bucket. The scene prefigures both the flood and also the stink and contagion that come to mark, in the film’s lexicon, the impossibility of maintaining a pure line between the haves and the have-nots, the employers and the employees, the hosts and the parasites. That the Kims all smell like their apartment, that the smell viscerally affects the Parks, and that it equally emanates from Geun-se’s (Myeong-hoon Park) body to prompt Ki-taek’s murder, is established as a key motif within the film’s narrative arc. Their sensitive noses work to establish the “line” wealthy homeowner Park Dong-ik is obsessed with maintaining and also to emphasize the impossibility of eliminating the material experience of poverty. Inhabiting the material rather than the mediated world, the Kims are bothered by filth and concerned with infection, but they don’t smell it; they live it. The drunkard’s urine, like the exploding sewage, inspires protest and concern, but no disgust or revulsion. Within the house, however, infection is metaphorical; to clinch the evidence of Moon-gwang’s tuberculosis, Ki-taek sprinkles hot sauce onto a used tissue in the kitchen trash. We know it’s harmless, since we saw it earlier on the Kims’ pizza. But in the context of the Parks’ kitchen and especially for the impressionable mother Park Yeon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo), it figures disease.

Perhaps this distinction may help explain Ki-woo’s inexplicable attachment to the scholar’s rock gifted him by his school friend Min along with the job as tutor in the Park household. Practically useless, the rock’s only potential functions are figurative and speculative: granting good fortune to the possessor. The rock is the only possession Ki-woo chooses to salvage from the flooded apartment (his practical sister, for example, salvages a packet of cigarettes stuffed with her savings and her smokes). Ki-woo takes the rock with him to the refugee shelter, sleeping with it clutched to his chest like a security blanket despite the fact that it must weigh at least 25 pounds, and then to the Park house. He shows it upstairs to his pupil, Park Da-hye (Jung Ziso), who finds it really cool. And then he carries it all the way into the sub-basement shelter, as some kind of metaphorical comfort; unfortunately, it slips from his fingers, tumbles end over end down the stairs, and is picked up by Geun-se, alerted by the noise, who uses it to beat Ki-woo senseless. The one useless item from the sub-basement apartment accretes affective meaning as Ki-woo lugs it across Seoul. The scholar’s rock is, arguably, the only object in the film for which some kind of East Asian specificity outweighs any globally recognized meaning.2 I’m still trying to unpack exactly how this fact is implicated in the moment when, inside the shelter, the scholar’s rock sheds its accumulated figurative weight to become a blunt physical instrument of violence between two victims of poverty.

Ki-woo’s memorable response upon first receiving the stone is the oft-repeated statement, “This is so metaphorical.” He pronounces the words as if Bill S. Preston Esquire (Keanu Reeves) in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure had made it to college as a literature major. Parasite comes in a long tradition of cinematic metaphors so obvious that we thrill at the visceral obviousness of their conceits about topics that literature, not to mention society, tends to approach more gingerly. This used to mostly be sex – the train shot at the end of North by Northwest – but perhaps the most frequent and enduringly obvious movie metaphors are about class and inequality: from Metropolis’s endless elevator rides, shuffling worker-hordes, and bodies molded to machines to the insinuation of working-class rhythms into the choreographed modernity of Jacques Tati’s Playtime, the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand of a blasted beach at the end of Planet of the Apes, and the paired homes that structure the plot of Parasite. They’re so obviously metaphorical because they’re so obviously visible around us wherever we are; the movies just make us recognize what we look past for what it actually is. They insist on the materiality of what we know to be both metaphor and only image.

