Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration 9004515623, 9789004515628

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Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration

Value Inquiry Book Series Founding Editor Robert Ginsberg Editor-​in-​Chief J.D. Mininger

volume 377

Philosophy of Film General Editor Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein (Gulf University for Science and Technology, Kuwait) Editorial Board Nathan Andersen (Eckerd College) Costica Bradatan (Texas Tech University at Lubbock) John Caruana (Ryerson University) Rey Chow (Duke University) Hye Seung Chung (Colorado State University) Dan Flory (Montana State University) András Bálint Kovács (Budapest University (elte)) Jason C. Kuo (University of Maryland) Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University) Daniel Shaw (Lock Haven University) Kevin Stoehr (Boston University) Hunter Vaughan (Oakland University) The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/vibs and brill.com/pof

Parasite: A Philosophical Exploration Edited by

Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein and Giannis Stamatellos

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Image by Giannis Stamatellos, Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein and Antonia Stamatellou, 2022. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://cata​log.loc.gov lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026452​

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-​typeface. issn 0929-​8 436 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 1562-​8 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 2151-​3 (e-​book) Copyright 2022 by Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein and Giannis Stamatellos. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  Notes on Contributors vii Introduction 1 1  Parasitism beyond Ethics 7 Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein 2  The Paradoxical Universal of Korean Cinema 18 Steve Choe 3  Parasite from Text to Context An Ethical Stalemate and New Auteurism in Global Cinema 33 Seung-​hoon Jeong 4  From Superfluous to Parasitic Russian Literature, Arendt and Korean Modernity 47 Daniel Regnier 5  Notes from the (Korean) Underground Being-​in-​the-​World Is Being-​a-​Parasite 61 Richard McDonough 6  Mice and Cockroaches Parasite through Nietzsche and Dostoevsky 74 Paolo Stellino 7  Planning Not to Plan The Fantasy and Failure of Underclass Solidarity in Parasite 88 Daniel Conway 8  Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite Viewed in the Context of Pasolini’s Theorem and Deleuze’s Filmic Theories 102 Tony Partridge 9  From Parasites to Monsters The Unfulfilled Promises of Serres’ Parasitism in Bong Joon-​ho’s Neoliberal Social Allegories 115 Hye Seung Chung

vi Contents 10 Parasite: A Predicative or a Substantial Concept? 129 Vincenzo Lomuscio 11 “A System of Apprehensions” The Art of Parasitism in Lucian’s De Parasito and Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite 144 Giannis Stamatellos 12 The Parasite Is the Truth of the System 157 Hyun Kang Kim 13  Parasite and Identity in the “End Times” An Interpretation of Bong Joon-​ho’s Film through the Lens of Slavoj Žižek 170 Michelle Phillips Buchberger 14  Parasite as a Scaled-​Down Disaster Film 183 Enrico Terrone 15 Symbiosis, Interruption, and Exchange Parasite after Serres’ The Parasite 193 Michael Weinman and Shai Biderman Index 207

Notes on Contributors Shai Biderman (Ph.D., Philosophy; Boston University, 2012) is an Assistant Professor for film and philosophy at Beit-​Berl College and Tel Aviv University (Israel). He is the co-​editor of The Philosophy of David Lynch (upk, 2011), Mediamorphosis: Kafka and the Moving Image (Wallflower/​Columbia, 2016) and Plato and the Moving Image (Brill, 2019). He published numerous articles and book chapters in film-​philosophy and philosophy of film, on filmmakers (such as David Lynch, Robert Zemeckis, Steven Soderbergh, the Coen Brothers, the Marx brothers, and Errol Morris) and on various films and tv shows (such as Gone baby, Gone, Lost, Family Guy, South Park, Twin Peaks, and Black Mirror). Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein was born in Germany, studied in Paris, and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Oxford University in 1993. As a postdoctoral researcher based in Finland, he undertook research for four years on Russian formalism in Russia and the Baltic countries. He received a ‘habilitation’ from the ehess in Paris in 2000, has been researching in Japan on the Kyoto School, and worked for the Center of Cognition of Hangzhou University (China) well as a at Tuskegee University (Alabama). He is now Professor of philosophy at Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait. Michelle Phillips Buchberger (Associate Professor, Miami University) teaches Integrative Studies, Liberal Studies, English Literature and Film. Research interests include post-​w wii British Fiction, the philosophy of film, and the relationship between toxic masculinity and neoliberal capitalism. Recent publications include “Avoiding the ‘Dead Thing Decorated’. Neoplatonism and Daniel Martin” in Plotinus and the Moving Image (2017); “The influence of D.H. Lawrence on John Fowles: Blood Consciousness, Women, and Heraclitus” in Journal of Literary Studies (2019); “‘Something Wrong with Me’: Transatlantic Neoliberalism in Franzen’s Freedom and McEwan’s Saturday,” Symbiosis, 2019; and “The Cult of the Charismatic Leader: D. H. Lawrence’s Leadership Novels and the Authoritarian Temptation,” D.H. Lawrence Review 44:2 (forthcoming 2022). Steve Choe is Associate Professor of Critical Studies in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Afterlives: Allegories of Film and

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Notes on Contributors

Mortality in Early Weimar Germany (2014), Sovereign Violence: Ethics and South Korean Cinema in the New Millennium (2016), ReFocus: The Films of William Friedkin (2021), and is a co-​editor of Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia (2019). Hye Seung Chung is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Colorado State University. She is the author of Hollywood Asian: Philip Ahn and the Politics of Cross-​Ethnic Performance (2006), Kim Ki-​duk (2012), and Hollywood Diplomacy: Film Regulation, Foreign Relations, and East Asian Representations (2020). She is also the co-​author of Movie Migrations: Transnational Genre Flows and South Korean Cinema (2015) and Movie Minorities: Transnational Rights Advocacy and South Korean Cinema (2021). Daniel Conway is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, tamu Arts & Humanities Fellow, Affiliate Professor of Film Studies and Religious Studies, and Courtesy Professor in the tamu School of Law and the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University (USA). Seung-​hoon Jeong is Assistant Professor of Film and Electronic Arts at California State University Long Beach. He wrote Cinematic Interfaces: Film Theory after New Media (2013), co-​translated Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Literature into Korean (2013), co-​edited The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema (2016), guest-​edited an issue of Studies in the Humanities “Global East Asian Cinema: Abjection and Agency” (2019), co-​ edited Thomas Elsaesser’s The Mind-​ Game Film: Distributed Agency, Time Travel, and Productive Pathology (2021), and is writing Global Cinema: A Biopolitical and Ethical Reframing (forthcoming in 2022). Hyun Kang Kim is Professor of Design Theory in the interdisciplinary context at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf. In 2004 she finished her Ph.D. in German literature at the University of Bonn, in 2014 her habilitation in philosophy also in Bonn. Her book publications include: Ästhetik der Paradoxie. Kafka im Kontext der Philosophie der Moderne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2004), Slavoj Žižek (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink 2009).

Notes on Contributors

ix

Vincenzo Lomuscio Ph.D. in History of Philosophy (Aldo Moro University, Bari), teaches history and philosophy in Liceo Casardi of Barletta, his research focuses on Metaphysics of Time, Continental Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion. In the last few years he is dedicated to research on philosophy of film. For Brill he published a contribute in the book Plotinus and the Moving Image (Botz-​Bornstein and Stamatellos), with the chapter “Moving Image and Conversion: a Neoplatonic film Theory.” Richard McDonough has a b.a. in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh (1971) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cornell University (1975). He has authored books on Wittgenstein and Heidegger and about 100 articles on philosophy, psychology and linguistics. He has taught philosophy and psychology in the United States, Singapore and Malaysia. He has recently become interested in film and literature as the appropriate vehicle for illustrating existential insights into human life. Tony Partridge (b.a. (Mod), H.Dip.Ed, M.Sc., Ph.D., m.a.) is a lecturer at the Atlantic Techno­ logical University, Ireland. He has a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Warwick and has also studied and worked at Trinity College Dublin, University College London and University College Dublin. He has published in the areas of ancient Greek philosophy, Russian philosophy, film, Artificial Intelligence, fine art and technology. Recent publications include “Is the Universe a Work of Art that We Can Perceive in a Film?” (2018), “To What Extent Can Human Personality Become Encapsulated by Technology-​ related Activity” (2015) and “After Image” (2015) about the paintings of Sinéad Aldridge. His most recent research focus has been on Pythagoreanism, Platonism and Neoplatonism and its continuing cultural connections and implications. Daniel Regnier (Ph.D. ephe Paris, m.a, lmu Munich, b.a. McGill) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at St. Thomas More College at the University of Saskatchewan, in Saskatoon, Canada. He works primarily on Plotinus, Neoplatonism in the Islamic World, Comparative Philosophy (Greece, China and India) and the Philosophy of Music.

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Notes on Contributors

Giannis Stamatellos received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David (2005). He was a post-​doctoral research fellow at the University of Copenhagen (2010–​2012) and a research associate at the University of Oxford (2011–​2014). He is now a Professor of Philosophy and the President of the Institute of Philosophy & Technology. He has published the books Computer Ethics: A Global Perspective (Jones and Bartlett 2007), Plotinus and the Presocratics (suny 2008), and Introduction to Presocratics: A Thematic Approach to Early Greek Philosophy (Wiley-​Blackwell 2012). He also co-​edited the volume Plotinus and the Moving Image (Brill 2017). Paolo Stellino is researcher at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (ifilnova) and invited assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy of the Nova University of Lisbon. His main fields of research interest are the history of nineteenth-​and twentieth-​ century philosophy, ethics (especially, philosophy of suicide), and philosophy of film. He is the author of the books Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: On the Verge of Nihilism (Peter Lang, 2015) and Philosophical Perspectives on Suicide: Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein (Palgrave, 2020). He is currently co-​ editing the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Suicide (Oxford University Press, expected 2024). Enrico Terrone is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at Università di Genova and Principal Investigator of the erc project “The Philosophy of Experiential Artifacts.” He was research fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg (Bonn), Gerda Henkel fellow at fmsh (Paris), visiting researcher at Institut Jean Nicod (Paris), and Juan de la Cierva fellow at logos (Barcelona). His main areas of inquiry are aesthetics and the philosophy of technology. He published papers in international journals such as The British Journal of Aesthetics, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Erkenntnis, Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Michael Weinman is Professor of Philosophy at Bard College Berlin and Visiting Assistant Profes­ sor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University-​Bloomington. He is the author, co-​author or co-​editor of six books, including Plato and the Moving Image, published in 2019 in the Brill Philosophy of Film series. He has published a number of articles and book chapters on philosophy and literature; Ancient Greek culture and thought; 20th-​century German philosophy and on themes in contemporary political philosophy.

Introduction Parasite won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019, four Oscars in 2020, and is the first non-​English speaking film to win an Oscar for Best Picture. It went on to be the highest-​grossing Korean film of all time. So far, it is the fourth highest-​ grossing foreign-​language film in the US and the highest-​grossing foreign-​ language film at UK box office of all time. It became popular even among viewers who are normally not much attuned to the tastes of Asian cinema. In articles and on blogs, the film has been dissected multiple times by journalists and fans alike, braving the obstacles posed by the protagonists’ names which are –​to Western ears –​confusing, and which, on top of it, the international press provided in various transliterations. In this book, which is the first English language book on a single Korean film, fifteen scholars, twelve of whom are philosophers (the other three work in the areas of comparative literature or film studies), attempt to find more abstract messages and patterns, making use of a long intellectual tradition dealing with parasitism. Basically, parasitism can be viewed from two angles: both as a biological and as an ethical problem. A parasite is an organism that lives off other organisms or hosts, to survive. Even bacteria are susceptible to the smallest versions of parasites, which are viruses: submicroscopic particles that enter bacteria, replicate, and can eventually kill them. Some biologists speculate that half the species on Earth are parasitic (Despommiers: xvi). But the word parasite is older and was first used in a non-​biological way. For centuries parasitism has been dealt with in ethics and political philosophy, and it has also been taken up by philosophy of science. The original concept of παρασιτῶ means to “board and lodge with” (Plato Laches 179b), and it has explicitly been attended to by Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–​c. 180 ce) whose De Parasito (The Parasite, Parasitic an Art) can almost be read, as Giannis Stamatellos demonstrates in his chapter, as a philosophical commentary of the film. Lucian satirically defends the art of parasitism by showing that the parasite is not necessarily a thief, but can also be a seducer, a creator, or a companion. In ancient Greek philosophy, an enigmatic reference to parasitic life can be found in Heraclitus of Ephesus (born c. 540 bce) and his riddle of the lice (fr. 56). For Heraclitus, genuine wisdom recognizes the truth of logos in things that are not readily apparent (the lice) and so they cannot be easily seen or grasped even by wise men like Homer. Aristotle uses parasitos with political connotations to refer to a person who dines with a superior officer (fr. 551) but Aristotle also sees parasitic life in relation to the phenomenon

© Thorsten Botz-Bornstein and Giannis Stamatellos, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_002

2 Introduction of abiogenesis, i.e., the spontaneous generation of life out of non-​living matter (see History of Animals v.1).1 Michel Serres, in his influential book on chaos theory called The Parasite, presents parasites not as useless beings but as agents that establish communications between parts, thus transforming the picture of the whole. Serres and Lucian are certainly the most obvious philosophical and para-​philosophical references in discussions of parasitism. Next come Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. In the present book, Nietzsche’s provocative ideas from Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals are discussed by Paolo Stellino, Vincenzo Lomuscio, Richard McDonough, and Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein. In the film, some parasites emit the same unpleasant smell that reflects their lower social class (the Kim family). Nietzsche refers to the smell of the mob in Ecce Homo and blames pity as a decadent virtue: “pity quickly begins to smell of the mob” (4). Likewise, in the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche criticizes the coquettish bugs that have “an insatiable ambition for smelling out the infinite, until finally the infinite smells of bugs” (26). While parasitism belongs to almost all life forms, Nietzsche blames ascetic life as parasitic and opposes the parasite to the noble (Human, All to Human 356) to relate it to the master-​ slave morality. Nietzsche also maintains that one can “evaluate a society or an individual according to how many parasites it can endure” (Daybreak). Stellino, McDonough, and Daniel Regnier engage Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground for a discussion of Parasite. Stellino points out that both Dostoevsky’s Notes and Parasite have a circular structure: in both cases, we end up where we started, namely underground and in the semi-​basement, respectively. Regnier connects this to the superfluous man, and takes the idea of superfluity literally, as it derives from the Latin ‘overflow’: The very notion that the Kims have been washed out by flood waters corresponds quite literally to the idea of superfluity. Another relatively obvious philosophical reference is Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality, in which Derrida speaks of the “conditional hospitality” whose

1 Discussions about flattery and friendship have been developed in later ancient philosophical periods. For instance, “How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend” by the Middle-​Platonic philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea (ca. 45–​120 ce) provides an ethical guide for how to develop a good character and recognize true friendship. Moreover, for the Romans, the parasitos was not strictly pejorative; it was a person living off the hospitality of others in return for flattery. The parasite has been related to the flatterer (Eupolis’ Kolakes), and Plato criticized the art of rhetoric (in its pseudo-​art form) as a branch of flattery (kolakeia) (Gorgias 463a-​465e; see also 500d-​504e).

Introduction

3

host-​subject and guest-​object keep a hierarchical power relation. Seung-​hoon Jeong and Steve Choe discuss Derrida in this context. 1

The Plot

Parasite relates the intersection of two families living in modern day Seoul, the poor Kims and the rich Parks. To escape their squalid, subterranean apartment, the Kims follow a path of trickery and manipulation, which enables them to take job opportunities for which they would otherwise not be qualified. Kim Ki-​woo (Choi Woo-​sik) tutors the Park family’s daughter Da-​hye (Jung Ji-​so), his sister Ki-​jung (Park So-​dam) poses as an art therapist to the psychologically damaged Parks’ son Da-​song (Jung Hyun-​jun), and father Ki-​taek (Song Kang-​ho) replaces the Park’s disgraced driver Yoon (Park Keun-​rok). Mother Chung-​sook (Jang Hye-​jin) replaces the housekeeper Moon-​gwang (Lee Jeong-​ eun). The two families only meet because Ki-​woo’s friend Min-​hyuk (Park Seo-​ joon), who used to tutor the Park’s daughter, suggested Ki-​woo be installed as his replacement during a study leave. The reason he chose Ki-​woo was that he saw him as a “loser” incapable of stealing the girl whom he counts to have for himself upon his return. Problems begin when the Parks go on a camping trip, leaving Chung-​sook in charge of the house. Once the Parks are gone, the entire Kim-​family moves in, and they begin an orgy of eating and drinking the Parks food and alcohol. Their festivities are interrupted when the former housekeeper Moon-​gwang unexpectedly appears, claiming that she forgot something in the basement. It turns out that her husband Geun-​sae (Park Myung-​hoon) has been living hidden for the past four years in a room under the basement, unbeknownst to everybody. A struggle ensues between the two competing parasite families, ending with Moon-​gwang and her husband tied up in the hidden underground room. To make matters worse, Mrs. Park (Cho Yeo-​jeong) calls to say that their camping trip has been washed out by rain, and that they are going to be back in eight minutes. The Kim family frantically conceals the mess they made. Once the Park family is asleep, the Kim family (except Chung-​sook) sneak out of the house and return to their underground home. They find it flooded by the heavy rains and spend the night in a community center. The next day the sun returns, and the Parks decide to throw a garden party for their son, Da-​song. The Kim family, exhausted by the preceding day’s trauma, must prepare everything. Ki-​taek is instructed to don Native American garb with Mr. Park (Lee Sun-​gyun) so that he and Mr. Park can jump out of the bushes and pretend to attack Jessica. Meanwhile, the fettered Geun-​sae

4 Introduction has freed himself and, finding his wife Moon-​gwang dead from a head injury, attacks Ki-​woo and smashes his head with a “Scholar’s Rock.” Geun-​sae, now with blood all over his face resembling American Indian war-​paint, grabs a butcher’s knife, runs outside, and fatally stabs Jessica during the birthday cake procession. The young son Da-​song has a seizure upon seeing Geun-​sae because this is the “ghost” he had already seen once late at night when he was in first grade. Chung-​sook, a former Olympic hammer thrower, attacks Geun-​ sae and fatally impales him with a kebab skewer. Mr. Park commands Mr. Kim to drive Da-​song to the hospital, but Mr. Kim attends to his daughter Ki-​jung, which infuriates Mr. Park. A struggle ensues and Mr. Kim fatally stabs Mr. Park. He runs out through the garage and takes Geun-​sae’s place in the secret room under the house, presumably to stay there for years. Ki-​woo recovers from his head injuries and, one day, deciphers a Morse code signal tapped out on the hallway light in the home. As a former Boy Scout, he translates the signals and realizes that his father is hiding in the underground room. Ki-​woo then plans to go to university, get a good job, and make enough money to buy the house and free his father from the underground room. 2

Neoliberalism and the Postmodern Situation

The philosophical articles that address this scenario are diverse and comprehensive but revolve around two main centers of thought: (1) a critique of neoliberal capitalism and (2) an analysis of a postmodern situation that is fluid, plays with identities, and thus relativizes the predominantly negative connotations that parasitism has originally had in biology. Almost all authors agree that parasitism –​in general or as it is presented in the film –​cannot be scheduled as simply unethical. Lomuscio states that the film depicts the failure of class struggle, with a victory of the upper class in an encounter “in which the upper-​class confines the poor behind an invisible line.” The problem is that Moon-​gwang/​Geun-​sae and the Kims both see each other as trespassers too. Daniel Conway notes that despite their seemingly equal status as parasites, each family regards the other as having crossed a line. This does not mean that class struggle is inexistent. However, according to McDonough, class struggle is depicted “in existential rather than moral terms.” Most authors agree that the film does not issue clear moral, political, or social judgments. A critique of capitalism in which the poor stress how nice the rich are is indeed a little odd. Hyun Kang Kim finds that though the situation depicted is perverted, the film does not convey a specific political message. One can, of course, critique the poor peoples’ behavior in terms of Marxian

Introduction

5

false consciousness. For Lomuscio this false consciousness situation is caused by an economic system of which Mr. Park is a representative. Poor families fight among themselves to obtain or maintain work and the acknowledgment of the rich man; they even kill one another. They prefer to be a parasite to the upper class like insects, rather than fight for their human dignity. Yet the film suggests no revolutionary progress. Hye Seung Chung states that “making any attempt to interpret the film as a progressive, Marxist text [is] a difficult undertaking.” For example, very little humanity or dignity is bestowed upon to Geun-​sae, who is practically portrayed as a monster. Seung-​hoon Jeong thus speaks in his chapter of an “ethical stalemate,” which might indeed be the most appropriate characterization of the situation. For Jeong this stalemate is due to Bong Joon-​ho’s lack of “political fantasy.” McDonough goes further, believing that the film portrays the dreamlike fantasy ‘existence’ of the ‘underground’ people. Stalemate or not, one consequence of the film’s rhetoric is that it does not permit us to get hold of an objective or substantial definition of the parasite. We recognize parasitism when it emerges, and this emergence can be more or less distinct. Enrico Terrone shows this by explaining parasitism through neo-​Aristotelianism and the application of the notion of substance to social entities. This non-​essentialist view of parasitism enables interpretations of the film in terms of “postmodern” themes such as the ‘post-​ethical’ or the ‘post-​political’. Some authors chose this approach. As a matter of fact, no author paints the picture of a well-​oiled neoliberal economy successfully exploiting the poor. The general impression is rather that of a “capitalist apocalypse” contributing to the disorders of mind seen in the film’s precariat (Michelle Buchberger). Parasite can thus be understood as a study in “liquid identity […] culminating in a breakdown of social order in this microcosm of capitalist society” (Buchberger). This also includes items such as ecological crisis and biogenetic revolution, through which the capitalist machine is not destroyed but rather becomes dysfunctional. Partridge likens the world of Parasite to changes of behavior based initially on rational plans and motives that affirm a filmic paradigm attested by Pasolini and Deleuze, described in terms of a mathematical metaphor. Yet the film’s second half is seen as a critique of these views, and is akin to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, an open system that bubbles forth according to a mass of roots where there is, in fact, no plan. Continuous ambivalence swings back and forth between reason and no reason and this is where truth ultimately occurs. Hyung Kang Kim employs the water metaphor, too, and finds that Ki-​taek eventually attains his sovereignty in the form of a “liquid” sovereignty: “Like the parasite, the sovereign is characterized by an ambivalence” as he is both tyrant and martyr. Ki-​taek is neither a criminal

6 Introduction nor a victim, but a martyr. Shai Biderman and Michael Weinman go perhaps furthest in this anti-​essentialist direction of when defining (following Serres) the “site” of the para-​site as pure simulation: we can understand the parasite as para-​site, that is, a site that can be found beside the original –​a site that contains the meaning of the original as simulation.

References

Despommier, Dickson D. 2013. People, Parasites, and Plowshares: Learning from Our Body’s Most Terrifying Invaders. New York: Columbia University Press.

­c hapter 1

Parasitism beyond Ethics Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein 1

Upstairs, Downstairs Korean Version

Parasite is a philosophically interesting film because it presents the ethico-​ biological problem of parasitism in an artistic and metaphorical fashion. Upstairs, Downstairs, the British television series from the 1970s, depicted the servants “downstairs” and their masters “upstairs,” thus documenting the slow decline of the British aristocracy. In the Korean version there are still a lot of stairs, but the picture has become more complex. The levels are not clearly distinct, nor does the film depict the rise or decline of any class. Instead, upstairs and downstairs form an organic whole. This peculiar cohabitation is enabled by a kind of “mutual parasitism.” Everybody is a parasite, although the parasites are divided into three levels: an upper level, a middle level, and the basement parasites. On the upper level are the Parks, the masters of the neoliberal economy. The housekeeper Moon-​gwang, represents the middle level whereas Moon-​gwang’s husband Geun-​sae, lives in the basement. The Kim family lives between the basement and middle level in a semi-​basement of another house and seems to have been pushed down, in the past, from the upper to the lower level. The family represents the degraded middle class that struggles to move upwards, which they momentarily get a taste of when occupying the middle level of the Park’s house. Geun-​sae has been hiding in the basement from loan sharks for years and is most obviously both a parasite and a victim of parasites; but a similar double status also applies to the others: every single one is both a perpetrator and a victim. At the end of the film, Geun-​sae destroys the other parasites and creates chaos, but he does not kill the organism in which the parasites are living. This organism is the house, which still stands as splendid as ever. One of the surviving parasites continues to live in this organism and moves to the lower ground, but still feeds from the middle level. The house, which has been built for the purpose of the film, symbolizes a form of organic capitalism that can be opposed to the mechanic Marxian vision of class struggle and its inversion of classes through destruction and revolution. The house looks modern, though it is probably better characterized as an enlightened postmodern space where various operatives constantly

© Thorsten Botz-​B ornstein, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_003

8 Botz-Bornstein feed upon each other. A fluid system with complex channels adapts itself to all sorts of transformations. The house is white, and its neutral appearance is not denoted by any particular cultural taste, which means that it can function as a canvas upon which people from all classes project their fantasies and desires. The architect is said to be “French-​Korean,” but neither French nor Korean cultural forces seem to have impinged on this architectural production. Revolutions tend to destroy buildings, and in communist countries, rich houses were converted into multi-​apartment complexes in which the inhabiting parties were supposed to be equal. Inside the hierarchically structured system of the Park house, the elements are not equal, but the class society is not rigid either. The elements move between the levels. Even the builder of the house, the French-​Korean architect, found it necessary to construct a secret basement bunker in case “creditors break in” and he would have to hide. On one occasion, the Parks sleep on the middle floor, just next to the Kims. In the twentieth century, because of the rising population in cities, mixed-​ use buildings gained greater importance. The inhabited high-​rise became an accepted global model for managing the increasing number of city dwellers. However, in mixed-​use buildings, social classes are practically never mixed. Such buildings do not create a sense of an urban community and cannot be seen as “mini cities.” Architects have been planning vertical cities for centuries, but practically none of these designs have ever been materialized. Many are shaped like pyramids, which shows that in vertical cities hierarchy remains very important. In the Park’s house, there is a hierarchy, but the limits between the levels are fluid, rather than rigid. Contacts are frequent, and often they are coincidental. Interactions between parasites and hosts are rarely planned; they just happen. The “non-​planned” evolution of actions is an important theme in the film as Ki-​taek tells his son that he should always act without a plan because “no-​ plan never fails.” Improvisation, adaptation, and organic evolution are more important than planned creation. In this house or in this organism, nobody is innocent. Guilt is ambiguous, too. The mutual invasions and mutual borrowings make ethical judgments impossible. Ethics has been sublated and transferred to a state beyond good and evil because everything that is stolen or borrowed has been stolen or borrowed by somebody else beforehand. Still, the energy circulating in the system remains stable. The transformation of power is more important than its reversal. Organicism always has a holistic approach towards life, it does not content itself with details, which is exactly what Ki-​woo explains to Da-​hye when giving her some advice to solve an English test. She should not be concerned with details: “If this was a real test and number 14 was the first question, you

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would’ve been in trouble from the start”; therefore you simply “move forward. You need to seize the flow. The rhythm. If not, you’re screwed. I don’t care about question number 14. I only care about how you seize the flow. How you conquer the test as a whole. You get it?” Of course, inequality will always subsist, but what matters is that one finds a reasonable place within the organic system and that one might gradually transform it. The end of the film suggests even another transformation. Ki-​woo has not made a revolution but has bought the house (though only in his imagination). He has moved up in the neoliberal hierarchy and his father can now move from the basement to the upper floors. It is a dream, and it will probably never happen, just as it is unlikely that the Parks will become poor, but it shows how constellations can be transformed without a clear reversal of power or without a thorough change of the system itself. In The Parasite, a book on chaos theory, Michel Serres holds that parasites are not useless, but that they establish communication between different spheres, which enables them to transform the picture of the whole. Parasites import coincidences into systems, without which the development of organisms would be too straightforward. Parasites establish new links between systems and can even activate other systems (such as defense systems, for example) by creating tensions. Parasites are useful because they push development from planned, rational, and telic (purposeful) patterns towards more organic patterns. Similarly, Mario Coccia’s provocative concept of “technological parasitism” attempts to explain technical evolution through parasitic subsystems. Coccia (2019) shows that technologies equipped with many associated parasitic technologies advance rapidly, whereas technologies with fewer parasitic technologies improve slowly. The parasite-​host encounter is thus not a confrontation, rather, the “host-​parasite interaction tends to generate stepwise coevolutionary processes within systems” (Coccia: 99). Coevolution is a mutual symbiotic relationship between the host technology and its associated technologies. Architecture discovered similar positive aspects to parasitism. Practitioners of “architectural parasitism” put box-​flats on roofs or into parking lots, or “glue” them to existing buildings. Should this method be consistently implemented, these architects would create new cities on top of existing ones. Unsurprisingly, parasitic architecture approaches the methods of organic architecture. Organic architecture rejects the idea of planning in favor of steady growth: its designs often develop out of something preexisting, and new elements are not mechanically added but “grow.” The term “organic architecture” was coined by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–​1959), and it was meant to describe a philosophy of planning that aspires towards harmony between the detail and the whole.

10 Botz-Bornstein Details are only added by looking at the overall totality and the coherence between the single element and the system is paramount. What Serres, Coccia, and architectural parasitism have in common is that they see parasitism as an opportunity. Parasitism alters existing schemes of development because it rethinks what is established, analyzes existing structures, and suggests alternative uses. In architectural parasitism, parasites are not hostile, but the hostile element is rather the existing, non-​parasitic architecture, which tends to be unimaginative, static, and overpriced. Apart from that, parasitic architecture can also preserve useful structures that would otherwise have been destroyed. For example, it can prevent the destruction of valuable old buildings. 2

The Good and the Bad

Bong Joon-​ho presents all parasites in a positive light, which establishes an organic coherence between the characters instead of a power clash or class struggle. The poor family is depicted sympathetically, but the rich are kind, too. Contrary to what one could expect when reading the plot, the rich are not shown as typical nouveau riches, that is, as exuberant and dominated by a kitsch taste. On the contrary, it is rather the Pizza Time logo from the working-​ class sphere that is tacky, and with which the Kim family is associated. Nothing about the Parks is repulsive let alone immoral. Their only problem is that they are naïve and not aware of the parasites’ existence. They lack empathy, but this seems to be part of their phlegm and their naivety; it is not downright evil. As a young ceo of a tech company, Dong-​ik (Mr Park) comes right out of the neoliberal economy, which is parasitic by definition if we consider the fact that much of speculative neoliberal capital survives only by feeding off the “real economy.” Despite this, Dong-​ik is rather down to earth and even sympathetic towards working class people. “I respect people who work in the same field for a long time,” he says to Ki-​taek, and his statement does not come across as hypocritical. Quite unexpectedly, he is sympathetic to the idea of a traditional, organic, long-​term development of professional structures, when we could have presumed him to embrace a kind of fast neoliberal careerism. His only negative trait is his disgust and a contempt for smelly people, which could make him appear snobbish and arrogant; however, he rather looks like a victim of these spontaneous reactions and as not their initiator, which gives him some ethical credit. Yeon-​gyo (Mrs Park) likewise has some characteristics of a parasite as she is unproductive, sleeps everywhere (in the garden, with her head on the table, and on the sofa), and does not manage the education of

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her children very well. Mr Park tells Ki-​taek that she cannot do anything. She represents the passive element in the organic system. However, she is trying very hard and is sincere. There are no negative characters in this film, which is highly unusual for a drama narrating class differences and exploitation. Even the pizza chain treats the Kims rather fairly. This is also the reason why spectators can easily identify with the characters. Kim and Park are the most popular Korean names, which indicates that the families are meant to be representative of a larger whole, whereas the neoliberal, globalized environment is only presented in a very abstract fashion. We hear protagonists speaking of loan sharks, but we never see such capitalist monsters in the film. Both Ki-​taek and Geun-​sae lost their “Taiwanese Castella” shops, which were typical bubble phenomena current in an overheated economy. Even the Parks end up selling their house to “real estate sharks” and become victims of neoliberal parasites in turn. Furthermore, the Parks are impressed by everything American, which is an indicator of globalization and neoliberalism. However, their “Americanism” is benevolent and merely serves as a further proof of their naivete. Everybody is, to some extent, suffering and/​or benefitting from the harsh capitalist reality, but there is no concrete character or feature that might represent this reality in the film. Bong’s other films are much more straightforwardly anti-​capitalist, as they often feature marginalized characters fighting oppression. Snowpiercer is clearly about class struggle and revolution, and Okja and Barking Dogs Never Bite are about animal rights and animal liberation. In contrast, Parasite does not harbor any vengeful feelings. The abstract “sharks” have created a bad system, but the human characters all manage to somehow get by within that system (at least until things go drastically wrong in the end) by applying complex survival strategies, the most obvious of which is parasitism. The film’s parasites live within a system that is fed by money, which would be blood or nutrition in a biological organic system, and which is therefore never evil. The class struggle that these people are involved in is complex and dynamic and is not limited to a simple desire to reverse the class order. For parasites, killing the host would signify their own death. The Kim family even talks –​though half ironically –​about intermarriage that would strengthen the organic whole of the Kim-​Park organism. There are also strange scenes of showing gratitude for the assumed “benevolence” of the rich. Father Kim suggests at dinner that the family “offer a prayer of gratitude to the great Mr Park” for the income he provides. In the house’s basement, Geun-​sae stands in front of a page ripped out of a financial magazine featuring Mr Park as “ceo of the Year” and thanks him for “feeding and housing me.” Geun-​sae also sends Mr Park daily welcoming messages using Morse code. This should not be interpreted as

12 Botz-Bornstein submissiveness, but it rather suggests a peculiar idea of respect. Nor are these people simply brainwashed. There is no indicator in the film permitting one to conclude that director Bong intends to criticize the logics of late capitalism in which working-​class members adopt the infamous “false consciousness.” Everybody simply looks for his/​her own advantage, which is sustainable only as long as nobody crosses the line and continues paying respect to the others. Traditional, harsh capitalism splits the world up into gated communities and ghettos with static borders and areas that are out of bounds for certain people. In the film, the parasites have a symbiotic relationship with the whole, which is the house. The old maid has lived there for many years, and her husband Geun-​sae says that he feels as if he was born in the basement. He plans to spend the rest of his life there. The Kims feel comfortable in the house and fantasize about which rooms they would occupy if the house belonged to them. “Let’s say we live here,” says Ki-​woo. The process exemplifies what Coccia calls coevolution: a mutual symbiotic relationship between the host technology and its parasites. Important is the playful aspect. Whereas Marxism speaks of Entfremdung, that is, the estrangement of the worker from her products, and whereas the “authentic” (which is the contrary of the estranged) has been advertised as a supreme value in Western cultures since the Enlightenment, the Kims find that their labor is best valued when they are pretending. There is thus no search for authenticity because life is much better when one is pretending. Correspondingly, when Da-​hye says that her brother only pretends, Ki-​woo suggest making English sentences with the word “pretend.” “Respect” is a recurring word in the film as it lubricates the social organism. Mr Park also disserts about the virtues of “distance.” Respect and distance keep people in place and establish lines by which the shared space is structured. Traditional urbanism creates a world in which the residents protect themselves from each other, whereas the lines by which the Parks’ house is divided are much more elastic. The organic model of capitalism that this house represents is not mechanic. Should the lines really be transgressed, like in the case of the former driver who is suspected of having had sex in the back seat of the car (normally Mr Park’s place), then the parasite will be evicted from the organism. Inequality subsists but playfulness has made it more bearable. The system will not be changed, but it will be taken less seriously by recognizing its absurdity. At the end of the film, Ki-​woo, having suffered a brain damage, laughs at its absurdity. The characters are not truthful but the energy that flows through the system is true and real. Ki-​woo expresses this in a metaphorical fashion: “See? Your pulse is irregular. Your heart doesn’t lie,” he says to Da-​hye. However, there is one element that is even more real, and which constantly transgresses the

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lines, which is smell. Eventually, smell will create a major problem. Smell, this immaterial essence that cannot be seen, and reveals existing realities that everybody involved in this organic game tends to forget. Smell is more fluid than money, nutrition, or blood, which is why even the most flexible organic system cannot accept its existence. Paradoxically, smell, which transgresses borders, also helps reinstate limits and guarantees that no definitive transgressions take place. Smell is the alternative energy flowing through the building. This energy is problematic because it reminds us of a certain reality that exists beyond play and pretense. As long as the “smell problem” is not solved, real social transformation is impossible, which is what the film makes clear in the most dramatic fashion. Eventually, smell causes the collapse of the system when organic organization gives way to mere chaos. Even before, chaos had been associated with bad smell, which is what Dong-​ik fears the most, as he confesses to Ki-​taek after the first housekeeper had left: “The house will descend into chaos. My clothes will start smelling.” The game played in the house might be open and flexible and make all sorts of transformations possible; but sooner or later, reality can be “smelled.” Smell is one of the reasons why Dong-​ik gets killed. Through the smell, like through a medieval holy spirit, the game played in the garden becomes reality: the toy axe becomes a real axe. While the lighthearted adults are playing the young son’s game, Dong-​ik notices a smell. Ki-​taek, in turn, notices that Dong-​ ik has noticed it, which “triggers something inside him” (script, Bong and Han 2019). Without further warning, he plunges the knife deep into Dong-​ik’s upper torso. As a matter of fact, the script by Bong Joon-​ho and Han Jin-​won describes a different scenario, which might indicate that the scene had originally been designed in a much more ambiguous fashion. The script says: “He picks up the toy axe from the ground and stalks Dong-​ik. That’s when we realize –​it’s not a toy. It’s a real axe.” The axe had been left on the ground by a worker after having chopped firewood for the barbecue. The script explains: “We’re not sure if Ki-​taek knew it. It doesn’t matter.” Ki-​taek sticks the axe into Dong-​ik’s neck. The murder can be interpreted as an accident. Smell is constantly flowing through the organism and can be accepted to some extent, but when it becomes too intense it creates chaos. As mentioned, money is another such energy flowing through the organic system, but “pecunia non olet” (money does not stink). In the film, contrary to smell, money has a morally beneficial effect on everybody. People seem to become immoral mostly because of a lack of money, declares mother Chung-​sook: “Money cures all the little wiseasses, money is like an iron. It smoothes out ugly things.” Chung-​sook’s description of rich people as being naïve is not meant as

14 Botz-Bornstein criticism. They are simply “more naive. They don’t have a bitter bone in them (…) And the kids are happier.” There is no class consciousness in Chung-​Sook’s mind because she also affirms that being naïve is morally better. Chung-​sook is, with her working-​class conduct, perhaps the only slightly negative character in the film, which shows most clearly when she misbehaves during the clash with the pizza business employees. But she attributes her bitter character to her poverty. In contrast, Mrs Park is “kindhearted because she’s rich. If I had all this, my heart would be overflowing with kindness!” Such a stance with regard to class struggle contrasts with classical Marxist ones. The film presents society as a system in which everybody struggles in his own way and the struggle is beyond good or evil. Society is an organic host-​parasite system that can be beneficial for everybody –​or not. In any case, there is no Marxist moral condemnation, whether of the people or of the system. 3

Parasite Lost

Such a rejection of any good-​evil dichotomy is highly unusual if one looks at the history of the term parasite. For centuries, both the political right and the left have condemned parasitism, presenting parasites as freeloaders who only take without giving back. Parasites are organisms that live at the cost of other host organisms, attack them, damage them, and often kill them. In the nineteenth century, with the penetration of natural science methodologies into the social sciences, the metaphorical use of the term parasite as a non-​ productive social sub-​organism evolved into a socio-​political term.1 “Parasite” now acquired ethical connotations that it did not necessarily have in the natural sciences. Eighteenth and nineteenth century leftist anti-​parasitism discourses find for merchants and manufactory owners the appellation of “the sterile class” to which one opposes the productive farmers. Most clearly, anarchists like Bakunin define anti-​capitalism as anti-​parasitism (it is, of course, ironic that, at the same time, parasitism can be perceived as “anarchic”). For Nietzsche, the parasites are the priests, as he declares in The Antichrist (1989: 26, 38, 49).

1 The word parasite is older. Giannis Stamatellos’ chapter in this book shows that concepts of parasitism could be conceived differently in Antiquity. In modern Europe, it was first used in a non-​biological way. In the eighteenth century it entered the natural sciences and was from there quickly “reintroduced,” through the “biologization” of language that was common at the time (especially in Romanticism), into non-​biological language.

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The leftist concept of the unproductive and exploiting parasite will remain central for many years until Maoism, which sees rich capitalists as sucking the blood of the working class. Ethics is here mainly derived from “work ethics” because the parasite is lazy. The ressentiment against the Jewish parasite, though often associated with right wing politics, was originally current in leftist thought, and even Bakunin saw the Jews as a kind of organic but destructive parasite collective (Bakunin 1924). The concept of the “parasitic Jew” is, of course, more racist than anti-​capitalist, which is why it would later be picked up by the far right and by nationalist movements. However, the image of the non-​productive money dealer was already present during the Enlightenment, where it was based on the assumption that Jews tend to live in states to which they do not belong, and that they are incapable or unwilling to form their own state. They have no organic roots in their own soil. Voltaire denied the Jews the ability to achieve lasting statehood and even held that the entire Torah had been parasitically borrowed from ancient Oriental sources (Mitchell 2008: 61 and 100). Nationalist arguments fit very well into this anti-​parasite pattern. In the end, the stereotype of the Jewish parasite would become more widespread in the right-​wing spectrum than in the left-​wing one. In the vein of social Darwinism, which was popular right before World War i, the “social parasite” would become an infamous Nazi concept. It was unthinkable that the parasite could form an organic relationship with a community. The problem of the parasite is that he is nomadic with no firm ground under his feet and that he always escapes his moral responsibilities. One assumes here that being settled in a certain environment and community is beneficial or even necessary for a good work ethics. This concept has become strongly challenged today as many peoples’ professional careers become much more “nomadic” (or “liquid” as some authors in this volume point out) than they ever were. Are modern workers bound to become parasites? All these negative evaluations of parasitism are based on ethical considerations, which sets the social idea of parasitism apart from the biological one. In nature nothing is good or bad, but once the concept of the parasite is introduced into a socio-​economic context, it becomes immoral. Agriculture, which is situated at the crossroads of nature and culture, will of course see the parasite as negative. What happens here is an ethicization of nature, which has determined the perception of the parasite ever since, especially in popular scientific literature. Carl Zimmer’s bestselling pop-​science book Parasite Rex contains telling chapter titles such as these: “Nature’s Criminals: How parasites came to be hated by just about everyone.” or “A Precise Horror: How parasites turn their hosts into castrated slaves, drink blood, and manage to change the balance of nature” (Zimmer 2001).

16 Botz-Bornstein 4

Conclusion

The film Parasite reconverts the term ‘parasite’ to a more “naturalist” or “organic” understanding because Bong refrains from ethical evaluations. By depicting social classes as organically linked, the film enables an amoral (not immoral) view of parasitism. Given the above-​described historical development of the term, this is unusual. That said, the most recent views of biological parasitism tend to support such an organic view. Tommy Leung, a lecturer in Parasitology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of New England, writes in an article entitled “Good Parasite, Bad Parasite: Nature has a Job for Everyone” that many parasites contribute, as much as they take, service the ecosystem, and are its movers and shakers. They “are more like tiny, hidden architects that are overlooked by most people” (Leung 2014). This parallels the above-​mentioned ideas of technological and architectural parasitism. In the film, the most obvious parasites are inventive and creative. They might be useless from a capitalist point of view because they do not produce any direct surplus value, but they do shake the system. They also have a lot of life force or “will to power.” They do not devalue life but are rather a sign of life. Furthermore, they are also indicators of the host’s life power. “Whoever is of the highest will nourish the most parasites,” writes Nietzsche in the Zarathustra (1989b: 19). Nietzsche believes that one can “evaluate a society or an individual according to how many parasites it can endure” (1997: 202), and that destroying a parasite is a sign of weakness. “May they live and prosper: I am strong enough for that!” (Genealogy of Morals 2010: 72).

References

Bakunin, Michael. 1924 [1871]. “Persönliche Beziehungen zu Marx” in Gesammelte Werke Vol. 3. Berlin: Syndikalist Verlag, 204–​216. Bong, Joon-​ho and Han Jin-​won. 2019. Parasite (Screenplay). New York: Neon. Coccia, Mario. 2019. “Technological Host-​ Parasites Co-​ Evolution” in Journal of Economics Library 6: 2, 97–​117. Leung, Tommy. 2014. “Good Parasite, Bad Parasite: Nature has a Job for Everyone” in The Conversation March 14. Mitchell, Harvey. 2008. Voltaire’s Jews and Modern Jewish Identity. Rethinking the Enlightenment. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989. The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1989b. Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997. Daybreak [Morgenröte]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2010. On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. New York: Knopf Doubleday. Zimmer, Carl. 2001. Parasite Rex: Inside the Bizarre World of Nature’s Most Dangerous Creatures. New York: Free Press.

­c hapter 2

The Paradoxical Universal of Korean Cinema Steve Choe Beast of prey or parasite –​everyone is both simultaneously. deleuze 1997: 13

∵ 1

The Meaning of Parasite

Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 and was released to South Korean and global theaters in the second half of that year.1 It went on to garner additional honors by winning four Academy Awards in early 2020, gaining incredible momentum as a “must see” movie, even for viewers whose tastes did not stray far from the typical Hollywood fare. In the meantime, critics and audiences set themselves the task of deciphering the plot of the widely popular film and of discovering its hidden meanings. Perhaps more than any other single work in Korean film history, popular discourse reporting on Parasite surged in traditional print media and online, celebrating the first non-​ English language film to win the coveted Best Picture prize at the Oscars ceremony. After the pandemic caused theaters to shut down in March and April of 2020, this discourse continued to multiply and inform our understanding of the place of Parasite in Bong’s overall oeuvre, the rise of Korean cinema more generally, the meanings of Koreanness depicted in the film, and the relevance of Bong’s film for contemporary life. The vast majority of these commentators discuss its depiction of class conflict against the backdrop of South Korea’s meteoric economic rise since the 1970s. Parasite is obviously set in contemporary Korea, but audiences outside of Korea have read the film as an allegory of the struggle between the rich and the poor that is endemic to capitalist societies more generally. As the

1 I would like to thank Margot Bruce for commenting on an earlier version of this essay.

© Steve Choe, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_004

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director has stated in an interview with Bertrand Tavernier in 2019: “The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism” (Mintzer 2019). Two families, the underprivileged Kims who live in their mildew and roach infested basement apartment and the well-​off Parks in their elegant, open-​plan home, stand in symbolically for two class sensibilities that are pitted against each other within the global capitalist system. The Kims are quickly seen to be the parasites as they infiltrate the home of the Parks. Yet if, by definition, a parasite surreptitiously exploits its host in order to survive, both families may be shown to parasitically make use of the labor and resources of the other in order to sustain their existences. Both aspire toward familial and individual happiness through the exploitation of the other. Commenting on the ideology of aspiration universally induced by neoliberal capital, the film critic for the The Independent writes that: Everyone’s fixated on transforming into something else: the Kim family give themselves new backstories that involve fancy foreign colleges and elite skill sets. Yeon-​gyo is obsessed with American culture (the most capitalist of them all), importing Native American-​style toys for her son and declaring he’s the next Basquiat. In Parasite, capitalism is an illusion piled onto another illusion, with everyone trampling each other to reach some undefined goal. loughrey 2020

And while we can acknowledge that we live in the “same country” called capitalism, a country that is metonymically depicted through the world of contemporary Korea, existing criticism is also careful to mark the distinguishing cultural and historical signifiers that populate the film’s diegesis. Nathan Park, for example, tells us the history of the rise and fall of fried chicken restaurants and Taiwanese castella bakeries, run by families who once belonged to the middle-​class but floundered due to the devastating imf Crisis that began in 1997. In Parasite, the Kim’s patriarch Ki-​taek and the husband of the Park’s housekeeper Geun-​sae both attempted and failed to sustain these businesses. Korean viewers reflecting on these characters, Park writes, “would immediately grasp the implication behind these simple words: ‘chicken place’ and ‘king castella’” (Park 2020). An article by Gabriela Silva continues in this spirit of explaining cultural particularity when she notes “10 Cultural Details Only Korean Audiences Would Understand,” such as the use of speech honorifics and titles, the drinking culture, the highly competitive university entrance exam, and the Kakao Talk messaging platform. “Parasite is a renowned film

20 Choe and it won many awards around the world,” Silva writes, “but you might [not] understand everything about the film if you’re not Korean” (Silva 2020). The global success and increasingly wide distribution of Bong’s film has once more raised the question of how the particularity of Korean culture and Koreanness may be made legible to non-​Korean audiences. The notion that we all live in the same country called capitalism calls for nuance when its depiction is at the same time distinctively Korean. Critics have further speculated on what Parasite says about the issue of class by addressing its politics. Armond White, film reviewer for the conversative National Review, cantankerously asserts that Bong’s film “kowtows to those privileged progressives who believe the old Communist adage ‘Property is theft’” (White 2019). He complains that it ridicules the “entrepreneurs” who are the Kims while compelling sympathy with the corrupt swindlers that are the Parks. Meanwhile, Ju-​hyun Park understands Parasite as a film that critiques Korea’s neoliberal and neocolonial present by playing out relations between colonizers and colonized through the film’s “recurring motifs of English, militarization and appropriated Indigenous material culture” (Park 2020). The Native American headgear that Ki-​taek and the Park’s patriarch, Dong-​ik, wear during the party scene signify unacknowledged Cold War hierarchies while allegorizing parallels between “‘Good/​Bad Indians’ to ‘Good/​ Bad Koreans’ –​those who serve the empire, and those who are brutalized for its maintenance and expansion” (Park 2020). Such readings of the film’s politics and its politics of representation typically turn on the ways in which sympathy, for either the poor Kim or the rich Park family, is solicited by its mode of address and through the characterizations of the film’s protagonists. In this, Seo Hee Im, disparagingly writes that the director “punches down” in his depictions of the film’s characters by playing them up as spectacle and framing them as entertainment, particularly for viewers who may already harbor contempt for the dispossessed. According to Im, Parasite “is exhilarating precisely because it is unfettered by such self-​awareness, because it refuses so-​called political correctness and snipes indiscriminately at the hypocrisy of the rich and the stupid placidity of the poor” (Im 2019). In stark contrast to White’s reactionary criticisms, Im laments Bong’s seeming lack of sympathy for the Kim family and charges the director for his “willingness to laugh at objection” (Im 2019). Parasite was released to American audiences during the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, a time when a series of events, including the death of George Floyd and the indictment of Harvey Weinstein, brought issues of race, gender, and sexuality into the public sphere in the U.S. and around the world. Trump himself decried Bong’s film for the awards it won at the Oscars while asserting his preference for Gone With the Wind and Sunset Boulevard,

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both well-​known Hollywood films set in historical moments when America was presumably “great.” Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post notes that the former president’s assertion of his cinematic tastes “is a decidedly unsubtle dogwhistle to voters who see their language and culture as under threat” (Rosenberg 2020). For audiences who recognize the legitimizing authority of the Academy, Bong’s Best Director and Parasite’s Best Picture prizes were also understood within U.S. cultural politics, as antidotes to the xenophobic forces emboldened by the Trump presidency. Despite the various discourses that circulate around Parasite, many of which deal less with the film itself and more with the particularity of politics in America and elsewhere, Rosenberg points to a key aspect of its aesthetics when she notes that “one of the great strengths of ‘Parasite’ is that Bong has created a cast of characters and a set of moral dilemmas that allow viewers to sympathize both with the Kims and with the Parks” (Rosenberg 2020). Bong’s film begins with the Kim family in their semi-​basement apartment. Ki-​woo and his sister Ki-​jung are looking for a free Wi-​Fi signal on their phones so that they can connect, parasitically, to the internet and check their Kakao Talk messaging accounts. Bong’s film once more associates the Kims with parasites just moments later when Ki-​taek flicks a stink bug off the kitchen table and then when their living space is fumigated from outside, again for free, through an open window. They reside in a dimly lit, shabby apartment cohabitated by insects and fold pizza boxes to earn money. Although they are poor, all four members of the Kims are charismatic and care for each other, and for this reason solicit viewer sympathy for their plight. Ki-​woo’s friend Min arrives and gives the family a scholar stone (“sansugyeongseok” or “suseok”), which is supposed to bring fortune to the family, to which Ki-​woo responds, “This is so metaphorical [“chusangjeok”]!” While looking at her family handling the gift, Chung-​sook, the Kim’s matriarch, quips that, “Food would be better.” The Kim family gradually invades the Park house by deploying their expertise in various specializations: English language proficiency, forging documents in Photoshop, art psychology and art therapy, the art of smooth driving, and the skills of competent housekeeping. As the lives of the Kims are portrayed as increasingly dependent on the affluence of the Parks, one begins to perceive their survival strategies as deceptive, especially as the viewer sees that the Parks remain innocently unaware that they are being manipulated. “Acting is one thing,” Ki-​taek remarks, “but this family is so gullible, right?” If viewers had been solicited to sympathize with the plight of the poor family, their sympathy may shift and veer toward the plight of the rich one as the former takes advantage of the latter, indeed in an increasingly parasitic manner. The Parks have granted the Kims hospitality in their home, but on the premise that their labor is useful to them.