What’s striking about the metaphors in Parasite is, as I suggested, that they are a function of class; privilege is defined throughout by the luxury of treating reality as a metaphor, as if, in other words, one were watching a movie, at one remove from reality. And, indeed, one can take the paired images of window-watching as paradigmatic of this luxury. Parasite opens and closes on a close-up of the Kims’ windows viewed from an angle just below street level. The camera setup frames the view as a wide-screen movie screen, except that the frame is divided into four quadrants by the window frames, each frame is further subdivided into multiple panes, and a circular rack of drying socks blocks the foreground. The opening credits roll on the rightmost window, stressing both the function of the windows as screen and the way they subdivide the view. It’s too tight and too high up for the Kims to share the frame; Bong films these sequences in reverse-angle shots between the family at their table and what we presume is their view. And the screen is porous; the fumigation comes through the open window, as does, presumably, the drunkards’ urine, and the flooding wastewater. In contrast, the Parks’ picture window, the spectacular centerpiece that frames the equally spectacular garden and privacy-creating greenery, is a single expanse of plate glass, simultaneously transparent and impermeable. Indeed, the Parks communicate with their son by walkie-talkie even as his teepee in the garden remains in plain view a few yards away.

One of the ways in which Parasite differs from many more naturalistic movies about urban poverty is that access to mediated experience is shown to be a function of opportunity rather than internal identity and a positive source of agency rather than a symptom of alienation. Given the opportunity, all four members of the Kim family are readily able to perform the roles required of them by the Park household: Ki-woo as an English tutor, Ki-jung as an art therapist, Ki-taek as a chauffeur, and Chung-sook as a housekeeper. Similarly, all four rely on expertise with translocal technology in order to enable their performances: the phones, Internet, and software that permit them to be accessible to their employers, to create a fictitious high-class domestic employment agency, to learn how to be an art therapist, to forge a diploma from a prestigious university, to find out in an instant how to cook “ram-don.” And given the opportunity, they are just as able to step into and play the role of wealthy homeowners as the Park family has been shown to be. Both high society and low society are permeated by global technology; however, the Kims appear to have successfully appropriated its techniques for their own necessities while the Parks seem more like hapless victims of ideology: asked by her husband if the teepee-tent will keep their son dry, Yeon-kyo replies, “Of course it will, I ordered it from the United States.”

The same delinking of class and personal identity is true, in reverse, of Moon-gwang, who is introduced when mistaken by Ki-woo as the matron of the house, and later shown in flashback dancing genteelly with her husband next to an old-fashioned stereo system in the vast open living room, the plate-glass window filling the background. Invariably dressed for the first part of the film in skirt suit, glasses, and tight bun, she is glimpsed briefly at the moment of eviction wheeling her bags down the steep street outside the home, reduced, outside the house, to her belongings and situation. Similarly, when she returns, she is tightly framed by a hood, rain, and strands of hair, and reenters the home a bedraggled figure of pity. When she briefly regains control, however, she lets loose with the wildest metaphor in the film, a bravura comic monologue likening, as E. Tammy Kim noted, the struggle between her and the Kims as the nuclear standoff between North and South Korea.3 Moon-gwang frames her reportage, however, from a mediated distance, in the voice of a North Korean newscaster mouthing the dictator’s absurd claims of a desire for lasting peace, while she and her husband enjoy the power given them by the absurd but effective device of cellphone-video blackmail. Her husband applauds what is clearly an intimately familiar performance. The allegory of class struggle, in other words, is being performed not primarily for the benefit of the audience, but as evidence of the distanced humor with which both the Kims and Moon-gwang frame their own lives, whenever they have a moment’s luxury to do so.

Bunker Fantasies

If the first half of the film drafts an entertaining and wickedly Buñuelian satire of class struggle and inequality, the second half swerves with the return of Moon-gwang to a more complex presentation of the relationship between poverty and wealth, or low and high. The transformations of Moon-gwang deepen Bong’s depiction of his have-not characters as possessing autonomy, agency, full awareness of their own life conditions, expertise with media technology, fluency in the languages of wealth and power, and deep insight into the psychological needs of their insecure targets. In this context, new money and ready access to technology are democratizing forces. That they might also appear from an outside perspective to be alienating forces pitting one human being against another in a struggle for resources is not an interpretation either of these families is afforded the luxury of having. Similarly, the leveling effect of access to mediation and metaphor affords little insight into the long-term health effects of a life of poverty in a semi-basement infested with stinkbugs, prone to flooding, and open to the fluids and odors of the outside world. By casting the have-nots with actors as beautiful, talented, glamorous, and culturally celebrated as those playing the haves, Bong sidesteps any analysis of fundamental difference. Nor, unlike Buñuel, does the film touch directly on the entrenched and fully confident kinds of power embodied in the old moneyed aristocracy, limiting itself to the softer target of the young and insecure nouveau riche.