22 Choe These shifting and divided sympathies are complicated further at the precise midpoint of Parasite, when we find out that Geun-​sae has taken up residence beneath the Park house, a discovery conveyed through a dizzying tracking shot down the secret steps to the basement bunker. Following this realization, diegetic time in the Bong’s film becomes increasingly compressed, building tension. His existence may be characterized as parasitic as well, one that is facilitated by his wife Moon-​gwang, who has secretly brought him food from the Park’s well-​stocked refrigerator. Parasite is a film about class conflict that is played out through a story of competing families, and it is important to remind ourselves that it involves three families, one of which is well-​off and two that are not. As we learn more about Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae, we see how their existence remains dependent on the wealth of the Parks but also that the Parks are dependent on the hidden presence of Geun-​sae, who operates the light above the entrance to the home. Yeon-​kyo, the Park matriarch, perceives this light as operating mechanically without the efforts of human labor. This reminds us once more of the dependence that the rich Parks have on the labor of all the characters who share their space, characters both visible and hidden inside their home, guests who have been invited to cohabitate with them and those who have not. It is the ghostly presences of all these unintentional employees who make the lavish life of the Parks possible at all. 2

Parasites and Divided Sympathies

In a seminar from 1996 that concerns hospitality and the foreigner, Jacques Derrida poses a question that is relevant for thinking about the ethics of the characters in Bong’s film. Throughout his discussion Derrida explains that the critical consideration of this ethics cannot be separated from the question of the law and the “right” to hospitality. He asks: How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite? In principle, the difference is straightforward, but for that you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered have to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction. Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don’t have the benefit of the right to hospitality or the right of asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced ‘in my home,’ in the host’s ‘at home,’ as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest. derrida 2000: 59–​61

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The conditions Derrida elucidates here emphasize the Kims’s right to hospitality. They are allowed to be guests in the home of the Parks so long as they continue to perform the signs of class and prestige while fulfilling their contractual obligations as laboring servants. Yet the hospitality extended to them is jeopardized as this performance constantly runs the danger of being revealed as an exploitative con, by others and by the Kims themselves. These roles of guest and parasite vacillate as the film’s story unfolds, turning on the law of capitalist social relations and the moral currency that is exchanged between the families. At the same time, these roles solicit the viewer’s sympathies in increasingly complicated ways as well, from virtuous guest to villainous parasite. In another context, I have written about Korean cinema by the filmmakers of Bong’s generation, the so-​called “386 Generation” that includes Park Chan-​wook, Hong Sang-​soo, Kim Ki-​duk, and Lee Chang-​dong, among others. I argued that their films radicalize the melodramatic mode of popular narration, melodrama understood here as a kind of genre of genres, to undermine its ethics dialectically from within. One might even say that these often challenging films operate in parasitic relationship to the Hollywood and commercial Korean cinemas. Some of the most important cinematic texts of the new millennium directed by these auteurs raise critical questions around the solicitation of sympathy and the dynamic of pathos and action by throwing habituated lines of moral reasoning into crisis. In doing so, they compel viewers to critically reassess key ethical concepts like accusation, culpability, revenge, contrition, reconciliation, and many others that implicate the other. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, like Parasite, tells the story of class conflict while raising the issue of whether it is possible to sympathize with those who seek murderous retribution. Secret Sunshine depicts the supreme difficulty of forgiving another for an intolerable transgression. 3-​Iron raises the issue of whether it is possible for the host of a house to hospitably accommodate unknown and invisible guests into his or her dwelling (again like Parasite). Bong’s own earlier film, Memories of Murder, problematizes the act of judgment, realized through the act of looking, that accuses another of moral wrongdoing and crime. While these works have received international recognition and praise, Parasite represents the culmination of this generation of Korean filmmaking. By creating a series of situations that allow spectator to sympathize with the Parks, the Kims, and the plight of Moon-​gwang and her husband, Bong’s film reiterates the ethical critique that animates Korean cinema of the new millennium. Perhaps no other scene makes this critique more forceful than the sequence depicting Da-​song’s backyard birthday party. Da-​song is the

24 Choe young son of the Park’s and while the Kims try to recover after losing their basement apartment to a flood (because they had left their window open), they must continue their charade in serving the Park family. Studying the guests who have already gathered and are setting up for the party, Ki-​woo tells Da-​hye, who he has been tutoring in English, with quiet amazement that, “Everyone looks gorgeous. Even for a sudden gathering, they’re so cool.” He sees party participants eating and drinking wine, wood being chopped, children playing with small dogs, a woman about to play the cello, and everyone properly dressed and seemingly happy. Perceiving the vast gap between the lives of these well-​ off, well-​adjusted people and his now homeless state, Ki-​woo removes the scholar stone from his backpack and clutches it tightly. Meanwhile, outside and behind some bushes, Dong-​ik and Ki-​taek wear Native American headdresses and discuss their plan to surprise and playfully attack Ki-​jung when she brings out the birthday cake. Da-​song, as the “good Indian,” will save her and all the guests will cheer. This plan is intended to help the young boy overcome his traumatic memories of seeing a ghost while eating cake. Looking miserable, we see Ki-​taek impersonating a driver about to impersonate a “bad Indian” for a rich family. But instead of healing this trauma, the violence that takes place only reiterates and exacerbates it. When the cake is brought out, Geun-​sae emerges from his basement dwelling and rushes outdoors to stabs Ki-​jung with a kitchen knife. She drops the cake and falls to the ground. A melee breaks out between the members of all three families. As Ki-​taek tries to stop Ki-​jung’s bleeding, Dong-​ik screams at him to retrieve the car so they can drive Da-​song to the emergency room. The well off man seems to care less at this moment for his son’s art teacher, lying bloodied on the ground and who he does not know is Ki-​taek’s daughter, and more for his emotionally traumatized son. Chung-​sook stabs Moon-​gwang with a skewer of sausages and for the first time he comes face-​to-​face with Dong-​ik. When they speak, Dong-​ik holds his nose at the musty smell of the basement occupant, a reaction that he had while driving with Ki-​taek. Nam Lee perceptively writes that here “Ki-​tek finally identifies with Geun-​Sae; however, Geun-​sae is dead, and he replaces him as a basement dweller: a ‘human waste’ who has no place above the ground” (Lee 2020: 144). When Ki-​taek observes this petty physical response, which signals Dong-​ik’s visceral disdain for the poor, he grabs the kitchen knife from the ground and coldly stabs the wealthy man with it. He is stabbed in the same location where Ki-​jung was wounded, in the chest above her heart. As bodies fall and party guests scatter, Ki-​taek runs as if lost and leaves the house. This explosive violence tests the limits of whether one is capable of continuing to sympathize with the plight of the Kims and raises the question of

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whether Ki-​taek’s acting out may be deemed as justified. And the inability to determine whether he may be thought as an agent of justice or a punishing avenger, a beast of prey or a parasite, induces confusion around the elucidation of moral clarity that is paramount within the melodramatic mode. The lines that typically distinguish victims from victimizers and the characters who are assigned to these ethical roles are blurred. Each family is parasitic on the others, each may be deemed both virtuous and villainous. In an interview for The Atlantic, the director explains that sympathy was intended to operate in paradoxical ways in his work: If you think about it, my films are always based on misunderstanding –​ the audience is the one who knows more, and the characters have a difficult time communicating with each other. I think sadness and comedy all come from that misunderstanding, so as an audience member, you feel bad –​you want to step up and reconcile them. As a filmmaker, I always try to shoot with sympathy. We don’t have any villains in Parasite, but in the end, with all these misunderstandings, they end up hurting each other. sims 2019

By blurring the lines between just and unjust violence, these actions place the very concept of justice into question, soliciting not moral certainty and the taking of sides typically associated with it but critical reflection upon the epistemological edifice that enables the act of moral judgment, including concepts of the moral self, the metaphysics of the other, the entitlement to cruelty, and the quid pro quo of modern ethics in late capitalism. 3

The Metaphor Is the Medium

These are key questions of moral philosophy that are framed by the ethical constraints set out by the melodramatic mode. On the other hand, I would like to pursue another mode of analysis here, one already enabled for us by the scholar stone which Ki-​woo calls “so metaphorical.” This word in Korean, “chusangjeok,” could also be translated as “abstract,” and even shares some of its uses in English that refer to the realm of ideas that are not concrete as well as to the summary of an academic research project. It is however not immediately clear what Ki-​woo means here when he receives the stone as a gift: a metaphor of what? The object will nevertheless reappear throughout the film. It seems to acquire some special significance when it emerges from the dark water during

26 Choe the flood, as if to solicit its owner to look upon it as a fetish object that holds mysterious value. In the end, the scholar’s rock becomes the weapon that Geun-​sae uses to knock out Ki-​woo during his violent rampage at the party. Yet even while the stone acquires abstract and then practical meanings, the question of what Ki-​woo means by it being “so metaphorical” persists, as if to invite the spectator into a game of interpretation. In another scene in Parasite, the English subtitles indicate another use of this word while the family eats lunch in a driver’s cafeteria. Ki-​jung tells Ki-​ woo that she set a trap in the Benz of the Parks by planting her underwear in the back seat. Her brother then remarks, as if rapt, “Then we’re diving right in. Wow, this is so metaphorical.” The word used here is “sangjingjeok,” which more directly means “symbolic.” (The translated subtitles of both “chusangjeok” and “sangjingjeok” for the single word “metaphorical” seems to run the danger of conflating the nuanced differences between the two.) But if we were to take Ki-​ woo as referring to a meaning that is simply not concrete, we might ask once more about the abstract meaning he imagines in these situations. What is so metaphorical about tricking the Parks? Does the old-​fashioned stone signify the trust of his friend Min while he is away studying abroad? Or is it a symbol of hope in the face of hopelessness? At stake, perhaps, is the realization of a non-​concrete, metaphysical reality that promises to take Ki-​woo beyond the here and now, beyond his status as the son of a poor family. When asked about the meaning of the scholar stone in an interview for the Hollywood Reporter, the actor Song Kang-​ho explains that “I think it represents this desire in the heart of Ki-​woo not to give up on the idea that he can become the kind of guy who can find a way to give his family a better life” (Brzeski 2020). But later the actor quips that, “all it ends up doing for Ki-​woo is bashing his skull in” (Brzeski 2020). In the same article, the director himself remains reticent about ascribing precise meaning to the rock: “‘Korean audiences are very perceptive about interpreting and analyzing all the symbols in films, so I was having fun with that,” Bong explains, “Is it still a symbol if a character outright tells you that it is? What does it mean?” (Brzeski 2020). If a character in Parasite tells us that the plan to become parasites is metaphorical, what is the status of what spectators see and hear as its story unfolds? Do these images and sounds relinquish their capacity to signify abstract meanings or even melodrama’s invisible “moral occult”? When critics and audiences interpret Parasite and claim that it deals with class conflict, colonialism, or Korean cultural specificity, they reiterate a mode of symptomatic reading that attests to a metaphysical reality ascertained through the interpretation of cinematic signs. Within this mode of melodramatic reading, the film functions as a cipher for societal or cultural concerns, for “real life” outside the cinema or, more abstractly, a moral

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or political message that is to be ascertained through what can be seen and heard in the cinema. On the other hand, Bong’s comment about the meaning of the scholar stone leads us into an impasse, one that also points us toward other acts of reading that are undermined at the moment of their articulation. This is allegorically relevant for the entire con the underground families put on before the well-​off Parks. “Kevin” the English tutor, “Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago,” a napkin stained with hot sauce, Ki-​Jung’s impersonation of an “advisor” at “The Care”: the Kim family may be touted for their skills in simulation and the viewer is solicited to share a kind of glee in their virtuosity. When Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung read Da-​song’s art, their deep interpretation of the young boy’s ostensibly troubled psyche is undercut by the viewer’s awareness of the duplicitousness of their expert opinions. Throughout the film, the expertise of the Kims is of course merely performative, a series of spectacles that reiterate discourses of class and legitimacy that are to be read sincerely by the naïve Park family. The same applies for the housekeeper Moon-​gwang who, according to Ki-​jung, “may look like a sheep, but inside, she’s a fox.” While practicing for their performance in the Park house, Ki-​taek and his son Ki-​woo rehearse prepared dialogue, which lines up with what Yeon-​kyo actually says later in their car, that will incriminate Moon-​gwang with active tuberculosis. Becoming a parasite takes immense strategizing so that the images and values of the host may be reiterated and reflected back, enabling the narcissism of the host while rendering their coerced cohabitation undetectable. At stake in the concept of the metaphorical is the realization of a “deep” meaning conveyed through concrete signs and, as such, the hermeneutics of the cinema itself. Although Derrida has discussed parasitism briefly in his thinking on hospitality, he has also meditated on this concept within the context of communication. The act of reading itself, and thus of communicating meaning, revolves around a series of epistemological assumptions that obstinately, parasitically, implicate the who, the what, and the why of what is being communicated. Interrogating J. L. Austin’s speech act theory, Derrida critiques the notion that the speech act can be deemed a success or failure based simply on the context in which it is performed. He notes that at a key moment Austin refers to the failed speech act, what he calls “empty speech,” when its locution is uttered in inappropriate contexts and when it is drained of its illocutionary force, “parasitic upon its normal use” (quoted in Derrida 1988:16). The British philosopher is concerned in his analysis with maintaining the purity of the speech act by excluding modes of discourse when it is utilized in “abnormal” or “non-​serious” ways, and which point to the very tenuousness of communication itself. According to the theory of the speech act, abnormal speech arises when the infelicities of improper contexts result in failed communication,

28 Choe when its reiterability is explicitly or even tacitly acknowledged, or when it is shown to rely parasitically on previous iterations of speech. Yet while Austin excludes the failed utterance in his normative understanding of communication, Derrida notes that the consideration of such utterances can take us to the heart of what constitutes communication in general, regardless of its generic context. Instead of thinking the performative in terms of an originary event and its derivation, its circulation compels one to conceive of it as non-​ metaphysical, always already iterative, and thus endlessly imitative. The so-​ called parasite is in fact what underpins the act of communication. “It is as just such a ‘parasite,’” Derrida coincidently writes, “that writing has always been treated by the philosophical tradition, and the connection in this case is by no means coincidental” (Derrida 1988: 17). One such instance is of course that of philosophical language, which has typically been denigrated for its putative irrelevance to ordinary speech, indeed for its “metaphorical” or “abstract” character. Derrida does not grant primacy to either writing or speech and for this reason the act of communication must be thought of as iterable in order that it be made meaningful. The iterability of the performative is in fact what materializes the contexts that determine its ostensible success or failure. What Austin calls “context” is not, as he assumes, a priori to the speech act, but is simultaneous with it, materialized at the moment of its articulation. Derrida reminds us that the instance of writing –​again, if its nature has to do with its iterability –​takes place as the sender and receiver of language disappear at the moment when meaning is put into motion via the utterance. This is explained by his insistence on the infinite delay that characterizes the operations of semiotic meaning, and which is embodied in the meanings of the word différance (signifying both difference and deferral). The writer writes for a reader to come; the reader reads after the writer is long gone; both roles are sustained by a mediating text that enables the act of writing to take place. Derrida’s critique of semiotics and his search for a non-​metaphysical vocabulary that appropriately addresses the arch-​writing of language is perhaps familiar to many of us. Nevertheless, in the context of everyday speech, in seeming contradiction to the impossible critique he undertakes here, a metaphysical origin of meaning stubbornly reasserts itself each time meaning is mobilized. He notes that acts of communication engage “the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing center remains intention” (Derrida 1988:15). Shoring up a relation of cause to effect in order to ostensibly ground meaning, intention reappears, once again parasitically, to generate the work and ground the telos of textual analysis. In our analysis of Parasite, this origin returns through metaphysical concepts manifest in discourses of

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national culture, auteurship, characterization and the moral self, class conflict, colonialism, and militarism or Trumpism. And as a film at least partially about the ethics of violence, it shows us that as morality is transgressed, an intentional body must be materialized so that blame may be placed, judgment rendered, and legal concepts that depend on a juridical subject be made possible. In order to become parasites, the Kim family must reiterate the signs of class, adopting behavior that will be legible as such to the Parks. Their chic clothes, manner of proper gesture and speech, and knowledge in areas of expertise such as the English language and the aesthetics of art not only narrate the con put on by the Kims, but their appearance in Parasite reminds us of their status as parasitic citations of respectability, acts of writing that manifest signs of the ostensibly privileged self. The Kims are to blend in with the sophisticated tastes reflected in the clean lines, open spaces, and isolation of the Park house. That these acts are made manifest through auditory and visual signifiers, reproducible through the technological means of the cinema, is noteworthy. While all the members of the Parks read these signifiers as mere indicators of the virtue and propriety of their helpers –​Dong-​ik repeatedly insists that they stay “in line” –​it is the smell of the Kims that transgresses boundaries and give them away. This odor apparently cannot be covered up, regardless of the kind of soap the basement dwellers use, and more significantly cannot be reproduced or iterated by the specific means of cinema. This apparently disgusting smell is registered only by the visual of Dong-​ik’s upturned nose, symbolic of his snobbish intolerance. Perhaps no other scene manifests this critique of communication more than the final minutes of Parasite that follow the explosive party sequence. Ki-​taek has taken refuge in the bunker and sends a message to his son in Morse code. Having taken Geun-​se’s place, this code is signaled through the light that illuminates the stairs to the Park house, turned on and off by a button. Ki-​woo translates this series of flashing lights into voiced sounds that he records on his phone. Later while listening to the recording on headphones, these sounds are decoded into legible Korean letters and words, which are then written down. The words accumulate and constitute meaningful correspondence from Ki-​taek. The letter is then read by Song Kang-​ho in voice-​over. His existence as a parasite, which is now dependent on the resources provided by the inhabitants of the house, is made most explicit here. On the other hand, the tenuousness of this communication from father to son takes up the parasitic as well. The content of Ki-​taek’s message can only be maintained through the reliance of one medium on the one previous, a kind of transmediated telephone game, each of which sustains the integrity of the message that was intended to the next. Moving stepwise from writing to Morse code, conveyed through visual and auditory signs, and

30 Choe finally to speech, each discursive instantiation is parasitically dependent on the previous ones. Ki-​taek switches the light on and off, sending his message with no guarantee that his intended recipient will receive it. “If I send out the letter this way every night,” he melancholically remarks, “maybe someday you’ll see it.” In response, Ki-​woo writes a letter of his own, indicating his plans for earning money and buying the house in which his father surreptitiously resides, but it remains unsent, and its content is left unrealized. That these acts of writing are given over to a receiver who merely happens to spot the flashing stairway light attests to the tenuous status of communicative act, while reminding us of the pure optical and sonic means of the cinema that make this sequence meaningful at all. Ki-​woo’s intentions for getting rich and reuniting with his father remain mere dreams, merely metaphorical. 4

Conclusion

Derrida’s critique of communication compels us to read this critique of the parasitism inherent to the concept of writing through the global circulation of Bong’s film and the writing it has inspired. In doing so, we consider how the discourse surrounding the film habitually configures Korean culture as the teleological origin of the meaning of Bong’s Parasite. From one to the next, one retraces a chain of communicative acts, like Ki-​woo decoding his father’s messages, to decipher what it all really means. When it is screened in theaters and then streamed into home theaters, computers, and phone screens, the film text then gives life to reviews and interpretations online, writing that reiterates the film as a parasitic text to something other to it. Yet Parasite, on this line of thinking, simultaneously critiques the notion of the text as interpretable at all, and by co-​extension the symptomatic, and at times even ethnographic, hermeneutics that lends primacy to Korean cultural particularity. When critics reiterate that Bong’s film depicts the melodrama of class conflict in Korea, they reiterate the pretense of metaphorical or symbolic meaning hidden behind surfaces, the claim toward universal knowledge, and an engagement with a discursive framework that understands cinematic sounds and images as straightforwardly signifying historical reality. They blame the director for “punching down” in his depictions of the poor. But this metaphysics of surface and depth is allegorized in self-​reflective moments in Bong’s film when characters point to the metaphorical nature of things, such as the scholar stone, the art therapeutic reading of the child’s drawings, the plan to overthrow the rich Park family: each of these moments model the symptomatic reading of the cinema while criticizing it. To reformulate Bong’s rhetorical question about

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the meaning of the scholar stone: when characters in a film show viewers how to interpret a film, what is the legitimacy of this mode of interpretation? That these acts of reading consist of citations and dissimulation attest once more to the condition of iterability intrinsic to the legibility of all communication. When asked about what she said to Yeon-​kyo that moved her to tears, Ki-​jung remarks that she “googled ‘art therapy’ and ad-​libbed the rest. Then suddenly she’s weeping. Crazy bitch, I couldn’t believe it.” One wonders what this character would have thought of the many review articles that explain the metaphorical meanings hidden in Parasite. Before Parasite began garnering its many awards, Bong was already in talks with hbo and writer and director Adam McKay to produce a television series based on the movie. The series will not be a remake of the film, and he makes clear that it will be an original series that will exist “in the same universe as the feature, but it’s an original story that lives in that same world” (Sharf 2021). With this serial drama, one that parasitically “lives” in the diegetic world created by Bong’s film, we will soon have more opportunities to mine the text for metaphor and to continue the hermeneutic game of meaning-​making in the cinema. Yet key elements of the film will continue to operate in defiance of critics, scholars, and television writers that will understand it as merely reflecting the travails of contemporary Korean society. As these elements disrupt ordinary practices of interpretation, the cinematic signifier shows itself to function, not merely as a means for representing Korean society and its particularity, but also as a universal, and paradoxical, end in itself. As the most successful Korean film so far in terms of its global recognition, Parasite invites audiences to read beyond its textual surface to discover an ostensibly authentic Koreanness beneath it. At the same time, it critiques this very discourse of cultural uniqueness in the realm of the universal, while soliciting viewers around the globe to continue to proliferate its meanings.

References

Brzeski, Patrick. 2020. “Bong Joon Ho Reveals the significance of ‘Parasite’s’ Scholar Stone.” Hollywood Reporter, January 7. https://​www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter.com/​news/​ bong-​joon-​ho-​reve​als-​signi​fica​nce-​parasi​tes-​scho​lar-​stone-​1265​811. Last accessed 18/​3/​2021. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Cinema 1: The Movement-​Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited, Inc. Trans, Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

32 Choe Derrida, Jacques. 2000. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Im, Seo Hee. 2019. “Punching Down: On Bong Joon-​ho’s ‘Parasite.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 18. https://​lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​punch​ing-​down-​on -​bong-​joon-​hos-​paras​ite/​#_​ftn2. Lee, Nam. 2020. The Films of Bong Joon Ho. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Loughrey, Clarisse. 2020. “Parasite review: An intricate examination of class conflict.” The Independent, February 6. https://​www.inde​pend​ent.co.uk/​arts-​entert​ainm​ent/​ films/​revi​ews/​paras​ite-​rev​iew-​bong-​joon-​ho-​cast-​direc​tor-​osc​ars-​2020-​best-​pict​ ure-​a9319​656.html. Mintzer, Jordan. 2019. “Bong Joon-​ho Talks True Crime, Steve Buscemi, Unlikely Success of ‘Parasite.’” The Hollywood Reporter, October 18. https://​www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter .com/​news/​bong-​joon-​ho-​paras​ite-​succ​ess-​true-​crime-​steve-​busc​emi-​1248​655. Park, Ju-​ hyun. 2020. “Reading Colonialism in ‘Parasite.’” Tropics of Meta, February 17. https://​tropic​sofm​eta.com/​2020/​02/​17/​read​ing-​colo​nial​ism-​in-​paras​ite/​. Last accessed 2/​3/​2021. Park, Nathan. 2020. “’Parasite’ Has a Hidden Backstory of Middle-​Class Failure and Chicken Joints.” Foreign Policy, February 21. https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2020/​02/​ 21/​korea-​bong-​osc​ars-​paras​ite-​hid​den-​backst​ory-​mid​dle-​class-​chic​ken-​bong-​joon -​ho/​. Last accessed 2/​21/​2021. Rosenberg, Alyssa. 2020. “Opinion: Too bad Trump slammed ‘Parasite’ for its Oscar wins. He might have loved it.” The Washington Post, February 21. https://​www .was​hing​tonp​ost.com/​opini​ons/​2020/​02/​21/​too-​bad-​trump- ​slam​med-​paras​ite-​its -​oscar-​wins-​he-​might-​have-​loved-​it/​. Last accessed 3/​3/​2021. Sharf, Zach. 2021. “Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite’ HBO Series Is an ‘Original Story’ Set in Film’s Universe, Not a Remake.” IndieWire, https://​www.indiew​ire.com/​2021/ ​04/​paras​ite-​hbo-​ser​ies-​origi​nal-​story-​not-​rem​ake-​123​4632​272/​. Last accessed 4/​25/​ 2021. Silva, Gabriela. 2020. “Parasite: 10 Cultural Details Only Korean Audiences Would Understand.” Screenrant, September 3. https://​scr​eenr​ant.com/​paras​ite-​cultu​ral -​deta​ils-​only-​kor​ean-​audien​ces-​would-​und​erst​and/​. Last accessed 3/​4/​2021. Sims, David. 2019. “How Bong Joon Ho Invented the Weird World of Parasite.” The Atlantic, October 15. https://​www.thea​tlan​tic.com/​entert​ainm​ent/​arch​ive/​2019/​10/​ bong-​joon-​ho-​paras​ite-​interv​iew/​600​007/​. Last accessed 4/​25/​2021. White, Armond. 2019. “Parasite: Antifa Comedy for the Cancel-​Culture Era.” National Review, October 11. https://​www.nat​iona​lrev​iew.com/​2019/​10/​movie-​rev​iew-​paras​ ite-​lau​ghs-​at-​fam​ily-​and-​soc​ial-​ruin/​. Last accessed 3/​6/​2021.

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Parasite from Text to Context

An Ethical Stalemate and New Auteurism in Global Cinema Seung-​hoon Jeong Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite (2019) is the first Korean film double-​crowned with the best Cannes and Academy awards.1 What is surprising but not much said is that this global wonder is Bong’s, or rather, today’s most pessimistic and desperate film. Its ironic ending imprints an uncomfortable truth in the heads of audiences leaving the theater: if you are a ‘loser’ in this polarized capitalist system, no plans you make will work out, and no dreams you have will come true. But while this class issue is cited as the film’s universal appeal, people enjoy consuming every detail on screen and cheer at Bong’s charm instead of paying attention to such losers. At the moment you come back to reality after watching the true-​to-​life film, its critical point is at best translated into a cinematic quality or marketability to appreciate and then to be put aside. The world willingly promotes the work-​as-​product that penetrates its problems as if there were no problems or presents its problems as inexorable. Taking no step away from this system, we all happily embrace the change of the world while applauding the film’s historical achievement of diversifying the Oscar winners in terms of race and language. Bong, now a ‘core insider’ of the world cinema scene, may continue to play some thrilling critical tug of war with the system while paradoxically enriching its co-​opting power. This inevitable entanglement is a global phenomenon that is today’s ‘new normal,’ and because of it, Parasite appears to be more than just a cinematic version of a K-​pop hit song. The film’s real significance lies not in that it raises the global status of Korean cinema measured in awards and popularity, but in that it intensively showcases the evolution of Korean cinema that has embodied the universal contradictions of the global system and cultural industry in a local setting. There are two layers to explore here: the film text and its context, that is, the film itself and the surrounding media that distribute or transform the film; in other words, the director-​as-​auteur’s vision and the film industry

1 This is a translation of my piece in Korean (정승훈 2020) with most of its sentences rewritten and with footnotes and references added.

© Seung-​h oon Jeong, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_005

34 Jeong and culture that enable or appropriate it. The antagonistic reciprocity of these two layers beyond a simple extension or confrontation is the kernel of global cinema reflecting the complexity of the global system. From this viewpoint, I will conduct a close reading of the film as reflecting today’s global system in an ethical stalemate. Then, I will examine how some critical dilemmas encountered in the text are reprocessed at the contextual level, raising new questions about the parasitic relationship between the cinema and the world. 1

The Evolution of Korean Films with ‘10-​Million Viewers’

For a text analysis, let me briefly note the film-​historical context of Parasite in Korea. The record that it generated–​10 million domestic ticket sales in 2019–​, though boosted by winning the Palme d’Or in Cannes, indicates its broad resonance with Korean society’s collective unconscious beyond its artistic accomplishment. Parasite thus prompts us to grasp the country’s new social phase unseen in former, similarly popular Korean films, and trace the evolution of the so-​called cheonman yeongwha: films attracting more than 10 million viewers (one-​fifth of the Korean population), which is the highest barometer of commercial success. Notably, almost all of the films in this 10-​ million-​viewer club have staged, I claim, ‘unfinished projects of building a modern nation’: from Roaring Currents and Masquerade in the backdrop of the Joseon Dynasty to Assassination, Taekugi, Silmido, Ode to my Father, A Taxi Driver, and The Attorney unfolding across Korea’s modern history and even to The Host, Haeundae, Train to Busan, and Along with the Gods depicting imaginary disasters. They dramatize the conflict between the sovereign power built around a premodern father/​family/​state and the social abject deprived of subjectivity by that very sovereignty. In doing so, these films take on historical or catastrophic fantasies that project onto past or virtual ‘states of exception’ the desire for a better, alternative ‘big Other’ like a good father, a utopian community, or a proper democratic, constitutional nation. In comparison, the shift of supralegal power from politics to economy shown in Veteran and The Thieves is quite suggestive. In Veteran, the death by foul play of a poor worker and its cover-​up are committed by a spoiled son of a chaebol (family-​owned conglomerate), not the state; the detective hero, though rough, lawfully investigates and arrests this superrich criminal. While the state power is normal, the sovereign and the abject are reshaped as the capitalist who abuses power even biopolitically and the have-​not who is brutally exploited and killed. If Veteran justifies the punishment of the chaebol by public power as punishment for evil, The Thieves attractively displays outlaws making fun of

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public power. They are not poor losers, but experts who carry out the task of acquiring capital outside the restraints of law and labor while possessing the attributes required by global capitalism, such as information and technology, physical ability and attractiveness, and transnational networks. They appear like agents who satisfy the borderless unrestricted neoliberal desires hidden in the public’s unconscious at the risk of being caught and undergoing abjection. The allegory that the capitalist is a thief may work here, but the film does everything to make a hedonistic fantasy out of the capitalist system in which power and abjection are intertwined, without taking any moral or ideological stand. Parasite delves into changes in the class structure in a more realistic, multilayered way. Unlike the vicious sociopath of the hereditary chaebol in Veteran, President Park is a self-​made global it company ceo with manners, culture, and ‘the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.’ His family is “rich, but even nice,” and he wields power with dignity, as in the scene of firing his driver and housekeeper with plausible excuses instead of physical violence. However, the sudden execution of this power to abject them, which is incomprehensible for the (un)employed, divides the classes like a line that cannot be crossed no matter how close they are and asserts the fate of the employees as nothing but replaceable temporary workers no matter how loyal they are. This normalized ‘exceptional state’ of the precarious proletariat, namely ‘precariat,’ with no job security in the age of digital cognitive capitalism –​when dismissals are performed via Twitter –​characterizes the ‘flexible’ labor market without a social safety net that Parasite evokes. Here we see no traditional proletariat like the factory workers in Save the Green Planet! or the wretched but rebellious people in Snowpiercer. Instead, the class structure is divided into the Fourth Industrial Revolution manager developing virtual reality devices and the jobless abject competing for a place to serve capital. As this structural polarization brings about subordination and adaptation rather than conflict and confrontation, the ruling class has hegemony as the predominant power sustained by the ruled. The unemployed wage ‘the war of all against all’ in the neoliberal ‘state of nature,’ struggling to strengthen competitiveness demanded by the system. Kim Ki-​taek’s family, all of whose members get/​steal jobs marvelously at Park’s house, embody in their way the excellent adaptability of the thieves (in The Thieves) to the system. The Kims learn to fold pizza boxes from YouTube, forge a certificate of studentship, subdue a naughty pupil to a tutor, apply online psychological knowledge to life, acquire skills to drive a Mercedes-​Benz at the store, get out of the house unbeknownst to the Parks, and make “ram-​don” at the speed of light. All these acts tell that they are not helpless victims of the system but all-​around job

36 Jeong seekers highly adaptable to unpredictable job markets, or even entrepreneurial workers hyperactive in self-​development. The family’s plot to take over the housekeeper Moon-​gwang’s place progresses like a perfect division and collaboration of labor on a conveyor belt, unfolding almost artistically to the baroque soundtrack “The Belt of Faith” as if to perform an aesthetic of fraud. Such acts of disguise, imitation, infiltration, and occupation look like guerrilla tactics helpful in entering the unstable service industry, whose mainstay is cognitive/​emotional labor such as tutoring and housekeeping. Creative deception is nothing other than the ability and skill to actively cope with contingent environmental changes in the era of limitless competition. Coincidentally, in Extreme Job, the last 10-​million-​viewed film just before Parasite, a chicken restaurant run by undercover cops to look for a smoking gun also stimulated the fantasy of success in Korea’s saturated market of small business owners who used to be the unemployed and retirees. 2

The Absence of Bong Joon-​ho’s Political Fantasy

Nevertheless, success from the bottom up always runs the risk of falling into the abyss. The Kims go downhill like losers from the Parks’ hilly wealthy village as their plans go awry due to the return of the repressed, Moon-​gwang. This time, the torrential rain, pouring down numerous flights of stairs which symbolize the ‘class ladder,’ floods their lowland district filled with semi-​ basement houses like an ironic manifestation of the economic ‘trickle-​down effect.’ While Park’s pet dog enjoys crabsticks, a dog in Kim’s neighborhood floats over the muddy alleys like a ‘reservoir dog.’ The class difference is most visible in architecture. Kim’s semi-​basement flat windows with bars evoking a prison cell are vulnerably exposed to external threats such as disinfectant gas, street urination, and floods, revealing a piece of reality like the ‘screen as a window’ as André Bazin would say. In contrast, the glass wall in Park’s living room exhibits formative beauty qualitatively detached from the outside world like the ‘screen as a frame’ for a perfectly controlled mise-​en-​scène. Unlike the realistic ‘screen-​window,’ the expressionistic ‘screen-​frame’ displays a well-​ maintained garden that looks like an artificial paradise. Here, the Kantian ‘dynamic sublime’ of nature caused by heavy rain and thunder is reduced to an aesthetic spectacle admired from a distance without fear. The Native American Indian tent of Park’s son, Da-​song, installed in the garden is like a simulacrum that allows him to safely experience the otherness of both nature and foreign culture without the originals’ authenticity. Park and his wife look at the garden in their dimly lit living room as if watching an adventure film in a huge home

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theater and play Boy Scouts as they are talking to their son on walkie-​talkies. The flood devastating Kim’s half-​underground home right now does not exist in Park’s world. As his wife Yeon-​kyo says, flooding is not a disaster for the rich but a blessing from heaven that washes away fine dust, like the disinfectant gas killing “camel crickets.” Smelly humans are quarantined in a camp-​like gym as if they were being punished and degraded into miserable non-​subjects, that is, the abject. If economic power takes on biopolitical sovereignty to make one an abject in Veteran, this extrajudicial power operates microscopically in Parasite, even among the abject themselves, who can survive only by repelling and killing each other. No legal agency or public sphere appears here to control this jungle-​like economic ecosystem. The two opposing classes barely encounter each other, only through personal connections for direct contracts between employers and employees. Even such contracts are very fragile, easily destroyed by the employer’s unilateral cancellation or the employee’s abrupt violence. Kim’s murder of Park is only briefly reported on tv as a random killing out of the blue, that is, a sort of terror. Moreover, nobody knows that Moon-​gwang’s husband Geun-​se emerged from the basement to haunt Da-​song’s mind and imprint it with “wrinkles” that cannot be “ironed out” even with money and that Da-​song’s schizophrenic painting, though identified as his extraordinary self-​portrait by Yeon-​kyo, depicted the very underground man who terrorized him like an ‘uncanny’ ghost.2 Sending and receiving Morse code between Geun-​se and Da-​song does not lead to communication and understanding. Instead, there are only contractual relations between the classes that “should not cross the line” on the one hand, and traumatic terrorist attacks caused by hatred of those who cross the line on the other. Thus, while the sovereign subject experiences Ki-​taek’s smell and Geun-​se’s face only as disgusting and terrible indicators of abjection, these abject ‘others’ turn into terrorists unexpectedly. Such disgust and hate, exclusion and terrorism are symptoms of today’s violent ethics that erupt when the political reconciliation and resolution of conflicts are impossible. Even more desperately, as noted above, the class hostility occurs between lower-​class people too, who thus become subdivided without symbiosis. Parasite, in this sense, leads to the impasse of Bong’s global Korean cinema that has resisted the global biopower and capitalist system. Indeed, the core of Bong’s political fantasy was once the eventual formation of an alternative

2 Anne Anlin Cheng (2020)’s comparative psychoanalytic approach to the uncanny house in Get Out and Parasite is noteworthy.

38 Jeong family even after a failed revolution or a total disaster. In The Host, a father adopts and feeds a boy cared for by his sacrificed daughter; in Snowpiercer, it is suggested that a Korean girl might build a multiracial eco-​relationship with a black boy and a white bear after a final catastrophe; in Okja, a girl and a super pig raise an orphaned piglet that they save from being slaughtered. When these protagonists feed the abject others whom they encounter and embrace (as if asking, “You don’t even skip meals, do you?”),3 the act of ‘feeding’ goes beyond eating and being eaten between humans and animals, between the system and the abject. It can lead to a gift-​giving relationship among the abject just as the Korean word for ‘feed’ (먹이다) is a dative verb which cannot be changed into the passive voice (like ‘being eaten/​fed’), and whose active-​only voice thus intimates some positive mutual care. Instead of preying on each other, the family as ‘식구’ (食口), literally meaning a food-​sharing community, gives and takes things to eat with each other beyond blood ties. Familism disintegrates and expands through the experiment on potential alternative families. In the state of exception where state and capital destroy the right to live, the abject are reborn as new biopolitical agents who perform gift-​giving for survival.4 However, Parasite shows no such abject agents who bring symbiotic coexistence. Kim’s daughter, Ki-​jung, tries to deliver food to Geun-​se in vain, ending up with a killing spree among three families. All that remains afterward is a contradictory self-​preservation fantasy of Ki-​taek and Ki-​woo, father and son, that minimal unit of patriarchy. Ki-​taek said no plan is the best plan, and Ki-​woo recites only an absurd plan to earn money to buy Park’s top-​class mansion. Their hope for an impossible reunion evokes nothing but the neoliberal ideology of “cruel optimism” in Lauren Berlant’s words. Has Bong given up on imagining any alternative outside or the solidarity of the abject? 3

The Ethical Double Bind and the Ghostly Parasite

Of course, we cannot ask cinema to offer an alternative that cannot be conceived in reality. The ending-​shot camera descending to Ki-​woo’s poor semi-​ basement room debunks his dream of upward social mobility cynically, leaving no false hope, at least in viewers’ minds. Parasite wittily yet eerily depicts some visions of local daily life that are the closest to today’s Korea in Bong’s filmography, capturing the class structure of the global capitalist system where political 3 It is a famous line that the detective (Song Kang-​ho) tells the serial-​killing suspect he barely found in Bong Joon-​ho’s Memories of Murder. 4 I elsewhere (2016) highlighted this ethical implication of ‘feeding’ in global Korean cinema.

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change becomes ever more impossible. However, this realistic tone somehow compromises with reality. In several interviews, Bong suggests “decency/​courtesy to humanity” as a solution, saying that the same situation can bring symbiosis, coexistence, or parasitism depending on whether we treat people with civility or not. This conclusion –​that we should not despise the dignity of others by smell, make others shed tears of blood by deceit, or fight with the same abject others –​conversely serves as an ethical lubricant that helps us hurt less and adapt more to the world of polarization that would not change in any way. Does this emphasis on human decency not echo Park’s warning, “Don’t cross the line”? It may be a moral lesson to the rich, but it eventually serves their established power when applied to the poor in the logic of mutual respect based on ‘social distancing,’ that is to say, ‘I will respect you too, so please don’t come too close.’ Then, social antagonisms and structural contradictions are reduced and rigidified into the question of each individual’s ethical attitude. Geun-​se, who shouts “Respect!” to Park, thus only wants to stay in the miserable but already comfortable basement where he feels his whole life has been spent. He is none other than, if any, a tail-​car passenger in Snowpiercer who would accept his fate as obeying the order from above, “Know your place!” Unlike the ideal of forming an alternative family, this ideology of keeping the status quo resonates with Jacques Rancière (2004)’s idea of the “soft ethical” turn of politics: the post-​political unification of the global system in the name of human rights and multicultural respect or tolerance, which, for some critics, serves the transnational capitalist market’s incorporation and consumption of diverse others. Here, respect or tolerance as a ‘politically correct’ gesture implies the hierarchy between its subject and object and the subject’s hypocrisy toward the object. The unspoken rule that the rich should not expose their hate for the poor even if they hate them is the essence of human courtesy. Park’s fault lies in provoking the terror of hateful revenge by not bearing but betraying his physiological repulsion against the smell of the underground and “subway.” Thus, soft ethics is only a kind smile that barely suppresses its flipside, the “hard ethics” of disgust, exclusion, hate, and revenge. This double ethics is like a ‘double bind’ in which we are stuck without a political exit. Be polite to avoid terrorism! In other words, Parasite is political only in that it makes us reflect on the historical limits of this ethical message to prevent tragic class strife. Indeed, the sovereign subject’s patronizing gesture of courtesy performs nothing more than what Jacques Derrida (2000) calls “conditional hospitality,” whose host-​subject and guest-​object still keep a hierarchical power relation. The rich hire the poor with kindness but fire any of them who cross the line; all the poor, fearful of unemployment –​a driving force of capitalism –​ exist only as the competitive system’s parasitic, abstract workforce and not as

40 Jeong living individuals. It is thus misleading to apply the master-​slave dialectic to Parasite in the sense that even the rich’s life depends on the poor’s labor. The rich always have power while the poor are desperate for jobs in the capitalist system. As Da-​song’s birthday party shows, the rich ‘invite’ but do not ‘visit’ the poor, whereas the poor visit but do not invite the rich. We never see an ‘Event’ in which the poor invite the rich and the rich visit the poor in such a way that either really cross the line and thus deconstruct (instead of terrorizing) the boundaries of the system. Furthermore, we should ask what the system desires under the surface of human decency to maintain. The Parks ‘look’ happy with everything luxuriously secured, but this image of happiness hides the seeds of cracks and lack. Impressive is the living room scene where the Park couple, watching Da-​song’s tent, suddenly makes love while mentioning panties and drugs: the fake evidence of “vulgar” pleasure that the Kims plotted to make Park’s driver fired, yet also the ‘object cause of desire’ that provokes the couple to enjoy the absent pleasure of the other. This ‘small object’ (the Lacanian objet a) in fantasy across the classes lets the libido of the rich erupt over their superego explicitly. Interestingly, the rich’s obscene enjoyment corresponds to the poor’s drinking bout that happened just there right before; the Kims greedily filled up with expensive liquor an emptiness they felt upon occupying Park’s house after all their efforts. In sum, the rise in status and wealth is marked with nothing but the volatile imagery of happiness, fantasized enjoyment, and instantaneous pleasure, ironically betraying the poverty of desire. So then, could the world be better if we only treated each other with civility? Would this be the realistic maximum of utopian imagination possible in today’s global Korean cinema? There is a scene that stimulates unrealized imagination. While the Park couple is having sex on the sofa, the Kims lie hidden under the coffee table and crawl out without being detected like invisible men. They escape, unseen and unheard, like the “mollusk” in Song Kang-​ho (playing Kim)’s words, or like the ‘phasmid’: stick insects, namely ghost insects that look like leaves or twigs, indiscernible from their surroundings (‘phasmid’ etymologically implies ‘phantom’).5 Their flexibility and camouflage at this moment prove their parasitic abilities while also embodying the parasite’s mode of being that the host cannot sense. The ‘parasite’ indeed subsists right beside (‘para-​) the place (‘site’) called the host, but as a potential abject that the host would throw away if it crossed the line into the host’s sensory realm. At this point, 5 See George Didi-​Huberman (1998)’s inspiring essay on the phasmid. In this paragraph, I combine this ontologically obscure phasmid with Michel Serres’ (2007) idea of parasite as a socially positive catalyst.

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let me briefly recall Kim Ki-​duk’s 3-​Iron. Its protagonist, a lonely drifter who spends his nights in one empty vacation home after another, falls in love with an abused housewife in a wealthy house and, as a consequence, is caught and imprisoned by her husband. But after practicing ‘becoming-​ghost’ in prison, he returns to the house and reunites with her without being detected by her husband. In the last dining scene, she exchanges a smile with her lover, who steals her husband’s food from behind him, and the husband rejoices at her smile without even knowing its cause. Then, what if the husband, his wife, and her lover are replaced by the Parks, the Kims, and the Geun-​se couple? Couldn’t we then see an alternative Parasite that shows not the vertical hierarchy between the ground, semi-​underground, and underground people, but their horizontal coexistence around the round table? There, the parasite would no longer remain an object of hatred and eradication but reappear as an invisible family member catalyzing the symbiosis of being ‘Happy Together.’ 4

New Auteurism and New Cinephilia

If the above text analysis is driven by a critical diagnosis of the ethical stalemate in our post-​political age, the cultural context in which the film is incorporated and converges demands another inquiry. For Parasite represents global cinema as a cultural response to, and a multilayered negotiation with, the global system in which it was made. Likewise, the discursive market that distributes various interpretations, including critiques of the system, is part of it, a part that exposes attributes and limitations, contradictions and flexibility of the same system. Parasite became a megahit thanks to a number of hermeneutic ‘access points’ stimulating people’s critical desire to the extent that everyone wants to put in their two cents. Of course, film critics and scholars have professionally explored the film’s aesthetic achievements and contexts in a low voice on the fringes of the system. However, most popular discourses surrounding this much-​talked-​about film center on and unfold around Korean cinema and society within the framework of the global media ecosystem. For instance, even mainstream international media such as the bbc have published articles about semi-​basement houses as a unique Korean space, including interviews with residents as if to report and reveal a social issue. Although they account for only 1% of all the residences in Korea and are also common in global cities like New York and London (though mainly for commercial use), the semi-​basement structures have been partly tinted with Western media’s orientalist sensationalism as something unusual, bizarre, and exotic, like the underground bomb shelter inside Park’s wealthy mansion.

42 Jeong Meanwhile, some Korean critics have pointed out that the film’s depiction of the semi-​basement house is full of provocative details such as cheap beer and the overflowing toilet, taking on ‘poverty porn’ that objectifies poverty as a spectacle without a structural approach and thus aestheticizes helplessness and contempt. However, I claim, the semi-​basement in the film is not a realistic index of the poor class in Korea so much as a schematic symbol of an unstable middle class that can rise above the ground or fall underground, the middle class that has fallen but jumped into the consolation race of the losers. It should also be noted that while the semi-​basement scenes make up less than a third of the entire film, nobody criticizes the scenes of the spectacular mansion occupying the rest of the running time as ‘wealth porn.’ In sum, on the one hand, the film is reduced to a reference to reality through a distortion filter and used to address actual issues; on the other hand, the film is criticized for distorting reality when this criticism itself lacks consistency. Both the cases thus point not to the film itself but rather to some ideological implications and interpretative blind spots that occur when the film is contextualized into the politics of representation. Nonetheless, it is crucial that such controversy is what the film allows and encourages (unknowingly) while enabling the infinite interpretive intervention of its context in its text. Numerous enigmatic elements in Parasite have caused the ‘snowball effect’ of the discourse going viral with ever more imaginative interpretations, thereby amplifying the word-​of-​mouth and box-​office cycle infinitely: from the symbolism of the ‘landscape stone’ to the connection between Da-​song’s tepee and “Illinois Chicago” in the Jessica jingle; from the relationship between architect Namgung Hyeon-​ja and housekeeper Moon-​ gwang to the events that might have happened to Yeon-​kyo and her children who left home after the catastrophe. Regarding the central topic of class too, each viewer has entered the film’s hermeneutic matrix through a different access point of understanding, sympathy, anger, or awakening since the stereotypes of the poor as good and the rich as evil disintegrate. According to Thomas Elsaesser (2012), this “access for all” is the strategic core of the new auteurism found in the films of contemporary Hollywood directors like James Cameron. While white American intellectuals criticized Avatar as a dubious narrative of white heroism, it was praised in India and China as a victory narrative inspiring indigenous peoples’ sovereignty; however, the point is that the film’s ability to provoke such contradictory responses rather widens its appeal for the global market. Today’s film auteurs are less independent artists struggling against the capitalist industry than managerial art planners looking for ways in which their vision and the audience reaction can intermingle in the market logic. What matters is to design a film that is ambiguous and contradictory enough

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to welcome various conflicting views in balance so that spectators do not stop at passive film consumption but can contribute to film promotion and even intermedial film culture through active critical engagement. Bong Joon-​ho, who performs this task globally, is the most successful global Korean auteur. In this sense, the new auteurism resonates with a new mode of cinephilia that actively responds to new media environments. As films are reprocessed into trailers, sample clips, bonus/​deleted footage, or spin-​offs and ‘relocated’ to different media, film fans not only comment on such cinematic ‘paratexts’ along with news articles but also produce and share numerous reviews across internet cafes, blogs, forums, communities, and social network services. In the case of Parasite, YouTube videos that illuminate hidden meanings of various details have poured in, accelerating the evolution of ‘verbal criticism.’ Also, many YouTubers have appeared who attract global-​scale clicks even just by uploading a handful of images with news reports on the film and the director. The general public has led an unprecedentedly productive trend of film reception even without seeking space in existing newspapers or magazines by appropriating new media platforms that absorb and overwhelm such legacy media. Notable, in particular, is the global variation of the film poster. Extending our curiosity about the faceless legs and blindfolds in the original poster, many posters made by fans worldwide in their languages depicted the main elements of the film with unique illustrations instead of photos. They offered intellectual amusements like a ‘Find the hidden picture’ game to those who had seen the film and sparked artistic inquisitiveness in those who had not. As also in the case of placing two families in the form of “Decalcomanie” (the original film title), not a few posters mapped the rich and poor characters hierarchically in architectural composition, demonstrating the fandom’s creativity to break away from conventional posters full of the faces of actors. Without a doubt, all these environmental changes contributed to Parasite’s triumph at the Academy Awards. If the success in Cannes resulted from the film’s quality itself, the film’s four significant Oscars should additionally be attributed to a fruitful collaboration between the film crew’s half-​year-​long Oscar campaign and the global online fandom accompanying this journey, which continued to stir up interest, holding appeal for a large voting body. Bong Joon-​ho’s satire on the Academy’s ‘locality’ and the American phobia of subtitles, along with long-​standing public criticisms of the white-​centered Oscars, also promoted the Academy’s opening to diversity and the worldwide support for Parasite. Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to whom Bong paid homage, claimed to be his fans inside American filmdom, and his borderless fandom dubbed the “Bong hive” helped the Jessica jingle (adapted from a famous Korean song “Dokdo is Our Land”) go viral like a global hook song. The

44 Jeong strange phenomena that even Bong’s interpreter Sharon Choi and the translator of Parasite Darcy Parquet became stars and that thanks to “ram-​don,”its source products Jjapaghetti and Neoguri are displayed in every U.S. local mart show the amazing feedback between the production-​consumption sectors, which was unimaginable in the traditional auteur-​cinephile culture once faithful to ‘film’ experience only. Of course, this feedback model at large has been established in the mainstream film industry since the 1980s, leading blockbuster-​centered New Hollywood. However, it is undoubtedly monumental that the first non-​English-​speaking winner of the best picture Academy Award activated the virtuous cycle of new auteurism and new cinephilia on a global scale amid the capitalist system through a story which cut to the quick of capitalism. It is indeed at the forefront of global cinema. 5

Performative Self-​Contradiction of Global Cinema

The ultimate problem lies in the very successful entanglement of cinema and media, text and context. ‘Paratext,’ like a parasite attached to a text (site), is parasitic on the text, but it endlessly absorbs and expands the text into the context and reduces and circulates it like a popular meme. The film’s message then tends to be trivialized while being inscribed and packaged into a cinematic event or phenomenon. The class issue in Parasite is rather diluted and ignored by those who praise the class structure as ‘well depicted.’ The new Cinephile, as a symptom of a hyperconnected society, takes Parasite out of its diegetic world and connects it with an infinitely proliferating network of memes, tmi, ‘subscriptions,’ and ‘likes.’ Bong Joon-​ho is none other than a film auteur who has learned how to survive in this global capitalist media-​tech ecosystem and how to coexist with it, willing to be parasitized by it while also parasitizing it. The antagonistic mutual dependence or mutually beneficial relationship between the auteur and the system is formed here. Let’s imagine that President Park in the film represents a capitalist whom Director Bong should ask to invest in his film in reality. Bong, who sees through the inevitable structural limitations and human inadequacies of the wealthy yet nice capitalist, drives him to death in the film narrative. However, the capitalist, recognizing the dramatic effect of this fictional death, invests a large sum of money in Bong and recovers more capital thanks to the film’s success, establishing himself as a patron of the socially conscious film auteur. The auteur uses the capitalist system to criticize it, and the system reappropriates this criticism while allowing it. In sum, the auteur and the system do not cross the line in that they respect each other’s capabilities but transcend the line in that they can only strengthen

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each other’s capabilities when mingling together. The traditional auteur as a cursed artist with an uncompromising anti-​establishment vision is already a romantic myth. Instead, we now see that the more blessings an auteur receives within the system, the greater power his artistic achievement gains. If the 1970s New German Cinema and the 80–​90s new waves in the Third World (China, Taiwan, Iran, etc.) swept international film festivals with auteur films critical of their own countries and their governments tried to reterritorialize their reputation in the name of their nation, the subject and stage of reterritorialization have recently expanded to the global system itself. Parasite is not only a proud Korean film that boosts national prestige among Koreans but is also an epitome of global cinema that manifests the cultural flexibility of the West-​centered global capitalist system. An artistic film about class problems can be the most commercial; when that happens, the auteur’s critical message spreads to the most people while simultaneously returning the most capital to the system. This ‘performative self-​contradiction’ is another keyword of the new auteurism, but it is also a long-​standing feature of Hollywood. To mention Cameron again, his consistent warnings against dangerous mechanical civilization –​from The Terminator to Abyss, Titanic, and Avatar –​have always been visualized through the lavish use of cutting-​edge technology. The message is carried out in the way of betraying itself, and the greater this contradiction, the greater its effect. No cultural products penetrate the devastating neoliberal polarization as much as recent sci-​fi blockbusters (Elysium, Children of Men, Blade Runner 2049, Alita, as well as Snowpiercer, now remade into a tv show), but these films export to the world the dystopian images that only Hollywood capital and technology can create, aggravating the global polarization of culture, capital, and technology –​as if there would otherwise be no way to fight the global system, even in a fictional way. What could this self-​contradiction performed within the film-​media and auteur-​capital interdependent symbiosis bring to the global system that has neither alternative outside nor utopian politics? Does this symbiosis participate in a process of building up the potential of self-​implosion that could lead to radical change at some point? Or, since the collapse of the system is only possible or impossible even in imagination, is the apocalyptic fantasy of ruining the entire world now in full bloom, and has the apocalyptic cinema of catastrophe become the most preferred genre of the system? Then, is cinema consumed like Derridean pharmakon, a cure and poison at once, a drug-​like gift that the system gives to the audience and itself? No answers to these questions could be definite, but let us note that the coronavirus pandemic shook the global system as soon as Bong Joon-​ho returned home in glory. This coincidence lets us anticipate another cinematic way of reflecting reality, entangled

46 Jeong with it anew, to come out in a post-​Covid period. Perhaps at this time, the limitations and contradictions of the global system could be more trenchantly and radically delineated than in Parasite. And film culture, too, as many film festivals and events are postponed or virtualized due to the virus, may check and renew its potentialities under unprecedented conditions. The future is still uncertain, but it is approaching all the more dynamically.

References

Cheng, Anne Anlin. 2020. “The Shell Game: From ‘Get Out’ to ‘Parasite.’” Los Angeles Review of Books, February. https://​lare​view​ofbo​oks.org/​arti​cle/​shell-​game-​get-​paras​ ite/​. Last accessed 6/​2/​2021. Derrida, Jacques and Anne Dufourmantelle. 2000. Of Hospitality. Trans. Rachel Bowlsby. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Didi-​Huberman, Georges. 1998. Phasmes: Essais sur l’apparition. Paris: Minuit. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2012. The Persistence of Hollywood. New York: Routledge. Jeong, Seung-​hoon. 2016. “A Generational Spectrum of Global Korean Auteurs: Political Matrix and Ethical Potential” in Seung-​ hoon Jeong and Jeremi Szaniawski (eds.), The Global Auteur: The Politics of Authorship in 21st Century Cinema. New York: Bloomsbury, 361–​78. 정승훈. 2020. “의 윤리적 난국과 봉준호의 글로벌 코리안 시네마.” 문화/​과 학 102, 240–​56. Rancière, Jacques. 2004. “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics” in Aesthetics and Its Discontents. Cambridge: Polity Press, 109–​32. Serres, Michel. 2007. The Parasite. Trans. Lawrence R. Schehr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

­c hapter 4

From Superfluous to Parasitic

Russian Literature, Arendt and Korean Modernity Daniel Regnier Dostoyevsky’s underground man did not inhabit a bomb shelter, but his notes might have been of interest to the Kim family. In fact, Parasite owes much of its success to brilliant exploration and development of themes and symbols that it shares with nineteenth century Russian literature, in particular, the ‘superfluous man’ and the house.1 Like nineteenth Russian Literature Parasite deals with deep questions of psychology and politics simultaneously and with penetrating insight. One of the twentieth century’s greatest political thinkers, Hannah Arendt, picked up and developed the notion of the superfluity in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. A central thesis in this work asserts that modern society generates superfluous people and that these superfluous people play a key role in the emergence of totalitarian political structures. But elsewhere Arendt also addresses the notion of the parasite. Arendt suggests that the reality of labor in modern society is such that anyone who is not part of the labor structure becomes a parasite. Arendt does not explain what the relationship between the superfluous man and the parasite is. But in some sense Bong Joon-​ho answers this question raised by Arendt’s work. More generally, it is striking how Bong’s Parasite resonates with these and other themes central in Hannah Arendt’s thought: work, totalitarianism, and bare life. In this chapter, I interpret Bong’s Parasite by asking what it has to say about the difference between the superfluous person and the parasite. I use elements of Arendt’s thought on superfluity, parasitism, work, and bare life. I also take into account certain particularities of what can be seen as a Confucian context invoked in the film Parasite. I suggest that the superfluous man in a contemporary hyper-​urbanized modern society is in some sense compelled to become a parasite. That is, in his exploration of the human predicament Bong takes into account a factor that was not important to Arendt on account of the time

1 See Chances 2001 and Van Baak 2009.

© Daniel Regnier, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_006

48 Regnier in which she was writing: urban space and housing.2 In Parasite’s treatment of this problem, the pressure towards parasitism is further exacerbated by the demand to fulfill Confucian duties. 1

Kim Ki-​taek and Ki-​woo as Superfluous Men

The drama of the film Parasite takes place by a way of a fundamental reversal, that of the fortunes of a family. In a sense, the Kim family is the protagonist of the film. In some ways this family functions as a single organism. Incidentally, the collectivism of the Kim family is reminiscent of certain non-​human forms of life. Indeed, the ability of humans to work together as do non-​human life forms has been seen as a positive attribute by such thinkers as Aristotle who compared the social nature of humans to that of bees (a metaphor which is harshly rejected by more individualistically oriented modern thinkers such as Hobbes).3 But, at another level, it is the father of the Kim family, Ki-​taek, a sort of failed Confucian patriarch, who is the real subject of the action, because it is he who

2 As it is elsewhere, housing is a serious issue in South Korea. Commentators explain, “Obtaining decent housing is not guaranteed to everyone in modern-​day South Korea, and further, acquiring one’s own private housing seems to be a life-​time but futile effort. Thus, people are consumed by the dream of owning their own homes. In the metropolitan city of Seoul, obtaining affordable housing options seems almost impossible because of various financial hurdles such as escalating housing prices and a housing supply shortage. […] In addition, three challenges exist for young adults and newly married couples, who are emerging as new vulnerable strata of the population and are deprived of the possibility to own housing. These challenges are fewer full-​time jobs, enormous education debt, and out-​of-​ control housing costs” (Chung et al. 2020: 1). 3 Plato, Phaedo (Plato 1997) 82 a-​b (discussing transmigration): “The happiest of these, who will also have the best destination, are those who have practiced popular and social virtue, which they call moderation and justice and which was developed by habit practice, without philosophy or understanding. –​How are they the happiest? –​Because it is likely that they will again join a social and gentle group, either of bees of wasps or ants, and then again the same kind of human group, and so be moderate men.” Aristotle Politics (Aristotle 1984) 1253a: “And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech.” Hobbes Leviathan (Hobbes 1994) Chap. 17 : “Men continually compete with one another for honour and dignity, which ants and bees do not; and that leads men, but not those other animals, to envy and hatred and finally war.” In the Republic books 8 and 9, Plato discusses the decline of society and political structures –​from oligarchy through democracy to tyranny –​in terms of the relations between bees (i.e. in particular the role of drone-​bees).

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suffers a shift in perspective both internally and externally. Ki-​taek is at first a passive figure who simply follows his son’s initiative. In some sense, however, he is the only character who changes in the story. In the end, he is the one who recognizes his humiliation and revolts.4 To be sure, one other character also revolts. It is Ki-​taek’s ‘double’ Geun-​sae. Indeed, Geun-​sae causes the eruption of violence at the climax of the film. In both cases, a man deprived of power, humiliated and frustrated explodes in violence. Kim-​taek ultimately replaces Geun-​sae in the bunker. He goes from living in a ghetto of sorts to living in a kind of tomb, becoming a ‘zombie,’ a phantom possessed only of ‘bare life.’ He is ultimately placeless. The bomb shelter is his last refuge. The dramatic arc of Ki-​taek’s character undergirds the entire film. To be sure, the Kim son Ki-​woo is also superfluous. Yet, he does not realize it. At no point in the film does he become a humiliated anti-​hero outsider like his father. Rather, he has some characteristics of a rogue figure.5 We admire him for his audaciousness and ingenuity. However, Ki-​woo has none of the roughness of the Renaissance rogue figure. Ki-​woo does not break with society and recklessly violate its fundamental norms. Rather, he cleverly and elegantly twists social norms with a view to maintaining a more fundamental truth. Thus, he resembles in some respects Robin Hood. His break with the superficial reigning order seems to serve a higher justice. Much rogue literature is associated with the confessional form. This form is also common in the literature of the superfluous man, for example, Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man and Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Living beyond societal norms, the rogue or the superfluous man is situated such as to explain their special point of view. Interestingly, Bong’s Parasite assumes the confessional form at the very end of the film when Ki-​woo observes the house from a distance. At that moment it is as if he were confessing his errors and returning to conformity with the values of the society the vacuity of which he himself had demonstrated. But it is at this point that his absolute superfluity is made most evident. Nevertheless, even if Ki-​woo has the 4 On humiliation in Korean culture see Lee 1999. 5 “Rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars were, as a class, the Tudor dispossessed, and, indeed, in a rising capitalist society were appropriated as a commodity themselves by the writers of rogue pamphlets who turned the misery of the vagrant into profit for themselves. […] vagabonds made the class system of Tudor England ineradicably, annoyingly visible, “an important stage in the long process of class formation,” […] “Idleness, dissipation, disorder, debauchery: these are the demonized terms for the topology which Bakhtin celebrated, from the perspective of the low, as the grotesque.” There is a sense, then, in which the rogues in England represent in their actions (and in the treatment of them) the carnivalesque which Bakhtin was finding contemporaneously in the France of Rabelais” (Kinney 1990: 5–​6).

50 Regnier final word, it is, as pointed out above, Ki-​taek who actually evolves throughout the film. At the very end of the film the lights flashing in the house, signals from Ki-​taek for Ki-​woo, take the place of any confession on his part. Ki-​taek’s voice has been absorbed by the house, his expressive abilities reduced to a military code (i.e. Morse code). The expressive shots of Ki-​taek’s face towards the end of the film crescendo towards the final explosion of violence. On the one hand, we follow Ki-​taek’s realization of having ‘lost face.’ This might be seen as part of a Korean aesthetic of han.6 But it is also very akin to the humiliation of Dostoyevsky’s underground man. Dostoyevsky’s underground man is insulted by an officer. In an effort to regain his honour, the underground man jostles his aggressor by deliberately colliding with him on the sidewalk. But the officer, oblivious to the counterattack, does not even recognize the underground man’s existence. Like the officer who insults the underground man, Park Dong-​ik does not even recognize that he is humiliating Ki-​taek. In his eyes Ki-​taek does not figure in the inter-​human economy of pride. We have here a certain element of the idea of parasite. Failure to have a place in a realm of mutual recognition is equivalent to the loss of basic human dignity. The parasite is of a completely different order. We will see below how Arendt comments this theme. In a sense, Ki-​taek took on his humiliation almost playfully at the beginning of the film. But his abasement becomes particularly manifest with regard to his role as father. Ki-​taek had prior to the film, we are made to understand, failed to succeed in the world of business. His sense of resentment which finally emerges at the end of the film is caused by and grows in the context of his relationship with Park Dong-​ik. There are four key moments leading up to Ki-​ taek’s revolt: Dong-​ik’s remarks in the car about love and life, his remark about the smell of Ki-​taek and his remark about playing the role of a North American indigenous person for his son –​and then, at the end, his reaction to the smell when we finally witness Kim passer à l’acte. Ultimately, Ki-​taek realizes that Geun-​sae –​who had killed his daughter –​is not his true enemy. Why is it that the girl suffers the worst fate in the film? Is she also superfluous? In Russian literature of the superfluous man, it is often the women who conform to societal demands and in so doing survive and allow society to regenerate (there is a long history of women in Russian literature, starting already with Tatiana in Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, who marry not for love but simply in order to keep life going). In the Korean Confucian context, it seems that agency is denied to the female figures. 6 See Kim 2017 and Boman 2020.

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51

Confucianism and Superfluity

It has been suggested that Korea is the state that was the most thoroughly influenced by Confucianism.7 Although Korean society is extraordinarily dynamic, several key Confucian values do continue to play an important role in it.8 Reference to two of these Confucian values can contribute to an interpretation of Parasite. The first consists in the importance of the family, which embraces a certain patriarchal structure and the notion of filial piety (Korean hyo, Chinese xiao).9 The second consists in the very high esteem for formal education.10 In fact, these two key Confucian values bracket the entire

7 8 9

10

This is due in part to the fact that Confucianism was implemented to the exclusion of other thought systems during the Joseon period and also because there had been no cultural revolution in South Korea. See Baker 2019, Kalton 2019, Kim 1996, Koh 1996 and Kwang 1998. Another key term in hyodo, which might be translated as ‘filial duty’: “Parents bestow on their children the three “gracious favors” (eunhye) of birth, upbringing, and wealth while children have the same number of obligations, that is, to carry on the family line, support their parents, and observe memorial rites after their death. The things inherited or passed down from parents including wealth, social status and human relations are at the core of the institutionalization of filial piety. This is not sufficient, however, to fully explain the concepts of hyo and eunhye. Eunhye might be understood as a reciprocal give-​and-​take concept, but the two concepts are not interchangeable as favors by parents and children’s filial piety are hardly equal in quality and quantity” (“Filial Piety in the Encyclopaedia of Korean Folk Culture: http://​folke​ncy.nfm.go.kr/​en/​topic/​det​ail/​553). See also Chung 2015: 107: “Among the so-​called ‘Five Relationships’ (parent-​child, husband-​wife, sibling-​ sibling, friend-​friend, and ruler-​minister), the parent-​child, ruler-​minister, and husband-​ wife relationships are known as the ‘three bonds’ (samgang in Korean; san-​kang in Chinese) that underscored the principle of reciprocity as the universal basis for maintaining human relationships. Ideally, the former had to show guidance and instruction in a virtuous and caring manner, while the latter was expected to demonstrate respect and compliance.” “One of the interesting characteristics of the modern Korean family, urban as well as rural, is the great emphasis placed on education. There are no differences in this respect between the poor and rich. Education is considered a ready means of social mobility and serves as the ladder for promotion in the workplace. […] Competition for college and the enthusiasm for education are even greater in urban areas. […] The high value of education and a strong achievement motivation are directed toward the prosperity of the family and establishing or maintaining a good family reputation –​values which reflect the old Confucian tradition in new forms. As with the yangban in the past, young people today think of their moral responsibility to the family name. Holding family honor high is a very important aspect of Confucian puritanism. In the past, people sacrificed themselves for the reputation of their families and gained a sense of personal identity by worshipping their ancestors. But in modern Korean society, people dedicate themselves to the reputation of their families and identify themselves through the success of their offspring” (Kwang 1998: 259–​62).

52 Regnier film.11 At the opening, the film’s action is motivated by the contrast between Ki-​woo’s failures at school and his friend Min-​hyuk’s success. Min-​hyuk represents the well-​integrated successful son –​understood in modern Confucian terms. Ki-​woo’s ability to feign having had educational success in some sense allows him to overcome –​at least temporarily –​his educational failures. But brilliance without the credentials can only go so far in the Korean context and Ki-​woo’s genius hits a ceiling. Rather than being able to serve his parents by becoming a rich businessman –​like his friend Min-​hyuk will probably be able to –​Ki-​woo can only invite his family into a world of imitation success, a world of counterfeit. But the fact that he does so, that he does not just ‘go it on his own’, is a genuine mark of some kind of filial piety. The thread of the connection between the father and the son runs through the entire film. It comes to a head when, evacuated as a result of flooding, they are discussing what to do. At this moment, the notion of filial piety is underlined by Ki-​woo’s apology to his father. Ki-​woo’s aspirations to filial piety are in conflict with the social system. Yet the two superfluous Kim men continue to plan together. The very notion that they have been washed out by flood waters corresponds quite literally to the idea of superfluity, derived as it is from the Latin for ‘overflow’. At the very end of the film, Ki-​woo promises to earn enough money to buy the house to save his father. This is, as it were, the perfect capitalist version of Confucianism.12 Filial piety is no longer a matter of simply working alongside one’s parents or becoming a successful state functionary, but rather is characterized by financial success in private industry and the ability to purchase luxury real estate which becomes ever more expensive.13 Ki-​woo demonstrates a kind of impossible filial piety. At the conclusion of the film his father is trapped in a house, which is ultimately occupied by foreigners. In the capitalist system the poor son cannot really be filial because the only solution (the only “plan”) is unrealizable. It is a groundless fantasy. In fact, what we see Ki-​woo doing at the end of the film is rather akin to Confucian ancestor worship. His father is no longer really in the world. However, his memory does not serve to anchor Ki-​woo in the service to his family, but chains him to an economic system. The depiction of the ruptured

11 12 13

I suggest that Bong’s references to the scholar’s rock also indicate that he wants us to understand that traditional values are at play in his work. Bong said, explaining why he thought that Parasite won the Golden Globe for foreign film (i.e. indicating it appealed to American audiences), “This film is about the rich and poor and about capitalism –​and the U.S. is the heart of capitalism” (Ankers 2020). Compare the pre-​modern examples of filial piety in the The Twenty-​four Filial Exemplars which dates back to the Chinese Yuan Dynasty.

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thread between generations at the end of Parasite is striking. The father Ki-​ taek is stuck in a kind of or purgatory –​a realm of the dead14 –​beneath the house which has become almost a kind of anti-​temple. The only ceremony that will help his father escape from the underworld is earning money. At the beginning of the film the members of the Kim family are very close to one another. If they fail in many ways to live up to Confucian values, they are successful in achieving the key value of harmony and solidarity in the family. We often see its four members eating together. By contrast, we never see Park Dong-​ik eat with his family. The Kim family plots together. Dong-​ik seems at a certain moment in the car to confide in Ki-​Taek, suggesting that his relationship with his wife is not very close. But by the end of the film, the Kim family has been destroyed. We see Ki-​woo alone fantasizing about a reunion with his rather who lives on for him only as flashing lights. In a sense, it is the daughter of the Kim family Ki-​jung who makes the ultimate sacrifice for the family. This suggests that the system of superfluity and parasites has no place for a figure like her even to simply ‘play the game’ as her brother continues to do even at the very end of the film. She is connected in a positive way to both of the younger generations of men (to Ki-​woo and Da-​ song). That this mediator –​in some sense representing the Confucian value of harmony –​is eliminated suggests that the polarization in the system has reached a point of crisis. Moon-​gwang is in various ways a similar figure. In fact, she very obviously mediates between levels in the house, between ‘realms’. From a certain point of view, she is a paragon of Confucian female virtue by maintaining social harmony. Nevertheless, by mediating between parasite and non-​parasite in a system which is not functioning as it should she is perpetuating injustice. She is also the character who seems to have knowledge, too much, it turns out. In any case, the viewer cannot help but sympathize with her compassionate nature. Her demise leads to the outbreak of violence.

14 On Naraka in Buddhist thought see Braarvig 2009. Compare Arendt, 1968: 445: “Concentra­ tion camps can very aptly be divided into three types corresponding to three basic Western conceptions of life after death: Hades, Purgatory, and Hell. To Hades correspond those relatively mild forms, once popular even in non-​totalitarian countries, for getting undesirable elements of all sorts –​refugees, stateless persons, the asocial and the unemployed –​out of the way; as dp camps, which are nothing other than camps for persons who have become superfluous and bothersome, they have survived the war. Purgatory is represented by the Soviet Union’s labor camps, where neglect is combined with chaotic forced labor. Hell in the most literal sense was embodied by those types of camps perfected by the Nazis, in which the whole of life was thoroughly and systematically organized with a view to the greatest possible torment.”

54 Regnier Dong-​ik does try to spoil his own son Da-​song in a way that is consistent with Confucian values. But something is missing. His son is haunted by the ‘ghost’. Rather than being prepared to worship his ancestors, Da-​song fears them. He will not be able to engage in Confucian Ancestor worship because for him a ‘ghost’ is not a manifestation of a positive connection to the past. Rather, it is precisely the dark side of the socio-​economic system. We might understand that the real horror of the situation cannot be recognized by the present generation. Da-​song even wants to stay outside of the house in a tent. For his part he plays ‘cowboy and Indian’ echoing the colonial theme, which is so important in Korean history (see Park 2020). Furthermore, Da-​song’s relationship with the past is traumatic. Dong-​ik repeats on various occasions that ‘people should know their place’ suggesting a conservative commitment to Confucian principles of hierarchy. But surnames were a late addition to Korean culture, imposed by Japanese occupiers and adopted arbitrarily from imperial history by all commoners. Park and Kim are two of the most common names adopted in this period and the suggestion is that there is no reason why one should be placed ‘above’ the other. Dong-​ik’s appeal to Confucian values rings hollow. 3

Superfluity and Love

A foundational text in the literature of the superfluous man is Turgenev’s 1950 Diary of a Superfluous Man. It is the story of a man who is a third wheel in love. He cannot get the girl. An attempt to assert his place in the asymmetric love triangle by dueling reduces him to shame and destroys any chance that he find a place in society. Ki-​woo for his part does get the girl, but not really. As a good Confucian son, he needs a good marriage, but that is impossible in the circumstances of his fraud. He pursued a girl who was beyond his class, just as at the end he pursues the house that is beyond his means. In seeking a romantic partner, he leaves behind traditional Confucian values which would have required of his family approval of the relationship. Indeed, Ki-​woo’s chasing the girl is portrayed as something of a game. The suggestion is that financial success in modern Confucian society is at certain level simply diversion. But there is a terrible disconnect between the game and the reality. Comedies end in marriage. Ki-​woo’s dream had been to marry the rich girl. But during the party he realizes that the dream cannot work and so returns to the bunker. Alas, the carnivalesque scene at the end of Parasite is a kind of anti-​marriage. At the climax of the film, instead of gaining a spouse, Ki-​woo

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loses his sister. What could have been a marriage scene is a scene of sacrifice. Ki-​jung is, as it were, sacrificed in order to re-​establish some order. But the order is unstable. It only works because the bunker is still inhabited. The Park family’s attempt at a weekend get-​away is foiled by rain. Their attachment to the house –​which represents a certain social structure –​is too strong. The literary motif of the escape from the realm of society to a realm of natural law or even of lawlessness –​like Shakespeare’s forests –​is at play here. Alas, the Parks have no existence outside the conventions of society. The sex scene between Dong-​ik and Choi Yeon-​gyo is characterized by masturbation and ‘non-​meeting’ (ne vstrech in the vocabulary of Russian literary criticism). They do not take their clothes off. There is little real intimacy between them. The Park family seems to be held together not at a biological level by common meals and sex, but rather simply by the walls of the expensive house. At the same time as the Park parents make out awkwardly on the couch, the Kim family is forced to cower in hiding. The image is clearly intended to show how their position is like that of insects, cockroaches that scuttle out of sight when the lights go on. Although, on the one hand, this represents a humiliation, it also suggests a vitality absent from the sterile life of the Parks, entirely devoid of spontaneity, as it is. The Real in the Lacanian sense is absent from the Park’s life. The frequent trolley pan by the kitchen counter of the Park house emphasizes the antiseptic nature of the space. The Kims bring the house alive when they eat take-​out food in the living room. Their way of being involves a certain jouissance including a violation of the order of the rooms when they eat in the living room. 4

Morse Code and Toilet Texts

Parasite is structured by the contrast of clear and telling images. One such pair of images depicts the respective bathrooms of the two families. On the one hand, we see Park Dong-​ik in a luxurious bathtub looking at a big screen television and, on the other, we see Kim Ki-​jung sitting on the toilet, not in order to take care of biological needs, but rather to get some wifi coverage –​presumable from the neighbors. The contrast of images is emphasized when the Kim family is temporarily inhabiting the Park residence and Ki-​woo remarks that he can imagine Ki-​jung in the bathtub. However, not long after Ki-​jung finds herself sitting once again on the toilet of the modest basement apartment barely keeping the lid down as it spews sewage on account of the flooding, all

56 Regnier while trying to read a text message. The image is all the more striking because it shows how the Kims are able to remain human while in a mode of survival. If the Kims are often reduced to bare life or survival, they are also pre-​ eminently human in their communicative superiority in relation to the Parks. It is the Kims who teach language and art to the Park children. The Kims are, despite their social rank, agents of humanization. The metaphor of the parasite is all the more strong in a Confucian context where the chief virtue is in 인 in Korean (ren 人 in Chinese) which means ‘humaneness’ ‘benevolence’ or ‘compassion.’ The ideogram represents the character for ‘human’ or ‘person’. Even if the connection between humanity and language (logos) is less pronounced in Confucian contexts than in Greek thought, it is nevertheless legitimate to see in the Kim children’s activities as teachers a virtuous activity according to Confucian values. The Park family, by contrast, is characterized by an absence of communication. This is witnessed not only in the sex scene and the absence of communal eating, but also in the general failure to understand what is going on. Dong-​ik and Choi Yeon-​gyo generally seem clueless and gullible. They buy into every aspect of Ki-​woo’s ruse including his relationship with their daughter. What is most flagrant is the fact that they and do not even notice that someone is living in their basement. Significantly, they fail to understand the Morse code messages from the bunker. They don’t even understand the military code, which in a sense makes their world –​a highly militarized zone –​possible. Perhaps this ignorance is essential to their being. We will explore this in the next section. 5

Totalitarianism and Homelessness

Germany and Korea represent two of the most dramatic sites of the Cold War, both single nations divided along clear borders by ideologies. But if Germany reached, as it were, the “end of history,” or at least the end of the confrontation between Soviet communism and western capitalism in Eastern Europe, Korea has experienced no such resolution. On the contrary, the ideological contrast between the two regimes of the Korean peninsula has only grown more marked since the opening of the iron curtain in Europe. North Korea is a pariah state while South Korea has affirmed itself not only economically as an Asian Tiger but also as an East-​Asian media leader. The totalitarian theme is invoked by the bunker and is expressed most directly by Geun-​sae’s quasi worship of Dong-​ik. Geun-​sae is perhaps the most superfluous and oppressed of all the characters. Yet, he is also the most ideologically committed to his own imprisonment. Indeed, when Kim visits him,

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he does not understand Geun-​sae. But we realize by the end of the film that Ki-​ taek, shall despite –​or even because of –​his revolt become just like Geun-​sae. Arendt explains how homelessness can lead to a retreat from the authentically political to the totalitarian where one has neither rights nor responsibilities. Arendt writes: It is easy to realize the extent to which totalitarian propaganda and even some totalitarian institutions answer the needs of the homeless masses, but it is almost impossible to know how many of them, if they are further exposed to a constant threat of unemployment, will gladly acquiesce to a “population policy” that consists of regular elimination of surplus people, and how many, once they have fully grasped their growing incapacity to bear the burdens of modern life, will gladly conform to a system that, together with spontaneity, eliminates responsibility. arendt 1968: 437

Homelessness emerges slowly as a theme in Parasite. At first, we see the Kims not as homeless but as ghetto dwellers. The real theme of homeless emerges with the discovery of Geun-​sae. But as the flood invades the Kim’s space, we see that even the ghetto basement is not a real home. The plan that the Kims make at the end is not to get rich but simply to overcome homelessness. The theme of homelessness is raised from another perspective. As we saw above, the Parks are tied to their house as a structure but perhaps not as a home. They are unable to make a family trip because the family does not exist apart from the house. But the little Da-​song wants to sleep out in the tent. He too is, although in a manner different than the Kims, homeless. Arendt talks about the allure of totalitarianism for the homeless as related to responsibility. Both the Parks and the Kims seem to have forsaken responsibility except in relation to the family. The Kims are willing to exploit their neighbor’s wifi, do poor work folding pizza boxes, dupe the entire Park family, disenfranchise, confine and even kill Moon-​gwang. The Parks, for their part, almost deliberately live in ignorance of everything, including their own children. There is crisis of responsibility in both families. The grandeur of the Park house is built on a bomb shelter. This is parallel to the way that the prosperity of South Korea is built on the role that it plays in a geopolitical struggle, the cold war and whatever we can call the subsequent situation in a divided Korea. The luxury of the space is predicated on the fact that it is in some sense situated in a zone of conflict. There is a colonial theme here too. The house ends up being inhabited by foreigners –​the Parks themselves glorified the foreign in their recognition of pseudo-​western qualifications.

58 Regnier 6

Conclusion: Becoming a Parasite

Hannah Arendt sees parasitism emerging in the totalizing economies of the industrial world. The labor theory of value elaborated by the likes of Adam Smith and David Ricardo was a great discovery for Marx. Marx not only agreed with the British economists but tried to see how the theory worked when it came to determine value in society. He saw how if labor is value, then the opposite of labor is non-​value and how in a modern economy one cannot step outside of the economic structure. The non-​laborer is valueless, or worse, a ‘burden.’ Hannah Arendt explains: What Marx understood was that labor itself had undergone a decisive change in the modern world: that it had not only become the source of all wealth, and consequently the origin of all social values, but that those who could not be adjusted into this process of labor would be seen and judged by society as mere parasites. To put it another way: while others were concerned with this or that right of the laboring class, Marx already foresaw the time when, not his class, but the consciousness that corresponded to it, and to its importance for society as a whole, would decree that no one would have and rights, not even the right to stay alive, who was not a laborer. The result of this process of course has not been the elimination of all other occupations, but the reinterpretation of all human activities as laboring activities. arendt 2018: 8

In some ways this picture is so pervasive in the modern world that it is hard to see any alternatives. But take for moment an example of a ‘superfluous man’ in nineteenth century literature. Oblomov in Goncharov’s eponymous 1859 novel is already in his time a relic of bygone days. Although essentially a lazy aristocrat, his inability to get out of his dressing gown, take care of his estate, read a book, or pursue the woman he loves hardly counts as parasitism. He is a complete non-​laborer but strikes us and his own serfs as a kind-​hearted and loving –​if entirely ineffective –​aristocrat. But he can continue to survive on the outskirts of society on his estate. Such a character is not tolerated in a modern economy. Even in the twentieth century Yuri Zhivago –​another superfluous man ­figure –​can retreat into a Russian hinterland at least temporarily to escape from societal demands. In Parasite there is nowhere to go. The society is ‘totalizing’ by its urbanization, by the narrowness of its values, by its emphasis on superficial marks of success. Moreover, it is not that the Kims are lazy, like Oblomov. Of course, they

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do not want to fold pizza boxes. They want the dream life, the life projected by the totalizing world of media as the one and only good life. What is lacking is qualifications –​on account of not playing the game right –​prior resources, like an appropriate dwelling, and perhaps luck. There simply is no place for the Kims. They must retreat into the cracks in society. A communal being cannot really become a parasite. Parasitism emerges where people are completely isolated from family and peers. Arendt writes: Loneliness, the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of its executioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which have been the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the industrial revolution and have become acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-​down of political institutions and social traditions in our own time. arendt 1968: 75

Loneliness is the fate of Ki-​woo and Ki-​taek at the end of the film. Arendt’s diagnosis of ‘curse of the modern masses’ is right. But the parasite is not only superfluous and uprooted. We see in the film how Ki-​taek goes from being superfluous to becoming a true parasite. He becomes trapped in the bowels of another being, dependent and unable to communicate with others. The parasite cannot survive without being attached to some kind of ‘host.’ But it is not a joyride at another’s expense, rather it is something like hell. There is no room to struggle against an oppressor, as might the slave in Hegel’s dialectic, because the parasite is nameless, faceless and dispensable. In the film, the superfluous man becomes a parasite by trying to pursue the dream when the situation has already disqualified him.

References

Ankers, Adele. 2020. “Parasite: Bong Joon-​ho Reveals the Meaning Behind the Title of the Oscar-​Nominated Film” in IGN Jan. 1 https://​www.ign.com/​artic​les/​paras​ite -​bong-​joon-​ho-​reve​als-​the-​mean​ing-​beh​ind-​the-​title-​of-​the-​oscar-​nomina​ted-​film Last accessed 6/​2/​2021. Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Orlando: Harcourt. Arendt, Hannah. 2018. Thinking without a Banister. New York: Schocken. Aristotle. 1984. Politics (trans. B. Jowett) in Barnes, Jonathan (ed.) The Complete Works of Aristotle Vol ii. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

60 Regnier Baker, Don. 2019. “What is Korean about Korean Confucianism?” in Young-​chan Ro (ed.), Dao Companion to Korean Confucian Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer, 47–​71. Boman, Björn. 2020. “From Oldboy to Burning: Han in South Korean films” Culture and Psychology 26: 4, 919–​32. Braarvig, Jens. 2009. “The Buddhist Hell: An Early Instance of the Idea?” Numen Vol. 56, No. 2/​3: 254–​81. Chances, Ellen. 2001. “The Superfluous Man in Russian Literature,” in Cornwell, Neil (ed.). The Routledge Companion to Russian Literature. New York: Routledge. Chung, Edward. 2015. Korean Confucianism: Tradition and Modernity. Seongnam: The Academy of Korean Studies Press. Chung, Sang-​Hyun, Seung-​je Kim, So-​Youn Park and Jun Ha Kim. 2020. “Past, Present, and Future of Social Housing in Seoul: Where Is Social Housing Heading to?” in Sustainability 12: 8165 https://​doi.org/​10.3390/​su1​2198​165 Last accessed 6/​2/​2021. Hobbes, Thomas. 1994. Leviathan. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Kalton, Michael C. 2019. “Korean Neo-​Confucian Thought” in Young-​chan Ro (ed.), Dao Companion to Korean Confucian Philosophy. Dordrecht: Springer, 17–​46. Kim, Kwang-​ok. 1996. “The Reproduction of Confucian Culture in Contemporary Korea: An Anthropological Study” in Tu Wei-​ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996., 202–​27. Kim, S. S. H. C. 2017. “Korean han and the Postcolonial Afterlives of ‘The Beauty of Sorrow’” In Korean Studies 41, 253–​79. Kinney, Arthur, F. (ed.). 1990. Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Koh, Byong-​ ik. 1996. “Confucianism in Contemporary Korea” in Tu Wei-​ ming (ed.), Confucian Traditions in East Asian Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kwang, Kyu Lee. 1998 “Confucian Tradition in the Contemporary Korean Family” in W. H. Slote, and G. De Vos (eds.), Confucianism and the Family. Albany: State University of New York Press. Lee, Zuk-​Nae. 1999. “Korean Culture and Sense of Shame” Transcultural Psychiatry. Vol 36: 2, 181–​94. Park, Ju-​Hyun. 2020. “Reading Colonialism in “Parasite”” Tropics of Meta, Feb 2020. https://​tropic​sofm​eta.com/​2020/​02/​17/​read​ing-​colo​nial​ism-​in-​paras​ite/​ Last acces­ sed 6/​2/​2021. Plato. 1997. Phaedo (trans. Grube), in Cooper (ed.), Plato: Complete Works. Indianapolis/​ Cambridge: Hackett. Van Baak, Joost. 2009. The House in Russian Literature. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.

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Notes from the (Korean) Underground Being-​in-​the-​World Is Being-​a-​Parasite Richard McDonough Parasite is best seen in existential rather than moral terms. It does not issue in moral, political, social or economic judgments. The film describes, or perhaps portrays, the dreamlike mode of fantasy “existence” of the “underground” people in a society so rigidly stratified that communication with people on the other side of the rigid societal “lines” is literally impossible, inevitably resulting in the destruction, real or metaphorical, from which there is “no exit,” of everyone on both sides of those rigid societal lines. The main characters in the film are the four members of the destitute Kim-​ family, composed of the father, Ki-​taek, the mother, Chung-​sook, the daughter, Ki-​Jung (Jessica), and the son, Ki-​woo (Kevin); the wealthy Park family, composed of Dong-​ik (Mr. Park), Yeon-​Kyo (Mrs. Park), Da-​Hye, the teenage daughter, and Da-​song, the Park’s young son; the Park family’s housekeeper, Moon-​gwang, and her husband, Geun-​sae, who has been living for the past four years in a hidden room, unknown to the Parks themselves, under the basement; the Park’s handsome “cool” driver, Yoon; and, finally, Ki-​woo’s allegedly sophisticated university friend, Min-​hyuk. The drama unfolds when the Kim-​ family, one set of parasites on the Park family, and Moon-​gwang and her husband Geun-​sae, another prior set of parasites on the Park family, become aware of each other and a struggle ensues, exposing the various levels of parasitism and leading, ultimately, to hideous violence. 1

Motifs in Parasite

1.1 Parasitism The central motif in the film is parasitism, of which there are many examples. The first parasite that appears in the film is Ki-​woo of the Kim-​family trying to steal the internet access of their upstairs neighbours. The next parasites encountered are the stinkbugs infesting the Kim-​home. Ki-​woo’s friend Min-​ hyuk is a parasite on the Park family insofar as he aspires to use his tutor’s position to seduce the Park’s pretty daughter when he returns from university

© Richard McDonough, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_007

62 McDonough the following year. Moon-​gwang and her husband, the latter hidden in the underground room in the house, are already parasites on the Park-​family when the Kim-​family parasites arrive at the Park household. There is even a sense that the wealthy Park-​family are parasites insofar as their wealth has enabled them to escape responsibility for their lives to the degree that they depend on poor people to do everything for them, drive them around, prepare their food, clean their home, tutor their children, and so on. Parasite presents parasitism as the normal condition of life after the fashion of De Morgan’s (1871: 377) observation: Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on. 1.2 The “Scholars Rock” “Scholar’s rocks” are a cultural item in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean societies often believed to possess spiritual properties (Elias and Hu 2014). In traditional animistic Asian societies, including Korea, the belief that these stones have souls has led to their use in architecture. However, the “Scholar’s rock” Min-​ hyuk gives to the Kim family turns out to be literally hollow. It literally floats in the flood water later in the film, i.e., it is a fake “Scholars Rock.” Far from delivering the desired material wealth, it is eventually used as a weapon by Guen-​sae to smash Ki-​woo’s head, almost killing him. Nothing in the film is what it seems to be. The “Scholar’s Rock” that is supposed to be a religious cultural item is used as a weapon to inflict violence. In a sense, everything in the film turns out to be “hollow” (inauthentic or at least not the genuine article). 1.3 Crossing the Line Mr. Park repeatedly states that it is very important that people do not “cross the line.” He pays the Kim-​family well and treats them well but only if they do not “cross the line.” This sacred “line” represents the rigid separations between different levels of Korean society. One can even respect a servant if they come close to the line but never cross it. For that shows that they possess a kind of cunning appropriate to their station in life that can be respected. They know exactly how close they can come to the line, but they know that their place is on their own side of the line. This line is also reflected in the different living arrangements of the two families. Whereas the Kim-​family is relegated to a sub-​basement “home” that permits the odiferous disgusting habits of their neighbors (urinating on the wall outside) to enter through their front window,

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the Park’s live in a perfect walled architectural bubble completely insulated from the world outside in a kind of fantasy existence. 1.4 Smell There are numerous references to the importance of smell in the film. The smell of things corresponds to their place in the heavily stratified society: The worse the smell, the lower in the social strata. It is significant that the first parasites identified as such in the film are the “stinkbugs” preying on the Kim family. The Kim-​family, being poor, also have a smell, described variously as that of radishes, boiled rags, or people on the subway, that identifies them as denizens of the lower level. Thus, when Mr. Park first finds the panties Jessica deliberately left in Mr. Park’s car to sabotage the Park’s driver, Yoon, he holds them to his nose, smells them, and winces distastefully. When he hands them, sealed in a plastic bag, to his wife, she takes them out, smells them, winces distastefully, and drops them back into the bag. Mr. and Mrs. Park agree that this smell reveals that Yoon is having sex in the backseat of their car with females from the other side of the line. Note the implicit assumption: Females from the Park’s side of the line obviously would not smell like that. The problem is not that the driver, Yoon, is having sex with women in the Park’s car when he is off duty but that he is having sex with women from the other side of the line. The smell of the panties indicates (falsely) that Yoon has “crossed the line” and must be replaced. It is also significant that when Mr. and Mrs. Park engage in the less than inspiring sex scene on the couch, not knowing that the Kim-​family is hiding under the couch and coffee table, Mr. Park states that if Mrs. Park would wear the dirty panties found in the car this would really excite him. This illustrates that though the Park’s officially despise the “smelly” poor people on the other side of the line, they secretly envy them for their more sensuous, more authentic, lives. For, in the Park family’s perfect scrubbed and perfumed life, even sex must be sealed off, like the outside world, in sanitary plastic bags. 1.5 Metaphor When, at the beginning of the film, Min-​hyuk presents Ki-​woo with the “Scholar’s rock,” Ki-​woo states that “this is so metaphorical.”1 Later, Ki-​woo says that Da-​song’s dreadful painting “is so metaphorical. It’s so strong.” When the 1 It is never explained why Kim-​woo’s receiving the “Scholars’ Rock” from Min is metaphorical. One hypothesis is this: It is metaphorical because Ki-​woo is not a university student but is only pretending to be one to get the tutor job at the Park’s. However, just as the “Scholar’s Rock” turns out to be hollow, so does Ki-​woo’s good fortune as the Park daughter’s tutor. Things could hardly turn out worse than they actually did. Ki-​woo’s “hollow” university credentials are as hollow as the “Scholar’s Rock.”

64 McDonough Kim family, enjoying their newfound fortune, acquired by conning the Park family, is eating in an all-​you-​can-​eat restaurant, Ki-​woo states again “This is so metaphorical.” Why is it so metaphorical? The answer is that parasites can eat as much as they want. For example, a bedbug can return every night to suck blood from its host. The body of the host is an “all you can eat buffet.” Finally, when, towards the end of the film, Mr. Kim asks Geun-​sae how he can live in that hidden room, Geun-​sae states that “lots of people live underground,” and adds that “it feels comfortable here,” “It feels like I was born here” and even that “Maybe I had my wedding here too.” The absurd suggestion that “maybe” he had his wedding there shows that his remarks about his underground existence are not to be taken literally, but, rather, that these are metaphors for the type of existence of the numerous “underground” people in the film. In Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, the “underground” is a metaphor for the irrational unconscious (Barrett 1962: 139), but in Parasite, the “underground” people are those that have been imprisoned at the lower levels of the society so long that they only feel comfortable there. The “underground” people in Parasite are keenly conscious of their “underground” existence (or Existenz). Note also that among the pictures of famous people Geun-​sae keeps on his underground walls is one of Abraham Lincoln, suggesting his hope, or, perhaps, his dream, that a “Korean Lincoln” might arise someday to free the “slaves” of Korean society from their “underground” existence. 1.6 The Plan The Kim-​family stresses that one needs a “plan” to deal with life. When Moon-​ gwang, after having been evicted from the Park home, shows up unexpectedly to request to enter into the Park-​home to retrieve her forgotten husband, Mr. Kim says, “this [Moon-​gwang getting back into the house] is not the plan.” After Mr. Kim has tied up Moon-​gwang and her husband in the hidden room downstairs, Ki-​jung asks Ki-​woo, “What is the plan?” and Ki-​woo asks “What would Min-​hyuk do in the situation?” This is odd because it is Ki-​woo himself who has caused Min-​hyuk’s plan to seduce the Park’s daughter to fail. Min-​hyuk thinks that Ki-​woo is a “loser” but, in fact, it is Min-​hyuk who is the loser (of the Park daughter) and he is a loser by virtue of his own plan. The fact that Ki-​ woo regards Min-​hyuk, who is actually a loser, as a master planner, symbolizes the fact in this upside-​down world nothing is as it seems to be. Mr. Kim tells Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung not to worry because he has a plan, but later, apparently recognizing how poorly everyone’s planning has gone, he says, “The plan that never fails is no plan.” It is, perhaps, worth noting that that this is at least akin to the Taoist theme that the true and proper “Way” is spontaneity, not intellectually planned out (Chang 1970: 169). In any case, Mr. Kim has, apparently,

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come to agree with Bergson that “The gates of the future are open” (Bergson 1946: 123), that is, that the unpredictable nature of the life inevitably, as it is said, frustrates “the best laid plans of mice and men” (Burns 1968: 153–​4). 1.7 The Meaning of Parasite One way to gain insight into the meaning of this challenging film is to locate the (or, at least, a) central character. None of the Park family, with one exception, seems the least bit interesting. Mr. and Mrs. Park are entirely superficial and are regularly fooled by the most absurd schemes. Ki-​jung’s claim that the bottom right of a picture is the schizophrenic zone would be laughed at on Oprah. The concocted story about the panties in the back seat of the car to frame Yoon is ridiculous. The Park daughter, Ki-​hye, is interested, in an entirely predictable and mundane way, in only one thing: Ki-​woo (Kevin). There is only one member of the Kim family that has any idea what is going on, namely, the young son, Da-​song. When Da-​song notices that all the Kim’s “smell” the same, he is on the verge, so to speak, of “sniffing out” the fraud being perpetrated by the Kim family. It is no wonder that Da-​song feels an affinity for American Indians. American Indian trackers, famous for their ability to follow the “scent” when a “white man” cannot, could not do better, but the rest of the Park-​family are entirely clueless. The young son, Da-​song, also notices that the flashing light in his home is tapping out Morse code signals, that is, that there are things going on in the home about which his parents and sister are entirely unaware. Perhaps he is a genius after all. However, Da-​song’s character in the film functions, usually in the background, only as the primary object of his “helicopter” mother’s obsession. Despite the fact that the alleged artistic genius Da-​song is potentially interesting in his own way, Parasite is not his story. Da-​song’s role in the film is to illustrate how clueless his parents, and, perhaps, all the adults in the film, are.2 The story does contain numerous interesting characters, Mr. Kim (the humiliated patriarch of the destitute Kim-​family), his wife Chung-​sook (an Olympic 2 It is also possible that the image of American Indians in the film symbolizes that kind of closeness to nature of the sort that only a genuine Taoist could appreciate, and the authenticity that such a closeness with nature brings with it, that is lost in our modern plastic world in which even natural smells such as sex smells must be sealed away in plastic bags. If this is true, then Da-​song’s affinity with American Indians might symbolize that as a child not yet entirely corrupted by the artificially scrubbed and perfumed modern world, he still enjoys this same closeness with nature shared by American Indians and Taoists, which enables him to “smell out” the fraud that is the Kim-​family. However, as fascinating, potentially, as this theme it, it cannot be said that it is developed within the film. The presence of this theme in the film is, therefore, left to the viewers to draw this inference.