Where Bong does complicate the depiction of fluid identity and social roles is through a second twist on which the film turns: when it introduces a third space that disrupts the classic division between high and low. The sub-basement fallout shelter not only provides an excuse to introduce Moon-gwang’s husband into the power struggle, it also unbalances any easy understanding of the film’s spatial metaphors and allegory of inequality. That the proletariat haunts the ruling class has been a commonplace since the Communist Manifesto; in recent years, the academic concept of spectrality has become an effective tool for describing the ways in which poverty and inequality are at once unseen, omnipresent, and, depending on one’s politics, either subtly haunting or profoundly disturbing. Bong’s film literalizes Marx’s metaphor, introducing Geun-se in a ghost story told by Yeon-kyo to Ki-jung as the traumatic origin of what she regards as her son Da-song’s innate artistic genius. Bong films the story/flashback as a dark mirror to the paired windows of house and apartment: seen from the kitchen, the entrance to the basement stairs is a pitch-black vertical rectangle framed by a pair of showcases. In Yeon-kyo’s telling, Geun-se slowly emerges from the blackness, eyes glowing like a specter.4 He is, it turns out, flesh-and-blood; however, he is also the only character who has suffered physical and mental deterioration from his condition of confinement. The only time when he appears something like himself, in fact, is in his appreciation of Moon-gwang’s comic performance.

Geun-se belongs to a different genre than the rest of the characters, for he is introduced not as a member of the high/low satire of inequality, but as a bunker survivor. Sealed in the fallout shelter to hide him from the enforcers of a loan shark he had defaulted on, Geun-se, like his generic predecessors, has been bunkered so long he has lost his moorings in the world above. He mumbles confused homages to the home’s owner, IT developer Park Dong-ik (Sun-kyun Lee); sends signals in Morse code to the trio of ceiling bulbs illuminating the home’s entrance; and drinks milk from a baby’s bottle. Culturally and cinematically, the fallout shelter is a metaphorically complex space, combining a utopian fantasy of security and insulation from the world and its problems not so distant from the hermetically sealed home above it with the confinement and isolation of a prison cell. Bong lavishes as much time on the shelter’s long descent as on its barebone cot, desk, and toilet. Its entrance is concealed behind the basement larder’s shelves stocked with preserved fruits and vegetables; we first glimpse it as Moon-gwang, suspended midair in contortions trying to shift the jammed system, and the outsized attention its mechanism occupies within the film’s action suggests its relation to the home above it is somehow crucial to the film’s meaning.

Moon-gwang tells us that the bunker was built by the (fictional) architect Namgoong Hyeonja as part of the home’s design, a typical feature of homes of the wealthy as a retreat from potential attack by North Korea. This explanation provides a powerfully local meaning to the space, a meaning echoed in Moon-gwang’s later performance of the TV announcer’s dialogue of “nuclear peace.” Private fallout shelters have a global meaning dating back to the Cold War, especially during the 1950s and 1980s. And, more recently, they are again in vogue among the global elite, no longer so much to protect against nuclear war, but against apocalyptic epidemic or climate change chaos – to protect, that is, not so much against radioactive fallout as against ravaging hordes of have-nots. The bunker is formally complex because it mirrors both the semi-basement apartment of the Kims and the starkly sumptuous mansion of the Parks. It is simultaneously a space of conspicuous consumption and a shelter from the outside world – only the ultra-wealthy can afford to build one and have the luxury of planning for the contingent future rather than the immediate present – and a space of poverty and deprivation occupied as if a prison cell first by Geun-se and then by Ki-taek.

The bunker is also the origin of the house’s haunting. This haunting, as mentioned above, is simultaneously literal, since Geun-se emerges at night from a space unknown to the Parks to raid the refrigerator, and figurative, albeit in an inchoate yet affectively powerful way. Knowledge of the space binds first Moon-gwang and then Ki-woo to the house, compelling both to return. That it also binds them to accepting the class warfare that identifies wealth as the only path to happiness is made clear by Ki-woo’s concluding fantasy of a success so huge as to allow him to purchase the house and free his father, effectively uniting home and bunker and exorcising the ghosts of both. Bong briefly teases the audience that this fantasy is the film’s “happy ending,” only to return his camera once more to the semi-basement apartment, its segmented screens, and Ki-woo as a part-time pizza delivery boy to bracket the fantasy as just that – fantasy. In some ways, the bunker transforms Parasite into a retelling of Ursula Le Guin’s well-known philosophical fable “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” in which the happiness and comfort of a community is made possible only by the lifetime imprisonment of a child in a locked basement room. The ones who walk away are those who refuse the predication of the comfort of some upon the suffering of others. Ki-woo’s knowledge of his father’s imprisonment (which is also Ki-taek’s protection from prosecution for murder) charges his pursuit of wealth with ethical purpose even as it binds him irrevocably to that pursuit. The injection of a family dynamic into Le Guin’s abstract fable of inequality echoes the specifically South Korean equation of hard work to support the family. While Ki-taek takes work when it finds him, IT executive Park Dong-ik, E. Tammy Kim suggests, is a typically workaholic paterfamilias in a society where the typical workload of more than 2,000 hours per year is well above the 1,750 OECD average.5

Parasitic Appropriations

Questions of inequality thus threaten to infect all meanings in Parasite even as the Parks are unable to keep the poor out of their home, their lives, and their sense of smell. No surprise, then, that Bong based his screenplay on his own experience tutoring a young member of the elite some thirty years ago.6 What for the Parks is the existential question of a life predicated on the service and the poverty of others becomes for the film and its viewers a formal challenge: can anything in our world exceed or escape the taint of inequality, and what would an aesthetics look like that would be able simultaneously to capture the depredations of poverty and the humanity and subjectivity of the poor? This is the question I think New Yorker critic Richard Brody misses when he takes the film to task for being “scripted to the vanishing point” and lacking “a radical sense of materiality,” presenting instead “a ground state of simple normalcy, free of culture and free of substance and free of ideas, as if personality itself were a luxury … that, no less than its elegant and creamy aesthetic, flatters the sophistication of its art-house audience.”7 Personality is a luxury in Bong’s Seoul, because, like the ability to mediate the world that creates “personality,” it is defined solely according to the spaces of the Namgoong house. Just as Bong constructed both the semi-basement and the showcase home especially for the film, according to his own needs rather than architecturally sound designs, so he challenges his viewers simultaneously to juggle the ways in which they are so metaphorical (the luxury of personality) while also refusing to let the bunker of materiality out of sight once it appears.

This challenge is especially striking for me in the way the film uses a wide and eclectic range of allusions and homages to prior films. Some of the allusions are canon, such as to Hitchcock, whom Bong has ranked at “the very top” of his pantheon of directors.8 Bong cites the staircase in the house in Psycho as a particular inspiration for Parasite.9 The misdirection that makes the viewer assume the secret is hidden up the stairs when it’s actually hidden down another flight, in the basement, seems particularly relevant to the borrowing, along with the tension Hitchcock embeds within these liminal spaces. Equally present to me was Vandamm’s modernist house perched atop Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest, constructed, like Bong’s, to the director’s specification on a set, allowing total control over every detail. Like Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill, the Kim family are intruders in another man’s home; like Thornhill and Eva Marie Saint’s Eve Kendall, the Kims and Moon-gwang are trapped in a game of shifting loyalties and advantages. Hitchcock shows us frequent shots of Thornhill pressed against the wall of the open second-floor hallway; Bong transposes this image of perilous confinement within an otherwise open space into the tight shots of the Kim trio lined up under the living room coffee table, visible to us but invisible if readily exposed to the Parks. As also in Hitchcock’s movie, the interior set piece choreographs within the space of the house the dynamic relationship that had previously been narrated on the much larger scale of exteriors from New York through Illinois to the observation center at Mount Rushmore. In this equally crucial scene from Parasite, the city’s social hierarchy is tightly condensed to the few feet separating the couple on the sofa above from the family under the table.