66 McDonough silver medalist in the “hammer throw”), and Jessica (the highly intelligent but morally vacant daughter). However, there is one character of unique importance in the story. The film begins with Ki-​woo standing near his basement window trying to access the electronic signal from the family upstairs and it ends with Ki-​woo’s plan to rescue his father from his underground prison. It is Ki-​woo who several times in the film states that certain things must be looked at metaphorically. It is Ki-​woo who first gains entry to the Park family. It is Ki-​ woo, at the end of the film, who, in a dreamed plan to release his father from his “underground” existence, provides the only real retrospective on the story. His father, Ki-​taek, in his final letter from the “underground,” does express certain regrets, but provides no plan and the key is always “the plan.” There is, therefore, a sense in which Parasite is Ki-​woo’s story. One might write a story about these events from the perspective of Ki-​woo’s father, his mother, his dead sister, the Park’s, Moon-​gwang, or Moon-​gwang’s husband, or even Da-​hye, but Parasite does not do so. But if Parasite is Ki-​woo’s metaphorical story (“It’s so metaphorical”), what is it a metaphor for? Note first that there is an unrealistic dreamlike quality to the whole story in the film. The entire Kim-​family “plan” to infiltrate and con the Park-​family is simply not believable. No one in the real world is as cloistered in their perfect walled architectural bubble as the Park-​family. Jessica’s story about the schizophrenic area in the bottom right-​hand corner of the child’s painting is patently silly. Her ruse to leave her panties in the back seat of the car would, in the real world, never succeed the way it did in the film. In the real world, Mr. Park would ask the driver, Yoon, a few questions and the ruse would be exposed. The plan to frame housekeeper Moon-​gwang as a blood-​spitting tubercular victim is even sillier. This is a fantasy, not a plan. The story about several different “underground” people using the light switch to tap out Morse code messages to people above ground is unrealistic. That is for Marvel Comics, not the real world. Even Min-​hyuk’s plan, to install Ki-​woo as the Da-​hye’s tutor because Ki-​ woo is such a loser, is unrealistic. In fact, Ki-​woo is an extremely good-​looking young man, intelligent, and charming. It is no surprise when Da-​hye falls for him. In fact, this was entirely predictable. Min-​hyuk too, the allegedly more sophisticated university lad, is apparently clueless in installing such a charming lad as Ki-​woo to protect the Park daughter until he returns from university. Finally, Ki-​woo’s daydream to save the father from his basement prison by getting rich and buying the house is not even presented by the film as a realistic plan. For, in that daydream, as it is presented at the end of the film, Chung-​sook is not waiting expectantly at the top of the stairs for her husband to “just walk up the stairs.” She is wandering around outside leisurely looking at the plants. The story in Parasite is not presented as a realistic description of something

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that even could happen in the real world. All of these “plans” are as fraudulent as the “Scholar’s rock,” for, in the flood, it is found to be literally hollow, floating on the sewage water. This signified that all these alleged plans in the film are, so to speak, “hollow” and the entire story rings hollow! Parasite does not even purport to tell the literal truth any more than Kafka’s (2017) “Metamorphosis” does. Parasite is not just Ki-​woos story. It is Ki-​woos dream. It is his metaphorical portrait, of the life of the “underground” class in Korea. But if it does not purport to tell a literal truth about human life, and if it is only a dream about life, and if one can talk about the metaphorical truth of a story, what is the metaphorical truth of Ki-​woo’s dream? Parasite is a dreamlike metaphorical description of the mode of existence (Existenz) of the people who live in the underground of a heavily stratified society in which people at the lower levels can, theoretically, advance to the upper levels, but are effectively prevented from doing so, forcing them to cheat constantly to survive to a degree that even communication between the different levels becomes literally impossible. Virtually all the communications across class lines in the film are fraudulent. Since virtually everyone in the film is running a con, nothing anyone says can be taken straightforwardly. The image of Geun-​sae attempting to communicate with the outside world by banging his head against the wall to the point that it bleeds is unmistakable. That is what “communication” is in this society: banging one’s head against the wall. The ancient Greek sophist, Gorgias, who held that communication between different human beings is impossible (Waterfield 2007: 224), would recognize this world. The fact that the Kim-​family is very talented only reinforces this point. One may not approve of con-​artists, but one has to be quite intelligent to be a successful one (recall Mr. Kim’s remark to Ki-​jung that her forged university degree is Oxford University-​level). The Kim matriarch is an Olympic silver medalist. These are talented people, and yet they are stuck in an underground basement existence apartment from the beginning to the end of the film. As Ki-​woo’s totally unrealistic daydream at the end illustrates, Parasite presents a picture of a society in which the mode of existence of the underground people (and arguably that of the wealthy people as well) is fantasy (recall Mr. Park’s fantasy about the dirty panties). This is why Mr. Kim eventually realizes that the best plan is no plan. For in this kind of society, there really is “no exit” from the “hell” of “other people” (cf. Sartre, 1976). There is “no exit” from the Korean “Underground” society because the “smell” of one’s origins literally cannot be eliminated. One might present one’s perfectly forged Oxford degree to a prospective employer, and that might succeed for a while, but the employer would inevitably, so to speak, smell out the fraud. For this reason,

68 McDonough all of these species of fantasized existence in the film cannot succeed. Just as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness presents human life as a series of impossible projects (La Capra 2019: 139), Parasite presents life in the Korean “underground” as a series of impossible projects. The various con’s must, inevitably, be exposed when the ineradicable stink seeps out. Thus, when the unpleasant odoriferous truth emerges from the underground below the mindless party in the sunlit garden, the sudden confrontation with reality mercilessly destroys everyone’s fantasy existence on both sides of the alleged “line.” 2

Parasite Not a Moral or Political Film

Bong Joon-​ho has stated that the film is a critique of capitalism, specifically US capitalism, and that the presence of the American “Indians” in the film signals a critique of US imperialism (Bean 2020). However, although these themes may be in the director’s mind, they are not a substantial presence in the film itself. That is an important distinction. Literary interpretation is not psychoanalysis of the author. First, it is an odd critique of capitalism in which the poor stress how nice the rich are, and how nice they themselves would be if they too could worm their way into the wealthy class by any con possible. Second, it is an odd critique of US imperialism in which the American “Indians” appear as the completely disconnected fantasy of the child of the richest people in the film, not as a genuinely aggrieved minority. Further, Guen-​sae attacks and kills, not the evil rich “capitalist” Park-​family, but a young female member of the poor Kim family, Ki-​jung, a candidate for inclusion in Marx’s (1978) oppressed “workers of the world.” And at the very end, in his underground prison, Mr. Kim tearfully apologizes to the picture of the wealthy Mr. Park on his wall. None of this makes for a compelling critique of the alleged capitalist oppressors. Furthermore, nowhere in the film is the cause of this oppressive stratification of society identified as capitalism. Non-​capitalist societies, e.g., North Korea, are even more rigidly stratified. All “capitalist” societies must, according to Marx, have class differences (Marx 1978), but not all societies with class differences must be capitalist. The issue of capitalism may, plausibly, be said to be in the background (but only because South Korea is a paradigm of a capitalist society), but, significantly, it is not, within the film itself, identified as the cause of the calamities at the end of the film. Furthermore, if, returning to the imagery in De Morgan’s poem, every flea has other fleas upon them, ad infinitum, that is, if everyone is a parasite upon someone or other even as they have parasites feeding on them, then the obvious point of the film is not to single out one species of parasites, the capitalists,

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for special opprobrium. Rather, the theme of the film is that parasitism is universal. Borrowing some of Heidegger’s (1996: Part i, Chap. 2) language, one might say that the theme of the film is that for living organisms, Being is Being-​ a-​parasite. It would, therefore, be unfair to single out the capitalists for special opprobrium, for, if they are parasites, this is not because they are uniquely evil, but because parasitism is universal. One might put this by saying that the theme of the film is not social or political. It is ontological (or perhaps cosmological). Just as Nietzsche, with considerable fanfare, makes the ontological claim that life just is will to power (Jaspers 1966: 295ff), Parasite makes the ontological claim that life just is parasitism. And just as Nietzsche advises one not to hide from this fundamental ontological truth, not to romanticize or sugar-​coat existence but to face it (Zumbrunnen 2002), Parasite tells one not to romanticize the fact that life just is parasitism. Rather, look reality in the face, in all of its ugliness, at least for the space of the film! It is also significant that the film does not make any moral judgments on the various characters or social issues in the film. There is no moral voice standing above the fray in the film, no “chorus” or no moral philosopher that judges that the Kim’s are bad and the Park’s good or vice versa. Nor is there any social reformer in Parasite that calls upon the members of this unjust stratified society to rise up because they “have nothing to lose but their chains” (Marx 1978). The only thing the Kim’s want is to join the wealthy class (no heroic proletariat revolutionaries there). We, looking in from the outside, might want to make moral judgments but it is imperative to see that it is not done within the film. Indeed, it could not, consistently, be done within the film. For, if life just is parasitism, if, that is, parasitism is an ineradicable feature of the cosmos, then it makes no more sense to say that parasitism is morally good or bad or that one ought or ought not to be a parasite than it would make sense to claim that predation (lions eating lambs) is morally good or bad or that lions ought or ought not to eat lambs. If life just is parasitism and if even parasites have parasites living upon them and so on ad infinitum, then parasitism is no more a moral issue than Newton’s laws are a moral issue. This explains why, in contrast with most Western films, it is never explained what happened to the surviving members of the Park-​family, the wife, daughter, and son, who have seen their father murdered in front of their eyes and who have lost their ideal home. The final scenes in the film deal entirely with the effects of this violent incident, initiated by Guen-​sae, on the Kim-​family. That is, the final scenes deal with Ki-​woo’s fantasy to accumulate enough money to buy the beautiful, secluded fantasy house for himself some day and rescue his father from the basement. No claim is ever made that this plan is either morally good or bad. If the film is, so to speak, existential rather than moral, there

70 McDonough could not consistently be any such moral judgments rendered within the film. The film describes the way the cosmos is, and, apparently, must be, not the way it ought to be. Nor is there ever any call within the film to change to a “more just” society. Since Parasite does not attempt a moral evaluation of the events it need not explain what happens to the surviving members of the Park-​family. That is, Parasite is not a Western “morality play.” There is no final resolution, as there is in so many Western films, in which the events in the film are tied up in a nice neat bundle at the end in which “justice” is served. Parasite is not a Western film and to judge it against that background is to misunderstand it.3 3

A Phenomenology of the Mundane Fantasy Existence of Nietzsche’s “Last Man”

Parasite has been called a tragedy, but it is nothing like a “Greek tragedy” in which deep character flaws in one or more of the characters lead inexorably to a fated tragic outcome. There are no grand characters with deep character flaws in Parasite, no Agamemnon, no Oedipus, no Antigone, etc. Nor is one advised to attempt to find an Achilles in the film. Parasite is, putting it mildly, not a film about events in “the [ancient Greek] age of heroes” (Nelson and Green 2008: 68–​77). On the contrary, all of the characters in Parasite, all of their faults, and even all of their virtues, are entirely mundane. The rich Park’s most grand aim is to 3 Parasite can be fruitfully contrasted with standard American television show where there is virtually always a just moral resolution at the end. The Rifleman is a good example. See the The Internet Movie Database. url: https://​www.imdb.com/​title/​tt0051​308 “The Rifleman” (Chuck Connors) fires his weapon in anger every week like clockwork, but in each case he does so only to right some wrong. There is always a “good guy” and a “bad guy.” The “bad guy” puts the “good guys” in danger. “The Rifleman” appears and rights this wrong by protecting the “good guys” with his weapon. The “good people” are generally the weak, who are oppressed by evil strong people, and, therefore, they need a suitably strong savior (Connors). Even the sheriff in “The Rifleman’s” town, Mica, is, oddly, a weak old man who needs to be regularly protected by “The Rifleman,” a private citizen who lives on a farm well outside the town. Some sheriff! Each show ends with a tidy moral lesson that “The Rifleman” can give to his innocent young son, Mark, who happens to be just the right age for a moral lesson in the important subject of manhood and the proper use of weapons. One might be forgiven for thinking that in The Rifleman one is given, in dramatic form, the substance of the weekly Sunday school sermon. If the reader is not familiar with The Rifleman, there are numerous videos available on youtube.com/​One might also see the brief introductory video at https://​ www.imdb.com/​video/​vi291​3648​921?pla​ylis​tId=​tt0051​308&ref_​=​tt_​ov​_​vi.

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turn their baby son into the next Van Gogh by employing a fake art teacher who talks psychobabble. The Kim family members are all con artists but they are also intelligent and motivated. Indeed, it is a shame such intelligent and industrious people have been put into a societal “basement” where they are driven to become con-​artists instead of choosing more honourable and productive pursuits. The Park family members, except for the little boy who appears in the background of the film, are all condescending, clueless and presumptuous, but they are also intelligent enough to be conventionally successful and explicitly said to be “nice.” Both the Kim’s and the Parks have common virtues and vices. But there is nothing cosmic or deep in any of Parasite’s characters. In a sense, that is the point. Parasite presents a human cosmos that is entirely shallow. One is accustomed to be presented with a “phenomenology” of rather grand regions of being, the “world” of values, the “world” of mathematical objects, the “world” of the Holy and the Idea of God (Smith 1977), but why should phenomenology be limited to the grand? Why should one not present a phenomenology of mundane existence? After all, that is what Heidegger (1996: Part i) does, in conceptual form, in his account of inauthentic existence in Being and Time. Parasite does something similar in cinematic form. As a first approximation, Parasite presents a “phenomenology,” against a Korean background, of Nietzsche’s (1977: Prologue) “last man,” that is, of us, of what we have all become, in all of our inauthentic 20th-​21st century fantasy existences. It is, to be sure, a kind of odd “description,” given its odd dreamlike quality, but it is still a description of this kind of modern mundane human existence. Note that the description of this “existence” is “dreamlike” because the existence of these “underground people” is itself dreamlike. Further, even though this description is set in a Korean context, certain features of it can be universalized to the mundane fantasy existence of the “last man” (and woman) everywhere, e.g., to the mundane mode of existence of those trapped in the “basement” of America’s inner cities (or, perhaps, the basement of the towers on Wall Street). Parasite presents this portrait of mundane human existence and says: this is our world. The “world” it describes is not an attractive one, but, then again, neither is the “world” we enjoy nightly on the Discovery channel in which a pride of lions rips apart and eats a young springbok while it is still alive. Further, Parasite does not judge or even presume that it is possible to change it any more than the Discovery channel judges the “world” of the lions on the African savannah or calls upon them to change their savage behavior. In the first place, it is the job of the phenomenologist merely to describe a “world” or “region” of being, not to judge or change it (Husserl 1970). In the second place, the lions will not listen and neither will we. If the implicit thesis in the film is correct, then we cannot change. For, if life is just parasitism,

72 McDonough then we can no more change than a lion can change its behavior by watching a film or attending a lecture. One can rail against Being, as one can rail against an omnipotent God, but it will change nothing. If the thesis in the film is correct, we will attend cocktail parties or seminars in which, referring to the film, we make witty comments about the universality of parasitism, we will virtuously bemoan the universal fact of parasitism, and then as soon as we leave the cocktail party or seminar, we shall proceed to resume the usual parasitical behavior on the other living beings with whom we come in contact, perhaps the taxi driver who takes us home. Parasite simply describes a Korean version of the “underground” “hell” of the mundane existence of Nietzsche’s “last man” (and woman) from which there is literally “no exit” because 1.) Parasitism is the fundamental fact of human existence and because 2.) It is a fact of nature that the smell of one’s station in the hierarchy of parasites cannot ever be completely eradicated and always gives one away. Perhaps it is some comfort that the wealthy Park’s will be parasites as well on some living organisms higher up in the hierarchy, perhaps on the Bill Gates of the world and will smell like radishes or boiled rags to those in the billionaire class, just as the Kim’s smell like radishes or boiled rags to the Park’s. In this cosmos, everyone’s fate is the same, to prey on others and to be preyed upon by some parasite(s) or other “and so on ad infinitum.”

References

Barrett, William. 1962. Irrational Man. New York: Doubleday Anchor. Bean, Travis. “Capitalism Gone Wild: The Ending of Parasite Explained.” Forbes. January 30, 2020 url: https://​www.for​bes.com/​sites/​tra​visb​ean/​2020/​01/​30/​cap​ital​ ism-​gone-​wild-​the-​end​ing-​of-​paras​ite-​explai​ned/​#7724d​4766​dbd. Bergson, Henri. 1946. The Creative Mind. New York: The Philosophical Library. Burns, Robert. 1968. “To a Mouse, upon turning up her nest with a plough, November 1785.” The Poem: An Anthology. Stanley B. Greenfield and A. Kingsley Weatherhead, (ed.’s). New York: Appleton-​Century-​Crofts. Chang, Chung­yuan. 1970. Creativity and Taoism: A Study of Chinese Philosophy, Art, and Poetry. New York: Harper. De Morgan, Augustus. 1871. A Budget of Paradoxes. Longman’s, Green and Company. Elias, Thomas, and Hu, Kemin. 2014. Spirit Stones. New York: Abbeville Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time. Joan Stambaugh, (trans.) New York: suny Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. Cartesian Meditations. Dorian Cairns, (trans.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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Jaspers, Karl. 1966. Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. Kafka, Franz. 2017. The Metamorphosis. David Wyllie, (trans.). Legend Press. La Capra, Dominick. 2019. A Preface to Sartre. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Marx, Karl. 1978. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” The Marx-​Engels Reader, 2nd edition. Robert Tucker,(ed.). New York: w.w. Norton and Co. Nelson, Stephanie, and Grene, David. 2008. God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1977. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Walter Kaufmann, (trans.) In: The Portable Nietzsche. New York: Penguin. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. 2015. “No Exit.” Stuart Gilbert, (trans.) New York: Knopf Doubleday. Smith, John. 1977. “The Experience of the Holy and the idea of God” (pp. 295–​306). Phenomenology in America, James Edie, (ed.). Chicago: Quadrangle Books. Waterfield, Robin. 2017. The First Philosophers: Presocratics and Sophists. Oxford University Press. Zumbrunnen, John. 2002. “Courage in the Face of Reality”: Nietzsche’s Admiration for Thucydides. Polity. 35 (2): 237–​263.

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Mice and Cockroaches

Parasite through Nietzsche and Dostoevsky Paolo Stellino In one of the central scenes of Parasite, while the Kim family is eating and drinking in the Parks’ living room, Ki-​taek, the father, observes: “Rich people are naïve. No resentments. No creases on them.” Resentment is precisely what characterizes, from a psychological point of view, the members of the Kim family, especially the father. Moved by their feelings of envy and social injustice, they succeed through dishonesty and trickery in living a parasitic life at the expense of the Park family. However, despite their best efforts in pretending to be what they are not, there is one thing which betrays their real condition: their smell. Bong’s portrayal of the Kim family recalls, in many respects, Nietzsche’s characterization of the slaves in the first essay of the Genealogy of Morality. In turn, Nietzsche’s characterization of the slaves and, more generally, of “men of ressentiment” cannot be understood without taking into consideration the profound influence that the reading of the French translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground had on him (see Stellino 2015: 37–​55). In the following, I will point out the several analogies between Bong’s Parasite, Dostoevsky’s Notes and Nietzsche’s Genealogy, focusing attention on hierarchies and resentment (§1), physical and moral undergrounds (§2), smells and lines (§3), animals and underground psyches (§4), and endings (§5). 1

Hierarchies and Resentment

In his 1915 study on the role played by resentment in the make-​up of morals, Max Scheler gave the following concise definition of resentment: Ressentiment is a self-​poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and

© Paolo Stellino, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_008

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corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. scheler 2007: 29

The three main aspects of resentment emphasized by Scheler in his definition (the repression of one’s own feelings, the tendency to indulge in self-​delusion, and the arousal of feelings such as envy and revenge) can be all found –​in varying degrees –​in Dostoevsky’s underground man, in Nietzsche’s men of ressentiment, and in Bong’s portrayal of the Kim family, especially the father. In all three instances, the feeling of resentment is caused by well-​definite and immutable hierarchies that arouse feelings of envy and humiliation as well as a desire for revenge in the lower class. The underground man is only all too aware of his low social condition. He is ashamed of his poverty, which is revealed to everyone by his old, shabby, worn-​out and stained clothes. These clothes rob him of his dignity and prevent him from being considered on an equal footing in the eyes of high society. It is precisely the self-​awareness of being seen as a “a foul, obscene fly” by the whole world that torments him and arouses in him a feeling of “ceaseless, unbearable humiliation” (Dostoevsky 2004: 50). The dinner with his former schoolfellows (second part of the Notes) gives a good example of this. The underground man in particular, feels humiliated by the way in which Zverkov, a rich and successful officer in the army, treats him. Zverkov’s attitude is condescending and patronizing at first, but then, as the underground man becomes more insolent, turns into indifference, disdain and contempt. In Zverkov’s eyes, the underground man is like “a little bug” (71), which is so insignificant that one can never feel offended by it. Indeed, when the underground man apologizes for having offended him, Zverkov brutally replies: “I’ll have you know, my dear sir, that you could never under any circumstances offend me!” (75). Social distance and hierarchies are even more pronounced in the first essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy. At the origin of the antithesis “good” and “bad” there is the pathos of nobility and distance, that is, “the continuing and predominant feeling of complete and fundamental superiority of a higher ruling kind in relation to a lower kind, to those ‘below’” (Nietzsche 2006a: 12). The nobles see themselves as “good” and define by contrast everything which is low, common and plebeian as “bad” (schlecht). In this perspective, language becomes a manifestation of power, and hierarchies are the external signs of power ­relations. In order to subvert this relation of power, the Jews bring about a reversal of the aristocratic value equation. The poor, the miserable, and the powerless are now the good ones, whereas the rich, the noble and the powerful are turned into the evil (böse) ones. In doing this, the Jews are moved by

76 Stellino “the most entrenched priestly vengefulness” as well as “the most unfathomable hatred (the hatred of the powerless)” (Nietzsche 2006a: 17). Influenced by the reading of the French translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, the word that Nietzsche choses in order to summarize the slaves’ poisonous feelings of envy, hatred, and vengefulness, is the French term ressentiment. Well-​definite and fixed hierarchies are also a typical feature of Bong’s films. This can be clearly seen already in Bong’s debut feature film, Barking Dogs Never Bites. It is, however, in Snowpiercer that hierarchies and relations of power constitute the most evident background of the narrative. The perpetually running train (a clear metaphor for neoliberal capitalism), in which the survivors of a new ice age must coexist, is divided into front and tail sections. The bright and somewhat extravagant front sections are for the elite, whereas the squalid and dark tail sections are for the poor. Most importantly, the social line that divides the rich from the poor cannot be crossed. Everyone has the duty to accept and keep his or her preordained position. As Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton) puts it in the reprimand speech that she delivers to the passengers of the tail sections: “When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.” Although in Parasite this social determinism is attenuated –​as Nam Lee points out, “the film implies that Ki-​taek, Geun-​sae (the basement dweller), and the wealthy Mr Park all may have belonged to the same middle class in the past” (Lee 2020: 142) –​the social distance that divides the rich Park family from the poor Kim family is nevertheless huge. Like Minister Mason, Mr Park repeatedly emphasizes the importance that his employees do not cross the invisible line that separate them from him and his family. “I can’t stand people who cross the line,” Mr Park confesses to Ki-​taek. Ki-​taek himself never crosses the line, but his smell does –​the semi-​basement smell that one can smell when a rag is boiled or when one rides on the subway, as Mr Park puts it, powering through right into the back seat. What determines Ki-​taek’s final explosion of resentment is, however, not so much the absolute disproportion between the wealth of the Park family and the poverty of his own family, but rather the constant humiliations that he is forced to endure: from the man that urinates in front of his semi-​basement window in the initial part of the film to the many occasions in which the Parks unconsciously show their unvoluntary disgust for their proximity with him. All these humiliations, which regularly remind him of his low social condition, his poverty and his failure in securing a dignifying living condition for his family, inevitably arouse in him a feeling of resentment that is eventually channelled against Mr Park.

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Physical and Moral Undergrounds

The arousal of feelings of resentment caused by well-​definite and polarized hierarchies, social distance, frequent humiliations, and the related self-​ awareness of one’s low place in society, is just one of the many analogies that can be found when comparing Dostoevsky’s Notes, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, and Bong’s Parasite. Among the most evident similarities, there is the theme of the underground. As Nam Lee points out, in Bong’s films, space “plays a hugely significant role in the narrative construction. […] space is not simply a vehicle for containing the story but instead serves an important dramatic function” (Lee 2020: 58). Bong shows a particular fascination with undergrounds, which are the sites of crime, horror and violence. Basements is where dogs are hanged or cooked (Barking Dogs Never Bite), suspects are tortured by the police (Memories of Murder and Mother), toxic chemicals are dumped down a drain or the bodies of the victims are collected by the monster (The Host), child labor is exploited (Snowpiercer) and animals are forced to mate or slaughtered (Okja). Parasite is the film in which the physical space of the underground acquires the most importance in the narrative construction. The analogy between Dostoevsky’s and Bong’s underground is so patent, that several reviews of Bong’s film explicitly emphasize this link in their titles.1 These reviews, however, seldom explore the depth of this analogy. The underground man writes his notes from the underground, which he describes as “loathsome, stinking” (Dostoevsky: 12). His room is “wretched, bad, on the edge of the city” (12). The thought that Liza, the prostitute which he meets in the brothel, might pay him a visit torments him because he is ashamed of his poverty, which is visible both from the clothes he wears as well as the furniture of his room (the “oilcloth sofa of mine, with the stuffing hanging out of it!” (100). Similarly, the Kim family lives in a relatively dark semi-​underground with small street-​level windows, located on a deprived neighbourhood. The stained walls of the flat bear evident signs of dampness, the furniture is old, and the tiny bathroom has a toilet on a high ledge. When Min-​hyuk, the college student, pays a visit to the Kims, Ki-​woo (Ki-​taek’s son) is clearly embarrassed and tells his friend: “We could’ve met outside, why come here?” The analogy between Dostoevsky’s Notes and Bong’s Parasite extends even further. Indeed, in both works there is a second underground, namely that in which Liza, the prostitute from the Notes, and Geun-​Sae, the former

1 See, for instance, Giordano (2019) and Kang (2020). See also McDonough’s chapter in this volume.

78 Stellino housemaid’s husband from Parasite, live. In both cases, this second underground is even darker and more squalid than the first one. Liza’s brothel room, almost totally dark, is described by the underground man as “narrow, small, and low, encumbered by a huge wardrobe, and littered with cartons, rags, and all sorts of castoff clothing” (Dostoevsky: 81). Entering it is like entering “an underground cellar, damp and musty” (81). Similarly, the underground in which Geun-​Sae hides himself from the loan sharks is a very deep and dark atomic bunker. The basic and poor furniture, the scant illumination, the big drainpipes, and the loose electrical wires along the dirty grey walls, all contribute to give the viewers not only a claustrophobic feeling of oppression, but also a sensation of complete degradation. It is also noteworthy that in Dostoevsky’s Notes, in Nietzsche’s Genealogy, and in Bong’s Parasite physical degradation corresponds to a certain degree to moral degradation. The anonymous author of the notes has become so used to the underground in which he lives that he has become a man with an “underground” way of moral thinking and feeling. His moral corruption is the consequence of a voluntary reclusion in the underground and the subsequent loss of contact with the so-​called “living life.” In the Genealogy, Nietzsche takes up Dostoevsky’s imagery of the underground and metaphorically describes the place where ideals are fabricated on earth as a workshop so dark that one cannot see anything. The darkness of the workshop is a clear metaphor for the moral darkness of men of ressentiment who tell lies and clandestinely forge false values (the slaves’ revaluation of aristocratic values), mendaciously turning “anything black into whiteness, milk and innocence” (Nietzsche 2006a: 28). Moral corruption is also a peculiar characteristic of the Kims, who have no scruples about forging a document, assuming false identities, sabotaging the chauffeur and the housemaid and replacing them, leading a parasitic life at the expenses of Mr Park, and leaving the senseless and bleeding housemaid and her husband tied up in the underground bunker during a whole night. It is precisely this negative moral connotation of the Kim family that allows Bong to subvert the typical dichotomy rich/​evil versus poor/​good, exactly in the way in which in the Genealogy Nietzsche subverts the dichotomy masters/​ evil versus slaves/​good. Geun-​Sae’s moral connotation is certainly more positive than that of the Kim family. Although he is one of the parasites of the film, he shows a sincere gratitude and deep respect to Mr Park for feeding and housing him –​respect metaphorically conveyed by the act of nodding when, bound, he hits the switches with his head. However, even in his case the physical space in which he lives seems to have had a bad influence on his moral character, for he got so used to his life in the underground that he is now unable to see how morally

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degrading his life is. Dostoevsky’s Liza seems to provide the only example that shows how moral debasement does not necessary follows from physical degradation. Indeed, despite the humiliation that the underground man makes her suffer, she is still able to genuinely love and forgive him. It is precisely this love that provides her with the possibility for a moral resurrection and regeneration, as the underground man points out (Dostoevsky: 115). 3

Smells and Lines

Physical spaces are the external signs of social hierarchies. The most evident example of this is the contrast between the spacious and bright house of the Park family and the small and dark semi-​basement of the Kim family. Poor people cannot afford high rents and, therefore, live in degrading conditions, getting used to permanent dampness, lack of light and bugs. None of this seems to be of the Parks’ concern, who lead their privileged life protected by the high walls and trees of their garden and far from the suburbs in which families like the Kims are housed. There is, however, one element that reminds them of the poverty still existing out there: the smell of their employees. The symbolic function of smell is emphasized not only by Bong, but also by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. In Dostoevsky’s Notes, smell is one of the main connotations of poverty and of both physical and moral degradation. The underground is by definition loathsome and stinking (Dostoevsky 12). In the Haymarket, the body of a young dead prostitute is carried out of a filthy and stinking basement floor, with trash all around (83). This is precisely how Liza risks ending its final days, when she will no longer be of use to those who exploit her body. As the underground man warns her: “They’ll shove you, on the point of croaking, into the stinkingest corner of the basement –​dark, damp” (94). Like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche too emphasizes the link between physical and “moral” smell. Interestingly, however, in the Genealogy it is not the physical place that impregnates the people who live there with its smell (as it is the case in both the Notes and Parasite), but rather it is the men of ressentiment’s rotten moral nature that makes the air so unbreathable (Nietzsche 2006a: 25). Bad air is also what one breathes in the dark workshop where ideals are fabricated. In this case, the smell is a direct consequence of the mendacity of men of ressentiment, who turn their impotence, inoffensiveness, and inability to take revenge into virtues. The smell is so strong than one can barely bear it: “But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated –​it seems to me just to stink of lies” (28).

80 Stellino In Parasite, smell serves two basic functions: on the one hand, it is a clear metaphor of class difference; on the other, it has an important dramatic function, since it triggers the explosion of Ki-​taek’s resentment and leads to the final denouement. It is noteworthy that the first member of the Parks to detect the smell of the Kims is Da-​Song, who is considered by his own mother to be “eccentric and easily distracted.” Similarly, Ki-​Jung (Ki-​taek’s daughter) is the only one to understand that it is useless to use different soap or laundry soap and fabric softener because, as in Dostoevsky’s Notes, they and their clothes are so impregnated of the semi-​basement’s smell, that only by leaving their home would they be able to lose the smell. The semi-​basement smell that Mr Park cannot stand, is the smell of the poor people –​the people who live in basements or semi-​basements and daily ride the subway. Considered from this perspective, Parasite constitutes a perfect cinematographic representation of what Žižek writes in his book Violence: For the middle class, the lower classes smell, their members do not wash regularly enough –​and this brings us to one of the possible definitions of what Neighbour means today: a Neighbour is one who by definition smells. This is why today deodorants and soaps are crucial –​they make neighbours at least minimally tolerable: I am ready to love my neighbours … provided they don’t smell too bad. žižek 2009: 141–​42

For Mr Park, Ki-​taek’s and Geun-​Sae’s smell is precisely too bad. As we have seen, however, this smell cannot simply be removed using soaps and deodorants, for it is the ultimate consequence of their respective life in the semi-​ basement and the underground atomic bunker. In this sense, Bong seems to add a more pessimistic note to Žižek’s passage: smell cannot be removed because the social differences and injustices created by the neoliberal capitalist society we live in cannot be erased –​unless the whole system explodes, as the train in Snowpiercer does at the end of the film, but this is rather a utopian dream. Thus, however much the members of the Kim family may pretend to be who they are not, namely high-​qualified employees, their smell will always betray and expose them for what they are: social parasites. The horizontal line that divides the upper from the lower class (the same line that Mr Park’s employees should not cross) is represented throughout the film by several symbolic vertical lines. In order to arrive to the Parks’ house, Ki-​ woo has to climb a very steep slope –​a metaphor that stands not only for the social ascendancy he naively hopes to achieve, but also for the distance that separates him from the wealthy Park family. The same distance that divides

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the rich from the poor is variously symbolized in the film through the key metaphor of the stairs. As Bong explained in various occasions, Parasite can be considered a “staircase movie.”2 The longest stairs are those that lead Ki-​taek and his children –​under the flood and in a kind of descent into hell –​from the rich neighbourhood where the Parks’ house is located to the poor suburbs where they live. As Bong points out, the symbolic significance of the stairs lies in the fact that “you can go up them or down them, that they can bridge gaps or keep folks separated” (Fear 2019). It is noteworthy that the same use of symbolic vertical lines can be found both in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. In the Notes, the underground man uses the metaphor of the descent in order to show Liza what kind of future awaits her if she continues to practice her profession of prostitute. The gradual transition from an upper to a lower floor symbolises both social (as in Parasite) and physical decline (sickness): “At any rate, in a year you’ll be worth less […]. So you’ll go from here to somewhere lower, another house. A year later –​to a third house, always lower and lower, and in about seven years you’ll reach the Haymarket and the basement” (Dostoevsky: 84). Nietzsche’s use of the metaphor of the descent is very different from that of Dostoevsky and Bong. Indeed, although even in this case descent symbolizes decline, this decline is neither social nor physical, but rather cultural and anthropological, and concerns the modern European man as a whole. According to Nietzsche’s interpretation, one of the consequences of the slaves’ revaluation of values and the triumph of Christian morality is the breeding of “a tame and civilized man, a household pet, out of the beast of prey ‘man’” (Nietzsche 2006a: 24). Man is deprived of his strong and dangerous instincts and turned into a “teeming mass of worms” (24). In Nietzsche’s view, this steady decline represents the greatest danger for modern Europe: Today we see nothing that wants to expand, we suspect that things will just continue to decline […] Right here is where the destiny of Europe lies –​in losing our fear of man we have also lost our love for him, our respect for him, our hope in him and even our will to be man. The sight of man now makes us tired –​what is nihilism today if it is not that? … We are tired of man … (25)

2 See, for instance, the Cannes Press Conference available on YouTube https://​www.yout​ube .com/​watch?v=​RGpb​AhJS​_​9E.

82 Stellino The so-​called “last man,” the decadent, modern man who represents the opposite of the overman, is the ultimate consequence of this cultural and anthropological decline. As will be shown in the last section, Mr Park and his family provide a fitting example of this kind of man. 4

Animals and Underground Psyches

Another very important analogy that links the Notes, the Genealogy, and Parasite, is the symbolic reference made by their respective authors to different kinds of animals. The imagery of the animals is particularly rich in Bong’s film: a bug, dogs, shrimps, and a fly appear in the film. To this, one can add the metaphorical use of cockroaches and what Ki-​Jung says of Moon-​gwang: “She may look like a sheep, but inside, she’s a fox.” The most obvious reference to the animal kingdom is, however, the one contained in the title Parasite –​although the plural form “parasites” would seem more appropriate. Indeed, the film shows such an abundance of parasites that it could be seen as a perfect representation of what Michel Serres writes in his study The Parasite: “We parasite each other and live amidst parasites” (Serres 1982: 10). A parasite is an organism that lives off other organisms, or hosts, to survive. As Oxana Timofeeva points out, “a parasitic relation is not mutual. A parasite never gives anything back” (Timofeeva 2016: 94). Thus, strictly speaking, there are no parasites in Parasite –​for even Geun-​Sae, who lives in the atomic bunker and is housed and fed by Mr Park, repays his debt by turning on the light switches. In a looser sense, however, all the main characters represented in the film are parasites –​for they all depend on others to survive. Throughout Bong’s film, the metaphor of the parasite intertwines with the symbolic imagery of subterranean animals. This is not surprising, given that both the Kims and Geun-​Sae lead underground lives. The association between subterranean animals and the Kims is made explicit already in one of the first images of the film, when Ki-​taek chases away a stink bug lying on the kitchen table, while Ki-​woo tries to hack the neighbors’ Wi-​Fi. The implication is clear: both the bug and the Kims lead a parasitic life. The insect that best represents the Kims (especially Ki-​taek), however, is not the bug, but rather the cockroach. When the Kims get drunk in the Parks’ living room, Chung-​Sook, Ki-​taek’s wife, makes fun of his husband by highlighting his cowardly nature: “suppose Park walked through that door now. What about your dad? He’d run and hide like a cockroach.” Ironically, this is precisely what happens few minutes later, when Ki-​taek, Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung hide under the living room’s table –​or even more explicitly, when afterwards they sneak out

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from under the table in the darkness (on this occasion, Ki-​taek even crawls like a worm). Subsequently, they escape the Parks’ house through the garage. To represent this scene, the camera initially moves forward, while the three run downhill. It then tilts down, ending on a close view of the water that flows into a sewer drain, as symbolizing that the rain is washing the underground animals that have come out at night off the streets of the rich neighbourhood.3 It is noteworthy that Bong encourages the viewer to associate the cockroach not only with the Kims, particularly Ki-​taek, but also with Geun-​sae. Indeed, when the latter can finally come out of its hiding place, after Moon-​gwang has filmed the Kims and threatened to expose their ruse to the Parks, he climbs the stairs on all fours, precisely as a cockroach. Dostoevsky’s Notes also abound in symbolic references to animals. The underground man is treated or feels like a fly (Dostoevsky 2004: 47, 50), whereas Zverkov silently studies him as if he were “a little bug” (71). In the initial part of his notes, the underground man also confesses that he never managed to become even an insect (Dostoevsky 2004: 8). Furthermore, in order to describe the antithesis between the normal man and the man of heightened conscious, the underground man, who represents a typical example of the latter type of man, explains that the man of heightened conscious “honestly regards himself, with all his heightened consciousness, as a mouse and not a man” (Dostoevsky 2004: 11–​12). It is, therefore, not surprising that the underground man has a propensity for dark, subterranean, and hidden places. Like a mouse, he seeks shelter in his corner.4 Analogously, Nietzsche’s man of ressentiment “loves dark corners, secret paths and back-​doors, everything secretive appeals to him as being his world, his security, his comfort” (Nietzsche 2006a: 21). Dostoevsky’s influence on Nietzsche is even clearer in the latter’s characterization of men of ressentiment as “cellar rats [Kellerthiere] full of revenge and hatred” (Nietzsche 2006a: 28). The analogy between Parasite, the Notes and the Genealogy is not limited to the correspondence between places (undergrounds or semi-​basements) and the symbolic reference to animals that live in there (bugs, cockroaches, and mice), but extends even further. Indeed, the underground men represented in

3 It would be interesting to develop via Dostoevsky the multiple analogies that exist between Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Bong’s Parasite. Indeed, as Andrew J. Swensen recalls, “Scorsese approached Paul Schrader specifically with the intention of adapting Notes from Underground into a film” (Swensen 2001: 268). In one iconic scene, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) writes in his diary: “All the animals come out at night […] Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.” The flood in Parasite seems to have precisely this function. 4 The word “corner” (угол) is often repeated in the Notes.

84 Stellino these three works seem to share certain psychological traits that fully justify the symbolic use of the animal imagery made by the respective authors. We already saw that resentment can be found in varying degrees in Dostoevsky’s underground man, in Nietzsche’s men of ressentiment, and in Bong’s portrayal of Ki-​taek. Cowardice, mendaciousness, a certain malicious cleverness, and the tendency to self-​delusion and daydreaming are other psychological traits that characterize not only the underground man and the men of ressentiment, but also the members of the Kim family, particularly Ki-​taek. Of all these traits, the tendency to self-​delusion and daydreaming is perhaps the most interesting one. In the underground man, this tendency has several causes, among which a heightened consciousness, a profound inability to act, and a terrible amour-​propre, which leads him to compensate in his imagination for the several humiliations he experiences. Like Dostoevsky’s man of heightened consciousness, the slaves from the Genealogy are essentially unable, due to their weakness, to take revenge on their oppressors. Being “denied the proper response of action” and moved by an insatiable resentment, they compensate for their situation “only with imaginary revenge,” that is, giving birth to values (Nietzsche 2006a: 20). The members of the Kim family as well compensate with their imagination for their low social condition and the humiliations they have to experience –​as happens, for instance, when they get drunk in the Parks’ living room and start daydreaming about the future’s marriage between Ki-​woo and Da-​hye, Mr Park’s daughter. The ending of the film also confirms this tendency to daydream. When all hope is lost, Ki-​woo writes a letter to his father, unrealistically vowing to earn enough money to one day purchase the former Parks’ house and reunite with him. 5

Endings

Both the Notes’ and Parasite’s endings are bitter. The novel and the film have a circular structure: in both cases, we end up where we started, namely in the underground and in the semi-​basement, respectively.5 The underground man, unable to love Liza (because for him, love simply means tyranny and moral subjugation), misses one of the few opportunities he has to return to “living life” and goes back to his sad, solitary life in the underground. The Notes end 5 A further analogy is suggested by the falling snow. When the underground man looks for Liza in the street, it is already too late. The young lady has gone forever, and he stands alone in the darkness with the snow falling heavily. In Parasite as well Ki-​woo stands alone in the dark living room, while outside snow covers the deserted road.

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abruptly and although we, readers, do not know the rest of the story, we can easily suppose that the underground man spends the remaining part of his life in his stinking underground. Parasite’s ending is even more tragic. Ki-​Jung dies and Ki-​taek hides in the atomic bunker, while Ki-​woo daydreams of a better future. Even in this case, we, viewers, do not know the rest of the story, but we have every reason to believe that what Ki-​woo imagines will never become reality –​or is at least highly improbable. The bitter implication is that daydreaming is the only thing the lower class has left. The pessimistic character of Parasite’s ending is even more patent if compared with that of Snowpiercer. As Nam Lee points out, in Parasite “a revolution, as in Snowpiercer, is no longer imaginable” (Lee 2020: 142). The linear progression from the tail to the front sections of the train in Snowpiercer is replaced in Parasite by an opposite vertical descent from the Parks’ rich house to the underground (be it the semi-​basement, as in the case of Chung-​sook and Ki-​woo, or the atomic bunker, as in the case of Ki-​taek). At the same time, the Marxist class struggle between upper and lower class is replaced by the Darwinian fight for survival between the social parasites. These are no longer able to stand together and help each other. Both the Notes and Parasite thus confirm what Nietzsche knew better than anyone: at the end, it all comes down to power relations (that is, in Nietzsche’s language, to impose one’s own will to power over others) –​not only between masters and slaves or rich and poor, but also between members of the same social class or even of the same family (as, for instance, in the case of Mr Park’s relation with his wife). Being humiliated by the way in which his schoolfellows treated him, the underground man needs to unload the offense onto someone else. This person happens to be Liza. Instead of sympathizing with her given their common misfortunes, the underground man prefers to exercise his power on the helpless prostitute. As he himself confesses to Liza in a fit of rage: “I’d been humiliated, so I, too, wanted to humiliate; they’d ground me down like a rag, so I, too, wanted to show my power …” (Dostoevsky: 111) Analogously, when Chung-​sook discovers that Geun-​sae has been hiding in the atomic bunker with the aid of his wife, she shows no signs of sympathy towards them: she threatens to call the police and refuses Moon-​gwang’s attempt to establish a connection on the basis of their similar social condition (to Moon-​gwang, who begs her not to call the police “as fellow members of the needy,” she answers “I’m not needy!,” thus firmly pointing out the social distance that divide them. Just as Mr Park does not want his employees to cross the line existing between him and them, so Chung-​sook does not want Moon-​gwang to call her “sis”). When the power relations are reversed, Moon-​ gwang shows no less lack of empathy: she threatens to send the video, in which

86 Stellino the true identity of the Kims is revealed to the Parks and refuses to be called “sis” by Chung-​sook. Only at the very end of the film, when Mr Park holds his nose at dying Geun-​sae, Ki-​taek is able to identify with the latter and understands that, after all, their social condition is not so dissimilar. However, this is too late: Geun-​sae dies, and he replaces him as a basement dweller (see Lee 2020: 144). Of the three works considered in this article, the Genealogy is perhaps the one that is the most optimistic. Both the first and the second essay end on a positive note. In particular, according to the utopian conclusion of the second essay, some time “the redeeming man of great love and contempt,” the “man of the future” (Nietzsche 2006a: 66), will come and redeem us, not only from the Christian ideal, but also from nihilism. It is, however, a fact that this utopian longing for the future overman contrasts sharply with the merciless diagnosis of modern Europe’s décadence that Nietzsche develops, above all, in the writings and posthumous fragments of the late period. It is symptomatic that when in the Prologue of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra speaks to the crowd of both the overman and the last man (the modern man who has no goal, no creative aspiration, settling for a comfortable and uniform existence), the crowd makes fun of the overman and asks Zarathustra to give them the last man (Nietzsche 2006b: 10). Considered from a Nietzschean perspective, the Parks provide a fitting example of this kind of decadent modern man. Although Mr Park possesses one of the typical characteristics of the noble man from the Genealogy, namely the pathos of distance, his ideal of happiness seems to match the one that Nietzsche attributes to English utilitarian morality and that, according to him, essentially consists in a typical bourgeois life and a striving “for comfort and fashion” (Nietzsche 2002: 119). The whole family is “so gullible,” in Ki-​taek’s words, that its members do not even have the slightest idea of the scam the Kims are running at their expense. The madame is particularly simple. When Ki-​Jung interprets Da-​song’s drawing as revealing symptoms of schizophrenia, the madame repeats in fear “Oh, phrenia,” showing that she does not even know the meaning of the word “schizophrenia.” Even the fact that the parents are convinced that their son is an art prodigy is symptomatic of their ignorance and naivety. Thus, far from being a personification of Nietzsche’s men of the future, which are called to redeem Europe from nihilism, the Parks rather represent the ultimate consequence and the typical product of contemporary décadence.

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References

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2004. Notes from Underground. New York: Random House. Fear, David. 2019. “‘Parasite’: Bong Joon Ho on Making the Movie of the Year” in Rolling Stone Dec. 16, https://​www.rolli​ngst​one.com/​mov​ies/​movie-​featu​res/​paras​ite-​bong -​joon-​ho-​interv​iew-​899​782/​(accessed 12 May 2021). Giordano, Neil. 2019. “Film Review: ‘Parasite’ –​Notes from the Underclass Underground” in The Arts Fuse, Oct. 18, https://​artsf​use.org/​189​684/​film-​rev​iew-​paras​ite-​notes -​from-​the-​und​ercl​ass-​unde​rgro​und/​ (accessed 6 May 2021). Kang, Inkoo. 2020. “Parasite: Notes from the Underground” in The Criterion Collec­tion Oct. 30, https://​www.criter​ion.com/​curr​ent/​posts/​7158-​paras​ite-​notes-​from-​the - ​ u nde ​ r gro ​ u nd#:~:text= ​ For%20a%20f ​ i lm%20t ​ h at,twist%20on%20a%20clas​ sic%20he​ist (accessed 6 May 2021). Lee, Nam. 2020. The Films of Bong Joon Ho. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2002. Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006a. On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006b. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer­ sity Press. Scheler, Max. 2007. Ressentiment. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Stellino, Paolo. 2015. Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. On the Verge of Nihilism. Bern: Peter Lang. Swensen, Andrew J. 2001. “The Anguish of God’s Lonely Men: Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Scorsese’s Travis Bickle” in Renascence. Essays on Values in Literature 53: 4, 267–​86. Timofeeva, Oxana. 2016. “Living in a Parasite: Marx, Serres, Platonov, and the Animal Kingdom” in Rethinking Marxism 28: 1, 91–​107. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Violence. Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

­c hapter 7

Planning Not to Plan

The Fantasy and Failure of Underclass Solidarity in Parasite Daniel Conway 1

Introduction

As the film begins, Director Bong Joon-​ho welcomes his audience into the squalid, flood-​prone semi-​basement apartment that is home to the Kim family. Gazing up and out through the grimy, street-​level window, we see socks drying in the filtered sunlight while nameless, interchangeable denizens of the Seoul underclass go about their business outside the tenement. We the viewers now see the world through the eyes of the Kim family, and what we see is likely, at least initially, to surprise. We first encounter the Kim family engrossed in their job du jour: folding (but mainly mangling) pizza delivery boxes for a local eatery. Jabbering back and forth with one another, they engage in the clever repartee that identifies them as a poor-​but-​happy family. Their work with the pizza boxes is predictably slipshod, and we are tempted to conclude from their subsequent behavior that they have deliberately sabotaged their work product. It’s not that they don’t care about their work, as parasite-​shaming apologists for the prevailing mode of production would no doubt insist a priori, but that they relish the spirited badinage that is certain to ensue when they present their irregularly folded pizza boxes to their boss. This, we soon learn, is their distinctive métier as a family of con artists: they tease unanticipated opportunities from even the most routine, humdrum aspects of their class-​bound poverty. They are parasites, to be sure, as the film’s Korean and English-​translated titles confirm, but they are also free of the typical complaints that burden the bourgeois overclass. We viewers don’t know it yet, but their carefree, con-​around-​every-​corner insouciance is a product of the family patriarch’s master plan –​namely, to approach life with no plan at all. For members of the obscenely wealthy Seoul overclass, plans that go awry may be salvaged, redrawn, denied, or deferred; other options are always available. For members of the destitute Seoul underclass, however, planning is an unaffordable luxury. When their plans unravel, the poor lack the means and recourse needed to gather themselves, to regain their balance, to pivot smartly, to minimize losses, and so on. For the Kim

© Daniel Conway, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_009

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family, there is no Plan B, which is why there can be no Plan A. Thus, as Kim Ki-​taek observes, the best way to live is to proceed free of plans and the false hopes they engender.1 According to this modus vivendi, happiness (on the model of an unexpected delight or an unanticipated meal) is only ever available to those members of the underclass who remain poised and coiled in the moment, ready to seize any opportunity that suddenly presents itself for exploitation. As Ki-​woo and Kim Ji-​jung wrangle with their “boss” from the pizza parlor –​somehow persuading her to pay them for their shoddy labor while also extracting from her the promise of a job in the restaurant for Ki-​woo –​they enact for us the savvy, class-​appropriate philosophy of the family patriarch. Putting us in mind of a veteran improvisational troupe, they descend on their “boss” with no real plan other than to probe her for weaknesses, to entertain and flatter her, to distract her from her job, and to seize any spoils they might shake loose in the process. As they later enjoy the fruits of their con, they are understandably pleased with their performance and at peace with their lot. Not even the raucous nightlife of their slummy neighborhood, including yet another vagrant urinating outside their window, can dampen their spirits. The downfall of the Kim family is prefigured very early in the film, as they take possession of the mysterious landscape stone, a “gift” bestowed on them by Ki-​woo’s friend Min-​hyuk. (Stopping just short of cynicism, Bong nudges his viewers toward the conclusion that inter-​class friendships are simply unsustainable.) According to Min-​hyuk’s grandfather, the stone will bring material wealth to anyone who possesses it. Unaccustomed to receiving anything outside the context of the cons they run, the members of the Kim family are insufficiently wary of this gift and the class-​based insult it conveys. As it turns out, the gift –​or, more precisely, the bourgeois ideology it represents –​arrives with significant strings attached: They will sample the material wealth the stone is said to promise, but they will pay for this windfall with their happiness, their independence, the life of Ji-​jung, and the freedom of Ki-​taek. Bong’s intention here is to reveal the fatal flaw in Ki-​taek’s otherwise commendable class-​based wisdom: those members of the underclass who are able to resist the prevailing ideology are vulnerable to unanticipated displays of 1 By the time Ki-​taek formally bequeaths this bit of wisdom to his son, the family has already renounced the sponging life for the (failed) planning life. While he appears to have learned his lesson from the previous night’s debacle, he does nothing to reinstate the family’s former ethos of carefree sponging. Having staked his (and their) proprietary claim to the Park estate, he is now captive to the bourgeois ideology he previously mocked. In sum, “planning not to plan” is not to be confused with “living without planning.”

90 Conway recognition and generosity. When Min-​hyuk presents them with the landscape stone, they simply don’t know how to respond, largely because no one ever gives them anything. (They certainly don’t envision the stone as a weapon to be used against them by a fellow parasite.) When granted access to the Park household with very little effort, they are similarly vulnerable to the blandishments on offer there, despite their understanding that the material wealth of the Park household has failed thus far to redeem or ennoble those who permanently reside there. As we eventually learn, Ki-​taek’s recommended modus vivendi places him and his family at great risk. Unpracticed at planning for the future, they are understandably inept at doing so. So long as they are content to sponge, of course, this deficiency is harmless, for they are prepared at any time for their con to collapse or run its course. Once they become ensnared in the bourgeois ideology, however, this deficiency proves to be fatal. When they encounter the other parasite family in residence, for example, they are unable to game out their possible futures in furtherance of their rational self-​interest. Rather than broker a mutually rewarding alliance (or détente) with Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae, such that both parasite families would continue indefinitely to feed on the bloat of the Park household, the Kim family reflexively implements a zero-​sum strategy. They are joined in this unfortunate decision by Moon-​ gwang and Geun-​sae, which means that both families choose for themselves the worst possible outcomes. 2

The Art and Profession of Sponging

In order to appreciate the peculiar brand of parasitism practiced by the Kim family prior to receiving the landscape stone, let us consider the thesis of Lucian’s classic defense of the art and profession of sponging. In “The Parasite,” Lucian prompts the character Simon to explain to Tychiades what is involved in sponging and why it is both a worthwhile art to cultivate and a credible profession to pursue.2 Of central relevance for our present purposes is the emphasis laid by Simon on the freedom of those who aspire to the sponging life. While appearances and popular opinion may suggest otherwise, it is the sponger, and not his host, who enjoys the independence and tranquility of soul that philosophers often (and correctly) associate with a flourishing human existence.

2 Lucian’s understanding of the species of parasitism designated here by “sponging” is explored by Giannis Stamatellos’ chapter in this volume.