One can imagine a genealogy of modernist homes in the movies, usually associated with pure villains, from Edgar G. Ulmer’s Black Cat (1934) and North by Northwest (1959) through Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and The Big Lebowski (1998) on to the dysfunctional and casually murderous family in Atom Egoyan’s Chloe (2009), to name a few among many. To cite Ki-woo, these homes are so metaphorical. Beyond the house in North by Northwest, the modernist building I find most evocative of Parasite is the perhaps obscure but for me nevertheless telling example of the Mies van der Rohe-designed hotel on Nun’s Island in Montreal, built in 1962 and used by David Cronenberg as Starliner Tower, the single location for his mainstream horror debut, Shivers (1975), also released as … The Parasite Murders. The story of a naïve and affluent young couple who move into a trendy high-rise only to find an infectious parasite has released the inhibitions of the inhabitants, leading to an explosion of sex and violence, the explosion of social repression that permeates Parasite Murders is echoed in the second half of Bong’s film, from the awkward sex scene on the sofa (witnessed by the family under the table) to the Grand Guignol finale in the garden party. Both actions result from no stronger motivation than the release of social inhibitions. As in Parasite’s house, the modernism of Starliner Tower is filmed as both setting for and instigator to the action; a metaphor of social dysfunction literalized in space.

Bong’s language in interviews and his demonstrated penchant for genre tweaking suggest a degree of cinephilia that might incorporate cult horror films, and he did work for Snowpiercer with the fight choreographer of Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.10 Nevertheless, I’d have to quality this connection as speculative. A second echoing of Cronenberg, however, seems too precise to me to be accidental. This is the brief and very funny scene in which Ki-woo and Ki-taek use an owner’s manual on a cellphone and a showroom car to give Ki-taek a crash-course in driving the Parks’ state-of-the-art Mercedes. Shot in a second-floor dealership with showcase windows opening onto the city, this anomalous scene perfectly echoes an equally anomalous scene in Cronenberg’s futuristic drama of eroticized driving, Crash (1996). In Cronenberg’s scene, shot in a similarly designed dealership in Toronto, Ballard (James Spader) and Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) equally overstay their welcome, as Gabrielle intricately and damagingly insists on insinuating her metal-braced and erotically scarred legs into the driver’s seat as a salesman helplessly looks on.

Or, an equally unlikely but to me also undeniable echo is the sequence of the three Kims fleeing the Parks’ home and descending to their own low-lying and now flooded apartment in the pouring rain, in a sequence of extreme-longshot framings that duplicate in duration and flow the climactic sequence of Abraham Polonsky’s New York noir Force of Evil (1948), where Joe Morse (John Garfield) descends to the base of the George Washington Bridge to retrieve his brother’s body, killed as a consequence of Joe’s mistakes. One shot almost precisely duplicates the most striking framing of Polonsky’s sequence, Joe visible only by his frantic motion against the massive water-worn stone walls behind and before him. But where Polonsky filmed the descent as a moral trial embedded within the cursed cityscape of New York, Bong’s version is a stark iteration of the distance and proximity of house and slum, connected by the path of the family and the flow of water but as distant as the inhuman scale of the infrastructure can make them.

What Bong’s echoings, allusions, and homages work toward, I want to argue, is the same reduction of metaphor to the literal as he shows poverty accomplishing throughout the film. The enormous variety of meanings and genres of these prior films becomes, in Parasite, all iterations of the same thesis that inequality flattens, deadens, and refuses figuration. But Bong, I believe, does more than simply hammer home this thesis, as so many slumdog movies do; instead, he creates a space to dramatize the process by which this flattening occurs. For the Parks, certainly, the playacting of an impromptu party and a staged ambush devolves into a tragically material slaughter and the traumatic displacement from their home and, for us, away from attention forever, replaced by some German strangers. For the Kims, it’s not as if nothing has changed – Ki-jung is dead and Ki-taek is sealed in the bunker – but it’s also not as if anything has. They’re still poor dreaming of wealth, they’re still doing piecework for a pizza company, and they’re still looking out their semi-basement window onto an all-too-literal world outside. Despite the violence of the treatment, none of the hosts – not the Namgoong house, not the Kim apartment, and not Korean or any other society – have been purged of anything: the parasites remain intact.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all images are screenshots from the film’s trailers.