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Although the term parasite typically carries a pejorative connotation, as in the case of invasive creatures that weaken or kill their hosts, Lucian and Simon are concerned to describe and defend a mode of being-​with-​another that benefits parasite and host alike. So described, these parasites live well and flourish only if their company adds value to the lives of their hosts (and, so, ensures repeat invitations). Like other parasites, spongers take from their hosts, but they also give back in equal or surpassing measure. According to Simon, in fact, those parasites who manage to thrive only at the expense of their hosts do not deserve the honor of being known as “spongers.” As we shall see, the arc of the dramatic narrative of Parasite carries us from an initial appreciation of the Kim family as lovable, carefree spongers to a rueful reckoning of their acquired status as expendable, self-​loathing pests. Simon begins his improbable defense by insisting to Tychiades that the sponger is obliged to “distinguish critically the man who will entertain him satisfactorily and not give him reason to wish that he had sponged elsewhere” (Lucian 1905: 170). In other words, the art of sponging requires a keen and discerning eye, such that one does not squander one’s wit and joy on hosts who prove to be unworthy of one’s company. That sponging may be seen to count as a viable (i.e., sustainable) profession is crucial to our appreciation of Parasite, for it is the Kim family’s decision to abandon this profession that precipitates their downfall. They renounce their con, moreover, not because it fails to nourish them, but because they suffer the body-​snatching infiltrations of the bourgeois ideology. Having delivered his preliminary defense of the sponging life, Simon proceeds as promised to his definition: “Sponging is the art of eating and drinking, and of the talk by which these may be secured; its end is Pleasure” (172). As we know from Parasite, the “talk” in question –​viz. the sparkling, witty banter that entertains and flatters one’s host –​should not be dismissed as merely tactical (or even cynical), for it must genuinely delight one’s host as well as oneself. Indeed, the key to sustainable sponging is that both parties leave the table satisfied and enriched. The host has been appropriately entertained, and the sponger has been appreciated and fed. It is for this reason, in fact, that Simon proceeds to define Pleasure as comprising “first, bodily tranquility, and secondly, an untroubled soul” (173), both of which are routinely attained by the sponger and temporarily sampled by the sponger’s host. Without saying so explicitly, Simon thus identifies the sponging life as uniquely productive of eudaemonia, which, according to various schools of ancient Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, is the highest and worthiest goal of a genuinely human existence.

92 Conway Simon’s intrepid defense of the art of sponging positions us to understand why the Kim family’s audacious plan to infiltrate the Park household goes so horribly awry. The Park family is entertaining, at least initially, but only passively so, owing to their naïveté, which Bong urges his viewers to acknowledge as a luxury reserved for the sheltered Seoul overclass. Although the members of the Kim family are understandably intrigued by the prospect of reaping such a large windfall with so little effort and so little resistance, their willingness to persist in an unfulfilling parasitic relationship precipitates their downfall. As Simon might have predicted, they will soon become failed spongers, for the ease with which they dupe the Kim family will dull their improvisational chops and prompt them to lower their expectations for themselves. In the Park household, there are laughs aplenty to be had at the expense of the hosts, but no mutually enriching give-​and-​take. On the contrary: what the Kim family receives in return is a steady dose of their hosts’ breezy, uninformed disdain for the poor. Furthermore, as Bong wishes for his viewers to understand, no amount of gourmet food and aged whiskey will compensate for the void at the center of a one-​sided parasitic relationship. Here, too, Lucian is a useful and prescient resource. In accounting for the enviable freedom enjoyed by those who sponge, he (via Simon) observes that “The sponger is the one person who can eat and drink without the worries from which others cannot escape” (174). As it turns out, the “worries” in question are connected to the anxieties associated with wealth and private ownership of property. When a fine meal or banquet gathering has concluded, the sponger may go his merry way, free to exploit and enjoy any opportunities that may arise. Such is not the case with the host, who, even if temporarily sated by the jolly company of the now-​departed parasite, must return to the supervision and maintenance of his household, his staff, and his belongings more generally. As the afterglow of the occasion fades, the host is beset once again with familiar anxieties: What if he loses his fortune? What if a thief takes the seat of the beloved parasite? What if his creditors descend en masse upon him? In what amounts in our present context to a timely word of warning, Simon reveals the key to a happy life: “The sponger has no ulterior object; occupation and pre-​occupation are for him one and the same” (175). In short, the sponger must resist any temptation to plan for the future, especially if this temptation troubles the soul and, thereby, detracts from his enjoyment of the present moment. In the case of the Kim family, we see that the temptation to plan for the future, even if conducted in dreamy, whiskey-​fueled reverie, lands them on the slippery slope that leads to the tragedy that awaits them. The thunderstorm that breaks over the Park estate thus augurs the self-​induced catastrophe that roils (and ruins) the Kim family: their designs on the future

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confirm that they have forfeited the freedom they formerly enjoyed and jealously guarded. Judging themselves to be worthy and credible candidates for the Seoul overclass, they have become as venal and unoriginal as the family they have mocked. From a philosophical point of view, their rash pledge of allegiance to the bourgeois institution of private property marks the denouement of the film: They are no longer spongers; they are no longer interesting; and they are no longer a family. In light of the self-​pronounced curse that has settled over them, the bloody events that ensue take on the manic tone of a garish, over-​ the-​top comedy. While the destructive power of late modern consumer capitalism may manifest itself in the form of a birthday party bloodbath, its more insidious effects are registered in the Kim family’s decision to renounce their sponging life, which places them at the mercy of a system in which, as they know, their failure is assured. To be sure, they become killers and victims and traumatized witnesses by the end of the film. But prior to that, they are subtly nudged to direct against themselves the loathing that is properly reserved for the Seoul overclass –​therein lies the real tragedy of the Kim family. What follows this fateful moment of voluntary capitulation belongs to the comedy (or farce) of late modern capitalism. 3

Toward a Psychology of Parasitism

The two underground families featured in Parasite find themselves in a predicament that calls for, but fails to deliver, class-​based solidarity. If neither family exposes the presence of the other, both families may continue to live at the unnoticed expense of the Park household. In their predicament, moreover, a cooperative arrangement would be unusually robust, for no decisive advantage would be gained by being the first party to renege on the achieved agreement. Neither family can expose the parasitism of the other without confirming its own complicity in what it seeks to expose. In other words: each family holds over the other the threat of mutually assured expulsion. While it is true that Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae are initially understood to hold the upper hand, their supposed advantage is in fact illusory. They cannot expose the Kim family without also exposing themselves in the process. At the very least, they would be hard pressed to explain to the police or the Park family how they came into possession of the incriminating cellphone video they have threatened to release. And although an excess of spite might explain why either family would risk expulsion from the Park household, Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae are at a considerable comparative disadvantage. If exposed and

94 Conway expelled, the Kim family would simply return to their hovel, awaiting the next opportunity to run an entertaining con. While a jail term may await them if they are exposed, it is perhaps equally likely that the Park family would prefer to avoid any public confirmation of their victimization. If Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae are exposed, however, they will become immediately vulnerable to the unnamed creditors whose threats chased him underground in the first place. If his creditors are as ruthless as they are described, the risk of exposure should be considered prohibitive. Even if Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae were to be indentured or extorted in some way by the increasingly vulpine Kim family, they would be better off in their incognito arrangement than in the bright light of public exposure. If these two families seek to ensure their mutual survival, in short, the best option for each is to agree not to expose the parasitism of the other. The desired level of cooperation is consistent, moreover, with the obscene wealth of the Park household and the sheer expanse of the Park estate. Both parasite families may continue to reside there indefinitely –​presumably, arrangements could be made for Moon-​gwang to come and go –​and they need not bother one another or raise the suspicions of the clueless Park family. In other words: Only minimal cooperation is needed for both families to feed indefinitely on the bloated wealth of the Park household. The parallel parasitism practiced by the two families need never suffer discovery. If, as Bong Joon-​ho suggests, the parasite families are unaccustomed to planning strategically for the future, they may not know how (or feel entitled) to determine where their rational self-​interest actually lies. If their outwardly (mis)directed self-​loathing blinds them to the likely benefits of transactional cooperation, for example, they may be unable to broker the détente that would allow them to live and let live. Indeed, the problem here is not that the contending parasite families are irrational –​indeed, we know that both families can run a complex, intricate con –​but that the reason with which they are endowed is framed (and, so, limited) by their subordinate position in the hierarchical class structure. Pledging allegiance to one of the deepest insights delivered by Marx & Engels in The Communist Manifesto (Marx 2013: 77–​79), Bong treats reason itself as a proprietary possession of the bourgeoisie, which the overclass may deploy in its ongoing efforts to disempower and shame the underclass. According to Bong, that is, the parasite families contesting for subterranean sovereignty in the Park household don’t stand a chance. They cannot enter into a productive relationship with the possible futures that await them because they are inept at, and distrustful of, planning for the future. Even if we grant that reason itself is class-​and caste-​independent, separable in principle from the ideologies generated in turn by successive modes of

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production, we may be inclined to agree with Bong that the process of reasoning reflects one’s placement within a hierarchical class structure. On the one hand, the entitled members of the bourgeoisie tend to think of themselves as having options that are virtually limitless, and they plan accordingly. On the other hand, the disenfranchised members of the underclass understand themselves to have very few options. They tend to plan as little and as modestly as possible, lest they suffer the disappointments that are certain to follow. This is especially true, Bong evidently believes, with respect to reasoning about the future(s) one is likely to inhabit. Depending on where one resides in the class-​based hierarchy, one’s appetite for risk will be more or less voracious, and one’s imagination of the future will be more or less robust. In Parasite, the contending underground families are simply unable to envision a future in which they would enact meaningful agency, a future over which they might expect to exert significant control. As a result, any scenario in which they are obliged or encouraged to game out possible future outcomes is already rigged against them. Here we may aspire to greater precision: Because the parasite families are unpracticed at imagining a better future, they both reflexively revert to the zero-​sum, parasite-​shaming strategy that has been employed so effectively against them. They may plan for the future after all, but only if they adopt as their own the worldview of the Seoul overclass. Thus, despite their seemingly equal status as parasites, each family regards the other as having crossed a line. 4

The Failure to Achieve Class-​Based Solidarity

Thus we arrive at the director’s big question, versions of which may be found in his previous films:3 Why don’t the two underground families cooperate with one another? Their shared predicament may not be ideal, but it admits of no scarcity of food, space, or opportunity for modest advancement. If they wish, they may steer clear of one another and simply agree not to spill the beans. If the two families were to work together, forming an enlarged parasite collective within the Park household, they might dare someday to seize control of the (local) means of production. But they do nothing of the sort. In order to venture an assessment of Bong’s answer to this question, we will need to examine the unusual encounter between the two parasite infestations and the unique vulnerabilities it manifests. What we immediately realize is 3 With respect to Bong’s 2013 film Snowpiercer, see Frase (2014), and Lee and Manicastri (2018: 214–​20).

96 Conway that both parasite families vent against the other the hatred that ought to be reserved for (if not directed against) the Park family and other representatives of the Seoul overclass. Much as Park Dong-​ik reflexively abhors the odor emitted, involuntarily, by his new chauffeur, so Kim Ki-​taek reflexively abhors the abject sight and smell of the man living beneath him in the house they both inhabit. In the case of Ki-​taek, there also may be an element of humiliation involved in discovering a previous –​and, in some sense, more successful –​ infiltration of the Park family fortress. In addition to conning the clueless Park family, after all, Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae managed to dupe the unsuspecting Kim family, which is a sure sign that the latter family has lost its sponging chops. Allowing Moon-​gwang to enter the house on that fateful, stormy night, casting upon the displaced housekeeper no suspicions whatsoever, was as eventful as their earlier decision to accept Min-​hyuk’s gift and the insult it implied. Similarly, the cruelty directed against the Kim family by Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae appears to be compensatory, standing in for the cruelty they otherwise might have wished to visit upon the Park family (or the shadowy creditors). For Geun-​sae, who is effectively imprisoned in the sub-​basement, there may be an additional pang of jealousy of those parasites who move about the house more freely. (When finally given the chance to lord it over others, he delights in sipping expensive whiskey while barking nonsense orders to the Kim family.) Indeed, both families immediately identify themselves not with the class-​based predicament they share with their fellow parasites, but with the privilege and status of the Park family. Why is this the case? We probably don’t know enough about Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae to aspire to anything beyond raw speculation. In the case of the Kim family, however, the key to their collective psychology is fairly clear: They have ceased to be the carefree spongers whom we met in the film’s opening scenes, and they have acquired the contemptuous opinion of all parasites, especially of the line-​crossing variety, that is spouted by Dong-​ik. As newly minted wannabe members of the Seoul overclass, the Kim family lays claim to the Park household and all that it contains, including the nubile teenager whom “Kevin” plans to woo. While their downfall was prefigured in their decision to accept Min-​hyuk’s seemingly harmless gift, the decisive moment in their transformation arrives under ominous atmospheric conditions. As the rolling peals of thunder rattle the sturdy house, Ki-​taek declares himself, in all seriousness, to be lord of the manor. His wife quickly steps on his proprietary moment, reminding him that he and they would scatter like cockroaches if the Park family –​the real owners –​were suddenly to appear. But her efforts to puncture his false bravado

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arrive too late to salvage the decaying family. By definition, spongers are those who feast at the tables of others. If Ki-​taek is in his own home, as he drunkenly claims, then the (coffee) table at which he feasts is not another’s, but his own. For this table and the estate that shelters it, he is now responsible in all the ways that are known to cause unwanted agitations in the beleaguered bourgeois soul. Very soon, we know, he and the others must deal with the mesoparasite infestation lurking in the sub-​basement of “their” home. As Ki-​taek’s fate-​tempting moment confirms, he and his family are no longer content to run a diversionary con. They now see themselves as owners, i.e., as aspiring capitalists in their own right, and they have talked themselves into believing that the wealth of the Park household is theirs not only for the taking, but also for the keeping. They are not exactly wrong about this, but they are sorely mistaken about the costs they will incur as they trade the spontaneity and joy of the sponging life for the anxiety and stress of the planning life. To borrow Park Dong-​ik’s favorite stereotype of the parasitic underclass: they have crossed a line that should have remained inviolate.4 On cue, the members of the Kim family scatter like cockroaches when Madame phones to announce the eta of the Park family’s premature return. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that the Kim family lacks the courage or nerve to carry out the bold plans Ki-​taek and his son have hatched. They are like cockroaches, to be sure, but only situationally so. When obliged to use force to secure their desired ends, they prove themselves equal to the occasion. The problem, of course, is that their hatred and blood lust are directed not toward their real oppressors, for whom they even manage to prepare an impromptu homecoming meal, but toward those with whom they might have been expected to feel a class-​specific bond of solidarity. In their escalating hand-​to-​hand combat with Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae, the members of the Kim family become downright cruel and ruthless, effortlessly visiting upon their fellow parasites the kind and intensity of violence they drunkenly threatened to spring on the Park family. Adroitly conveying the double consciousness and divided allegiance imposed on the underclass by the bourgeois ideology, Bong depicts the members of the Kim family as simultaneously cockroaches and exterminators.

4 In his interview with Gabriella Paiella, Bong explains the psychology of the Park family as follows: “But what they really want, and this is something Mr. Park says in the film, is they [draw] a line over their sophisticated world and they don’t let anyone cross it. They’re not interested in the outside world, the subway and people who might perhaps smell. They want to push everyone outside of that line and they want to remain safe behind it” (Paiella 2019).

98 Conway 5

The Replacements

In completing their transition from spongers to planners, the members of the Kim family forfeit their charming spontaneity and settle into their prescribed roles as replacements for the non-​family members of the Park household. Here we witness the genius of Bong’s reliance on the trope of mimetic replacement to facilitate the Kim family’s infiltration of the Park household. With the exception of Kim Ji-​jung, whose “Jessica” is a new (and barely visible) addition to the household, the members of the Kim family succeed by slipping seamlessly into the roles of those whom they have replaced. Initially, we know, the success of their con depends upon a relatively smooth transition from the former composition of the household to its new configuration. Rather than endeavor to disrupt the balance of the Park household, the Kim family aims to provide a stable and comfortable fit. But at what cost? For a while, we know, the individual members of the Kim family are able to inhabit their roles without disappearing into them. So long as their con holds the promise of additional excitement and escalating challenges, they continue to display a healthy share of the insouciance that informs their sponging performances. As confirmed by our occasional glimpses of their life together o­ utside the Park household, they are convincing as replacements and yet independent from the servile roles they have chosen to play. So long as they can sustain the double life they collectively lead, moreover, they are seemingly immune to the petty grievances and resentments that typically afflict the servants of the overclass. Free to improvise, malinger, plot, pilfer, and abscond at any time, they exude the buoyant good cheer that Lucian (via Simon) hails as characteristic of his and their chosen profession. In the early, heady days of their infiltration, Bong is content to mine the absurd situation for easy, slapstick laughs. Misplaced panties! A tuberculosis scare! Fake blood on a napkin! As we shall see, however, this indulgence is but a head fake on the part of the canny director. Even as his viewers gasp and guffaw at the audacity of the enterprising Kim family, an unalterable reversal of their good fortune is already underway. Their fatal error, in short, is that they mistake their dull, clueless hosts for the mode of production itself. Plausibly convinced that they will outwit the Park family at every turn, the members of the Kim family assume, disastrously, that they are immune to the charms of the quietly efficient bourgeois ideology. The irony here is that their past successes as spongers should have prepared them to score a quick and entertaining con before pivoting to their next opportunity. Instead, they are seduced to the cardinal sin of sponging: they overstay their welcome at the table of another.

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Unbeknownst to the members of the Kim family, the bourgeois ideology has imperceptibly colonized their worldview. Mistakenly convinced that they can work alongside their risible employers, they gradually succumb to the fantasy of having the best of both worlds. As they become fixtures in the Park household, inured to its silently circulating contempt for the poor, they come to despise parasites like themselves, and for no other reason than their acquired belief, imprinted on them by the dour Park Dong-​ik, that parasites invariably “cross the line.” When the opportunity arises to vent their acquired disgust upon fellow parasites, who apparently smell even worse, their capture by the roles they have played is seen to be both complete and irreversible. According to Bong, the bourgeois mode of production replicates itself in its most formidable critics not through coercion or intimidation, much less through starvation and subsistence wages, but by inviting them to mock the wealthy, to sample the perks of the undeserving overclass, to amuse themselves at the expense of their dim hosts, and to sponge with impunity for as long as they like. It’s a trap, of course, but one that the Kim family is unable (or unwilling) to recognize as such. (Even at the conclusion of the film, in the wake of his serial experiences of humiliation, grief, separation, and severe head trauma, Ki-​woo is determined to amass the fortune needed to purchase and inhabit the estate vacated by the remaining members of the Park family.) Indeed, it is to Bong’s credit as a director that he is willing to expose the deadly narcissism of those to whom he also grants a sympathetic hearing. Thinking themselves equal to the force exerted against them by the bourgeois ideology, the members of the Kim family fail to take the kill-​switch precautions that their experience as spongers should have prompted them to arrange in advance. Thus emerges Bong’s central insight into late modern capitalism, at least as the mode of production has shaped the class system in South Korea (and continues to do so). The Seoul overclass coopts its most potent critics –​viz. those spongers who appreciate the genuine value of freedom from attachment –​not by visiting upon them the deprivations predicted by Marx & Engels (72–​73), but by seating them at the banquet table and inviting them to plan for a future replete with consumer comforts. While the members of the Park family are parasites, as Bong has insisted,5 the unique character of their parasitism 5 In his interview with Kaleem Aftab (2019), Bong observes that “The rich family are the ones who pull the poor families into their homes. They can’t do anything on their own, they have to rely on others to wash their dishes, to drive, all these menial tasks, so in terms of labor, you could say the rich family are parasites as well” [Aftab 2019].

100 Conway rounds into view only when they have succeeded in remaking their hosts in their image. Serving as unwitting vectors of a numbing ideology, the members of the Park family feed neither on blood nor flesh, but on the freedom and spontaneity of those who would dare to con them. Deemed harmless in virtue of their authentic vapidity, they lull their would-​be infiltrators into a relaxed condition of unguarded complacency. In turn, the members of the Kim family gradually renounce their genuine freedom (e.g., from attachment, responsibility, obligation, and class-​based social expectations) in exchange for the (bogus) bourgeois freedom to plan for the future. Believing themselves to have entered freely into this devil’s bargain, they come to feel at home in the Park estate and in the hierarchical class system more generally. Hence the point of the director’s labored orchestration of the various reversals and replacements he (initially) plays for laughs: The members of the Park family are dangerous in a way and to a degree that the supposed parasites in the film, teeming in the filthy, garbage-​strewn neighborhoods of Seoul, are not. In stark contrast to the amoral violence perpetrated by that most famous of cinematic parasites –​the facehugging xenomoph from the Alien franchise –​ the Park family unwittingly practices a surprisingly hospitable brand of parasitism: While opening their home to effortless infiltration, permitting their unchaperoned teenage daughter to canoodle with her “tutor,” entrusting their emotionally fragile son to the care of a bogus art therapist, Madame and Mr. Park are generally oblivious both to the con unfolding around them and to the counter-​con to which they contribute their unearned sense of privilege. As unsuspecting vectors of the bourgeois ideology, they effectively turn the tables on their would-​be infiltrators, enticing them to become permanent members of the household and permanent hostages to the mode of production. Having done so, moreover, they fulfill their pre-​ordained destiny of social obsolescence. After the family patriarch perishes in the tragic-​comic birthday party bloodbath, countless replicas –​including the brain-​damaged Ki-​woo –​eagerly await their turn to occupy the oft-​vacated bourgeois fortress. And so the cycle renews itself. Indeed, here we encounter Bong Joon-​ho’s deepest set of reservations about orthodox Marxism: the class consciousness that is presented as a prerequisite of any credible course of revolutionary action (Marx 2013: 69–​70) is nearly impossible to instill in those who would benefit most from a change in the mode of production. The bourgeois ideology is not only elusive and difficult to puncture, but also disarmingly welcoming of intelligent criticism and even mockery. While it may be the case that the Seoul underclass comprises a vanguard of righteously indignant “gravediggers,” as Marx and Engels fantasized about the enlightened proletariat they had hoped to lead (Marx 2013: 72–​73),

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the corpses these “gravediggers” will inter are of no concern to the guardians of the capitalist mode of production.6

References

Aftab, Kaleem. 2019. “Palme d’Or Winner Bong Joon-​ho: ‘Rich People are Parasites too’” in The National June 16. Frase, Peter. 2014. “Smash the Engine” in Jacobin July 3 https://​www.jac​obin​mag.com/​ 2014/​07sm​ash-​the-​eng​ine Last accessed 6/​24/​2021. Lee, Fred and Manicastri, Steven. 2018. “Not All are Aboard: Decolonizing Exodus in Joon-​ho Bong’s Snowpiercer” in New Political Science 40: 2, 211–​26. Lucian. 1905. “The Parasite: A Demonstration that Sponging is a Profession,” in The Works of Lucian of Samosata, Volume iii. H.W. Fowler and H.G. Fowler, trans. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marx, Karl. 2013. The Communist Manifesto, Second Edition, ed, Frederick L. Bender. New York: W.W. Norton. Paiella, Gabriella. 2019. “Parasite Director Bong Joon-​ho on the Art of Class Warfare” in GQ October 8. 6 I am grateful to Thorsten Botz-​Bornstein and Giannis Stamatellos for their instructive comments on earlier drafts of this chapter.

­c hapter 8

Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite Viewed in the Context of Pasolini’s Theorem and Deleuze’s Filmic Theories Tony Partridge 1

Introduction

Every film is a looking back. As Jean-​Luc Godard says, “Without cinema, I wouldn’t have known I have a history of my own.” We are attracted by films and “we can make a memory of this history” (Godard 1988–​98: npn). Is this where the magic of cinema lies? What magic? The magic of history, or truth, or just the magic of story-​telling? Bong Joon-​ho’s film Parasite is a story that twists and turns and, yet, it knows its own history. And its history is what? Is it films, is it reality, is it Korean society and culture, is it the machinations of parasitism, or is it a mathematical metaphor? Let’s take the final one of these as a starting-​ point, maybe because it is the most unusual category of history we can choose from this list, though there is a precedent for this approach. That precedent is based on a film that has strong similarities to Bong’s Parasite, the film Theorem (1968) by the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bong’s film describes the infiltration into a bourgeois Korean family home by another family, a poor but clever family who are the main protagonists of Bong’s story. They use a rational plan in order to infiltrate and then systematically turn bourgeois rules and behavior to their own benefit. Theirs is a real-​life stratagem and the film Parasite is the story of how this stratagem unfolds. In Pasolini’s film, Theorem, there is a handsome guest who, likewise, infiltrates a bourgeois family, this time in Milan, and then, in a stepped fashion, he alters the consciousness of each member of the household, changing, corrupting, or saving each of them. In both films, there is the closed system of the bourgeois family, with their own rules and laws, upon which they have built certain rigid theorems of behavior. However, in both stories, an extra ingredient is added to this closed system. In Pasolini’s case it is the handsome guest, who may be a god or a devil, while in Bong’s case, it is a family who act as parasites within the home of the enclosed bourgeois family and their world. Both infiltrations alter the rational movements of behavior in each of these bourgeois homes. In particular, they are seen to alter them from theorems into the alternative domain of problem-​solving. This change of focus is explained, in the context of

© Tony Partridge, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_010

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Theorem, by Gilles Deleuze, who has in turn derived his theories from Spinoza and Proclus (see section 3, below). Gilles Deleuze argues that the films of Pasolini, particularly Theorem (1968) and Salò (1975), “present themselves as geometrical demonstrations in action.” Deleuze argues that Pasolini, here, seeks “to carry the image to the point where it becomes deductive and automatic” (Deleuze 1989: 168). Deleuze explicitly describes the difference between theorem proving and problem-​solving, there are two mathematical instances which constantly refer to each other, one enveloping the second, the second sliding into the first, but both very different in spite of their union: these are the theorem and the problem. A problem lives in the theorem and gives it life, even when removing its power. The problematic is distinguished from the theorematic (or constructivism from the axiomatic) in that the theorem develops internal relationships from principles to consequences, while the problem introduces an event from the outside –​removal, addition, cutting –​which constitutes its own conditions and determines the ‘case’ or cases. … This outside of the problem is not reducible to the exteriority of the physical world any more than to the psychological interiority of a thinking ego. Ibid.: 168–​9

In an interview in 1969, Pasolini alludes to some of these ideas: It’s a mysterious theorem. And the title … I’ve chosen the title Theorem, because there are statements. There is a Milanese bourgeois family. … And then there’s a hypothesis. In fact, there’s a demonstration by reduction to the absurd. The hypothesis is that there is a young man, maybe God, maybe the devil, that is to say, authenticity arrives in this family and all the characters are in crisis. pasolini 2020: npn

Noel Purdon suggests a link between Pasolini’s Theorem and Spinoza’s Ethics (Marcus 1986: 257). Deleuze himself investigates the influence of mathematical thinking on Spinoza’s philosophy and he uses this in his own philosophical work, especially Difference and Repetition (1968). He links Spinoza’s views on mathematics with the theories of Proclus (Deleuze 1994: 202). This theory is used by Deleuze to explain Pasolini’s film. The question for this paper is whether the same theory, or paradigm, can be used to explicate Parasite? It is argued that the paradigm can explain Bong’s film up to a point. However, the

104 Partridge later stages of the film can be read as a critique of Deleuze’s, and Pasolini’s, views. In essence, by the end of the film, this paradigm comes tumbling down. Part of the reason for this is that the film, in fact, has two problem-​solving regimes that simply do not mix in a coherent fashion. But accompanying this there occurs a natural disaster, in this case a flood, which completely turns the tables on rational explanations. That is why, in its second half especially, Bong’s film can be read as a critique of the rational approaches of Deleuze and Pasolini. This paper expresses the view that Bong Joon Ho sets up such a paradigm in order to knock it down. 2

Theorem Proving and Problem-​Solving in Theorem and Parasite

Pasolini’s film Theorem fits rather neatly into Deleuze’s mathematical conceptions. In this metaphor, a closed system of rules and laws is described as theorem proving. Problem-​solving is when an infiltration of this closed system occurs from without, that is, where a closed scenario becomes adulterated by interference from outside. In Pasolini’s film, a bourgeois family is the closed scenario which abides by meticulous and systematic rules. When the family is interfered with by someone who is extraneous to its mores, this is more typical of problem-​solving. Deleuze says that Theorem shows a family milieu literally exhausted by the arrival of an external character. But in Pasolini, it is primarily a case of ‘exhaustion’ of logic, for example, in the sense that a demonstration exhausts the set of possible cases of a figure. deleuze 1986: 242

Deleuze adds that, Pasolini’s deduction in Theorem must be understood [as] a problematic rather than a theorematic deduction. The envoy from outside is the instance on the basis of which each member of the family experiences a decisive event or affect, constituting one case of the problem, or the section of a hyper-​spatial figure. deleuze 1989: 169

Deleuze sees theorem proving as automatic, law-​abiding activity that is without choice. There is certainty that underlies its activities. In contrast, problem-​ solving lacks certainty and is full of choice. Theorem proving restores “internal

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certainty,” while problem-​solving “puts the unthought into thought” and takes away the interiority. It actually “excavates an outside in it that excavates its substance” (170). How can such mathematical views move seamlessly into existential concerns? According to Deleuze, “choice is increasingly identified with living thought, and with unfathomable decision” (171). According to Tony Cesare, “A psychological analysis of the bourgeoisie, based on an historical theory and an economic law, is Pasolini’s real theorem” (Cesare 1989: 22). Into the closed system of a bourgeois family in Milan there ensues “the idea of a visit from a god who involves and overwhelms everyone …” (Peterson 1996: 218). This is an infiltration. Pasolini insists on calling this infiltration a theorem, not a problem. According to Thomas F. Peterson, Pasolini does this because he sees the word as being also visual, derived from teōrēin, meaning ‘to look’ (219). Peterson explains that, in Pasolini’s film, Salò, the theorematic prevails, as the film describes a closed system in which there are no infiltrations. Peterson calls this a “dead theorem” (226). In contrast, Theorem “opens outward towards possibility.” Naomi Greene describes the visitor in Theorem as “a ‘problem’ within the theorem” (Greene 1990: 199). Theorem proving is automatic, law-​abiding activity that is without choice. There is certainty that underlies its activities. Problem-​solving lacks certainty and is full of choice. Theorem opens outward towards possibility. It is a problem within a theorem. Can this paradigm be applied to Parasite? Bong’s film opens from the viewpoint of the infiltrators before there is any infiltration into the bourgeois household, which is unlike Pasolini’s film, which opens directly from the perspective of the bourgeois family. We see that the Kims live in a seedy basement, a place worthy only of vermin. It is a place where ratlike, and survivalist, behavior festers and grows. It is a university for parasites. At the opening of the film, the Kims operate at an essentially low level of activity and theirs is a survivor’s logic, the logic of making do and of taking little advantages. For instance, they steal Wi-​Fi coverage and they make pizza boxes to survive. However, with the discovery of the Park’s household there comes an escalation of their petty-​mindedness onto a bigger stage. A university student, a school-​friend of the Kim’s son, Ki-​woo, persuades him to go forward for the vacated tutor-​job in the Park’s household. Until the Parks come into their purview, the Kims have limited ambitions and it is the friend that plants a seed that grows. In the film, the first sighting of the Park’s house and garden looks very similar to the house and garden in Pasolini’s Theorem. It is bourgeois comfort in a modern setting. We encounter a home that is organized on a strictly logical basis, a home that functions like a theorem. The infiltration that occurs then is accordingly a problem-​solving scenario, as this is described in the above paradigm. Ki-​woo, now calling himself Kevin, gets the

106 Partridge job as a tutor and he opportunistically seizes on the mother’s concern about her son in order to suggest that she consult a mythical teacher, one he spins out of cliches that fit neatly into the mother’s prejudices. This grabs her attention, then her interest and finally her keenness. Ki-​woo briefs his sister, Ki-​jung, to become Jessica, who precisely fits the bill of the mother’s needs for her son. Jessica is brought to meet the mother. The Park’s daughter suspects Ki-​woo and Jessica have a relationship and so Ki-​woo kisses the daughter, thus displacing the situation and creating a movement that allows the infiltration to survive. This is rat-​like behavior in a hole. Jessica uses psychology-​based mumbo jumbo to bamboozle the mother. A pathway of rat-​like subterfuge begins and so, systematically, and rationally, the father, Ki-​taek, takes over as valet, after the existing valet is ousted by very devious means. Then, an even more elaborate subterfuge is used to oust the existing housekeeper and place the mother, Chung-​sook, in her place. It seems that the infiltration is complete and the theorem of the Parks’ bourgeois life, a life without choice, has now been altered into a problem, a life based on the choices of the Kims. The Kims choices are used to infiltrate the bourgeois family home and gain substantial income, by using devious rational subterfuges. As in Pasolini’s Theorem, the infiltration occurs, and the order of things has completely changed. The repercussions, in both films, are, on the initial viewing, unpredictable. As first, it seems that the Kims have fitted into the Park’s closed system like fingers into a perfect glove. The laws and rules of the Park’s perfect household seem to unfold like a perfect theorem, with everything inexorably moving along to both families’ mutual benefit. The problem-​solving that occurred when the Kims infiltrated now seems to have reverted to the closed loop of theorem proving. But this is an illusion. 3

The Origins and Theoretical Basis of Deleuze’s Filmic Theories

This mathematical metaphor is used by Deleuze to describe Pasolini’s Theorem and there is some evidence to suggest that Pasolini viewed his film in similar terms. The veracity and inviolability of mathematics and geometry greatly influenced Deleuze and, as a metaphor, it deeply underlies his philosophy. The same can be spoken of the philosophy of Spinoza, from whom Deleuze derived many of his theoretical ideas (Deleuze 1994; Peden 2014). Deleuze also mentions Proclus as a source for his thought (Deleuze, 1994: 202). In the seventeenth century, an almost forgotten work by the Greek Neoplatonist philosopher Proclus, his Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, was “rediscovered” (Claessens 2011: 179), and a number of the insights

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in Proclus’s text can be seen in Spinoza’s philosophy (Zovko 2017). In fact, Spinoza embraces mathematical metaphors and uses the geometric method in his Ethics in a manner similar to Proclus. Deleuze also uses these insights in his philosophy and especially in his books on cinema. He applies these ideas to the films of Pasolini, and especially to Theorem. For Proclus, the objects of mathematics and geometry are neither Plato’s universal ideas nor are they Aristotle’s abstractions from sense-​perceptions. They are between the two, where there is a kind of matter –​called “intelligible matter” –​which facilitates such objects (Proclus 1970: 64, 70, 93; Nikulin 2008: 161–​5; Chlup 2012: 154; MacIsaac 2014: 78–​9). Proclus derives this from Plotinus, who argues that such matter is shaped in the intelligible world, and it underlies the Forms and the incorporeal substances (Plotinus 1966: ii 4, 4, 5–​8). Yet Plotinus also says that matter is both shapeless and not shapeless. He reconciles this ambiguity by taking an immaterial body and dividing it, digging deep into it again and again, until he finds matter, that which in the depths of the body is dark and needs light. However, unlike in the material world where shape is an image that decorates the dead corpse of matter, in the intelligible world matter is substance (ii 4, 5, 20–​1). Such intelligible matter is at first dark and undefined until it turns towards a light that is other than itself. This is the light of the One. Plotinus here combines the views of Aristotle and Plato in seeing intelligible matter as, respectively, the substrate seeking upwards towards the One and the receptacle that the One shines into. He adds that matter is undefined quite simply because it is not Form (ii 4, 6, 17–​19). Neoplatonists, from Iamblichus (O’Meara 1989: 14, 44, 50) to Syrianus (Syrianus 2006: 133, 14–​15; 173, 1–​7) to Proclus, use this paradigm to envisage mathematical objects in our imagination. Intelligible matter facilitates such objects, which are then operated upon using discursive reason. In Plato, and in Pythagoreanism, it should be noted that the shining light is described in terms of both the One and the Indefinite Dyad. The Dyad here is responsible for every kind of multiplicity and the One and the Indefinite Dyad are, together, strongly associated with the genesis of number (Burkert 1972: 21–​2). But, according to Aristotle (in Metaphysics A 6), Plato too sees that “the objects of mathematics occupy an intermediate position between Forms and sensible things” (Sayre 2005: xii). For Proclus, in order to engender theorem proofs or problem solutions in geometry, we visualize geometrical objects as images. These images are projections into our imagination of ideal circles or triangles (Nikulin 2008: 153–​5, 159, 162–​7; Claessens 2011: 186, 190–​1; MacIsaac 2014: 58–​9, 66–​7, 70–​71, 79). We can then operate upon them using discursive reason. This process is all about movement, where, from imagined starting-​points, discursive reason typically

108 Partridge moves geometry forwards towards inviolable conclusions. These movements occur as theorem proving and problem-​solving (Nikulin 2008: 153, 162; Chlup 2012: 159–​160; MacIsaac 2014: 77, 86). The starting-​points are axioms, postulates and definitions, or, more generally, principles and hypotheses (MacIsaac 2014: 58, 70–​71). In the movements of discursive reason, a narrative unfolds over time. The difference between theorem proving and problem-​solving is that theorem proving relates to ideal circles and other geometrical objects, whereas problem-​solving relates to individual geometrical objects with specific characteristics, like a right-​angled triangle with specific lengths of sides (Proclus 1970: xlix; Deleuze 1994: 202). These same ideas influenced seventeenth century thought and they subsequently arise again in Deleuze and can also be seen in Pasolini. The veracity and inviolability of mathematics is, for Spinoza, sacrosanct and the inexorable way that mathematics unfolds is the way that he sees the laws of nature unfolding in a necessary and deterministic world. Reason is the ultimate arbiter of philosophy, though such reason may in fact be God’s reason and not our human type (Spinoza 1994: 131, 154, 234; Nadler 2006: 162, 165, 193–​4; Koistinen & Vijanen 2011: 9). Humans use a combination of reason and intuition to find a way to knowledge. Spinoza describes this process and uses mathematics as a metaphor for it. Accordingly, we humans seek and find definitions and axioms, postulates and hypotheses, and then we let the flow of reason and intuition begin. Through this process, we look deep into the eyehole of eternity in order to move beyond rationality into Godlike eternal thinking. We, as proper human beings, are venturing rational sages. As such, according to Spinoza’s programme we should pursue mathematical-​like thinking, coupled with scientific investigations and analyses, until this methodical process gathers momentum. This allows us to break into the light of Godlike intuitions (Spinoza 1994: 258). Gilles Deleuze seeks to reformulate Spinoza’s philosophy in his own terms. For Deleuze, activities bubble forth from particulars and repetitions and, then, we perceive a pattern. Deleuze transgresses Spinoza’s universal laws and causes and replaces these with inductive patterns. He models these patterns on Kant’s categorical imperatives (Deleuze 1994: 4–​5). Laws are built from these inductive patterns. They are derived from human perception combined with common sense and good sense. Particulars are the building blocks for thought and they are brought into play by problem-​solving (Peden 2014: 173, 201–​2). That truth occurs as the possibility of solving a problem based on common sense is also derived Kant (Ibid.: 200). Problem-​solving happens in time and, therefore, within this conception timeless ideas are no longer essences and truth. Instead, these are envisaged in problems that bubble out of an incoherent

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Ungrund (Ibid.: 289). Deleuze follows Kant in seeing truth arise from problem-​ solving, which is something that occurs over time (Ibid.: 154). Truth is therefore a combination of problems and the bubbling forth of particulars and repetitions. In all this, mathematics is Deleuze’s guide (Ibid.: 202). Such a paradigm fits neatly with Bong’s Parasite until the mid-​way point. Then something changes. 4

Returning to Parasite

The Park family goes camping and the Kims have a party in their house. During this party, we learn that there has in fact been a double-​infiltration. Hidden in a secret basement there is the husband of the first housekeeper. He has been living quietly in the Park’s home. His wife returns to the house, inveigles her way in and releases her husband. Now we have two infiltrations in the same house and two separate problem-​solving regimes create a logical traffic jam. Two different deductive regimes have come together and, like water and oil, they do not mix. The coherent theorem proving of the closed system of the Parks and the Kims starts to unravel. Violence occurs as the two families, the infiltrators, come to blows. Then, as if to add spice to this, the Parks return home rain-​sodden from their camping trip. The weather, along with the double-​infiltration, creates chaos and logic is subsumed in mayhem. In a kind of frenzy, the Kims lock the other infiltrating family into the basement, somehow clean up the mess and then they hide. Eventually, the three, Ki-​taek, Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung escape from the house, leaving Chung-​sook and the hidden family behind. The rains become a flood, a flood that drains down into the lower town making rivers of the streets and filling the Kim’s basement with filthy water. Bong present us with the starkest image in the whole film, one that sums up the chaos that has descended upon the Kims. In this image, we see Ki-​jung –​or Jessica –​smoking a cigarette while sitting on the seat of a shit-​spewing toilet in the Kim family’s basement. Soon after, in a refuge for flood victims, Ki-​taek speaks: Ki-​woo, you know what plan never fails? No plan at all. No plan. You know why? If you make a plan, life never works out that way. Look around us? Dialogue in bong’s Parasite, 2020

A sad resignation has subsumed Ki-​taek. He realizes that the logic of their problem-​solving has, instead of turning into a fool-​proof theorem, reverted to

110 Partridge chaos. Then, as if from the very basement of logical thought, he looks at their best-​laid plans and says: With no plan, nothing can go wrong. And if something spins out of control, it doesn’t matter whether you kill someone or betray your country. None of it fucking matters. Get it? Dialogue in bong’s Parasite, 2020

Ki-​jung sitting on the toilet, smoking, and then Ki-​taek’s speech about the chaos born from the double-​infiltration and the rains, create a deep-​seated nihilism in the consciousness of the Kim family, and especially Ki-​taek. He seems to see that the distance between their basement home-​life and the bourgeois life of the Parks is a chasm, this despite their ability to problem-​solve and infiltrate into this other world. For him, problem-​solving and theorem proving has turned sour. What has occurred is more like an evil theorem moving inexorably towards its bloody conclusion. But maybe, between theorem proving and problem-​solving, he can envisage a middle-​ground of algorithmic thinking, such as in computer programming and, by extension, in the methods of Artificial Intelligence –​for instance, in adaptive learning, neural networks and fuzzy logic (Luger 2008). This possibility may allow Ki-​taek to rise out of his despondency and nihilistic despair. In fact, Deleuze refers to a similar type of thinking in the context of Jorge Luis Borges’ story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (Borges 1999). In this story, “divergent series trace endlessly bifurcating paths” (Smith & Proteri 2018: npn), yet discords and dissonances and imponderables occur that contain all possibilities. Deleuze also “discusses forking paths in film plots”: he does this in terms of flashbacks and memory (Deleuze 1989: 47–​55; Branigan 2002: 112). Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus (2004[1976]), also discuss an “open system” called a “rhizome” that bubbles forth according to a mass of roots and where there is, in fact, no plan. One simply enters and exits and interprets at multiple points. In such a system, eventualities occur, flowing like water, as events and occurrences move nomadically and unpredictably through the world (Deleuze and Guattari 2004; Smith & Proteri 2008). However, Ki-​taek travels none of these paths, as we can see in the finale of the film. The Parks, oblivious of the chaos that is surrounding them, have a garden party celebrating their son’s birthday. The Kims are requested to attend and to serve the visitors. Ki-​woo, in an attempt to retrieve his original plan, seeks to release the other family from the basement. But this simply unleashes the “bats of hell” and bloody murder ensues. The resulting antics in the garden are like a bloody pantomime, but then Dong-​ik, the father of the Park family, sniffs the

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air. He sniffs the water-​sodden poverty of Ki-​taek and the latter sees, on Dong-​ ik’s face, disgust and disdain. “… whether you kill someone or betray your country. None of it fucking matters.” Ki-​taek kills Dong-​ik. He stabs him with a knife and then he flees. The theorem of the Park’s closed system of bourgeois life, and the problem-​solving of the Kims, has been smashed to smithereens. Ki-​taek retreats. He reverts to the former housekeeper’s husband’s position and secretly hides in the basement of the house. Ki-​woo dreams of retrieving the theorem again through problem-​solving, but the audience knows that this is a pipedream. The theorem has been lost forever. 5

Comparison between Parasite and Theorem

As in Parasite, the infiltration of the stranger in Pasolini’s Theorem causes chaos, but here the chaos is based on rational developments from the infiltration. For Pasolini, the stranger’s infiltration is the arrival of authenticity into the bourgeois home. Having systematically slept with every member of the bourgeois family, the stranger then departs, and every member of the family systematically descends into crisis. Each crisis is their own, some poetic –​as in the case of the housekeeper who becomes a holy saint and levitates –​and others pathetic –​like the mother turning to casual sex with strangers. The whole family, now as isolated individuals, continue to love the departed stranger. He has impacted their lives in different, but ultimately rational, ways. The most extreme reaction occurs with the father. This father takes off all his clothes in Milan railway station after he has given his factory away to the workers. He has an awareness of authenticity in a way that never occurs for the Park family in Parasite. This father abandons his bourgeois personality, he leaves the closed theorem of his previous life behind him and follows a new path. He walks off into a volcanic wilderness. Even though a stark bleakness ends Pasolini’s film, seemingly in the manner of the flood waters in Parasite, Pasolini is still moving within the rational paradigm that Deleuze derives from Spinoza and Proclus. In Parasite, the flood waters herald the demise of the theorem proving and problem-​solving, lock, stock and barrel. This bleak image, along with Bong’s companion images of Ki-​jung sitting on the toilet and Ki-​taek’s watching Dong-​ik sniff the air, epitomize a complete loss of all there was before. Here, the infiltration of problem-​solving components into the theoremic mix has resulted in disaster for the bourgeois status quo. This is social satire of the highest order, where the comforts of the wealthy are not only parodied, but actually deconstructed down to their core. By contrasting two different regimes, described here in terms of theorem proving and problem-​solving, and mixing

112 Partridge them together, and then adding a natural disaster into the mix, not only is the façade of bourgeois life corrupted and shattered. Bong is also asking deeper questions about whether it is even possible for the devious mechanisms used by the poor to achieve any place at all within this bourgeois world. All such devious means are ultimately illusions and any rational mechanisms used to justify such deviousness are, at a deeper level, highly questionable. 6

Conclusions

In Ki-​taek’s speech in the refuge for flood victims, he looks deeply at the reasoning that underlies Ki-​woo’s subterfuges and plans. He looks deeply into the infiltrations and problem-​solving that these plans engineered, and then something snaps in him. He sees the futility of all these carefully laid-​out schemes. He sees that one cannot integrate total logic with the disparate eventualities that occur in real-​life. What he says to Ki-​woo is, in a strong sense, the verbal equivalent of brushing aside the whole tradition that bubbled forth from Proclus and Spinoza. Ki-​taek, and through him Bong, after initially seeing these mechanisms at work, dismisses them as a lie. Rational plans and life are starkly contrasted and, for Ki-​taek, rational plans come up short in the face of real life. In the face of natural disaster and in the face of Dong-​ik’s disgust at everything that Ki-​taek stands for and is. Ki-​taek’s thinking comes to rest in an abiding nihilism that is contrasted with the logic of bourgeois life and even the logic of infiltration itself. “With no plan, nothing can go wrong.” Then, without believing anymore in a plan, Ki-​taek, pulls everything down on top of himself. Activity without a plan is the real source of truth, and indeed of reality, and Ki-​taek asserts himself anew. In the end, everything spins out of control, but despite this there arises a new authenticity. After his own basement has been flooded, Ki-​taek has found a new basement and he has withdrawn almost completely from the world, from the bourgeois world and even from his earlier world of problem-​solving. In a minor key, he now scavenges from his hidden sanctuary, secluded and almost completely quiet, except for the signals he sends using a light switch to his son Ki-​woo. Here is the only plan that works, no plan at all. The earlier paradigm, that of Deleuze and Pasolini, takes us into an empty and joyless procedure that ultimately ends with the termination of our finite lives. Bong Joon Ho, through Ki-​taek, looks deep into this path and, then, he forsakes it. Truth lies somewhere else. For Jean-​Luc Godard, every film is a looking back. Bong Joon Ho’s film Parasite can be seen as looking back to Pasolini and to the uses of theorem proving and problem-​solving in Gilles Deleuze’s paradigm for film. But Bong’s

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film can also be viewed as a visual deconstruction of these views, that is, the deconstruction of the paradigm proposed by Deleuze. The film plays with the language of Deleuze’s paradigm, and in fact, in the initial stages, Bong uses this to the benefit of his film. But he then critiques this view. The power of Bong’s film lies explicitly in the two images that shape this critique: Ki-​jung’s smoking on the toilet and Ki-​taek’s speech in the refuge. These images are the hinges on a creaky door from which the truth swings into view: social truth, life’s truth and filmic truth. Bong’s film swings back and forth between reason and unreason, but it never settles with either. The film that results from these movements is unsettling and, ultimately, very profound.

References

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) in Collected Fictions: Jorge Luis Borges. Allen Lane The Penguin Press. Branigan, Edward. 2002. “Nearly True: Forking Paths, Forking Interpretations” in SubStance 31(1): 105–​114. Burkert, Walter. 1972. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Cesare, Tony. 1989. “Pasolini’s Theorem” in Film Criticism 14(1): 22–​5. Chlup, Radek. 2012. Proclus: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. Claessens, Guy. 2011. “Imagination as Self-​knowledge: Kepler on Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements” in Early Science and Medicine. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill: 179–​199. Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Cinema 1. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus Continuum. Godard, Jean-​Luc. 1988–​98. Histoire(s) du cinéma. (dvd by Artificial Eye. 2008.). Greene, Naomi. 1990. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema Heresy. NJ: Princeton University Press. Koistinen, Olli & Valtteri Vijanen. 2011. “Introduction” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza’s Ethics, O. Koistinen (ed.). Cambridge University Press, 1–​25. Luger, George F. 2008. Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving. London: Pearson. MacIsaac, D. Gregory. 2014. “Geometrical First Principles in Proclus’ Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements” in Phronesis 59: 44–​98. Marcus, Milicent. 1986. Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism. NJ: Princeton University Press. Nadler, Steven. 2006. Spinoza’s Ethics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.

114 Partridge Nikulin, Dmitri. 2008. “Imagination and Mathematics in Proclus” in Ancient Philosophy 28, 153–​172. O’Meara, Dominic J. 1989. Pythagoras Revived: Mathematics and Philosophy in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pasolini, Pier Paolo. 2020. “Interview with Cécille Philippe,” an extra on the Criterion Collection dvd of the film Teorema. Peden, Knox. 2014. Spinoza Contra Phenomenology. CA: Stanford University Press. Peterson, Thomas E. 1996. “The Allegory of Repression from Teorema to Salò,” in Italica 73(2): 215–​232. Plotinus. 1966. Plotinus: Ennead ii. Cambridge MA & London: Loeb Classical Library/​ Harvard University Press. Proclus. 1970. A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements. NJ: Princeton University Press. Sayre, Kenneth M. 2005. Plato’s Late Ontology: A Riddle Resolved. Las Vegas, Nevada: Parmenides Publishing. Smith, Daniel & John Proteri. 2018. “Gilles Deleuze” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at plato.stanford.edu/​entries/​deleuze/​. Spinoza, Benedict de. 1994. The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader, E. Curley (ed.). NJ: Princeton University Press: 85–​265. Syrianus. 2006. On Aristotle Metaphysics 13–​14. London & New York: Bloomsbury. Zovko, Marie-​ Élise. 2017. “Understanding the Geometric Method: Prolegomena to a Study of Procline Influences in Spinoza as Mediated through Abraham Cohen Herrera,” in Proclus and his Legacy, D. A. Layne and D. D. Butorac (eds.). Berlin: Milennium Studies, De Gruyter, 391–​414.

­c hapter 9

From Parasites to Monsters

The Unfulfilled Promises of Serres’ Parasitism in Bong Joon-​ho’s Neoliberal Social Allegories Hye Seung Chung 1

Introduction

Class warfare has long been a staple of South Korean cinema, from Golden Age family dramas of the 1960s such as Mr. Park (Pakseobang, 1960) and The Coachman (Mabu, 1961) to more recent examples of “extreme cinema” from the likes of Kim Ki-​duk and Park Chan-​wook, two writer-​directors whose films, including 3-​Iron (Binjip, 2004) and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naeui geot, 2002), speak directly to the issues of social ostracism and interclass resentment.1 This theme has often been focalized through sosimin (“small” or ordinary citizens) who struggle to make ends meet in a development-​driven capitalist society where wealth inequality has exponentially worsened over the past four decades. In The Coachman, the winner of the Silver Bear at the 1961 Berlin International Film Festival, the titular widower (played by beloved avuncular star Kim Seung-​ho) is injured in an automobile accident and gets unjustly laid off. A casualty of modernization and an obsolete relic of the past, the emasculated patriarch, whose horse-​driven cart is inoperable after that potentially life-​ending collision, saves face due to the filial loyalty of his four adult children and the selfless devotion of his romantic interest, a maid in his ex-​boss’s household. The film’s dénouement shows the family happily reunited on the streets of snowy downtown Seoul, where they celebrate a hopeful future of upward mobility after receiving the long-​awaited news that the eldest son has passed his bar exam. In Parasite, Kim Ki-​woo’s undeliverable letter to his fugitive father in the basement bunker expresses resolve to become rich enough to buy the mansion and thereby free the patriarch, a pipe dream far removed from the family’s impoverished reality.2 The impossible resolution of 1 The author wishes to thank David Scott Diffrient for proofreading the manuscript and improving it with many suggestions for revisions. 2 Bong said that it would take Ki-​woo 547 years without spending a penny of his minimum wages to buy a mansion like that, according to an expert he consulted (Kim Hye-​ri 2019).

© Hye Seung Chung, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_011

116 Chung Bong’s film implicitly mocks The Coachman and other classic family dramas in which the upwardly mobile filial son unironically saves the downtrodden family/​nation. On the surface, Parasite appears to be an example of an anti-​capitalist strain of “occupy cinema” that has recently gained traction in South Korea. Exemplified by Lee Chang-​dong’s Burning (2018) and Choi Kook-​hee’s Default (Gukgabudo eui nal, 2018), this emerging cycle of films converges with a global “bust culture” that followed the Great Recession, the most severe economic crisis in U.S. history since the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to Kirk Boyle and Daniel Mrozowski, a group of post-​2008 motion pictures and television series produced in the United States –​Up in the Air (2009), The Company Men (2010), Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010), Raising Hope (2010–​2014), 2 Broke Girls (2011–​2017), and Girls (2012–​2016) –​share “recessionary narratives permeated with existential and economic dread” and underscored by “scarce resources and diminished prospects” (2015, xxiii). The Kim family suffers economic hardships –​unemployment and underemployment as well as a lack of decent housing, among other things –​which justify their antagonism and parasitism against the top one-​percent (represented by the Park family) living in opulence and abundance. However, Parasite does not vilify the rich, but instead depicts them as having sympathetic traits such as charm, grace, and politeness. Ultimately, true “villainy” is to be found not in the hearts and minds of individual characters, but rather in the societal conditions that give rise to economic disparities in the first place –​factors that condemn intelligent, ambitious millennials such as Ki-​taek and Ki-​jung to an endless cycle of temporary, menial jobs with little-​to-​no prospect of upward mobility. Around 2010, “Hell Joseon” emerged as a neologism popular among young Koreans. The compound expression combines the English word hell and Korea’s dynastic name before its 1910 Japanese annexation. According to a 2016 survey of 3,173 college students and corporate employees (jointly conducted by JobKorea and Albamon, two of the many employment service websites to take such results seriously), 90 percent of respondents in their twenties and thirties said that they have adopted the damning rhetoric of “Hell Joseon” at various times in their young lives (Gu 2016). The neologism has often been invoked in response to the cutthroat competitiveness of the current job market (South Korea’s rate of youth unemployment between ages 15 and 29 has increased from 8 percent in 2009 to 8.9 percent in 2020 [Shin 2020]) and the widening income inequality (as of 2017, top 10 percent earn more than half of total national incomes and in the last quarter of 2018, whopping 70 percent of bottom 20 percent were unemployed or underemployed [Jin 2019]).

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The first half of Parasite alludes to these real-​world social problems and appears to position itself as a progressive social commentary that encourages the audience to “think and decide what to do to prevent” the catastrophe of neoliberal capitalism (Lee 2020, 150). Once Bong’s film takes a neoliberal turn at the midpoint, transforming the black comedy of subversive parasitism to a blood-​filled horror film of monstrosity and violence, it fails to deliver transformative social allegories that unite the disfranchised, the working-​class, women, and the disabled. Lateral violence among the parasite class specifically targets women (despite their pursuit of peaceful resolutions to conflicts) and senseless male-​to-​male violence causes the downfall of all three families. 2

A City Rat, a Country Rat, and the Parasited Feast: Serres’ Fable in Bong’s Film

In his 1982 posthumanist philosophical treatise The Parasite, Michel Serres defines parasitism as the basis for humanity. As the French philosopher notes, “man is the universal parasite (…) everything and everyone around him is a hospitable space. Plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always their guest. Always taking, never giving” (1982: 24). Rejecting the individual autonomy and agency upon which so much of contemporary liberal humanism is predicated, Serres sees any social and communicative system as relational parasitism. To explain the parasitic cascade, he uses the metaphor of two rats –​a city rat and his country cousin guest –​feasting on leftover bits of ortolan under the Persian rug of the tax farmer’s house. Their nocturnal banquet is interrupted by a noise at the door, which sends the country rat scampering away. All four players in this parable are parasites. In Serres’ words, “The tax farmer is a parasite, living off the fat of the land: a royal feast, ortolans, Persian rugs. The first rat is a parasite; for him, leftovers, the same Persian rug. (…) At the table of the first, the table of the farmer, the second rat is a parasite (…). The noise, the ultimate parasite, through its interruption, wins the game. In the parasitic chain, the last to come tries to supplant his predecessor” (1982: 3–​4). On the surface, Parasite appears to be a cinematic companion to Serres’ philosophy on parasitism. Like the city rat in the aforementioned parable, Kim Ki-​woo is the original parasite who gets the lucky break of finding an optimal host in the wealthy Park family whose patriarch Dong-​ik owns a virtual reality venture company named Another Brick. After successfully gaining lucrative employment as an English tutor for Park’s precocious teenage daughter Da-​ hye, Ki-​woo invites human equivalents of the country rat relative in Serres’

118 Chung tale: “One parasite opens the door to the next by creating access” (Nordheim 2021: 89). Before defrauding the gullible Parks under false pretenses and framing their current employees to make way for their infiltration, the Kims are obviously spotlighted as social parasites; residents of a dingy semi-​basement (banjiha) apartment where they live hand-​to-​mouth doing occasional menial labor such as folding pizza boxes for a local eatery. From the opening scene, which introduces the Kim residence by way of a camera tilt (directing the spectator’s gaze from the overexposed windows with an alley view to the underlit interior living space where Ki-​woo is glued to his cellular phone looking for his usual free Wi-​Fi connection), the parasitic theme is apparent. During that opening scene, the unemployed young man (who has failed the college entrance exam four times) complains to his sister, another jobless college age adult, that the upstairs neighbor has set a new password to her unsecured network, effectively blocking their access to the Internet. Their momentary disconnection from the digital world is remedied when another open network –​presumed to be that of a newly opened coffee shop in their vicinity –​is located. In fact, Ki-​woo’s tutoring job (which triggers the whole family’s parasitic intrusion to the Park household) is in and of itself a product of parasitism since his well-​ do-​to college student friend Min-​hyuk hands his own job over to him, entrusting a pupil/​love interest to his pal during his extended absence abroad as an exchange student. When the Parks depart for an overnight camping trip to celebrate Da-​ song’s birthday, the Kims show their true color as parasites who appropriate or “poach” the master’s mansion and indulge themselves with few restraints, recalling the city rat and his country cousin feasting under the Persian rug of the tax farmer’s house in Serres’ story. Ki-​taek and Chung-​sook take an afternoon nap on the living room sofa while their son reads on the backyard lawn, soaking up the stress-​relieving rays of the sun. His sister takes a relaxing bubble bath in the master bathroom, leisurely flipping through the channels of the wall-​mounted flatscreen television. The Kims’ parasitic housesitting –​or, rather, their unauthorized occupation of the upper-​class residence –​ends with a nighttime drinking party: the imbibing of expensive whiskey and other Western hard spirits. Not only are the Parks’ resources from the pantry and the liquor cabinet poached or “parasited,” but so too are Da-​hye’s private thoughts, transcribed in her diary, which Ki-​woo takes from her room with the professed intention of “understanding [her] deeper” (the two are seen kissing during an earlier tutoring session). The proud son confesses to his parents that he is planning to ask the rich girl out seriously when she enters college –​an absurd daydream considering not only the underaged girl’s legal inability to give consent

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to a sexual relationship (not to mention her parents’ anticipated horror at finding out who Ki-​woo really is) but also his own status as a penniless high school graduate with less-​than promising hope of being admitted to college himself after multiple failures. The impressed parents encourage their son’s bloated ego and are excited to imagine the house belonging to their in-​laws. Ki-​woo even concocts a far-​fetched plan to hire actors to play his father and mother in his wedding so as not to expose their deceit to Da-​hye and her family. In a fit of drunken joviality and bravado, the father and son start to claim their ownership for the appropriated mansion. Ki-​woo asks his sister which room she would like to designate as hers and Ki-​taek goes as far as declaring the mansion “our [cozy] home.” Chung-​sook cynically responds, reminding her husband of his lowly parasitic status, “Suppose Park walked through that door now. He’d run and hide like a cockroach. Kids, you know at our house, when you turn on the light, and the cockroaches scatter?” Around the one-​hour mark, right after the above-​quoted dialogue, which accentuates the film’s titular theme, the doorbell rings. Arriving at its midpoint, this is a crucial turning point of Parasite, one that has been described by cowriter/​director Bong Joon-​ho as “the real beginning of the film, [which] turns the narrative flow upside down” (Kim Hye-​ri 2019). I argue that this is the precise moment when Parasite severs its ties to Serres’ theory and turns into a neoliberal spectacle of intraclass violence and destructive monstrosity. 3

From the Parasitic to the Monstrous: A Noise at the Door, a Bunker, and the Monster

As Serres’ translator Lawrence R. Scheher notes, there are three meanings of the French word parasite. The first one is biological: “a microbe, an insidious infection that takes without giving and weakens without killing.” The second one is social: “a guest, who exchanges his talk, praise, and flattery for food.” The third meaning is uniquely French, conjuring ideas that would not likely spring to mind within an English-​speaking context: “noise … the static in a system or the interference in a channel” (Serres 1982: x). The interruption of the Kim family party in the Park mansion via the noise at the door appears to be the cinematic counterpart to the revelatory moment when the tax farmer opens the door in Serres’ story, his presence signified as a sonic interruption of the proceedings. According to the French philosopher, Noise has a subject, the one who makes the noise, in the fable. No doubt it is the farmer, the parasited one. One of the first in the chain, he was thus

120 Chung cheated on behind his back. Awakened by the noise of the rats, cutting and nibbling, he suddenly opens the door. He jumps behind those who were eating behind his back and chases them. The parasited one parasites the parasites. One of the first, he jumps to the last position. […] Who is the host? The first rat for the second, the sleeper for the rats who eat his food, the taxed for the tax collector (the tax farmer), and so forth along the chain. […] The host comes before and the parasite follows. Such is the case for every system where we eat at the expense of another, where we speak of him. Who is the parasite here, who is the interrupter? Is it the noise, the creaking of the floorboards or of the door? Of course. It upsets the game, and the system collapses. […] The noise temporarily stops the system, makes it oscillate indefinitely. […] noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. This parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again. (13–​14) Unfortunately, in Bong’s dystopic tale, parasitic constellations do not give rise to a new system where disorder presumably breaks the status quo and leads to a more productive, more equitable coexistence of hosts and parasites. The film ends with the deaths of four individuals from three different families (the host Mr. Park, Ki-​jung as well as the Park family’s ex-​housemaid and her husband), the criminal prosecution of two parasites (Ki-​woo and Chung-​sook), and the indefinite self-​detention of Ki-​taek in the secret basement bunker of the Park residence after inexplicably killing his boss out of self-​destructive rage. Who is the interrupter in Bong’s film? It is not Mr. Park and his family (the equivalent to the farmer in Serres’ tale), but Moon-​gwang, the housemaid who was laid off unjustly after being framed by the Kim family’s planted evidence of being a tuberculosis patient. Her return turns The Parasite from a black comedy/​social satire about parasitism to a horror thriller involving a fantastical gothic bunker space where Moon-​gwang’s husband Geun-​sae has been hiding for the past four years to escape loan sharks. Geun-​sae is codified not as a parasite but as a monster who is seen crawling up the stairs like a wounded animal or robotically limping through the narrow passage of the bunker like a zombie. In a later flashback scene narrated by Da-​song’s mother Yeon-​gyo, the man-​monster is visualized as a sinister head emerging from the unlit, dark stair passage connecting the kitchen and the basement cellar. Seen from the perspective of Da-​song, who came down to the kitchen late at night to eat the leftover birthday cake in the fridge, Geun-​sae’s head –​peeking up to show a deathlike pallor –​is a barely visible silhouette in darkness (deep

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shadows contrasting sharply with the led backlit cabinet surrounding the stair entrance).3 High-​contrast lighting design accentuates the monstrous mien, drawing attention to subhuman features, including the enlarged white pupils of predatory eyes. The birthday boy’s frightening encounter with what he believes to be a ghost gives Da-​song an uncontrollable seizure, which can be cured only if the patient is taken to a hospital within fifteen minutes. After being defeated by the Park family in a physical struggle to gain the upper hand, Geun-​sae is taken as a rope-​bound prisoner in his own hideout. Ki-​taek, who has lost his entire fortune to the same Taiwanese cake shop franchise as his captive has, sympathetically asks him, “How can you live in a place like this? What’ll you do? You don’t have a plan?” The bunker man replies despondently, “I just feel comfortable here. It feels like I was born here. Maybe I had my wedding here, too. As for the National Pension, I don’t qualify. […] So please let me continue living down here.” A glimpse of hope for empathetic bonding between the bunker family and the semi-​basement family (two different sets of parasites with a shared experience of failed businesses and family bankruptcy) is cut short when a full war between two tribes is activated. As Nam Lee points out, in previous Bong Joon-​ho films, Horizontal solidarity is one of the constant themes in Bong Joon Ho's films. In Barking Dogs Never Bite, part-​time lecturer Yoon-​ju unites with the apartment's management office employee Hyun-​nam to find his lost dog; in Memories of Murder … a rural detective and an urban detective cooperate despite their mutual hostility; and the Park family in The Host […] could finally kill the monster with the help of a homeless man who joined them and poured gasoline over the monster. In Snowpiercer, in addition to the tail-​enders, security specialist Namgoong Minsoo forms an alliance with Curtis, and Mija in Okja cooperates with the members of alf [the Animal Liberation Front]. […] Most of these alliances and instances of solidarity end in half successes at best, thus making Bong's films pessimistic; however, Parasite is the most despairing by showing a world in which the possibility of solidarity is nonexistent. The only source of community and solidarity left in Korea is within the immediate family; however, all three families disintegrate at the end. lee 2020: 140

3 In his interview with Cine21, Bong Joon-​ho compared the black square door that connects the kitchen to the underground space to the monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). See Kim Hye-​ri 2019.

122 Chung Not only is “horizontal solidarity” among the marginalized and poor characters in Parasite non-​existent, but it is also marked as undesirable, making any attempt to interpret the film as a progressive, Marxist text a difficult undertaking. Very little humanity or dignity is bestowed to Geun-​sae as monster whose sudden appearance at the midpoint of narrative derails the film’s earlier evocation of productive parasitism as a modifier of the status quo or a generator of a new system. When the Park family first encounters the monstrous figure of Geun-​sae, who has been living secretly in the unventilated basement bunker for four years without showering (the makeshift shelter has a bed, a desk, and a toilet but no bathing facilities), their collective reaction is that of “disgust, repugnance, nausea, physical loathing, shuddering, revulsion, abhorrence, [and] abomination” –​a list of affectively charged responses provided by Noel Carroll to refer to fictional characters’ horrifying encounter with a monster’s radical alterity or perceived impurity (Carroll 1990: 28). Geun-​sae is a “threatening and impure” creature who “[breaches] the norms of ontological propriety presumed by the positive human characters in the story” (Carroll 1990: 16, 28). Chung-​sook’s immediate reaction is to threaten to call the police, defining Geun-​sae’s existence as abnormal and unlawful, although soon thereafter the tables are turned and her own family’s fraud is revealed to the cornered couple who strikes back. Notably, while Moong-​gwang is pleading to enlist Chung-​sook’s help to provide her husband’s food supply (in pronounced shot-​reverse-​shot format, emphasizing the two parties’ opposing interests and lack of “horizontal solidarity”), the camera cuts to a medium-​long shot of Ki-​taek, Ki-​jung, and Ki-​woo who, hiding behind the staircase wall, are arranged vertically. The latter is on the bottom of the staggered line on the stairs, closest to the offscreen right space of Geun-​sae’s subterranean shelter, presumably permeated with the foul stench of the unwashed monster. Lending an ironic note to the proceedings, the camera shows Ki-​woo pulling his T-​shirt up in order to shield his nose from the offending odor, an instinctual reaction not unlike that demonstrated by Mr. Park (who would be stabbed to death for it in a later scene). 4

The Self-​Destructive Murder and Its Parasitic Illogic

Why does Ki-​taek, a parasite, kill Mr. Park, his host, at Da-​song’s birthday party where the two men have been entrusted with the goal of pleasing the event-​ loving Yeon-​gyo and are given the roles of tomahawk-​toting Native American ambushers so that the birthday boy can play the part of the rescuer (of the princess/​art teacher)? The outdoor garden party, attended by several of the

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Parks’ elegantly dressed friends, turns macabre when Geun-​sae (whose face is spattered with Ki-​woo’s blood after hitting him with a rock) raids the civilized space and attacks Ki-​jung with a kitchen knife. The hideous monster is in turn stabbed with a barbecue skewer by his victim’s avenging mother. Amidst screams and growing panic, Mr. Park yells at Ki-​taek, ordering him to throw the car key. The motion then slows as the disoriented Kim patriarch, shown applying pressure to Ki-​jung’s gushing wound, scans the chaotic scene and witnesses party guests fleeing in terror. The reverse-​shot close-​up, combined with slow-​motion effect, makes Mr. Park’s disgust at dying Geun-​sae’s smell (recoiling instinctively while retrieving the car key fallen underneath the mortally wounded man) not just visible but palpable. In contrast, Ki-​taek’s confused face hardens into a look of silent anger. In a quick succession of close-​up shots, Mr. Park’s hand is shown lifting the key while he pinches his nose and his driver picks up another object next to the stinky body: the weapon that has fatally injured his daughter. Ki-​taek grabs his victim’s Native American headdress from behind, turns him around, and plunges the knife deep into his upper torso to the horror of Yeon-​gyo and her birthday guests. After this violent outburst of primordial rage, Ki-​taek turns his head to the left and casts his gaze offscreen, where Chung-​suk is attending to her bleeding daughter. The wife averts her gaze from the horrific scene while the dying daughter lifts her weakened body to confirm this unbelievable sight. Then he turns to his right, where Yeon-​gyo faints (presumably leaving her son to succumb to a debilitating seizure). In a low-​angle close-​up, Ki-​taek closes his eyes to the sonic accompaniment of a complex mixture of somber cello, dissonant electronic effects, and the buzz of a fly that lands on Geun-​sae’s corpse. The camera cranes up to a high-​angle bird’s-​eye-​view shot, a fatalistic perspective that shows the literally red-​handed killer exiting through a maze of eerily empty birthday tables. Two main readings have been put forth in much of the previous scholarly or academic commentaries on Parasite: one concerns postcolonial resistance and the other revolves around class resentment. Focusing on the “three recurrent motifs of English, militarization and appropriated Indigenous material culture,” Ju-​Hyun Park sees Bong’s film as “an allegory [not] of ‘class conflict’ [but] of imperialism” (2020). According to the Korean American writer, with the war bonnet still on his head, [Mr. Park’s] callous reaction to the deaths of Ki-​jung and Geun-​sae is linked to his allegiance to the racist empire. This is where Ki-​taek breaks, and the specific choreography of what unfolds is key to understanding the action. As Ki-​taek lunges for the knife, he tears the war bonnet off of his head and rushes at Dong-​ik, whose back is turned to him. Ki-​taek grabs Dong-​ik by the war bonnet,

124 Chung knocking it to the ground as he turns Dong-​ik around, and stabs him in the chest. […] The irony of Dong-​ik dying as a result of his racist assumptions of Indigenous extinction should not be lost on us. In stark opposition to Dong-​ik’s original vision, none of the killings are committed by characters in war bonnets. When Ki-​taek throws the war bonnets to the floor, he reframes the two sides from ‘Good/​Bad Indians’ to ‘Good/​Bad Koreans’ –​those who serve the empire, and those who are brutalized for its maintenance and expansion. Under conditions of occupation, perhaps being Bad Koreans is the only ethical choice to be made. park 2020

It is perhaps an overly charitable interpretation of Bong Joon-​ho’s use of Native American artifacts to argue that, through this brutal murder, Ki-​taek is rejecting Dong-​ik’s racist appropriation of indigenous culture and by extension, the racist empire that the Korean venture capitalist serves. Ironically, Bong’s own appropriation of Native American props in the graphic scene of savagery and violence might be construed as racist insofar as it reiterates Hollywood’s recurrent racial stereotypes and tropes dating back to silent Westerns of the 1910s and 1920s. In his 2019 interview with the Korean daily newspaper Munhwa Ilbo, Bong explains that he wanted to convey “feelings of death” via the Indian motif and to explore the incongruity between a young boy (Da-​song who fetishizes Native American culture) and the “extinct tribes who live only in reservations” (Kim Gu-​cheol 2019). This admission confirms that the authorial intention reinforces, rather than resists, mainstream “racist assumptions” of imperial culture when it comes to cross-​culturally appropriated Indian images. The second interpretation is more explicitly foregrounded in the narrative and elaborated by scholars like Nam Lee and Min-​jung Noh. According to Lee, “the seed for [Ki-​taek’s] explosive action is sown” the previous night (2020: 144), when the driver overhears his boss’ private conversation with his wife, hiding under the living room coffee table along with his children (after the Park family unexpectedly returns early due to the flooding of the camping site, leaving little time for the Kims to clean up their mess following the drinking party and physical altercation with the bunker family). Sniffing something in the air that is reminiscent of his driver’s smell, Mr. Park describes the odor as that of people “who ride the subway,” drawing a clear dividing line between his family and ordinary citizens. Eavesdropping on the couple while positioned right under their noses (beneath the sofa), Ki-​taek sniffs himself in embarrassment. The smell that Mr. Park describes is, according to Bong, “the odor of class.” The writer-​director refers to this dialogue as the “most unpleasant” within the script, as many of his own audiences would have taken the subway to come to

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see his film. Bong defends his character, however, quickly adding that it is not a public speech meant to be heard by other characters or the audience. In his final analysis, Mr. Park is not guilty of “a sin that deserves to be punished with death” (Kim Hye-​ri 2019). Furthermore, as Lee points out, the self-​made entrepreneur Park and his well-​meaning wife are complex characters who “defy the stereotypical depiction of the rich as villains” (2020: 142). At multiple junctures in the narrative, the couple’s generosity, politeness, and niceness are demonstrated in their interactions with tutors and domestics. Even after being presented with fabricated evidence of Driver Yoon’s unauthorized sexual activities in the family car and Moon-​gwang’s concealment of tb affliction, the Parks let them go gracefully without confronting them with accusations or showing their feelings of betrayal. When Yeon-​gyo is worried if the digitally savvy young chauffeur might go online to accuse them of an unjust firing, Mr. Park tells her to treat him with a generous sum of severance money. After Ki-​taek and Chung-​sook are hired to replace the laid-​ off domestics, Da-​song reports that they smell the same. The embarrassed parents are visibly mortified and hurriedly send the candid boy away to his room to dissipate the awkward situation. Taking all these factors together, it might be more persuasive to consider that the real cause of Ki-​taek’s violent eruption is not his boss’s aversion to his or Geun-​sae’s bad odor but his Kafka-​ like metamorphosis or awakening of his inner monstrosity. In his 2019 interview with Cine21, Bong elaborates that “the most crucial moment (leading up to the murder) is when Ki-​taek returns to his semi-​basement apartment after escaping the Park residence only to find that his home is submerged in flood water. This event is not related to Mr. Park, but it destroys the foundation for Ki-​taek’s mind and body … . This individual’s fundamentals collapse and his mind crosses the river of no return” (Kim Hye-​ri 2019). This description explains Ki-​taek’s transformation from a parasite (who interrupts the status quo and generates a new system) to a monster (who lashes out for his forced marginalization and annihilates the system that he believes is responsible for it with self-​destructive rage). Biological parasites rarely kill their hosts, as it is self-​harming to destroy the environment that nurtures them. As a social parasite, Ki-​taek does not kill, as Noh claims, as “a resistance to the humiliation of being categorized as Other or non-​human” or to “claim his humanity” since one’s humanity cannot be fulfilled by the inhumane act of destroying another human being and ruining another family’s life. After murdering Mr. Park, Ki-​taek –​now a fugitive from the law –​becomes a new bunker squatter in his victim’s house, which is later sold to a wealthy German family. In front of the previous occupant’s wall of worship for Mr. Park (plastered with magazine cover pictures of his hero, to

126 Chung which Geun-​sae was shown bowing and paying tribute earlier in the film), Ki-​ taek weeps in remorse and apologizes to his victim, signaling a return of his humanity and conscience. In that sense, his monstrosity could be likened to that of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). As Carroll asserts, Bates is “not a monster technically speaking” but embodies the impurity of monstrosity in his psychosis, being “two persons in one” and shuttling between “both victim and victimizer” (1990, 39). Through a similar fluctuation, Ki-​taek’s ability to become a productive parasite –​“a ‘modifier and generational figure,’ bringing about oscillations in the status quo, and something new in turn” (Guiherme 2015: 1056) –​is finally undermined when he tragically turns into a monster who destroys without recreating. 5

Conclusion

The ultimate irony is that Parasite is financed and distributed by cj Entertain­ ment, a vertically integrated entertainment subsidiary of the conglomerate cj Group. In 2017, two years prior to Parasite’s release, President Moon Jae-​in’s new liberal administration expressed a concern about the “screen monopoly” (oligopolistic control of all three branches of the motion picture industry by conglomerate-​owned media giants such as cj Entertainment/​c gv theater chain and Lotte Entertainment/​Lotte Cinema chain) and announced its plan to discuss countermeasures (such as anti-​trust regulation that would ban vertical integration, akin to the 1948 Paramount Decree of the United States Supreme Court) in hopes of alleviating the power and capital differential between major studios and small independent companies (Yonhap 2017). Following the 2020 Oscar ceremony, where Micky Lee (Lee Mi-​kyeong), vice chairman of cj Group, took the stage after Parasite was selected as the year’s Best Picture, many Korean industry personnel felt that the chaebol (conglomerate) family member’s speech was inappropriate. One producer is quoted as stating that “undoubtedly, Lee contributed to the success of Parasite but her speech at the Oscars ironically demonstrated that ‘semi-​basement’ filmmakers have no choice but to parasite in the conglomerate ‘mansion’ in the reality of Korean filmmaking” (Ko 2020). The inequality of the South Korean film industry is increasingly widening as the top 20 percent movies financed and distributed by media conglomerates such as cj and Lotte comprise approximately 80 percent of all box-​office admissions, pushing indie and art films to the subterranean bunker of the Korean movie scene. In terms of invitations from “the blue-​chip European film festivals,” only a handful of South Korean auteurs such as Bong Joon-​ho,

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Park Chan-​wook, and Lee Chang-​dong have been ushered into the spotlight as recipients of an “unofficial quota for new Korean filmmaking,” leaving young talent with few opportunities to make their names known internationally (Brzeski 2019). For the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which in the past few years has been mired in racial controversy as a result of the Oscars being “so white,” Parasite is a perfect quota filler that “enables the Academy to visibly present its initiative for promoting diversity while minimizing the possibility of invoking any uncomfortable race question” (Noh 2020, 261). In the final analysis, unlike its monstrous protagonist, Bong’s Parasite does not stupidly kill the hospitable host but flatters and embraces those most terrifying of offscreen “monsters,” namely the spokespeople and leaders of global neoliberal capitalism whose support has been instrumental if not indispensable to the film’s fame and prosperity.

References

Boyle, Kirk and Daniel Mrozowski. 2015. The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-​First-​Century Bust Culture. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Brzeski, Patrick. 2019. “Meet South Korea’s Next New Wave Auteurs.” The Hollywood Reporter. November 7. https://​www.hollyw​oodr​epor​ter.com/​news/​gene​ral-​news/​ meet-​south-​kor​eas-​next-​wave-​film-​aute​urs-​1252​874. Carroll, Noel. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge. Gu, Hui-​ryeong. 2016. “90% of Both College Students and Corporate Employee Say ‘Hell Joseon Is Correct,’ [Daehaksaengdo jikjangindo 90%ga “heljoseon matda”].” Joongang Ilbo. July 1. https://​news.joins.com/​arti​cle/​20249​142. Guiherme, Alex. 2015. “Michel Serres’ Le Parasite and Martin Buber’s I and Thou: Noise in Informal Education Affecting Dialogue Between Communities in Conflict in the Middle East.” Educational Philosophy and Theory 47:10, 1052–​1068. Jin, Hyeon-​ jin. 2019. “Increasing Wealth Gap in Korea [Galsurok buleojineun Hangukeui binbugyeokcha],” Digital Times, March 18, 2019. http://​www.dt.co.kr/​ conte​nts.html?art​icle​_​no=​201​9031​8021​0995​8038​004. Kim, Gu-​cheol. 2019. “Bong Joon-​ho’s Symbols and Metaphors in Parasite [Bong Jun-​ho gamdoki malhaneun Gisaengchung sok sangjing gwa eunyu].” Munhwa Ilbo. June 12. http://​www.mun​hwa.com/​news/​view.html?no=​201​9061​2010​3241​2053​001. Kim, Hye-​ri. 2019. “Parasite Production Report [Gisaengchung jejakgi].” Cine 21. June 24. http://​m.cin​e21.com/​news/​view/​?mag​_​id=​93174. Ko, Gyeong-​seok. 2020. “Parasite Which Criticizes Polarization Is Not Free from Chungmuro’s Polarization [Yanggeukhwa bipanhan Gisaengchungdo Chungmuro

128 Chung yanggukhwaseon jayuropji mothae.” Hankook Ilbo. February 12. https://​www.hank​ ooki​lbo.com/​News/​Read/​202​0021​2154​9074​421. Lee, Nam. 2020. The Films of Bong Joon Ho. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Nordheim, Gerret von. 2021. “Uninvited Dinner Guests: A Theoretical Perspective on the Antagonists of Journalism Based on Serres’ Parasite,” Media and Communication 9:1, 88–​98. Noh, Min-​jung. 2020. “Parasite as Parable: Bong Joon-​ho’s Cinematic Capitalism,” CrossCurrents 70:3 (September 20), 248–​262. Park, Ju-​Hyun. 2020. “Reading Colonialism in Parasite.” Topics of Meta. February 17. https://​tropic​sofm​eta.com/​2020/​02/​17/​read​ing-​colo​nial​ism-​in-​paras​ite. Shin, Eun-​jin. 2020. “Youth Unemployment Rate OECD [Cheongnyeon sileopyul OECD].” Chosun Ilbo. September 10. https://​www.cho​sun.com/​econ​omy/​indus​try -​comp​any/​2020/​09/​10/​W B6​3 HFZ​3 MFH​R DES​H S4V​73XA​S 3A/​. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Yonhap. 2017. “Culture Ministry Considering Measures to Ban Conglomerates’ Screen Monopoly.” The Korea Times. June 30. http://​www.kore​aher​ald.com/​view.php?ud =​201​7063​0000​848.

­c hapter 10

Parasite: A Predicative or a Substantial Concept? Vincenzo Lomuscio 1

Human Parasite

The notion of parasite is a biological notion applied to the human nature to express a reprehensible behavior of concealed mistreatment. If we read the biological meaning of term in a biological dictionary, we notice that parasite notion cannot be consistently applied to human nature: Parasitism is s form of symbiosis in which one organism (called parasite) benefits at the expense of another organism usually of different species (called host). This host-​parasite association may eventuate to the injury of the host. Parasites can cause harm or disease to their host. They are generally much smaller than their hosts. […] Parasites may also be obligate or facultative depending on their interaction with their hosts. Obligate parasites are those that require a host to complete their life cycle. Facultative parasites are those that do not depend on a host to complete its life cycle. Certain parasites require only one host and they are referred to as direct parasites. Those that require both an intermediate host and a definitive host are called indirect parasites. Parasites that live outside the host are called ectoparasites whereas those that live inside the host are called endoparasites.1 The host organism and the parasite are different species, whereas the human parasite benefits at the expense of another human being. In Parasite, the first parasitism we encounter is that of the Kims, who infiltrate the upper-​class Park family one-​by-​one. However, the movie shows us another kind of parasitism which overturns this relationship between the two families: the Parks are unable to do anything and need the Kims’ skills to get by (learning English, driving the car, cooking, etc.). The Parks are rich but lack skills, the Kims are poor but are able to multitask: the former depend on the work of the latter.

1 https://​www.biolog​yonl​ine.com/​dic​tion​ary/​paras​ite.

© Vincenzo Lomuscio, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_012

130 Lomuscio This Hegelian overturning is not present in sub-​human organisms, where relationships between host and parasite are rigid. The second important difference between biological parasitism and the human one is that in human relationships we can have a bijective parasitism, according to the categories we use and to the point of view we choose. If we consider the Kims and Parks as individual or simple families, we define the Kims as “parasites” of the Parks’ resources (house, food, bathroom, drink, money …), but if we consider the Kims and Parks as representative of the underclass and the wealthy, with the great economical divide between them, our judgment is overturned. In this case, we choose a socio-​political point of view and use Marxist categories: the failure of the class struggle with the victory of upper class (Harvey 2005: 201–​3; Losurdo 2016: 247–​65) is the setting of the Kims-​Parks relationship, in which the upper-​class confines the poor behind an invisible line (“If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who cross the line,” Mr. Park says). In an underclass family, each member must work to live, and despite this commitment, any social climbing is impossible (Kim Ki-​woo’s final purpose touches our hearts, but we know that it will remain a dream), since the upper class defends its privileges (Harvey 2007: 153). On the contrary, almost all members of the wealthy family do not need to work, as Mr. Park alone earns a great deal of money. He is the ceo of “Another Brick Company,” with many people are under his command. We do not know what this company produces, perhaps high-​tech products, but it is not important, as it is enough for us to know that he is the ceo, and his benefits are incomparable with underclass salaries. This absurd gap shown in the movie likely wants to prompt viewers to think about the free trade model and the contradictions of the turbo-​capitalism economy, where multinational companies have no limits on increasing their profits, with no respect for workers and their lives.2 Their enrichment grows on the lack of dignity of the workers (Harvey 2007: 170–​81). This relationship between upper class’ enrichment and under class’ impoverishment is clearly shown in the movie through Mrs. Park’s words: choi yeon-​k yo: When Da-​Song was in first grade, he saw a ghost. […] Dong-​Ik doesn’t take it seriously. Growing pains, he says. And he says living in a haunted house actually brings good fortune. Good for business or something. You know what though? Business has been very good these past few years. It’s funny. 2 With regard to strategies of neo-​liberal economics see J. Comaroff-​J.L. Comaroff, 2001; Perry-​ Maurer 2003; Bayart 2004; Ong-​Collier, 2005; Fischer-​Downey 2006.

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Here we discover the strange coincidence between Geun-​sae’s presence in the house (the ghost that traumatized Da-​song) for the last four years, and the Parks’ great accumulation of wealth in “these past few years.” Geun-​sae started a cake shop, which went bankrupted, and so he escaped his creditors by hiding in the Parks house. His presence in the house signaled the beginning of the Parks’ luck. If Geun-​sae’s ruin were simultaneous with the Parks’ luck, and if we consider these individuals as representative of social classes, we understand this simultaneousness as the effect of the economic system, where small businessmen are crushed by great companies. By way of this correlation, the parasite relationship is inverted: the upper class’ richness is obtained through the exploitation of the lower classes. In this exploitation, the underclass is reduced to non-​human living conditions. This lack of humanity is shown throughout the movie in various moments, for example when we see the Kims’ house at the sub-​basement level of stacked slums resembling an architectural landslide, or when the Kims think the buffet for drivers is “amazing” (Ki-​woo: “Then it’s begun. Father, how amazing is this? We just so happen to be eating at a buffet for drivers. How symbolic!”), or when they discover the scandalous living conditions of Geun-​ sae. The dialog in the bunker between Ki-​taek and Geun-​sae is frightful:

ki-​taek:

God … I can’t believe you lived here for so long. I guess you had no choice … geun-​s ae: Plenty of people live underground. More if you count semi-​underground apartments! (Geun-​sae laughs). ki-​taek: So what was your plan? You didn’t even have one, did you? geun-​s ae (laughing): I like it here. It almost feels like I grew up here. This might as well be my official address.

We are first scandalized by the Kims’ living conditions, but we will be more scandalized by Geun-​sae’s living conditions. This deterioration corresponds to the descent of their homes, from sub-​basement to underground, from a narrow window to an absence of light. None of them acknowledges their own non-​human living conditions, and we can imagine that their descent knows no limits. There could be a worse and lower level of life. The movie shows us not only that human-​beings can get used to all living conditions, forgetting their dignity, but it also makes clear a cognitive distortion: in this formation, each of them becomes grateful to the members of the

132 Lomuscio wealthier class. This is the real defeat of the underclass and the real victory of the upper class: Geun-​sae is grateful to Mr. Park and venerates him –​in this aspect we can read the relationship between social alienation and a religious one (Givsan 2006: 67–​82; Hinkelammert 2018: 331–​60) –​because thanks to him he is safe, can live in a house (!) and can eat. Every day Geun-​sae thanks Mr. Parks by lighting up his walk along the house.

geun-​s ae (singing): Welcome back, what a hard day you must have had at work /​Welcome back, Mr. Park we love you so much.

He has photos and magazine interviews of Dong-​ik on the wall of the bunker, which he treats like holy icons. When dying, Geun-​sae looks at Mr. Park surrounded by sky light, like a god. He contemplates his successes as a ceo, his growing richness for which he is grateful. He idolizes Mr. Park and does not recognize that his condition is caused by an economic system of which Mr. Park is a representative. Poor families do not identify their enemy in the upper class, they fight among themselves to obtain or maintain work and the acknowledgment of the rich man; they even kill one another (Moon-​gwang, Geun-​sae and Ki-​jung). They prefer to be a parasite to the upper class like insects, rather than fight for their human dignity. As Thompson argued, if there is no consciousness of class, there is no class. They see themselves as individuals in the fight among one another. In contrast, the upper class appears to be a unit, harmonious, and conscious of its position (Ki-​woo: “They’re all so gorgeous. Even though they had to come at the last minute. So cool. Laid back”). In the same way, Ki-​taek, despite Mr. Park’s scornful judgment about his smell, tries to adulate his boss with these words:

ki-​taek: dong-​i k:

I guess Mrs. Park enjoys throwing parties. I suppose she does. She put a lot of effort into Da-​ Song’s birthday this year. ki-​taek: How thoughtful of her. And you too. ki-​taek (cont’d): What can you do, I guess. You love them, right? dong-​i k: Mr. Kim, you’re technically working today, aren’t you? ki-​taek: Yes, sir. dong-​i k: Then just think of this as part of the job.

This impotence of the underclass calls us to question who the real parasite is in the relationships between the Kims/​Parks, Parks/​Geun-​sae and Moon-​kwang.

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Yet in each of these relationships, we can consider parasitism in both directions, depending on the point of view we choose. 2

Parasite as Predicative Notion

Given this reversal of parasite/​host relationship, the concept of parasite can refer to both sides; “parasitic” is then no longer a characteristic of a certain type of human behavior, but a “predictable concept” depending on the point of view. It seems to be a predicative, relational and non-​substantial concept. When we use “predicative notion,” we mean that a human being, who belongs to a social class, is not parasite for essence, but only for relation. The same human being could be considered a parasite or not, according to the point of view we consider. If virtually everyone is a parasite or a host, this means that we cannot define a human being as more parasitic than others, or objectively a parasite to relative parasites. There is no objective or substantial definition of parasite. To investigate whether the notion of parasite could be substantial for some kind of human being, in the same way in which it is for biological organisms, we have to move from a socio-​political plan to an ontological one. Each parasite shares a biological similarity with the organism hosting it, in order to adapt to its host’s characteristics. Yet in ontological terms, this similarity is firmly anchored in the ontological difference between Being and beings: Being does not coincide with beings, so no one being, or entity, possesses the Being more than others. This notion has been developed in Middle Age philosophy by Aquinas and underpins the ontology of Heidegger. Aquinas explains this difference in Summa Theologiae: Being is the actuality of every form or nature, as goodness or humanity only signify in act in so far as they are. It follows then that being itself is compared with essence, which is distinct from it, as actuality is with potentiality. […] Being is said in two ways (esse dupliciter dicitur): in one case it means the actuality of being (actus essendi); in the other it means the composition of a proposition, which the soul gets to when it joins the predicate to the subject (alio modo significat compositionem propositionis, quam anima adinvenit coniugans praedicatum subiecto). According to the first meaning of being, we cannot know the being of God, nor can we know his essence. But we can know it in the second meaning. Because we know that this proposition, which we form when we say ‘God exists’,

134 Lomuscio is true (scimus enim quod haec propositio quam formamus de Deo, cum dicimus ‘Deus est’, vera est). And this we know by his effects. aquinas 2012: I q. 3, a. 4, ad 2

All beings share participation in Being. Heidegger interprets this participation in a secularized way, as no longer as a gift from God, but as Dasein’s “thrownness” in the Being, which is first and foremost the possibility to be (Heidegger 2008: 78–​86). In existentialistic terms, no one being decides to be because we are thrown into existence; therefore, we are thrown into possibilities to be. In the question which we are to work out, what is asked about is Being –​that which determines entities as entities, that on the basis of which entities are already understood, however we may discuss them in detail. The Being of entities “is” not itself an entity. heidegger 2008: 25–​26

Parasite and host take part in the Being in the same way because both are thrown into possibilities to be. This approach seems to confirm what we found in the socio-​political approach. Because all beings take part in ontological possibilities, we can find elements of parasitism in virtually every being. Basically, to be means taking part in possibilities to be, but these possibilities do not belong to anybody, because Being in itself does not coincide with beings. Indeed, when we use the notion of parasite to distinguish worthy human beings from parasitic ones, in doing so, we establish a precedence of some beings against others. Yet this way we define some humans against their enemies, probably according to an idea of justice, law, or state (Schmitt 2008: 26). Therefore, we need friend/​ enemy categories to define the parasite/​host. We are not able to define “parasite” without these political categories. As such, this notion could be reduced to a mere narrative or political classification, to define one group against its antagonist. Again, the difference between parasite and non-​parasite would not depend on the kind of human behavior, but on the (political) point of view we choose, as in the case of Kims-​Parks or Mr. Park-​Geun-​sae relationships. Each being takes part in possibilities to be and these possibilities to be belong to no one. The natural resources are neutral in themselves, what we define as a parasite is what we consider an enemy, or dangerous, as opposed to a friendly being. But friends/​enemy are political categories. Moreover, taking an ontological approach –​the ontological difference in Being/​beings and ontological participation in Being –​we only have a predicative notion of “human parasite”: no one is a parasite by itself, but only through a political interpretation. Therefore, we have to analyze the question of power

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to understand what defines a “parasite,” perhaps in a substantial way, drawing the line between participation and parasitism. The most ontological treatise of power is surely that of Nietzsche about the notion of “Will to Power as innermost essence of being” (Nietzsche 1973: 693). Yet we also find an analogous difficulty in Nietzsche’s in-​depth analyses of the “Will to Power.” Will to power is the most important concept in Nietzsche’s later works and in posthumous fragments. It is a general determination of being, and therefore an over-​individual principle, i.e. a dynamic force which moves the man without his decision. The Will to Power does not belong to man, but man belongs to it. To understand this reversed relationship, we can begin with Daybreak (1881), where Nietzsche thinks of will as an enigma, because each decision is always conditioned by unknown instincts and unconscious reasons (Nietzsche 1997: ii, 124, 125, 129). In turn, we cannot affirm real freedom in our will, because what appears to be free is only a superficial phenomenon. In the following works, this enigma is explained through the concept of “power.” In The Gay Science (1882) Nietzsche writes: On the doctrine of the feeling of power. –​Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power over them –​that is all one wants in such cases! We hurt those to whom we need to make our power perceptible, for pain is a much more sensitive means to that end than pleasure: pain always asks for the cause, while pleasure is inclined to stop with itself and not look back. We benefit and show benevolence toward those who already depend on us in some way (that is, who are used to thinking of us as their causes); we want to increase their power because we thus increase our own, or we want to show them the advantage of being in our power –​that way, they will be more satisfied with their situation and more hostile towards and willing to fight against the enemies of our power. The Gay Science, i: 13

Unlike Daybreak, here Nietzsche finds a reason for all of our actions: the “feeling of power.” We want to feel our power every time we act, even when we give up our life for somebody. This is a principle that explains not only all our actions, but also our consciousness. Indeed, consciousness (and thus also self-​consciousness) is the last development of the individual organism, but it is not needed to live. Men could live without consciousness because they could “think, feel, want, remember and act in the same way.” Its function is only “communication from man to man,” insomuch as consciousness and language evolve simultaneously. At the beginning, communication was used

136 Lomuscio by powerful individuals to command weak people; then it became useful to know one’s own thoughts, feelings and needs. This argument is particularly important: Nietzsche argues that personal experiences (thoughts, feelings, needs) and consciousness are very different: the former are essential elements of (animal and human) life, the latter is accidental and superfluous (Nietzsche 1991: v, 354). In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–​85), Nietzsche delves into the relationship between individuality and communication and argues that there is no real communication, but only incommunicable and eternally separate worlds. Each living being is a “center,” therefore a “perspective,” which considers other centers and perspectives only within itself. Each living being knows only its feelings, that are not objective cognitions of external reality, but perceptions of its power on other beings.3 So, self-​perception (and then also self-​consciousness) is first of all a perception of one’s own power, and not of truth. Each living being wants to feel its power, so it is first of all a “Will to Power.” Each kind of behavior aims to feel its own effects on others: presumption and passivity, command and slavery, words and silence … The Will to Power precedes logics and truth, it can be all and its contrary, it precedes the principle of non-​contradiction and “does not imply a principle, law, order”: The will to accumulate force is special to the phenomena of life, to nourishment, procreation, inheritance –​ to society, state, custom, authority. Should we not be permitted to assume this will as a motive cause in chemistry, too? –​ and in the cosmic order? Not merely conservation of energy, but maximal economy in use, so the only reality is the will to grow stronger of every center of force –​not self-​preservation, but the will to appropriate, dominate, increase, grow stronger. nietzsche 1973: 689

All human behaviors, even those that differ greatly, are always forms of Will to Power. Nietzsche provides some examples of these different possible forms.

3 “How lovely it is that there are words and sounds; aren’t words and sounds rainbows and illusory bridges between things eternally separated? To each soul belongs another world; for each soul every other soul is a hinterworld. Illusion tells its loveliest lies about the things that are most similar, because the tiniest gap is hardest to bridge. For me –​how would there be something outside me? There is no outside! But we forget this with all sounds; how lovely it is that we forget!!” (Nietzsche 1974: 175).

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The disguised forms of the Will to Power: 1. Desire for freedom, independence, also for equilibrium, peace, co-​ordination. Also the hermit, “spiritual freedom.” In the lowest form: will to exist at all, “the drive to self-​preservation.” 2. Enrollment, so as to satisfy the Will to Power in a larger whole: submission, making oneself indispensable and useful to those in power; love, as a secret path to the heart of the more powerful –​so as to dominate him. 3. The sense of duty, conscience, the imaginary consolation of outranking those who actually possess power; the recognition of an order of rank that permits judgment even of the more powerful; self-​ condemnation; the invention of new tables of value (Jews: classical example).

nietzsche: 774

Could this notion help to distinguish a parasite and non-​parasite? Each living being is a center toward increasing its possibilities. Each being relates to other beings only to increase its power. If the aim of each being is always this egoistic growth and never an impartial interest in doing good for the others, each being is intrinsically parasitic to others (because everyone wants to increase their possibilities to the detriment of others) and intrinsically a host to others (because everyone is surrounded by other wills to power). If we consider the beings in light of the ontological difference, parasite/​ host are not substantial definitions but only relational definitions according to political points of view. If we consider the beings in light of Nietzsche’s “Will to Power,” each being is intrinsically a parasite and a host at the same time. In both, parasite/​host is merely a perspective question. 3

The Question of the Plan

The movie provides a suggestion to distinguish human parasites in a substantial way. The question of “plan,” which is central to all of the Kims’ actions. Throughout the film, we have twenty occurrences of this word, each time before the Kims’ actions. Every time they have to increase their resources (Wi-​ Fi, job, money, the problem of Geun-​sae and his wife …) they develop a plan. For example, when they have to solve the Wi-​Fi issue:

chung-​s ook: Our phones have been suspended for weeks, and now the neighbors have shut us out. What’s your plan?

138 Lomuscio Or when Ki-​woo exposes his aim to study next year and his father is happy because he is a “man with a plan.” Or when they make a trap to have the housekeeper Moon-​gwang fired.

chung-​s ook: ki-​woo: ki-​j ung: ki-​woo: ki-​woo:

So she survived an ownership change. It’s a made job. Of course she won’t just let go. If we want to extract her, we’ll need to do some prep work. That’s right. We need a plan. This wasn’t in our plan.

Or when they are shocked at the discovery of Geun-​sae in the bunker, Ki-​woo says: “This wasn’t part of the plan.” And then Ki-​taek asks Geun-​sae what his plan is to solve his situation, but he replies “I like it here.” And so on, until the end of movie when Ki-​taek affirms that it is better to have no plan.

ki-​taek: Don’t plan at all. Have no plan. If you plan, something will always go wrong. That’s life. (then) Look around. Do you think these people got up this morning and said “Tonight I’m going to sleep on a dirty floor with hundreds of strangers”? But look where they are now. Look where we are. That’s why you should never plan. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t fail. You can’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t matter if you kill someone or commit fucking treason. Nothing fucking matters. You understand?

It seems that every time they speak about a plan, they have a parasitic behavior, to increase their resources to the detriment of others. Each plan is an expression of Will to Power. A kind of plan is seen also in the Parks’ behavior: they need to confine the underclass, to prevent it from crossing the line. We see this behavior every time the Parks fire their workers:

dong-​i k: But why does he have to do it in my car? And why in the backseat? That’s my space. Is he trying to mark his territory? With his dirty cum stains? Son of a bitch crossed the line.

When Mrs. Park fires Moon-​gwang and Mr. Park does not know why, he is astonished because the housekeeper never crossed the line. If a worker never crosses the line, there is no reason to fire her/​him. Mrs. Moon-​gwang has a flaw, she eats too much, but this is no problem.

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dong-​i k: She took care of all the little things in the house. And she was a tremendous cook. Most importantly, she never crossed the line. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s people who cross the line. Well, I guess she did have one flaw (laughs). She was a big eater. Ate twice as much as other people. But I suppose she worked twice as hard to make up for that.

The only problem according to Mr. Park is when a worker crosses the line. Understanding Mr. Park as representative of the upper classes’ behavior, we can deduce that this is the upper class’ plan, or the counterplan by the upper class to prevent any social climbing from the underclass. This way, we are also able to understand the bankruptcy of Geun-​sae cake shop, who tried to climb socially but was stopped by big creditors. This invisible wall is built by the behavior of the upper class, from Mr. Park’s behavior to his little son’s behavior. When Da-​song is in his tent and notices the call for help sent out by Geun-​sae in Morse code, he translates the message, but he remains indifferent. He is a child, but he is already building an invisible wall between him and under class. He already recognizes the difference, like when he recognizes the same smell on the Kims. The only exception is his sister Da-​ hye (“Those people are boring”), who wants to stay with Ki-​woo (Ki-​woo: “Do I look like I belong here?” … Da-​hye: “Just stay with me”). Maybe in love, there is a possibility of not being a parasite. Let us see. Who has no plan? Geun-​sae and his wife seem to have no plan. They can be considered a parasite of the Parks, because Geun-​sae is hidden in their house like a ghost, but he does not threaten the Parks’ resources and he cannot cross the line. Even the food, as Moon-​gwang tells the Kims, was not stolen but bought.4

chung-​s ook: So the whole time you were working here, you were smuggling food down from the kitchen? moon-​g wang: No! Everything he ate came from my pocket. From the money I made here. I never stole anything!

4 Mr. Park says that Moon-​gwang is eating twice as much, which could mean that she is bringing her husband food. But this would imply that the Parks were keeping track of the food expenditure, which is improbable given their wealth. It is more plausible that Mr. Park (or his wife) watches when Moon-​gwang cooks for herself (and for her husband), but this does not imply that that food has not been paid for out of her own pocket.

140 Lomuscio They are the only people who have no plan. They are not increasing their resources and they cannot threaten the Parks’ richness. They accept their conditions; they recognize that any growth or change is impossible and the only possibility to be is that of staying within the line (“I like it here. It almost feels like I grew up here. This might as well be my official address”). This seems to suspend Nietzsche’s Will to Power, which is always before truth. Ki-​taek learns this lesson from Geun-​sae. He recognizes that it is better “not to plan” as he realizes that any growth is an illusion. But unlike Geun-​sae, he understands this not through love, but through suffering. Geun-​sae however has understood the truth (that there is no possibility of growth) through the love for his wife (“No one can imitate North Korean news anchors like you. I love you, babe”), Ki-​taek understands the truth, but he does not find a different meaning of life in love. Without this love –​he never says “I love you” to his wife –​he continues to suffer. Like Geun-​sae, he gives up on the plan, but his words to his son have a different tone to those of Geun-​sae:

ki-​taek: If you plan, something will always go wrong. That’s life. Look around. Do you think these people got up this morning and said “Tonight I’m going to sleep on a dirty floor with hundreds of strangers”? But look where they are now. Look where we are. Ki-​woo is hardly consoled. That’s why you should never plan. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t fail. You can’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t matter if you kill someone or commit fucking treason. Nothing fucking matters. You understand?

Ki-​taek accepts his insurmountable condition but within the problem of power, the failure of his plan. He continues to look at reality through the lens of the Will to Power. Unlike Geun-​sae, he does not love Mr. Park, who is recognized as an enemy. It is against him that Ki-​taek performs the last act of his Will to Power: he takes his enemy’s life. In the Geun-​sae/​Moon-​gwang relationship, the only aim is their love. He explains to Ki-​taek that he wants to stay in the bunker, he and his wife do not have to fight. They do not want to improve their resources, but only survive and love. They have no plan.

geun-​s ae: Please. You have to let me stay here. Please. Talk to my wife. We don’t have to fight. Where did she go? She didn’t mean what she said. The woman really has a heart of gold. She stood by me the whole time I was in here. Four long years

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Geun-​sae changes after the death of Moon-​gwang because he no longer has a reason to live. As he comes out of bunker to avenge Chung-​sook, his life no longer has any value, and he dies happily at the hands of Mr. Park. On the other hand, Ki-​taek does not seem to love his wife in the same way, for two reasons: he looks for a comparison with Mr. Park (“You love them, right?”; “But … you still love her, don’t you?”) as if he understands the love-​power relationship through Mr. Park’s successful life; he prefers to kill Mr. Park instead of living with his wife; in this act, the Will to Power is more important than will to love. He understands that there is no possibility of changing his life, but his wife and his family do not seem to be a reason to go on. The day after, when he sees Mr. Park holding his nose at the awful smell, he decides to kill him and abandon all plans. He decides to live in the bunker. Living without any attempt to improve oneself to the detriment of others seems to be the only non-​parasitic life. If we are not able to define a substantial notion of parasitism, we at least gain a substantial notion of a non-​parasitic human being: a life in which the acknowledgement of truth suspends the Will to Power. This suspension is possible only through love. If there is no love, this acknowledgment of truth moves towards death (Ki-​taek against Mr. Park and Geun-​sae against Chung-​sook). If a non-​parasitic life lies in the link between truth and love, outside of this relationship each of these terms remain within the Will to Power. The parasitic life is characterized not only by truth without love, i.e. hate for one’s enemy (Mr. Park and Ki-​taek), but also by love without truth, as in Ki-​woo’s final plan. Ki-​woo wants to become rich to buy the house where Ki-​taek is hiding. This is a plan of love for his father, but without truth.

4

ki-​woo: Father. Today I made a plan. First I’ll need to go to college. Then I’ll get a job and get married. But ultimately, I want to get rich. And when I get rich, I will buy this house. Conclusion

In this chapter, I have discussed the problematic notion of applying parasitism to human behavior. This complexity emerges in the movie through the reversibility of the parasite-​host relationship according to the point of view we choose. This choice seems to be socio-​political and linked to enemy/​friend categories. Furthermore, when taking an ontological approach, the problem still remains: if we consider the ontological difference Being/​beings and consider each being as participating in possibilities to be, we cannot define a parasitic

142 Lomuscio appropriation of these possibilities. Given that each being is “thrown” into Being, we have to consider these possibilities of both everyone (every being is thrown in existence) and nobody (no one being has a priority to be, but a divine being). I have suggested defining the difference between parasite and non-​parasite by way of Nietzsche’s notion of Will to Power. Through this lens, we can find in the movie a key to distinguishing a substantial notion of non-​ parasite. Notwithstanding their apparent parasitic life, only Geun-​sae and his wife live without attempting to increase their resources. With no attempt to grow to the detriment of other human beings, their life is the only non-​parasitic life in the movie. Indeed, their life will be destroyed by the Kims’ parasitism. Although Ki-​taek ultimately recognizes the impossibility of changing his life, he lacks the perspective which allows Geun-​sae to go on: love. He suffers from this impossibility and performs his last act of Will to Power to the detriment of Mr. Park’s life. While Geun-​sae and his wife accept their condition in relation to love, Ki-​taek is not able to approach truth within love. Without love, the truth becomes sufferance, impotence, resentment, and the Will to Power cannot be achieved. This relationship between truth and love is absent in another way also in Ki-​woo’s final aim. He lives in the love for his father, but he does not recognize the truth in which he is constrained. Ki-​woo makes a plan to save his father, but this plan is impossible. The love he has towards his father recalls Moon-​gwang’s love for her husband; both are in the bunker, both are alone. But in Ki-​woo’s love, there is still the illusion of Will to Power, while in the love between Moon-​ gwang/​Geun-​sae, there is a grateful acknowledgement of the truth. This love, which both Mr. Kim and Mr. Park are missing, seems to be the real revolution.

References

Aquinas, Thomas St. 2012. Summa Theologiae. Eng. trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute. Bayart, Jean-​François. 2004. Le Gouvernement du monde. Une critique politique de la globalisation. Paris: Fayard. Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff John L (eds.). 2001. Millenial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Fisher, Melissa S. and Downey, Greg (eds), 2006. Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, Durham: Duke University Press. Givsan, Hassan. 2006. “Homo homini deus est –​der Wendepunkt der Weltgeschichte,” in U. Reitemeyer, T. Shibata, and F. Tomasoni (eds.), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–​ 1872): Identität und Pluralismus in der globalen Gesellschaft, Münster: Waxmann, 67–​82.

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Heidegger, Martin. 2008 [1927]. Sein und Zeit, hga ii, Eng. trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Being and Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Hinkelammert, Franz, 2018. “El ser humano como ser supremo para el ser humano. Más allá de la religión neoliberal del mercado” in Landa, Roger (ed.), El vuelo del fénix: El capital, lecturas críticas a 150 años de su publicación (1867–​2017). Buenos Aires: clacso, pp. 33160. Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford-​New York: OUP. Losurdo, Domenico. 2016. La lotta di classe. Una storia politica e filosofica. Eng. trans. by G. Elliot, Class Struggle. A Political and Philosophical History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1997 [1881]. Daybreak. Thoughts on the Prejudice of Morality (trans. R. J. Hollingdale). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1991 [1887]. The Gay Science (transl. W. Kaufmann). New York: Random House. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974 [1884–​85]. Thus Spoke Zarsathustra (transl. R. J. Hollingdale). London: Penguin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1973 [1906]. The Will to Power. (trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale). New York: Randhom House. Ong, Aihwa and Collier, Stephen J. (eds). 2005. Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, Malden (Mass.): Blackwell. Perry, Richard and Mauer, Bill (eds), 2003. Globalization under Construction. Governmentality, Law and Identity, Minneapolis-​ London: University of Minnesota Press. Schmitt, Carl. 2008 [1932]. The Concept of the Political. Expanded Edition (trans. G. Schwab). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

­c hapter 11

“A System of Apprehensions”

The Art of Parasitism in Lucian’s De Parasito and Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite Giannis Stamatellos Humans are tricked in the understanding of what is obvious, just like Homer, who was wiser than all the Greeks. For children who were killing lice tricked him saying: “what we saw and seized we left behind, but what we did not see or seize, this we took with us.” heraclitus (fr. 56)

∵ In the Art of Deception (2002), the notorious hacker Kevin Mitnick describes social engineering as a performance art of influence and persuasion (xi, xii). He names himself as a con artist who uses deception to manipulate people (xii).1 A company job is more like what we call a big con. You’ve got setup to do. Find out what their buttons are, find out what they want. What they need. Plan an attack. Be patient, do your homework. Figure out the role you’re going to play and learn your lines. And don’t walk in the door until you’re ready. (232) In Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite (2019), the impoverished Kim family acts as a fine-​ tuned gang of parasites, well coordinated and inventive in the sophisticated art of deception and manipulation of the wealthy Park family. In the second century ce, the satirist Lucian of Samosata, in his dialogue De Parasito, amusingly portrays parasitism as an art. By taking into account a Stoic definition of 1 In his preface, Mitnick offers a classification for the con artist as the grifter (who swindles and cheats people out of their money) and the social engineer (who uses deception, influence, and persuasion against businesses, usually targeting their information). See Mitncik and Simon 2002: XI–​XII. © Giannis Stamatellos, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_013

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art (techne) as a “system of apprehensions,”2 assigned to Zeno of Citium (l.c. 336–​265 bce), it is maintained, in a satirical manner, that the art of parasitism is even better than philosophy and rhetoric (Luc.Par. 4). The parasite recognizes obscure and hidden things, knows how to talk and act appropriately, and shows highly developed expertise. This paper aims to offer a philosophical comparison between Lucian’s De Parasito and Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite in light of Zeno’s definition of art. Serres’ Parasite (1982) will also be used as a text-​ interrupter installed in-​between Lucian’s satire and that of Bong Joon-​ho’s film. It is suggested that the art of parasitism in Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite is a system of apprehensions, a body of knowledge co-​exercised for a specific purpose. 1

Techne in Lucian’s De Parasito

Lucian’s De Parasito (Περὶ τοῦ Παρασίτου ὅτι Τέχνη ἡ Παρασιτική –​“The Parasite: Parasitic an Art”) satirically oscillates on the old controversy between philosophy and rhetoric.3 Lucian challenges, in a rhetoric manner, the fact that Parasitike (Παρασιτική) is not only an art but even better than any art. Lucian adopts the form of satiric dialogue to mimic a Platonic maniera and to criticize both philosophers and rhetoricians.4 Simon (the parasitos) uses philosophical language and rhetorical devices to defend the art of parasitism and the artisanship of the parasite. Lucian’s parasitos is a caricature of the flatterer and the crook, a controversial persona that exhibits the virtues of courage and self-​sufficiency along with notable intellectual qualities, insights, and practical skills.5 The philosophical aura of De Parasito conflates a Stoic theory of art with Socratic dialectic and also alludes to Epicurean, Platonic, and Peripatetic conceptions of techne.

2 svf i 73: σύστημα καταλήψεων. 3 Modern scholars canonized Lucian in the period of the Second Sophistic (c. ce 60–​230); see Bozia, 2015: 17 –​18. During this period, wealthy Romans used to host in their houses mostly educated Greeks as teachers or guests, frequently called “clients” or “parasites” (Bozia, 2015: 21). See also Harmon (1921: 235) and Nesselrath (1985:144). 4 For the stylistic and eccentric divergences of De Parasito from Lucian’s oeuvre see Anderson 1979: 59. 5 For parasitos (or ‘sponger’ –​“a fellow dinner”) and how this term has been used interchangeable with kolax (‘toady’, ‘flatterer’) see Brown (2016). Brown correctly adds that the two terms “overlap with other character-​labels such as the sykophantēs (‘swindler’).” Lucian’s De Parasito (along with Alciphron’s Epistles and Libanius’ Declamations) is recognized as an indicative example of parasitos in Greek and Roman comedy.

146 Stamatellos “Is parasitim an art?” This question drives De Parasito. In his dialogue with Tychiades, Simon refers to a Stoic definition of techne (svf i 73) by Zeno of Citium:6 An art, I remember to have heard a learned man say, is a system of apprehensions (σύστημα ἐκ καταλήψεων)7 exercised in combination (συγγεγυμνασμένων) to some end useful in life (πρός τι τέλος εὔχρηστον τῷ βίῳ).8 Luc.Par. 4; trans. Harmon modified

A work of art is a system of knowledge founded on direct apprehensions (katelipseis), i.e. “to be sure of something,” in the Stoic terminology.9 Sparshott emphasizes the dynamic element of Zeno’s use of katalipsis as it is originally associated to the military occupation of a town (285). Zeno’s definition of techne denotes the active order of a creative and productive condition, common, for the Stoics, to humans, Gods, or Nature (Mansfeld 1983: 65). The term systema stresses the coordination of apprehensions, co-​exercised and integrated in the accomplishment of a useful end (telos).10 The purpose of art is equally important as it designates the application of the exercised apprehensions to be developed for a useful objective in life.11 Art is not an unplanned and spontaneous application of skills, as Epicureans would claim, but a purposeful coordination 6 7 8

9 10 11

Zeno is regarded as the founder of the Stoic school at Athens. For the Stoic theory of art see Zagdoun (2000). See Sparshott (1978). I translate katalipsis as “apprehension” to denote intellectual conception, knowledge, and expertise. Other translations suggest “body of perceptions” (Fowler and Fowler, 1905); or “complex of knowledges” (Harmon 1921). See Olympiodorus in Plat. Gorg. 53, 54. By interpreting Plato’s Gorgias, Olympiodorus wonders if rhetoric is an art or not. See Mansfeld 1983: 57 and Sparshott 1978: 281. It is surprising that Harmon doe not recognize Zeno as the source of this fragment (p. 247, n. 1). An additional definition of techne is assigned to Zeno by the scholiast of Dionysius Thrax (svf i 72): “Art is a habit of roadbuilding” (techne estin hexis hodopoietike). As Sparshott suggests, the two definitions are not in contradiction but show the dual aspect of Zeno’s techne: art as specialism and systematization of a body of knowledge (281). Both elements of the art are reflected in De Parasito, despite the fact that Lucian quotes only svf i 73. It is not the aim of this chapter to offer a philosophical interpretation of Zeno’s definitions of art. For a detailed discussion on Stoic techne and its philosophical background in Lucian’s De Parasito see Nesselrath (1985), 123–​239. For the Stoic katalipsis, see von Arnim (1903–​05), vol. 2, 29–​32; Sparshott 1978: 284; Nesselrath 1985: 170–​74. In the Zenonian definition of techne, the coordination of apprehensions signifies a unit of mutual interaction similar to a group of athletes or a group of musicians who have trained together and function as a team. Sparshott 1978: 284; Mansfeld 1983: 57–​58. See also the discussion of Nesselrath (1985), 175–​178.

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of apprehensions applied to obtain a pre-​established but fruitful end for life that is attained beyond the practice of art, as a Peripatetic would suggest (Sparshot 1978: 288). The usefulness of art in life prefigures also Chrysippus’ art of virtue that is crucial for life as whole.12 The art of a parasitism is a system of direct apprehensions (katalipseis) as far as it exhibits intelligence and expertise: the first apprehension of the parasitike is “testing” and “deciding” who will be the patron (Luc.Par. 4). The parasite’s ability to distinguish the suitable host requires intelligence and insight in things that are not always obvious but sometimes “hidden” and “obscure.” Simon claims that the art of parasitism is like the numismatic art of the assayer of silver who can tell original coins from counterfeit. It exhibits intuitive elements, even better than divination, in “distinguishing and recognizing things so obscure and hidden” (4). The second katalipsis, according to Simon, aims to express devotion to the patron. The parasite knows how to talk appropriately, how to act in order to become intimate and to distinguish between merits and defects (5). The art of parasitism is more demanding than any other art; it is exercised every day, not occasionally. The constant application of parasitike makes it demanding but vital, as “drinking” and “eating” are its ultimate ends; they are vital for the sustainment of life and for the survival of the parasite (6). Simon clarifies that parasitism is not a natural power like beauty and strength (dunamis), nor a “want of art” or unskillfulness (atechnia); parasitike always leads to an achievable result like horsemanship or captainship (8). The art of parasitism has not any chance for failure but its successful exercise saves the parasite. Simon offers a definition of the art of parasitism that conforms with its ends: “Parasitism is that art which is concerned with food and drink and what must be said and done to obtain them, and its end is pleasure” (Luc.Par. 9). The end (telos) of parasitike is pleasure as a virtue, but not in Epicurean terms (10). This is justified through Homer’s Odyssey 9, that a life of happiness and pleasure is blessed and desirable (10). Lucian satirizes Epicurus and accuses the Epicurean theory of pleasure as plagiarism: “As to Epicurus, quite shamelessly filching the end of parasitike, he makes it the end of his conception of happiness” (11). In parasitism, pleasure is (1) “the freedom of the flesh from discomfort” and (2) “not having the spirit full of turbulence and commotion” (11). For Simon, Epicurus should be blamed for being inconsistent to his own 12

Sparshott (1978) summarizes: “An art, as a complex of intuitions interrelated in the service of a specific end, has its own integrity; but only respectable ends generate arts, and the ultimate ground of respectability is the possibility of integration into, or due subordination to, the art of arts which is virtue” (289).

148 Stamatellos theories by accepting the bodily affections both from human life and the universal order. The parasite, however, is happy with the pleasures of the present moment, eating and sleeping in peace and comfort, without being annoyed about future expectations or disturbed by other obligations. An Epicurean perspective of pleasure entails the burden to satisfy all arising desires (12). In addition to the definition of the parasitike and the justification of parasitism as techne (4–​12), Simon aims to show that parasitism is “the best art (…), excels all the other arts put together, and then, that it excels each of them individually” (13). Parasitism excels “all other arts put together” as it is learned without laborious study, hardship, fear, or unnecessary pains; the parasite exercises his art at his own good will and pleasure; other arts attain this end late, “reaping their harvest of pleasure only after their apprenticeship.” Parasitism “derives profit from the art immediately, in the apprenticeship itself, and no sooner does it begin than it is at its end” (14). It has no hidden objective in its work (ergon), no means to another end, as it is the case for other arts.13 The parasite celebrates and enjoys life with plenty of food and wine every day, while other artisans celebrate once or twice per month (15–​16). Moreover, the parasite needs no tools for his art. While other artisans use complex tools and even pay to learn their art, the parasite is paid for his art (17–​18). Other arts have teachers, but the parastike has none.14 The art of parasitism can be exercised everywhere; other arts stand in need of parasitism, while parasitism stands in no need of any other arts (19–​21). A parasite is never a knave or a fool (25). Parasitike is a noble art; friendship and trust are its inherent and original values; no one shares food and drink without a “trusty friend” (22). It is a royal art: while other artisans exercise their arts with toil and sweat, the parasite “plies his art lying down like a king” (23). Parasitism “excels each art individually”: it surpasses both rhetoric and philosophy as far as parasitike deals initially with its objective reality and real existence (hypostasin) (26–​27). There is a plurality of philosophies but not a common agreement and uniformity on what is wisdom between different philosophical schools. In the art of parasitism, there is a concord and agreement about the nature of wisdom (27–​30) and so, parasitism, as far as wisdom is concerned, is even higher than philosophy: “no parasite ever fell in love with philosophy; but it is on record that philosophers in great number have been fond of parasitike, and even to-​day they love it” (31). Philosophy is not always desired but parasitism is; philosophers might be cold and hungry but never 13 14

Parasitike is an end in itself close to Aristotle’s activity of virtue as phronesis (practical wisdom) and eupraxia as an end in itself. Lucian refers to the definition of poetry in Plato’s Ion 534 b-​c. See Harmon (1921).

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the parasitos (38). Furthermore, in a state of war, parasites prove to be greater heroes, braver and stronger in the battle than philosophers, as well as, in a state of piece, parasites are always in good shape and joyful characters with humor (40–​48). Simon stresses the self-​sufficiency and independence of the art of parasitism; parasites despise reputation and opinion of others, while philosophers are subject to distress, anger, jealousy, and all sorts of desires. Parasites have no desires, either of reputation or money. A parasite is not depended on food, since by definition the one who lacks food is not a parasite. Thus, the life of the parasite is happier and more fortunate than the life of philosophers and rhetoricians (51–​58). 2

The Art of Parasitism in Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite

Lucian’s satire of parasitike, the techne exercised by the parasitos in wealthy Roman houses, meets Bong Joon-​ho’s satire about a wealthy Korean family being manipulated by parasites. The Kim family (the parasites), who lives in a semi-​basement apartment (banjiha), gains the trust of the prosperous Park family, and progressively occupies the house of its patron. Ki-​woo, the son of the Kim family, is the first who settles in the house as the English tutor of Da-​hye. Ki-​woo exercises the first katalipsis. As Zeno metaphorically portrays katalipsis with the gesture of the closing fist,15 Ki-​woo, in his first lesson with Da-​hye, receives her trust and gains position in her heart, by pressing gently his thumb on her wrist (20): Ki-​woo suddenly snatches Da-​hye’s wrist, shocking both Da-​hye and her mom. He presses his thumb gently and feels her pulse like doctor. The Kim family rationalizes their knowledge, intelligence, and skills. Ki-​jung and Ki-​woo are handy with computers and technology. Ki-​jung prepares a fake certificate of enrolment using photo-​editing software. They exercise the art of persuasion by taking advantage of various situations. Ki-​woo pretends to appreciate avant-​garde art and the son’s works, while Ki-​jung pretends to be an art teacher and an art therapist who analyzes these works. The parasites aim to inspire trust to the Park family; they pretend to be honest, direct, clear, 15

For Zeno’s gestures see Snapshott (1978), 285: “perception is illustrated by the outstretched hand, assent by a hooking of the fingers, katalepsis by a closing of the fist, and true knowledge, which only the wise attain, by enfolding that closed fist in the firm grip of the other hand.”

150 Stamatellos and with good intentions. The Parks appreciate honesty but without knowing the real objectives of the parasites. The young members of the Kim family, particularly Ki-​woo, exercise a sophisticated art of parasitism. The dismissal of Moon-​gwang from the house due to her alleged tuberculosis (an allergy against peaches) is masterfully orchestrated by Ki-​woo. Bong Joon-​ho illustrates the art of the parasites in a ballet montage with the musical background of “Spietati, io vi giurai” from Händel’s opera Rodelinda. Notable is the scene where Ki-​woo instructs his father Ki-​taek to act convincingly vis-​à-​vis Yeon-​kyo when talking about Moon-​gwang’s alleged tuberculosis. The “Belt of Trust” is well tightened in the Park family. The art of Ki-​woo is iconified in the suseok, the “scholars rock,” the “uniquely shaped stone,” a “symbolic gift” Ki-​woo receives from his friend Min-​hyuk, who actually introduces him to the Park family as an English tutor of Da-​hye. In the Korean tradition, a suseok is an object of art shaped by natural elements; they come in various sizes and are usually kept on scholars’ writing tables; a suseok “graces the homes of sophisticated Korean families.” However, this “fabled rock isn’t a step towards sophistication; it’s an invitation to violence.”16 The suseok is also an invitation to techne, and particularly the art of parasitism, as it has been described in De Parasito and with regard to Zeno’s creative logos of techne as part of the human nature that is similar to the way that the Stoic God (Nature) creates (see Mansfeld 1983: 65). Suseok marks a difference in the exercise of parasitism between two generations of parasites, as becomes obvious in the relationship of father Ki-​taek and his son Ki-​woo. Ki-​woo has a plan, and his plan shows his techne. Ki-​woo has the plan to study at the university; the father is proud: “That’s my son. Man with a plan.” Ki-​woo’s parasitike is based on a well-​organized and structured17 plan, which is, however, interrupted by unpredicted factors. For example, when Moon-​gwang discovers the true identity of the Kim family, things go against the plan. Conversely, Ki-​taek and Chung-​sook live an unplanned life in their semi-​underground apartment; likewise, the parasites in the basement, Moon-​gwang and Geun-​Sae, live an unplanned life underground. As Ki-​taek, Ki-​jung and Ki-​woo run away, out of breath, in a rainy night from Park’s house, just closely escaping from the danger of their true identity being revealed, and

16 17

Chernick (2020) explains that a suseok is related to good fortune and stratifies the hierarchy of the Parasite. Ki-​woo’s change of luck should be also considered in terms of moral luck that is prefigured in suseok as a gift and his acquaintance of the wealthy Park family. For structured solutions in problem solving, see Doukakis and Psaltidou (2002), 28–​30.

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return to their working class impoverished neighborhood,18 Ki-​Jung asks her father about his plan., Ki-​Taek remains silent. Like a good father, Ki-​taek tries to be firm and reassure his kids: “I know what I’m doing. Daddy has a plan.” However, in the evacuation center, the dialogue between father and son is apocalyptic. Ki-​taek explains to Ki-​woo that he has no plan, which is the only foolproof plan: “If you plan, something will always go wrong. That’s life.” ki-​taek That’s why you should never plan. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t fail. You can’t do anything wrong. Ki-​woo hugs his “scholar’s rock,” he tightly holds his art. The suseok becomes a Serresian “parasitic stone” that progressively builds an “I” (Serres: 134, 227). Bongs parasitism is presented as an allographic art19 but with the intention to produce a telos useful in the life of the parasites and beyond the moral aim to turn things right. He applies an art in the form of a plan as a means for a specific end that actually prefigures Zeno’s definition of art as a co-​exercised system of knowledge and what Beardsley suggests for an artwork as the “arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience.”20 Ki-​woo promises to turn things right. His aims are supported by a plan, an art of organizing life towards a useful end, a telos for the art of parasitism beyond the bios of the parasites. The horizontal social hierarchy between parasitic lives is enriched with the different hierarchy of aims and the means by Ki-​taek and Ki-​woo to achieve an end. The unplanned life of Ki-​taek downgrades him to an underground parasite in the basement of Park’s house. Ki-​woo’s plan aims to upgrade his parasitic life to the wealthy conservative level of the high society. Towards the end of the film, Ki-​woo writes a letter to his father (154–​155):

ki-​woo (v.o.) Father. Today I made a plan. ext. stream –​ day We witness the moment when the viewing stone was first discovered. a pair of hands pick up the rock from a beautiful, pristine stream. ki-​woo (v.o.) A long-​term plan. 18 19 20

For parasitic poverty in Bong’s Parasite, see Casey (2020) and Ridgeway-​Diaz et. al. (2020). See Goodman’s classification in the Languages of Art (1968). Beardsley 1982: 299. For the artwork as a product of intention see Szu-​Yen Lin’s general overview (2018) as well as Adajian (2018).

152 Stamatellos Ki-​woo intents to leave behind his parasitic life, he plans to get rich, buy the house, and bring back Ki-​taek. Thus, whereas Lucian’s parasite acts alone, Bong Joon-​ho’s parasites act as a team. Ki-​woo has a plan, and not only spontaneously applied skills. The parasites systematize active apprehensions in the coordination of knowledge and expertise to accomplish an end useful for their parasitic domination. According to Lucian’s description of the parasitic life, the parasites are happy with the pleasures of the present moment (Luc.Par. 12), and with the exception of Ki-​woo, nobody has plans for the future. Similar to Lucian’s techne, the art of Bong Joon-​ho’s parasites needs no training; it is an art without instruments or tools. The fruits of the art of parasitism can be enjoyed every day and exercised everywhere independently of the circumstances. The Kim family offers to their patrons its services but also fake companionship and friendship. Their aim is to gain the trust of their patrons. In Bong’s Parasite, the patron is not aware of the real identity of the parasites. The parasites eat and drink together though not with their patrons. The parasite taxonomy between the Kim family on the one hand, Geun-​sae and Moon-​gwang on the other, reflects a social classification more complicated and structured than Lucian’s De Parasito. The parasites in Bong’s film are in a fight for survival, parasitism is useful mainly for their own life, they are not virtuous, but selfish and manipulative. The older members of the Kim family can hardly be considered as educated. The art of parasitism is a means to obtain pleasure and happiness; it is an art of manipulation, a social engineering, and an ergon that aims to the perseverance of the life of the parasites themselves. In contrast to Lucian’s parasite, the patron in Bong’s Parasite, the Park family, becomes an ornament of the Kim family. However, this is not the case of the basement parasites. 3

The Interrupter

The structural and interpersonal complexity of Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite echoes Serres’ Parasite. The Serresian parasite is an expansion: “it runs and grows. It invades and occupies” (253); “it appears in the logic of reasoning, in calculation and language, in order, plans, and space” (32); “its role is paradoxical, it is the static in a system or the interference in a channel” (Schehr 1982: xi). For Serres, a system is a harmony of disequilibrium where the parasite marks the necessary malfunction or noise for the development of the system, and the parasitic noise produces a new system that is inverted or contradictory but different from the one that was interrupted (12–​13). In Bong’s film, Ki-​woo is the juvenile parasite that brings disorder to the system; it disconnects the chain

153

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of order between the hosts and established generations of parasites and then composes a new order. The parasite brings a metamorphosis and contributes to the transformation of the system. The key role in the film is Ki-​woo: his parasitism is a sophisticated art and not just a parasitic noise; he is the parasitic factor of asymmetry, an atomic relation that brings a new meaning to the system (184–​185). However, Ki-​woo is transformed by his art; he becomes absorbed by the system he converts; the system moves to a new state of malfunction and justifies Serres’ oxymoron that “the system works because it does not work” (13, 72). In the loci of metamorphic systems, Ki-​woo is the “Interrupter,” “the elementary link of the parasitic chain”:21 Ki-woo (Interrupter)

Host (Park Family)

Parasites (Kim family)

Ki-​woo is the Serresian artisan of the position who plays the relation between subjects. The parasite masters men, and “the master of men is the master of the masters of the world” (32). The parasite exercises interference as the art of invention and, similar to Zeno’s techne, Serres’ parasite systematizes expertise for a specific purpose, “a system of knowledge or its pathology” (71, 18). The parasite is the hunter who exercises the cynegetic art:22 The hunter is a parasite, first and foremost. Not only the hunted, but also the hunter. He makes the dog, falcon, or sparrow hawk do what he cannot or does not know how to do. Hunting is above all a cynegetic art –​an art of leading dogs. Dogs, a pack of dogs, horses, birds of prey. Dogs, horses, and grooms, all with hearty appetites. For Serres, hypocrisy lies in the art of not planning (211). Ki-​taek, Geun-​sae and Moon-​gwang are mediocre artisans fed by the host, invisible like Tartuffe or Gyges. They do not exercise an art: it is only with Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung that parasitism becomes a systema that challenges and transforms the already established structure into a new system (214). Schehr explains that the Serresian parasite is “a microbe, an insidious infection that takes without giving and weakens without killing” (Schehr 1982: x). Bozia follows this interpretation

21 22

The following diagram is based on Serres’ diagram of the parasitic chain, (1982) p. 19. Serres refers to Xenophon’s Art of Hunting, 81.

154 Stamatellos and applies it to Lucian’s De Parasito (Bozia 2015: 24). The Lucianic parasite is regarded as selfish, arrogant, or even unappreciative; not paying anything for the food he has received. However, Simon ironically explains how the parasite is a good and useful acquisition to the patron, how he is the best companion and a precious ornament of the rich. A rich man without a parasite appears low and cheap. The parasite is “an ornament to the rich man, but the rich man is never an ornament to the parasite” (Luc.Par. 59). It is profitable for the rich man to support the parasite: the parasite offers security because he can be bodyguard and pre-​tastes poisonous foods and drinks. The rich man is saved: “So the rich man is not only ornamented but is actually saved from the greatest perils by the parasite, who faces every danger on account of his affection, and will not suffer the rich man to eat alone, but chooses even to die from eating with him” (59). Lucian stresses the element of companionship in the etymology of the term parasito; that is, not only to eat (sito) but also to eat with someone else (para) (60). The importance of “the other” is not emphasized without purpose, and even if Lucian’s language satirizes the parasite-​patron relationship, the parasites serve as companions. It is better to eat and ride with “someone else” than be alone (61). Lucian’s parody aims not only to create a satire for the life of the parasite but also of the lifestyle of wealthy Roman families.23 Moreover, Lucian’s parasitos is not ungrateful. In his De Mercede Conductis, the educated parasite shows the illiterate patron how to be more sophisticated and learned. However, in De Mercede Conductis, the parasite (Timocles) is portrayed as a “pitiful figure who entertains high yet unrealistic hopes” while, in De Parasito, the parasite (Simon) “is prideful of his status.”24 In Bong’s Parasite, the Geun-​ sae and Moon-​gwang are also grateful to the Park family. Geun-​sae shows “respect” to Dong-​ik; they live as unnoticed “lice” on the host but they appreciate what they have, and enjoy their quality moments alone in the house, enjoying the view and “listen to Rachmaninoff on the bluetooth speaker” (76).25 23

24

25

There are incidents from the Homeric literature to the early Roman period that parasites offer some kind of service and return in their own way the benefits and food which have been received by their patrons (see Bozia 2015 and also the case of Irus in Homer’s Odyssey, Xenophon’s Memorabilia 29, and Cicero’s Pro Flacco. Bozia compares Lucian’s De Parasito to Juvenal’s Saturae. Bozia (2015: 42) discusses the importance of rhetorical motif of the Platonic dialogue in De Parasito and interestingly considers that Lucian sets Platonic and Socratic philosophy into a different context, making De Parasito the metalanguage for De Mercede Conductis (43). For the metaphor of the louse and the parasite see Serres, 5–​7, 25. The unnoticed lice could be seen as an echo of Heraclitus' anecdotal reference to Homer and the childer who were killing lice and tricked him in fr. 56, see Stamatellos (2012: 89).

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While Geun-​sae and Moon-​gwang are the home-​based parasites and value the life with the host, the Kim family is an intruder, harassed in their banjiha, and in search for the better life of a bourgeois dream. 4

Conclusion

Bong Joon-​ho’s Parasite portrays an art of parasitism that can be compared to Lucian’s De Parasito. Bong’s parasitike is a systematized art in the Zenonian sense: a system of apprehensions co-​exercised for a specific end. The Kim family exhibits active apprehensions, intelligence, and skills. Whereas Geun-​sae and Moon-​gwang are insiders and home-​based old-​fashioned traditional parasites, the Kim family are outsiders, they are banjiha parasites of the Korean society that aim to manipulate the host and dominate Park’s house. Ki-​woo is the interrupter that breaks the parasitic chain. The key is his art of deception: the suseok, which is a natural art of manipulation that guarantees the continuation of the social structure on a long chain of traditions of parasitike as a techne of interruption and alterations with a useful telos. In Bong’s film, the art of parasitism is the solution, not the problem, a new form of deception and manipulation based on the host’s pathetic desire for trust and companionship.

References

Adajian, Thomas. 2018. “The Definition of Art.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://​plato.stanf​ord.edu/​entr​ies/​art-​def​init​ion/​ [Last Accessed: 1/​7/​2021]. Anderson, Graham. 1979 “Motifs and Techniques in Lucian’s “de Parasito,” Phoenix 33, 1, 59–​66. Beardsley, Monroe. 1982. The Aesthetic Point of View. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bong, Joon-​ho and Han Jin-​won. 2019. Parasite (Screenplay). New York: Neon. Bozia, Eleni. 2015. Lucian and His Roman Voices: Cultural Exchanges and Conflicts in the Late Roman Empire. New York: Routledge. Brown, G. M. Peter. 2016. “Parasite.” Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casey, Rife. 2020. “Parasitic Poverty” in Aegis: The Otterbein Humanities Journal 17, 46–​53. Chernick, Karen. 2020. “A Highly Collectible Rock Plays a Key Role in the Oscar-​ Nominated Film ‘Parasite.’ Here’s the Actual Meaning Behind It” in Artnet, https://​ news.art​net.com/​art-​world/​guide-​sus​eok-​stone-​paras​ite-​1768​059 [Last Accessed: 1/​ 7/​2021].

156 Stamatellos Doukakis, Spyridon and Alexandra Psaltidou. 2002. Software Development in Programming Enviroments. Athens: New Technologies. Fowler, H. Watson and F. George Fowler. 1905. (trans.) The Works of Lucian of Samosata. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goodman, Nelson. 1968. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Lucian. 1921. “The Parasite, Parasitic an Art” (trans. A. Morris) in Harmon, Lucian with an English translation, vol. 3, Loeb Classical Library, London: Heinemann. Lin, Szu-​Yen. 2018. “Art and Interpretation,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://​ iep.utm.edu/​artin​ter/​ [Last Accessed: 1/​7/​2021]. Mansfeld, Jaap. 1983. “Techne: A New Fragment of Chrysippus,” Greek Roman &. Byzantine Studies 24, 57–​65. Mitnick, Kevin and William L. Simon. 2002. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security. Oxford: Wiley. Nesselrath, Heinz-​ Günther. 1985. Lukians Parasitendialog: Untersuchungen und Kommentar. (Untersuchungen zur und Geschichte, 22.) Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. Ridgeway-​Diaz, Julia, Thanh Thuy Truong & Glen O. Gabbard. 2020. “Return of the Repressed: Bong Joon-​Ho’s Parasite” in Acad. Psychiatry 44, 792–​94. Schehr, R. Lawrence. 1982. “Translator’s Introduction” to M. Serres, The Parasite. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ix–​xi. Serres, Michel 1982. The Parasite. (trans. Lawrence R. Schehr). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sparshott, Francis. 1978. “Zeno on Art: Anatomy of a Definition” in John M. Rist (ed.), The Stoics, Berkeley, 273–​95. Stamatellos, Giannis. 2012. Introduction to Presocratics: A Thematic Approach to Early Greek Philosophy with Key Readings. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. SVF =​von Arnim, H. 1903–​5. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Leipzig: Teubner (Vol. 4 indexes). Zagdoun, Mary-​Anne. 2000. La Philosophie stoïcienne de l’art. Paris: cnrs Edition.

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The Parasite Is the Truth of the System Hyun Kang Kim The parasite has no place in the system because he is the one who does not belong to it. The present study is based on the assumption that the parasite is of central importance for the existence of the system. Without the parasite, which brings noise and chaos into the system, a system’s adaptability and survival are at risk since a system can only survive through interaction with the parasites. It is the parasite that brings new and creative impulses into the system. The parasite is the truth of the system, which always remains hidden. He is the constitutive place in the system, the constitutive exception, which is essential for the establishment of order. The study attempts to interpret the figure of the parasite as a political subjectivity on the basis of the theories of Deleuze/​Guattari, Negri/​Hardt, Rancière, Serres, etc. Concepts like “micropolitics,” “multitude,” “part of no part (la part des sans-​part),” etc. are employed to analyze this new political subjectivity. 1

Staging of a Class Society

Parasite is about the parasites representing the lower class in a class society. The parasites are embodied by the poor Kim family. As a contrast, there is the rich Park family who are the employers of the Kim family. In addition, there is the third family, that of the housekeeper Moon-​gwang and her husband, who has been secretly hiding from loan sharks in the Park family’s underground bunker for years, thus embodying a parasite in the truest sense of the word. First everything is going well, although it is all built on the lies of the Kim family. The Park family is satisfied with the services of the Kim family. A crack appears in this rather harmonious relationship between the two families because there is a smell. The rich boy Da-​song recognizes the poor Kim family by the smell. His father Dong-​ik also notices the unpleasant smell of Ki-​taek and later of his mother Yeon-​kyo. Words can lie, but the smell cannot. Dong-​ik tells his wife that it is the smell of people riding the subway: poor people mixed with the musty smell of the subway tunnel. Smell is a symptom of poverty: poverty becomes apparent and recognizable as a pathological feature. The smell of poverty is the equivalent of the David star that Jews had to wear: an invisible

© Hyun Kang Kim, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_014

158 Kim David star that can only be smelled. The only exception is the daughter Da-​hye, who does not notice the bad smell because she is in love with Ki-​woo. Only love overcomes the class difference. The social status of three families can be clearly seen in the film through their different places of residence. Three separate worlds, marked from top to bottom by a dramatic decline in quality of life and dignity. While in the light-​ filled world of the Park family everything is possible and everyone seems to be happy, in the half-​shadow world of the Kim family one must fight for survival. In Geun-​sae’s shadow world, there is no hope. Everything is unreal there, because there is no life, only mere survival. Originally, Moon-​gwang and Geun-​ sae were the Park family’s parasites. However, Moon-​gwang has been perfidiously robbed of her job by the intrigues of the Kim family. New parasites drove out old parasites and took their place. Then a dramatic event happens: heavy rain that brings high water and flooding, inundating the lower-​lying slums. The Kim family’s basement apartment is completely flooded by sewage and feces –​a dramatic scene which clarifies the connection between climate disaster and social inequality. After all, the socially weaker are precisely those who suffer the most from the consequences of the ecological crisis. But the Kim family are relentless fighters. Despite the crisis and tragedy they have suffered, they do not lose hope. This is clearly shown in the final scene of the film. The father, hiding in the bunker after his murderous act, sends a message in Morse code to the son, although he does not know if his son will ever receive it. The son then imagines that one day he will become rich, buy the house and free his father from hiding. The real chance of realizing the plan is extremely small, because in reality he is just a poor paperboy. Nevertheless, the naive son dreams hopefully about it, and nobody can take the dream away from him. In this dream, however, resides a spark of emancipatory potential that Lenin already recognized when he spoke of “forward dreaming” (Bloch 1996: 6). The degree of a film’s success can be measured by how tightly the staging and the content of the film intertwine without moralizing. Bong Joon-​ho says of his film: “In the second half of the film, I wanted to show that the greater the gap between rich and poor, the greater the sense of horror. In my films, you often see rain and scenes in water. Water flows from the top to the bottom, never the other way around. You can’t stop it and you can’t swim backwards. Just as naturally, the gap between rich and poor is getting deeper. That’s why the feeling of fear gets bigger at the end of my film” (ndr, 02/​10/​2020). Here, Bong makes it clear that it is the deep societal divide that triggers the true feeling of horror. The real cause of horror is the social situation in which one cannot overcome the gap between rich and poor and will ultimately turn into a

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zombie, an undead that is neither dead nor alive. The inhabitants of the underground bunker, Geun-​sae and Ki-​taek, embody the undead. Paraphrasing Rosa von Praunheim’s famous film It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the society in which he lives (1971), one could say that it is not the parasite who is perverse, but the society in which he lives. Who is now the parasite? The poor who dine at the rich peoples’ table? Or the rich who have increased their wealth because of the unjust system based on the exploitation of the poor? This question echoes that famous question by Berthold Brecht: “What’s breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank?” (Brecht 2015: 204) Who is the greater criminal: bank robber or bank founder? 2

Hope of the Hopeless

Yes, the film does not convey a concrete political message. The power of a film does not lie in offering concrete political solutions. A film is neither a manifestation of an ethical or political message nor propaganda, but it reaches us on a deeper, affective level and changes the way we see and think. Therein lies the power of film. Parasite does not tell us what to do, but instead shows us the people who do not lose hope despite their hopeless situation. Everyone has their own hope. For some, it is to become successful and rich. For others, it is to fight together for a just world. Walter Benjamin ends his essay on “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” with the famous sentence: “Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope” (Benjamin 2004: 356). This hope of the hopeless ones is related to Benjamin’s messianism, which characterizes his early thinking and does not completely disappear even in his Marxist-​oriented late phase. In his theses “On the Concept of History” he writes: “We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance. (…) This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became a homogeneous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter” (Benjamin 2006: 397). The future always holds open a “small gateway” of hope and salvation for the hopeless. For me, Parasite is about this hope of the hopeless, a hope that things can be different. What else can one do when there is no hope to change things? All that remains is to hope and to keep open the possibility that it can also be different. This hope may be very small and vague. Nevertheless, it is the indispensable beginning and the condition of the possibility of changes. Although hope has an uncertain outcome, it is not opposed to planning. Rather, he who plans nothing also has little to hope for, because he does not

160 Kim actively work on the realization of his hope. In this respect, hope and planning belong together to a certain extent. Ki-​taek and Ki-​woo have opposing attitudes with regard to planning. For Ki-​taek, “the best plan is to have no plan.” This is because, according to Ki-​taek, if you have a plan, you can fail. But if you don’t have any plan, you can’t fail. Ki-​taek is wise, but unable to become the master of things as long as he does not plan anything. He adapts to the course of events without trying to influence them. His son, Ki-​woo, on the other hand, makes a ‘plan’ for saving his father at the end of the film. Namely, he will become rich and buy the house. He no longer wants to be a victim of the system, but to become a determining factor who himself changes the course of events. It is quite obvious, though, that his plan would not work. Nevertheless, he is determined to become the master of things. However, his hope is less like planning but more like salvation. This hopeful look into the future represents a small gateway of hope. Perhaps the irreducible value of hope lies in the fact that it is always a hope of the impossible. A hope of the possible would be plannable and realizable, whereas a hope of the impossible lies beyond the plannable. Hope perhaps lies precisely in between: between the possible and the impossible, the plannable and the unplannable. This in-​between is not a specific area, but the infinitely open horizon that grants the openness of what could happen. In his opus magnum The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch states: It is a question of learning hope. Its work does not renounce, it is in love with success rather than failure. Hope, superior to fear, is neither passive like the latter, nor locked into nothingness. The emotion of hope goes out of itself, makes people broad instead of confining them (…). The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong. It will not tolerate a dog’s life which feels itself only passively thrown into What Is. BLOCH 1996: 3

Yes, Ki-​woo does not want a dog’s life. He does not want to passively submit to the existing conditions. He does not want to be a subordinate in the ruling system but actively shape his own life. His name, which means “senseless worry,” is ironic in this context. According to a Chinese lore, there lived in the state of Ki a man who was extremely worried that one day the sky would fall on the earth and destroy it. Another man explained to him that the sky is held by cosmic energy (qi) and therefore cannot fall. He also said that the earth too is full of cosmic energy and therefore cannot be destroyed. After that, the man with the worry was finally reassured. The word Ki-​woo stands, therefore,

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for the senseless worry about the extremely improbable events. The moral of the story is thus: Don’t worry unnecessarily! In contrast to his name, Ki-​woo embodies a hopeful attitude. He is not predetermined by his name or his class and, on the contrary, wants to determine for himself what his future will be. Ki-​woo’s hope is thereby a “subjective hope” that merely reflects wishful images of others. According to Bloch, however, there is also an “objective hope” that is mediated in the objective material process. For Bloch, the world is unfinished and only in “tendency-​latency” (Bloch 1986: 1375). The objective correlate of hope is “the still unclosed determinateness of existence” (Bloch 1996: 6), i.e., the world in latency. Hope understood as “the concept of the utopian (…) principle” (7) is not only an affective but also an anticipatory force that recognizes that the essence of the world is not already determined but still lies ahead. “The Authentic or essence is that which is not yet, which in the core of things drives towards itself, which awaits its genesis in the tendency-​latency of process; it is itself only now founded, objective-​real –​hope” (Bloch 1986: 1373). Like Benjamin’s, Bloch’s concept of hope contains traces of messianism but is ultimately based on Marxism and its dialectical-​materialist philosophy. The Marxist concepts of dialectical mediation and historical development, however, have long since lost credibility. What is sought are new terms that bring to bear the latency and processuality of the world without teleological historicity and thus denote the transition from the “tendency-​latency of the process” to a latency without tendency, i.e., a processuality without a predetermined direction. One such concept is the concept of desire in Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Anti-​ Oedipus. While hope is subjective-​conscious and related to an idea of utopia, desire is material-​unconscious and related to a “micropolitics.” For Deleuze and Guattari, desire is a productive force, a “desiring-​machine.” Desire does not signify a lack, but a “production,” a productive force capable of producing the real. What desire produces, therefore, is “real” (Deleuze & Guattari 2000: 26): “The desiring-​machines are not in our heads, are not products of imagination, but exist in the technical and social machines themselves. […] We populate the technical-​social machines with desiring-​machines; we are capable of this and nothing else” (Deleuze & Guattari 1972: 478).1 The desiring-​machines manifest and mobilize the unconscious of the technical-​social machines, which are in no way similar to the ruling interests. Rather, it is a matter of “a different distribution, a different ‘map’ that no longer concerns the dominant interests in

1 This and the following passage come from the Appendix of L’Anti-​Oedipe, which has not been translated into English.

162 Kim a society, not the division [répartition] of the possible and the impossible, not the constraints and freedoms, in short, not all that constitutes the specific rationality [les raisons] of a society” (483). Deleuze and Guattari have developed their concept of the desiring-​machine into the theory of a micropolitics. The perspective of a micropolitics of desire should lead to remove the separation between society and individuals and to stop centering politics on state power. The state should be replaced by a “multiplicity of goals within the immediate reach of the most diverse social contexts” (Guattari 1977: 13). However, micropolitics lacks the concept of a political subject. Subsequently, Negri and Hardt develop a concept of the subject, which they call “multitude” and is a “class concept” (Negri & Hardt 2004: 103). The multitude refers to the “singularities that act in common” (105) and form an “open and expansive network” (xiv). The characters in Parasite do not form a network and do not act together. In this respect, they are not yet a multitude, but its precursor, the “poor.” For Negri and Hardt, the poor are not yet political subjects, but they are nevertheless “powerful agents” (129). Above all, they are characterized by a creativity. They are “enormously creative and powerful” (129) because their creative power embodies the productivity of life itself. “The poor embody the ontological condition not only of resistance but also of productive life itself” (133). In this, there is a clear parallel between the parasites and the poor. Both are excluded from the system and included in it at the same time: “‘The poor’ is excluded from wealth and yet included in its circuits of social production. ‘The poor’ is the flesh of biopolitical production” (152). Parasite is therefore not so much about a class struggle despite its clear critique of class society. Rather, the struggle at stake in this film can be described in terms of micropolitics (Deleuze and Guattari) and biopolitics (Foucault). The micropolitics of desire is a counter concept to the separation between society and individual, macro and micro level, which was strictly carried out especially in Marxism and psychoanalysis. Instead, this separation should be overcome by means of the desiring-​machine. The desiring-​machine does not intervene at all to mediate between the two levels. Instead, it builds manifold connections which are later concretized into the conception of the “assemblage.” Each assemblage is connected with other assemblages without one assemblage determining the others. Therefore, there is no “overdetermination” of one assemblage over the others and thus also no generalization, since there is no higher instance that names the other elements as such. However, the assemblage includes not only the social and the individual, the public and the private, but also nature and technology. This is because it describes the heterogeneous, molecular processes of production below state power and anthropological form. Thus, the term assemblage makes the

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fundamental interconnectedness between humans, nature, and technology comprehensible and shows, among other things, how the ecological crisis and social inequality are interrelated. The counterpart to the micropolitics of the desiring-​machine is biopolitics. Biopolitics, first explored in Foucault’s conception of “biopower” (Foucault 1998), aims to regulate the bodies of the population at all levels (from birth to health and death). Micropolitics, on the other hand, produces the “lines of flight” of desires and resistances at the “molecular” level. Just as power operates not only hegemonically, hierarchically, and “molar,” but also below the prevailing structures at the molecular level, counterpower operates at the molecular level. Just as power does not simply act repressively, but also productively, counterpower also acts productively and positively. According to Foucault, a disciplinary power developed from the sixteenth century and a biopower from the eighteenth century. Deleuze continues Foucault’s analysis and states that now “control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies” (Deleuze 1995: 178). The information-​technological control power has taken over the next level of power technology. The power relations in the beginning twenty-​first century can therefore be determined by a mixture of a biopower and a control power. The counterstrategy against the two forms of power is micropolitics, which works affectively, “molecularly” and productively. It remains to be seen whether micropolitics is the right strategy to counter global capitalism and decentralized-​omnipresent power relations. At the very least, micropower seems capable of providing lines of flight from all-​ encompassing biopower and control power. However, on the other hand, it is criticized precisely for this reason by the representatives of universalism such as Badiou and Žižek, who call for a political solution on the universal –​ “molar” –​level. Yet it is not right to claim that Deleuze and Guattari reject macropolitics altogether. Indeed, they emphasize that the perspective of a micropolitics would not “a priori reject every action of the party, every idea of a line, of a program, or even of centralism; it would, however, strive to situate and relativize all this according to an analytical micropolitics” (Guattari 1977: 13). Thus, they do not argue for a pure politics of lines of flight. Instead, what is needed is to address micropolitical power structures in all social spheres and to reconceive power from the perspective of a micropolitics. This is not the right place to ask whether a micropolitical or a universal strategy would be the better alternative. For us, the discussion of biopower and control power is interesting insofar as their manifestations are subtly thematized in Parasite. An example of this is Ki-​taek’s escape scene. He has

164 Kim disappeared, as if swallowed up by the earth or “as if liquefied,” although surveillance cameras are installed everywhere in the neighborhood. Why couldn’t they find him? Because Moon-​gwang cut the cable of the surveillance camera at the main entrance during her visit the previous night to cover up her visit. Therefore, there was a gap in the almost seamless surveillance system. Ki-​taek has just disappeared through this small gap and is secretly hiding in the basement without being caught. How about comparing this gap in the surveillance system to the “small gateway” of salvation that Benjamin spoke of? The bizarre communication method of the two cellar dwellers is also an example of the micropolitical strategy. In the realm of the digital, everything can be controlled and is controlled. The only method of evading digital surveillance is to communicate analogously like a dead letter box. The basement dwellers use the light switch and Morse code to communicate with the outside world. Their message is received only by those who recognize the turning on and off of the light as a signal and also know the Morse code. In the film, the senders and the receivers of the message are characteristically the scouts, the “pathfinders.” They are the ones who would find a way even in complete darkness and a hopeless situation. Morse code consists of three elements: short, long, and pause. Therefore, it resembles the binary system of digital communication, but it is fundamentally different in that it does not require a network. It is a language of the initiated and isolated, who lack any means of communication. It is a language of the needy. In shipping, for example, learning Morse code and the radio system is essential for survival. The cellar dwellers in the film are the stranded people who send a signal to the outside world because they are unable to save themselves under their own power. We, the viewers, are now the insiders who should understand and respond to their message. Now it is our turn to respond and act. What is our response? What is our appropriate response to this film? 3

Logic of the Parasite

Who is the parasite now? According to Michel Serres, the parasite embodies a third which is excluded in classical logic. The theorem of the excluded third is a basic logical principle, which states that there is no third between A and -​A. That is, for a statement only the statement itself or its opposite can be valid and there is no third possibility expressing something in between. For example, there is either being (There is something) or nothing (There is nothing) and nothing in between. The parasite embodies this prohibited third, which makes the clear distinction impossible and always steps in between. He is

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therefore a “third” (Serres 1982: 240) beyond the distinction between subject and object, inside and outside. “The position of the parasite is to be between” (230). The parasite is “never outside, never inside, liminal, subliminal. What he wins he loses. He liquidates it” (246). The parasite embodies precisely this fundamental fuzziness. A characteristic feature of parasites is that they are creative because of the noise they bring into the system. Because it is the noise that creates a new order. Serres states, “noise gives rise to a new system, an order that is more complex than the simple chain. This parasite interrupts at first glance, consolidates when you look again” (14). Without noise from outside, a system can no longer exist. The parasite brings the noise into the system and makes it more complex and adaptable. The host is simple, naive, and gullible. Above all, he is also inflexible. For he has no need to adapt, since he lacks nothing. He has the comfortable status of letting the others work. It is the others who have to adapt to him, not he. He is the result of a successful reduction of complexity and embodies order and stability. The poor parasite, on the other hand, is up to no good. He is cunning and knows every trick. Above all, he understands how to survive in extreme hardship. That is why he is creative, because he is always forced to make a virtue out of necessity. Because they say: necessity is the mother of invention. The relationship between host and parasite is not contingent, but rather constitutive. As Serres says, “there is no system without parasites” (12). One cannot survive without the other. The parasite is the transition and contact zone, which is neither inside nor outside. The autoreferential closure of a system is only possible because of its openness to the environment. It is the parasite that embodies this inherent openness of the system. This blurred zone of in-​between is where something new happens. It is where an old order can be destroyed, and a new one can be evoked. Serres says that “order sometimes comes only from an explosion of noise” (20). The parasite is neither inside nor outside: he is excluded from society and included in it at the same time. How can we understand the contradiction that the parasite is excluded and included at the same time? In the symbolic order he is excluded, that is, on the phenomenological level his existence is almost nothing. In the real, on the other hand, he is the constitutive void that allows everything else to exist precisely because of his absence. In the real, he is the subject par excellence. The parasite is not only subjected to the social order, but also the subject capable of founding a new order. This paradoxical logic of the parasite has striking parallels with the concept of “part of no part.” In the next section, thus, an attempt will be made to relate the concept of parasite to the concept of “part of no part” and to interpret it as a political subjectivity.

166 Kim 4

Part of No Part

Parasite presents three types of parasites in relation to subjectivity. First, there is the father Ki-​taek, who goes through the process of subjectivization and transforms into a political subject. His subjectivization takes place at the moment when he refuses to be a parasite. He no longer wants to be a parasite, but a subject. Then there is Geun-​sae, who is content with his parasitic existence and shows respect for his host Dong-​ik until the last moment. He wants to be nothing but a parasite. In addition, there is the son Ki-​woo, who doesn’t want to be a parasite, but chooses a completely different path than his father. He wants to become successful within the system and thereby end his parasitic existence. If Ki-​taek embodies a revolt, Ki-​woo an adaptation and Geun-​sae a renunciation. These three characters embody three possible ways of parasitic existence. Although the film brilliantly stages a class society, there is no class struggle here in the proper sense. The poor remain the poor. The act has taken place but remains inconsequential because the parasite lacks a political project and a party. Ki-​taek is not a revolutionary, but rather a murderer who is also a martyr. His act of murder, directed at his boss, was not revenge. At the moment his boss grimaces in disgust at the foul smell of Geun-​sae, at that moment of awakening, he suddenly realizes that it is not the other parasite, Geun-​sae, who is his true enemy, but the system that produces the parasites like his and Geun-​ sae’s family. The boss dies as a representative of this system. In the beginning, Ki-​taek still failed to recognize the fact that he was not supposed to be in solidarity with his host but with other parasites. He is loyal to his host and feels a part of his household. He identifies with his host, who acts as his ego ideal. At this stage, he is not yet different from the parasite type embodied by Geun-​sae. As punishment for his misrecognition and his non-​ solidarization with other parasites, he falls into greatest distress, which results in the injuries of his two children. Ki-​Jung dies from Geun-​sae’s knife blow and Ki-​woo is severely injured in the head. The moment Ki-​taek ultimately realizes that he is by no means part of his boss’s household and that he is just a nothing but a stinking mob to him, he transforms into a representative of his class. The gentle and kind father turns in an instant into a cold-​blooded killer, a fighter who is the subject of his decision on the one hand, and the victim of his affects on the other. The moment he kills his boss is also the moment he transforms from a mere functionary paid to play his role in the system, into a subject. The parasite is ambivalent: he is a threshold, a zone of transition since he inhabits the very zone in which a nothing transforms itself into a subject. The moment Ki-​taek realizes that he is not an isolated and closed individual but belongs to a

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network in which his class affiliation is assigned to him, he becomes a subject, a fighter. The cause of Ki-​taek’s murder is by no means simple hatred or envy. Certainly, he has become a victim of the affects that suddenly overtook him. However, these affects are of a personal nature. Ki-​taek is not the subject of his own affects, but rather possessed by impersonal affects. If anything, he hates his boss as a representative of his class, who personifies the injustice of a system to which not everyone can belong, and which is divided by a deep gulf between those who belong and those who do not. The parasites are those who do not belong and have no part in society. The rich always say one thing: “There is no part of those who have no part” (Rancière 2010: 14). The party of the poor, on the other hand, says that there is a part of those who have no part. Jacques Rancière states: There is politics when there is a part of those who have no part, a part or party of the poor. Politics does not happen just because the poor oppose the rich. It is the other way around: politics (that is, the interruption of the simple effects of domination by the rich) causes the poor to exist as an entity. The outrageous claim of the demos to be the whole of the community only satisfies in its own way –​that of a party –​the requirement of politics. Politics exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by the institution of a part of those who have no part. This institution is the whole of politics as a specific form of connection. It defines the common of the community as a political community, in other words, as divided, as based on a wrong that escapes the arithmetic of exchange and reparation. Beyond this set-​up there is no politics. There is only the order of domination or the disorder of revolt. (11–​12) In this respect, Ki-​taek does not yet embody authentic politics. His act therefore remains within the framework of a “disorder of revolt,” since a “party of the poor” is still lacking, which first establishes a “part of no part.” Rancière further says that “the party of the poor embodies nothing other than politics itself as the setting-​up of a part of those who have no part. Symmetrically, the party of the rich embodies nothing other than the antipolitical” (14). The poor do not yet exist as an entity, since they are only constituted by politics, i.e., the interruption of the domination of the rich. In contrast to the proletariat, which is to be understood as a class concept and a fixed entity, for Rancière the poor are insubstantial and are only brought forth through the disruption of the ruling order. For Rancière, this concept of the poor replaces that of the

168 Kim proletariat, as it is better suited to denote the subproletariat and the precariat in late capitalist society. Ki-​taek, who embodies the murderer and the resistance fighter at the same time, sacrifices himself for the struggle for a “part of no part” without being aware of it. He is therefore ultimately not a parasite that belongs to the system as its disruptive element, but the irreducible outside on whose exclusion every system is constituted. He is the truth of the system: the parasite is the truth of the host. 5

Conclusion

This paper has first analyzed the film Parasite with regard to concepts of hope (Benjamin, Bloch) and desire (Deleuze, Guattari). Then it has interpreted the figure of the parasite on the basis of the theories of Deleuze/​Guattari, Negri/​ Hardt, Rancière, Serres, etc. as a political figure par excellence. In doing so, it has dealt with the concepts of “micropolitics,” “multitude,” “part of no part,” etc. In the process, the parasite has turned out to embody the logic of the excluded third and the zone of the threshold. Every order is founded on the exclusion of a third, which in our case is embodied in the figure of the parasite. However, the parasite is not simply passively excluded from the system but is also included in it and functions as its creative productivity itself. The parasite, on whose exclusion the system is founded, is ultimately the secret truth of the system: the parasite is the end of one and the beginning of another system. Because the unknown reverse side of the parasite is the sovereign who is able to found a new order.

References

Benjamin, Walter. 2004. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 297–​360. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. “On the Concept of History” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings. Vol. 4. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 389–​400. Bloch, Ernst. 1996. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 1. Cambridge, MA.: mit Press. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA.: mit Press. Brecht, Berthold. 2015. Brecht Collected Plays: 2: Man Equals Man; Elephant Calf; Threepenny Opera; Mahagonny; Seven Deadly Sins. London: A&C Black.

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Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. “Postscript on the Societies of Control” in Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 177–​182. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1972. L’Anti-​Oedipe. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie I. Paris: Minuit. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2000. Anti-​Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, Michel. 1998. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin. Guattari, Félix. 1977. Mikro-​Politik des Wunsches. Berlin: Merve. Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London and New York: Continuum. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ndr. 02/​10/​2020. “‘Parasite’-​Regisseur Bong Joon Ho im Porträt” in https://​www.ndr .de/​kul​tur/​film/​Osc​ars-​2020-​Paras​ite-​Regiss​eur-​Bong-​Joon-​Ho-​imPortraet,para site116.html.

­c hapter 13

Parasite and Identity in the “End Times”

An Interpretation of Bong Joon-​ho’s Film through the Lens of Slavoj Žižek Michelle Phillips Buchberger At the heart of Parasite is an implicit crisis of identity which, this chapter suggests, is the source of a malaise and unease that animates the decisions of his characters, ultimately leading to a dramatic unraveling of social norms of behavior including murder. This dramatic unravelling might be interpreted as a microcosm of the collapse of global capitalism characterized variously by Slavoj Žižek, especially in his 2010 work, Living in the End Times. The fluidity and interchangeability of identity among the economically disadvantaged characters in Parasite is central to the film’s dramatic arc. Under severe economic pressure, these characters’ cohesive sense of self, attachment to a cultural tradition, and the possession of a moral compass is eroded. The refrain, “it’s so symbolic” is uttered four times in the film (three times by the central character, Ki-​woo, and once by Mrs. Park, i.e., Yeon-​kyo) underscoring the significance of identity and layers of meaning in the film, but also suggestive of identity’s malleability. The centrality of the symbolic suseok or “scholar’s stone,” familiar to East Asian audiences as a talisman of good luck, is similarly revealed in the film as hollow, a film prop, indicative also of hollowed-​out identity and hidden spaces, which will also be central to the film. The plot of the movie emphasizes this sense of layered and myriad interpretations of meaning since it also extends and problematizes the audience’s expectations: presenting in the opening scenes a comical set of characters and establishing what appears to be a movie of the class-​war genre. However, our expectations are quickly dashed, signaling we too should look beyond surface meaning and scrutinize what is going on around us. The Kim’s complete lack of compassion for the employees they fraudulently displace emphasizes the aggressive competition for lucrative employment in which the Kim’s find themselves and dispels any notion that this is a “class warfare” film, since there is no camaraderie among the domestic servants. After a deceptively light-​ hearted beginning, the film takes a dark turn when, after a severe weather event, there ensues a pathological deterioration in identity and personality cohesion.

© Michelle Phillips Buchberger, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_015

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Extreme Competition for Resources and Personality Disorders

The threat to a coherent identity posed by the severe pressures of capitalism –​especially the competition for resources that capitalism both perpetuates and on which it thrives –​is explored by Paul Verhaeghe. Focusing on the U.S., Verhaeghe theorized that capitalism, and the neoliberal policies that support it, has had a catastrophic effect on the individual psyche. To support this conclusion, Verhaeghe traced the massive rise in incidences of psychological disturbance (as evidenced by increases in both suicide rates and in the prescription of anti-​anxiety and anti-​depression medication) in the U.S. and compared it to the parallel rise of neoliberal policies. Neoliberalism’s dependence upon aggressive individualism and competition, Verhaeghe suggested, conflicts with the inherently social nature of human beings, causing an irreconcilable psychological conflict which in turn contributes to a deterioration in mental health and a proliferation of clinical psychological disorders of mind. In this cutthroat environment, identity-​forming can flounder […] if the focus comes entirely to lie on separation individualism, group forming suffers, leading to competition, social isolation, and loneliness […] this provokes narcissistic aggression against the mirror image that we perceive in the other, creating a cycle of dissatisfaction and envy. verhaeghe 2015: 374

Amongst other things, Parasite is surely a study in “dissatisfaction and envy” as the Kims attempt to get ahead in a society that has excluded them. I suggest that Varhaeghe’s observation might be extrapolated to consider the impact of capitalism on the citizens of South Korea, whose adoption of a predominantly capitalist economic system and neoliberalism in the last half of the 20th century has resulted not only in the extended workday, now familiar to most American workers, but also in a curious devotion to one’s employer that borders on cultish fanaticism, reflecting a need to beatify the source of one’s income. This competition has perpetuated extreme pressures on high school students to excel in order to compete for the best college places, a fact that is directly incorporated into the plot of Parasite. Complicating my extrapolation of Verhaeghe, however, is the fact that U.S., and South Korean cultures are very different in one critical area: the degree to which they are considered individualistic or collectivistic. According to the

172 Buchberger Hofstedte scale,1 the U.S. is, not surprisingly, characterized as highly individualistic, with an individualism score of 91. South Korea scores at the other end of the spectrum: 18. That such an elevated level of malignancy and psychological damage was detected by Varhaeghe in American society, where rugged individualism is celebrated as part of the national identity, surely does not bode well for a highly collectivistic culture. Indeed, as we might anticipate, malignant effects evinced in South Korea have been substantial. Specifically, in the first decades of the 21st century, South Korea reported the third highest suicide rate in the world behind Japan and France and the second highest divorce rate behind the U.S. (Peerenboom 2013: 16). This destabilizing effect on the individual identity caused by capitalist and neoliberal-​induced competition for resources is characterized by Verhaeghe as, “protean […] (or ‘liquid modernity’, as the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called it), a kind of ‘liquid identity’ [… which] results in borderline personality disorder, when unstable identity causes a constant seesaw of emotions” (Verhaeghe 2015: 423). Parasite is surely a study in “liquid identity,” with several specific examples of characters showing the effects of psychological damage, depression, acting out violently in frustration, culminating in a breakdown of social order in this microcosm of capitalist society. By the end of Parasite there is no longer a coherent sense of self or moral compass or a need to adhere to social norms. Such a breakdown in social coherence in the face of capitalism’s relentless destructive consumption is the focus of Žižek’s Living in the End Times. 2

The End of Capitalism and its Effects on Identity and Mental Health

Žižek’s 2010 work highlights the unsustainability of capitalism’s relentless drive for expansion and consumption, suggesting its imminent collapse. Although his work suggests capitalism is in its death throes, it has not yet relinquished its grip on individuals, particularly those at the losing end of this economic system. In Parasite, those living on the margins of economic success –​the precariat –​are, I suggest, those most at risk from the psychological damage described by Verhaeghe. In Living in the End Times, Žižek describes and summarizes four key symptoms he associates with the impending demise 1 The Hofstedte scale uses multiple metrics to determine whether a country might be characterized as individualist or collectivistic based on its traditions and cultural values. See https://​www.hofst​ede-​insig​hts.com/​coun​try/​south-​korea/​.

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of capitalism: ecological crisis, biogenetic revolution, imbalance in access to resources, and social divisions/​exclusions (Žižek 2010: xi). In Parasite, I suggest not only that these four “horsemen” symptoms of the capitalist apocalypse are clearly discernible in the film, but also that these symptoms directly contribute to the disorders of mind seen in the film’s precariat. 2.1 The Four Horsemen –​Ecological Crisis The first of Žižek’s symptoms of the demise of global capitalism is ecological crisis. It should not surprise us that climate catastrophe will be an important part of Parasite. As Hyoung Song reminds us, Bong Joon-​ho’s work has foregrounded this crisis in all his films since his breakout movie, The Host (2006), which is “a meditation on the consequences of environmental racism”; Snowpiercer (2013) “set in a world destroyed by a failed attempt to reverse the effects of climate,” and Okja (2017), which considers the “moral hazards of industrial agriculture” (Hyoung Song 2019). Significantly relevant to our consideration of the film, Žižek notes the denial with which humanity is greeting ecological catastrophe. The characters in Parasite are similarly silent on the subject, even as the Kim’s world is literally washed away by a violent flood. The Kims are consumed with desperate efforts to survive in the face of extreme competition for resources; unable to find work, they spend their days in constant search of a poachable WiFi signal, their only means of entertainment and distraction from an otherwise miserable existence. This denial on the part of the Kims of an obvious and impending environmental catastrophe establishes a fundamental schism between their real, day-​ to-​day struggle to survive and the wider threat to humanity in general. When a flood overwhelms their basement apartment, the environmental problem is in excess of their ability to either apprehend, articulate, or confront. As such, they are in denial of reality; the first of many symptoms present among Parasite’s characters which suggests a dissociated identity. This complicit silence in the face of global catastrophe is identified by Žižek as a characteristic human response to this overwhelming problem. It is a coping strategy; a “collective ideology […] mobilizing mechanisms of dissimulation and self-​deception which include the direct will to ignorance” (Žižek 2010: 327). Bong Joon-​ho juxtaposes his characters’ denial of impending climate catastrophe with the prominence given to the extreme weather event that lies at the dramatic heart of the film. Indeed, the film dedicates its most dramatic and extensive frames to the storm that serves as a fulcrum around which the drama pivots.

174 Buchberger 2.1.1 Ecological Crisis and Identity: The Storm In Parasite, this dramatic pivot occurs when the rich Parks decide to take a camping trip, ironically choosing to leave their expansive and expensive, comfortable home –​the kernel of the “Korean” dream –​and instead to “rough it” in the elements. A sudden, violent storm forces them to abandon their camping trip and return to their home earlier than expected. This return triggers three key events in the narrative, all of which are directly connected to floundering identity. First, taking advantage of the vacated, opulent house, which contrasts starkly with the deprivation of their squalid basement apartment, the Kims are spending the weekend there, eating and drinking, celebrating their trickery and victory over the Parks. Their revelry is suddenly cut short when a phone call their employer informs them that a severe storm has cut the camping trip short, and that they will be returning home in only eight minutes. The Kims find themselves trapped inside the house, frantically trying to clean up the mess before the Parks return. The symbolic significance of the storm might be interpreted variously, but all interpretations emphasize the culpability and the doomed nature of the Kims who are now, like all of us, literally living on borrowed time. Faced with imminent catastrophe, they are forced to defend and extend their complicity in a system of deceit (and self-​deceit) in order to survive. The parallels between the Kim’s elaborate confidence trick and global capitalism under threat are numerous. Surely, like the Kim’s identity pantomime, late-​stage global capitalism is completely dependent on commitment and belief in that system. When confidence in the system begins to falter (for example, the literal heart of free-​ market capitalism, the Stock Market) the system breaks down. The storm is a metaphorical as well as a literal signal of the collapse of the Kim’s artifice as well as a symptom of ecological breakdown. A further twist is revealed when we learn that Geun-​sae, husband of the fired housekeeper, Moon-​gwang, has been secretly living in a hidden room in the Park’s house, sustained with food and water by regular visits from his wife. He is literally a hidden victim of capitalist predation, forced to live in this secret room to escape the vengeance of loan sharks. The Kim’s betrayal of Moon-​gwang, therefore unleashes another facet of threat into the already deteriorating and fragile fake identities. To avoid the threat of Geun-​sae and Moon-​gwang exposing their true identities, the pair are forcibly imprisoned in the hidden room. The storm, a reminder of human damage to ecological systems, exacerbated by global capitalism, is a highly appropriate symbol, threatening to reveal and lay bare inauthenticity. In the film it demands a “doubling down” on the part of the Kims to keep their fragile reality and identities intact.

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2.1.2 Ecological Crisis and Identity: Revelation The second element of environmental crisis that threatens to explode coherent and functional identity affects Ki-​taek, and it is arguably the most important dramatic turn in the film. Upon the Park’s unexpected return, Ki-​taek scurries and hides under a table. Here, in this embarrassing and demeaning position, he cannot help but overhear the Park’s cruel discussion of him and his family. The scales fall from his eyes as he realizes that the Park’s hitherto professional and kind treatment of him has been a phony and patronizing affectation: they too have been playing a role. Dong-​ik reveals his condescension and contempt for Ki-​taek when he comments on the man’s unpleasant smell. It is the smell of poverty, from which the Parks have insulated themselves. The lingering shot of Ki-​taek attempting to surreptitiously smell himself while not revealing his degrading hiding place under the table ultimately reflects a new and emergent self-​awareness. For the first time in the film, Ki-​taek recognizes the extent to which he has lived as part of a despised underclass. Such dissembling, role-​playing and denial is described by Žižek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real as emblematic of late-​capitalist consumerist society, where, he suggests, “‘real social life’ itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in ‘real’ life like stage actors and extras. […] Again, the ultimate truth of the capitalist utilitarian despiritualized universe is the dematerialization of ‘real life’ itself, its reversal into a spectral show” (Žižek 2002: 16). Ki-​taek’s sudden awareness of this “staged fake” ignites a growing rage in him that reaches its boiling point in the final scenes of the film, and the revelation has been facilitated by the undeniable intrusion of climate crisis into his life. 2.1.3 Ecological Crisis and Identity: Psychological Breakdown Eventually able to flee their hiding place, the Kims hurry back to their flooded home. In some of the most shocking scenes in the film, the Kims must wade and swim through their flooded neighborhood, in what is now an open sewer, to retrieve their meagre belongings. Completely humiliated and homeless, Ki-​ taek and his family join other displaced families sitting in a converted gymnasium. Ki-​taek’s expression and demeanor has changed completely from his early appearances in the film. Now aware of his own oppressed situation, his personality seems to change irrevocably when he takes a phone call from his employer. In a shockingly callous moment, completely unaware and disinterested in the Kim’s calamity, Mr. Park Dong-​ik requests that his chauffeur should make himself available to take Yeon-​kyo to buy trifles for their son’s birthday party the next day.

176 Buchberger Ki-​taek’s simmering breakdown is obvious and yet unspoken. We can see it simmering beneath the surface: a looming crisis that reflects society’s peripheral acknowledgement and simultaneous psychological suppression of impending and unavoidable catastrophe. Such psychological gymnastics are unhealthy. This inability or unwillingness to articulate the real state of affairs is also alluded to in Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Žižek opines that a psychological incongruence is caused by a simultaneous yet peripheral awareness of the “unreality” that we have constructed accompanied by our inability to articulate this incongruity. Žižek provides a clue to this thwarted impulse to apprehend what is wrong with us in his analogy of ‘red ink’. This analogy conveys the inability of individuals to articulate cognitive or psychological disturbance caused both by rampant individualism and aggressive competition, and by the effects of living amid irreconcilable ideological positions. Žižek takes his analogy from events occurring in tumultuous times in East Germany, where there is an absence of the vocabulary with which to express this dissonance: In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true; if it’s written in red ink, it’s false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: ‘Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair –​the only thing you can’t get is red ink. žižek 2002: 2

Žižek interprets this analogy as indicative of the situation in which we live in post-​9/​11 Western democracies. The code we have established to articulate whether things are or are not as they should be has functioned fairly satisfactorily up to this point, but now everything seems as it should be, but something is wrong. However, despite our unease, we lack the “very language to articulate our unfreedom […] our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom” (2). After Ki-​taek’s final humiliation by his employer, it is as if he is seeing the “real” for the first time, but it is beyond his ability to articulate or understand, which therefore exacerbates its effect on his mental state.

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2.2 The Four Horsemen –​Biogenetic Revolution The second of the four apocalyptic horsemen signaling the collapse of capitalism, is, according to Žižek, “the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulatable machines [with] total digital control over our lives” (Žižek 2010: 327). In Parasite, the exhausted Kims are repeatedly represented almost as hollowed out, shadows of human beings. For example, Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung readily accept the names bestowed on them on them (i.e., Jessica and Kevin) by their new employers, not only emphasizing the Park’s fetish for Americanization and therefore by extension, capitalism, but also stressing the malleability of the Kim’s identity, individuality and human dignity. They are eminently disposable and interchangeable with others of their class: little more than machines, devoid of individual identity, and completely interchangeable with others in their class. The film’s opening scenes reflect the dominance of hollow shells devoid of content: rows of socks hanging in their dingy basement home; empty pizza boxes that the family assemble as the meager and soul-​destroying means of income, and the highly valued, yet ultimately hollow, suseok. In the end times of capitalism, Žižek suggests, individuals are as replaceable as machines: devoid of individuality or humanity, and this reduces the likelihood that they will have the power to overthrow the system. Although the Kims’ attempt to fight back against their dehumanization not only through their rejection of assigned social roles but also in Ki-​taek’s violent attack and murder of his employer, his act of resistance changes nothing. Indeed, Ki-​woo vows to perpetuate the neoliberal fiction of self-​betterment and simply work harder to buy the house in which his father is hidden at the end of the film. This is obviously an unattainable goal, but it is one that holds such promise for Ki-​woo, that its spell has succeeded in sustaining the social order. The machine has duplicated itself, parasite-​like, and capitalism will persist. The removal of one aspect of a broken system, i.e., Dong-​ik, is not enough. Revolution must be complete. It is, Žižek suggests using the analogy of India’s caste system, “not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables” but rather “the symptom […] can only be resolved by abolishing the entire system” (Žižek 2010: 23). The Kims, Žižek might suggest, show a lack of radicalism in their response to their situation. Park has gone, but his murder will not change the machine or the role the remaining Kims have in the system. Specifically, as Žižek concludes, “if we change reality only in order to realize our dreams, without changing these dreams themselves, then sooner or later we will regress to the former reality” (79). Ultimately, in Parasite, we see that capitalism has succeeded in using the promise of upward mobility to perpetuate itself. This, Žižek explains, is how capitalism works. It is the “material efficiency of capitalist ideology; even when we know how things are, we continue to act upon our false beliefs” (132).

178 Buchberger This sentiment is expressed not only with Ki-​woo’s vow to persist in his attempts to work hard enough to buy the house in which his father is imprisoned, but also by his insistence on returning the suseok, fully exposed as a hollow prop, to its “natural” place in a stream. Thus he redoubles his commitment to a false ideology. He will remain part of the machine. He will not change his dream. 2.3 The Four Horsemen –​Imbalances with Resources One of the clearest victims of the expansion of American capitalism are Native Americans. It is interesting, therefore, when considering Žižek’s identification of the third symptom of capitalism’s imminent demise –​imbalances with resources –​to consider Native American imagery in Parasite. The seizure of Native American resources by immigrants to the U.S., perpetuated by a belief in Manifest Destiny, is legend. This seizure, together with the cultural appropriation and manipulation of Native American’s identity, particularly by Hollywood, and the literal exclusion of Native Americans from American society by encircling them in reservations, makes the presence of Native American imagery in Parasite even more imbued with resonance as it pertains to global capitalism. Native American imagery is everywhere in Parasite. Significantly, it is the psychologically damaged Da-​song, who is obsessed with Native American artifacts. One of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film for the informed bourgeois viewer, is the child’s birthday party, in which not only the child dresses in “Indian” garb, but also his father and (in a further act of seemingly unavoidable but increasingly despised servitude) Ki-​taek don Native American costumes. Such cultural appropriation triggers familiar and yet problematic judgment of the Parks by liberal audiences, particularly in America, and this was surely Bong Joon-​ho’s intent given the contemporary political climate and appetite for cancel culture. Žižek criticizes such inauthentic discomfort and, by association, the concept of cultural appropriation, because, he suggests, such energy is misdirected. As he explains, when energy is expended criticizing cultural appropriation, it is: as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism –​since, as we might put it, everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay –​ critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world system intact. žižek 1997: 46–​7

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Parasite thus achieves a curious doubling by its extensive inclusion of Native American imagery, a symbol of cultural appropriation in the U.S., in a film that is set in South Korea, which is itself economically colonized by the U.S. In this time of late global capitalism, where all countries are colonized by a system without national borders, cultural images such as those worn at the ill-​fated birthday party, have become rootless signifiers of past traditions. They are also, as Žižek suggests, windmills at which Leftist politics will tilt, and from which bourgeois audiences will cringe, rather than using that energy to confront a common and dangerous enemy: global capitalism. Such is the significance of Native American imagery in Parasite, that it is at Da-​song’s birthday party (where this imagery is ubiquitous) that Bong Joon-​ ho choose to situate the climactic episode of his film. The plan is that Ki-​taek and the similarly-​adorned Dong-​ik will feign an attack on partygoers so that the birthday boy can play the role of “good Indian” in defeating their attack. However, in a shocking twist, Geun-​sae, driven mad by his extended imprisonment in the house’s bunker, interrupts this narrative, by leaping out and stabbing Ki-​jung. Any hope for solidarity in a traditional “class war” narrative is thwarted, since Geun-​sae attacks not the representative of the oppressive class, Dong-​ik, but instead, inexplicably, he attacks Ki-​jung, his social equal. Compounding the significance of the birthday party is the fact that it is also the anniversary of Da-​song’s first seizure, brought on by his first sight of Geun-​ sae who appears to the terrified child to be some kind of specter, sending him into convulsions. Therefore, the apparition of Geun-​sae might be interpreted as the first interpenetration of the sins of capitalism into the idyllic world of the Parks. Geun-​sae’s appearance at the birthday party causes Da-​song to suffer another seizure, and it is this event that finally establishes the fatal sequence that will result in Dong-​ik’s murder. Specifically, despite the fact that Ki-​taek’s daughter has been stabbed, Dong-​ik demands that Ki-​taek drive the Parks to the hospital immediately so that Da-​song’s seizure might be addressed. Ki-​taek, displaying what Verhaeghe might describe as a predictable disorder of mind, the result of his extended servitude to preserve his income caused by extreme competition for resources, explodes into rage and stabs Dong-​ik before running away and hiding in the secret room previously inhabited by Geun-​sae. Even this act of defiance, the stabbing of Dong-​ik is diminished, reducing its association with revolution, since Ki-​taek thinks he is attacking Dong-​ik with a child’s “Indian Ax” toy, but instead, he picks up a real ax from the Park’s barbeque, thus inflicting a fatal yet unintended blow. Thus, Geun-​sae’s is replaced by another of the precariat: Ki-​taek, who now cowers in the hidden room in the Park’s home, evading arrest for Dong-​ik’s murder. Any hope that Ki-​taek’s uprising will bring about real change in the

180 Buchberger social order is dashed, since in the concluding frames of the film, we are informed that the house has been bought by a German family. They will inherit the hidden Ki-​taek, just as the Parks inherited Geun-​sae. 2.4 The Four Horsemen –​Social Divisions/​Exclusions Žižek’s fourth and final indicator of capitalism’s demise is social division and exclusion. Both are clearly present in Parasite and, I suggest, have a corrosive effect on individual identity. The most obvious example of physical and social exclusion is the secret room in the Park’s home. As we learn in the film, the room is unknown to any of the Park family because as Moon-​gwang explains, rich people like Mr. Namgoong, an architect, for whom she worked before the Parks bought the house, “build bunkers and secret rooms in their homes. You know, in case the North Koreans invade, or in case creditors come knocking on their doors. Maybe Mr. Namgoong felt embarrassed about building such a room. He didn’t mention it to the Parks when he sold the house” (Bong and Han 2019: 78). Žižek describes the phenomenon of this kind of hidden space in a building as an “architectural parallax”; an area which reflects a gap between different perspectives on material existence held by different socio-​economic groups. Thus the secret room in the Park’s house is an architectural parallax, providing a divided perspective on material experience for the wealthy and the poor. For the Parks, a whole segment of lived reality is excluded from their experience. Žižek describes this idea in “Architectural Parallax Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle” (2009) and develops it in Chapter 3 of Living in the End Times. The importance of this sense of hidden and excluded populations is clearly evident in the film. Even Parasite’s advertising posters clearly depict layers of socio-​economic groups who inhabit the ascending levels of buildings: from desolate subterranean basements, which are invisible to all except those who descend to these dwellings, to the elevated and airy lofts of the rich. What is interesting to Žižek, and germane to a discussion of exclusion and identity, is the fact that there are human segments of capitalist society that are relied upon to ensure its continuance, but they are also erased from existence: made invisible by various social and economic capitalist policies. This erasure is both physical, in terms of their invisibility to those who are their economic superiors, and psychological, since the precariat inhabit a space that is unknown by the rest of the inhabitants of a city like Seoul. They inhabit the architectural parallax. Žižek explains the unique nature of the architectural parallax: an area that is secret yet implied. As such, it yields a certain power: something quite terrifying and repressed. We are peripherally aware of

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something being hidden from us, but we are unable to apprehend or articulate what it is. This peripheral awareness of the parallax invites all kinds of disturbing images to trouble the mind, and, as Žižek reflects, it is a phenomenon that has been exploited to great effect by writers of psychological thrillers: “In science-​fiction, horror films and techno-​thrillers, this dark space between walls is the space where horrible threats lurk (from spying machines to monsters or contagious animals like cockroaches and rats). Recall also, in science-​fiction architecture, the mysterious topic of an additional floor or room which is not in the building’s plan (and where, of course, terrifying things dwell …)” (Žižek 2009: n.p.). The hidden room in Parasite is funtional: a hiding place for those sought by others, or shelter from atomic attacks. However, the sense of foreboding or a peripheral awareness of what is or might be hidden on the part of those who live in and around these spaces is due to what Žižek suggests is the ability of buildings and architecture to provide “mute signs” or what we “cannot directly talk about” (Žižek 2010: 255). This sense of exclusion from aspects of material existence combined with an inability to apprehend and articulate the source of one’s psychological disquiet is a phenomenon of global capitalism: it is a sense that all is not well. Žižek provides the example of the Hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining as a building that communicates to its inhabitants that which cannot be articulated. The Park’s home too, despite being the pinnacle of neoliberal successs, might be interpreted as having the same ability. It too is an “ambiguity of utopian impulses” articulating a “longing for inequality, for a clear cut hierarchy and for class distinctions” (225), an attitude that global capitalism would surely echo. Parasite incorporates crisis of identity as a symptom of global capitalism. The film’s huge, and yet largely unanticipated success, might suggest that audiences who have hitherto ignored these symptoms might now be beginning to listen and, more importantly to take heed.

References

Hyoung Song, Min. 2019. “Climate Change in the Film ‘Parasite’” in Chicago Review of Books. https://​chire​view​ofbo​oks.com/​2019/​11/​21/​clim​ate-​cha​nge-​in-​the-​film -​Paras​ite/​. Bong, Joon-​ho and Han Jin-​won. 2019. Parasite (Screenplay). New York: Neon. Peerenboom, Randall. 2013. “An Empirical Overview of Rights Performance in Asia, France, and the USA: The Dominance of Wealth in the Interplay of Economics, Culture, Law, and Governments” in Randall, R. Peerenboom, Carole, J Peterson, &

182 Buchberger Albert. H. Y. Chen (Eds.) Human Rights in Asia. A Comparative Legal Study of Twelve Asian Jurisdictions, France, and the U.S.A. New York: Routledge, 1–​63. Verhaeghe, Paul. 2015. What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-​Based Society. London: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capita­ lism” in New Left Review 225, 28–​51. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Architectural parallax: spandrels and other phenomena of class struggle. Lacan.com. https://​www.lacan.com/​ess​ays/​?page​_​id=​218 Last accessed 06/​27/​2021. Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Times. London: Verso.

­c hapter 14

Parasite as a Scaled-​Down Disaster Film Enrico Terrone What kind of film is Parasite? To answer this question, I shall rely on René Thom’s theory of catastrophes which I will introduce in § 1. Then, in § 2, I shall propose an account of the disaster film as a genre whose distinctive feature is the destruction of an entity by an external perturbation. Specifically, I shall show that disaster films rest upon a perturbation-​disintegration structure in which the entity exposed to destruction is a complex social community. In § 3, I shall individuate the scaled-​down disaster film as a category including films that also exhibit a perturbation-​disintegration structure and yet do not belong to the disaster film strictly understood. In the scaled-​down disaster film, the entity exposed to disintegration is not a complex social community but rather a small group, typically a family, and the perturbation is a person or a group thereof. Among the instances of the scaled-​down disaster film one can find Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968), Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995) and, more recently, Bong Joon-​ ho’s Parasite (2019), whose narrative based on the perturbation-​disintegration structure I will analyze in depth. 1

Catastrophes

In the concluding section of Parables, Parabolas and Catastrophes (2014), René Thom considers the application of his theory of catastrophes to narratives. He focuses on the structure of the crime drama, which he takes to be based on the actions of criminals who threaten the stability of a community, which reacts by means of the police. Starting from this characterization, a more general narrative structure can be derived: an entity X jeopardizes the stability of an entity Y, and Y reacts by trying to neutralize X’s threat in order to preserve its own stability. In the case of the crime drama, X are the criminals and Y is the community in which they commit their crimes. More generally, the narrative structure “X destabilizes Y” characterizes all those stories whose core is the response of a certain entity Y to a perturbation X that can go so far as to break it up. Parasite is one such story.

© Enrico Terrone, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_016

184 Terrone Thom’s theory of catastrophes is a development of Aristotelian hylomorphic conception, according to which an entity or substance is identified by its form, that is, a principle of organization that provides the entity with its identity and persistence conditions. The form differentiates a certain substance from all other things and preserves it through its changes as time passes. By virtue of its form, a substance can have an individual history of its own. Although the exemplary substances in the Aristotelian framework are organisms and artifacts (see Evnine 2016), Thom applies the notion of substance also to social entities such as families and communities. These substances, just like organisms or artifacts, begin to exist when they acquire their specific form and cease to exist when they lose it. To make this point, Thom draws on Herbert’s Spencer’s (1860) analogy between social entities and organisms, which in turn can be traced back to Thomas Hobbes’ (1909: 8) conception of society as “an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended.” Moreover, as Hobbes’ metaphor suggests, social entities can be cast as artifacts that have human beings as constituents. In Vincent Ostrom’s (1980, 310) terms, “human beings both design and create organizations as artifacts and themselves form the primary ingredients of organizations. Organizations are, thus, artifacts that contain their own artisans.” Families also can be cast in this way. The Kims and the Parks in Parasite, as social organizations, are artifacts that contain their own artisans. The novelty of Thom’s contribution with respect to the Aristotelian metaphysics is the notion of “points of catastrophe,” which are meant to specify how the form contributes to the existence and persistence of a certain substance. These points constitute the spatial boundary that separates a certain substance from the environment in which it is located, so as that in each of these points the substance is exposed to change. The form of a substance is ultimately the combination of a boundary constituted by the points of catastrophe with a mechanism of internal regulation, namely, homeostasis. The form, so understood, defends the substance against environmental aggressions. In Parasite the points of catastrophe that defends families against environmental aggressions are first of all the walls of their houses. While the house of the Kims is from the very beginning exposed to environmental aggressions, the house of the Parks seems to be perfectly protected. Parasite, in this sense, can be cast as a narrative argument aimed to prove that it is not so. The points of catastrophe are also the points through which the substance is exposed to the possibility of its end. A catastrophe may occur when a substance is attacked by a foreign element, namely, a perturbation which threatens its form, jeopardizing its existence. When the perturbation succeeds, the points

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of catastrophe are no longer confined to the boundary but spread everywhere. The substance thus loses its form and therefore its existence. As a result of the perturbation, the environment overflows into the substance and reabsorbs it, disintegrating it. This conception of the catastrophe as a perturbation that leads to the disintegration of a substance is crucial to the Parasite narrative as well as to the disaster film, as I will show next. 2

The Disaster Film

We can characterize the disaster film by combining the narratological theory that Aristotle proposes in the Poetics (1992) with his conception of substances in the Metaphysics (2002) as developed by Thom’s theory of catastrophes. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that a narrative essentially has a beginning, a means, and an end. In the disaster film, these three sections are determined by the vicissitudes of a vulnerable entity whose form is threatened by a perturbation which might involve its catastrophe. In the beginning, the vulnerable entity and the perturbation are introduced. In the middle, the entity resists the perturbation. In the end, the entity either manages to neutralize the perturbation or succumbs and disintegrates. In paradigmatic disaster films, the vulnerable entity is a complex social community, which might even consist in the whole of humanity, while the perturbation may be either a human element or a natural element. In any case, the perturbation is such that its order and magnitude is significantly less than the disintegrated entity. Unlike other kinds of disintegration such as decay, the catastrophe occurs in a limited period, often unexpectedly, due to a circumscribed perturbation whose complexity is usually lower than that of the disrupted substance. For example, in True Lies (J. Cameron, 1994) the perturbation is a terrorist group that threatens the metropolitan community of Miami, just as in The Peacemaker (M. Leder, 1997) the perturbation is a terrorist group that threatens the metropolitan community of New York. The distinction between war and terrorism is crucial for membership in the disaster film. Even in war films, a nation can face disintegration, following military defeat. In this case, however, the disintegration is caused by another nation (or by an alliance of other nations), that is, by a social entity of the same (or even greater) order of magnitude and complexity than the disintegrating entity. A catastrophe, on the other hand, can occur only if the perturbation is a simpler entity than the disrupted entity. This is the situation that one can typically find in films about terrorist attacks: the social complexity of the terrorist group is significantly lower than that of the community under attack.

186 Terrone A second category of disaster films involves a perturbation that is not a human element. In this case, the difference in complexity between the perturbation and the vulnerable entity consists in the fact that the non-​human element does not present the complex social organization that characterizes the human community. When, instead, the non-​human element is as complex as the human community, for example in films about alien invasions such as The War of the Worlds (B. Haskin, 1953) or Independence Day (R. Emmerich, 1996), there is no instance of the disaster film properly understood, but rather a sort of science fiction version of the war movie. On the other hand, films such as King Kong (M.C. Cooper and E.B. Schoedsack, 1933) and Godzilla (I. Honda, 1954), in which non-​human perturbations are monsters of an extremely superior size to human beings, can be instances of the disaster film in virtue of the lower complexity of the life of those monsters which lacks linguistic and social skills. When the perturbation is a monster, disaster films reveal significant affinities with the horror film (Carroll 1990). Such disaster films, as Susan Sontag (1965: 45) puts it, “partly overlap with horror films” in virtue of “the undeniable pleasure we derive from looking at freaks, at beings excluded from the category of the human.” Parasite, from this perspective, can be traced back to both the disaster film and the horror film. The most typical cases of non-​human perturbation in the disaster film, however, are not monsters but rather are astronomical, geological, and biological elements. For example, in Earthquake (M. Robson, 1974) the eponymous perturbation (geological element) threatens the metropolitan community of Los Angeles, in Deep Impact (M. Leder, 1998) the existence of all humanity is jeopardized by the trajectory of a comet (astronomical element), in Contagion (S. Soderbergh, 2011) a virus (biological element) threatens the United States and in perspective the whole humanity. Starting from its title, Parasite draws a fruitful analogy between social and biological bearers of the disaster. Beside the perturbation-​disintegration structure, a further requirement which is crucial for membership in the disaster film is that the catastrophe (or at least its looming) is shown, and that the possibility of catastrophe constitutes the narrative core of the film, not simply its premise. As suggested by the title of Sontag’s (1966) seminal essay, The Imagination of Disaster, the disaster of the disaster film does not only involve the story told, but also the images whereby it is told. Disaster films, as Sontag (1966, 43) puts it, “can supply something the novels can never provide –​sensuous elaboration. In the films it is by means of images and sounds, not words that have to be translated by the imagination, that one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself.”

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Parasite can be seen as a disaster film in Sontag’s sense, but one on a smaller scale. It is not a matter of “the death of cities, the destruction of humanity itself” but just of the destruction of more basic social entities such as families. Still, Parasite, just as disaster films according to Sontag (1966, 44), “is concerned with the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc, making a mess.” Sontag focuses on disaster films produced in the context of the flourishing of American science-​fiction cinema in the Fifties. However, her account can fruitfully be extended to the most pure and exemplary instances of the disaster film as a genre. These are films made in the Thirties and in the Seventies, which are usually considered the two “golden ages” of the genre (Kay and Rose 2007). Despite their differences due to historical and productive contingencies, disaster films of both these ages exemplarily instantiate the perturbation-​ disintegration narrative structure. Among the disaster films of the Thirties, one can mention: San Francisco (W.S. Van Dyke, 1936), in which the vulnerable entity is the eponymous city, and the perturbation is the earthquake; In Old Chicago (H. King, 1938), in which the perturbation is a fire, and the vulnerable entity is again the eponymous city. On the other hand, among the paradigmatic disaster films of the Seventies, one can find: The Towering Inferno (J. Guillermin, 1974), in which the vulnerable entity is a skyscraper, and the perturbation is a fire; Earthquake (M. Robson, 1974), in which the eponymous perturbation threatens Los Angeles. In all these film, one can find what Sontag (1966, 44) calls “the depiction of urban disaster on a colossally magnified scale” which provides one with “the thrill of watching all those expensive sets come tumbling down.” Yet, the depiction of destruction may be rewarding also on a smaller scale, offering a different, subtler variant of “the aesthetic enjoyment of suffering and disaster” (Sontag 1966, 45). That is what one can find in scaled-​down disaster films like Parasite. 3

The Scaled-​Down Disaster Film

There are films that are not usually cast as members of the disaster film and yet have a significant structural affinity with the genre since they also involve a vulnerable entity whose existence is jeopardized by a perturbation. I will dub them scaled-​down disaster films since the vulnerable entity in their narratives is much less in scale than the wide communities of paradigmatic disaster films. Crime dramas such as M (F. Lang, 1931) are the first candidates to be considered as scaled-​down disaster films. Thom himself, as seen above, suggests that

188 Terrone the crime drama is a paradigm for the application of the catastrophe theory to narrative. However, the crime drama lacks a fundamental trait of the disaster film: the possibility that the perturbation leads to the disintegration of the community. Although criminals put pressure on the moral and legal principles on which a certain community is based, it is hard to see how their disruptive actions can go so far as to disintegrate the entire community. Indeed, criminals are usually interested in the preservation of the community in which they operate since the wealth of the community makes crime more profitable. The crime drama can lead to the disaster only when the criminals turn out to be terrorists whose objective is the disintegration of the social system they are attacking. In that case, as seen above, we have a full-​fledged instance of the disaster film. While in the crime drama there is perturbation without disintegration, the perturbation-​disintegration structure of the disaster film is entirely present, if scaled down, in those films in which the vulnerable entity is a family, and the perturbation is an extraneous character who infiltrates the family and tends to disintegrate it. Exemplary instances of this scaled down disaster film are the numerous adaptations of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, among which one can mention the two films of the same name directed by Tay Garnett (1946) and Bob Rafelson (1981), as well as Pierre Chenal’s 1939 Le Dernier Tournant and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). In these films, the perturbation is a drifter who enters the life of a couple and ends up dis­ integrating it. Other films such as Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle (1969), its remake Unfaithful (2002) by Adrian Lyne , as well as Lyne’s own Fatal Attraction (1987), deploy the same sort of narrative structure according to which a family is threatened and finally disintegrated by a person coming from outside it. While in all these films the basic mechanism of perturbation that leads to the disintegration of the family is the erotic attraction between a member of the married couple and a lover, in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) a mysterious visitor destabilizes a bourgeois family by having sexual affairs with all the inhabitants of its house, namely, the maid, the son, the mother, the daughter, and the father. In Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995), on the other hand, the disintegration of the bourgeois family occurs after hiring a new maid who will threaten their stability with the help of another woman. The novelty of Parasite, with respect to the scaled-​down disaster films considered so far, is that both the destabilizing entity and the destabilized entity are families. Just as in disaster films there is a significant difference in complexity between the destabilizing and the destabilized entity, so in Parasite there is a significant difference in social status between the two families. The Kim family is a lumpen unity that has its place at the lowest levels of the social hierarchy

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whereas the Park family is a much wealthier bourgeois unity. Interestingly, the audience is meant to share the point of view of the perturbation rather than that of the destabilized entity. The story of Parasite is told from the perspective of the Kims, not from that of the Parks. It is as if we were invited to enjoy a horror film form the perspective of the monster instead of from that of those trying to fight it, or a disaster film from the perspective of the disaster instead of from that of those trying to face it. The opening sequence shows the Kim family in its miserable semi-​basement apartment where they fight against bugs, and risk to be suffocated by pest control gas as if they themselves were bugs. This characterization of the Kims as living in a sort of subhuman way favors their identification with the perturbation, as the title itself of the film suggests, which is meant to subvert the properly human way of life. At the end of this sequence occurs the first turning point of the film: a friend of Ki-​woo, who is about to leave Korea to study abroad, gives the boy a scholar’s rock symbolizing wealth, and proposes him to take over as the English tutor for Da-​hye Park. The next section of the film shows how the Kim family infiltrates the Park family, threatening its stability. First, the camera follows Ki-​woo who walks towards the Kim residence. His path from the semi-​basement to the residence on a hill suggests a symbolic path from the bottom to the top, from darkness to light, from dirtiness to cleanness, from disorder to order (see f­igure 1 and ­figure 2). In the first instance, one might interpret this as a sort of ascent or redemption. Yet, on closer inspection, this reveals itself to be a mechanism of perturbation and disintegration through which the bottom will infiltrate the top, darkness will obscure light, dirtiness and disorder will destroy cleanness and order. Ki-​woo’s arrival initiates a chain of deceptive recommendations which will bring the whole Kim family into the Park’s residence. Speaking with Mrs. Park, Ki-​woo recommends his sister Ki-​jung as an art teacher for Da-​song, presenting her as a classmate of his cousin. Ki-​woo and Ki-​jung are portrayed at the threshold of the Kim’s residence in a long shot that rhymes with that of Ki-​ woo’s first arrival in that place (see ­figure 1 and ­figure 3). Brother and sisters here look like small creatures who are on the verge of entering a much bigger organism, threatening its stability. This impression reveals itself to be veridical when Ki-​jung frames Mr. Park’s chauffeur leaving her panties in his car, thereby recommending her father Ki-​taek to replace him. Finally, in a long complex sequence unified in the soundtrack by the baroque pastiche The Belt of Faith by Jung Jae-​il, the Kims frame the Park’s maid Moon-​gwang, exploiting her peach allergy to convince

190 Terrone Mrs. Park that the maid has tuberculosis, and then persuading Mr. Park to replaced her with Chung-​sook. There is a double irony in this sequence. On the one hand, Mrs. Park is concerned to avoid a biological contagion, namely tuberculosis, but ends up favoring a social contagion, that is, the infiltration of the Kims in her family. On the other hand, the housekeeper Moon-​gwang is not an innocent victim as the sequence mighty suggest. As the development of the narrative will reveal, she also was the vector of a social contagion since she infiltrated the Kim’s house by letting her husband Geun-​sae to secretly live in the underground bunker, thereby traumatizing the little Da-​song who mistook the man for a ghost. The successful infiltration of the Kims in the Park’s residence is celebrated by another sequence which portrays Chung-​sook bringing a tray of peaches and other fruits to the kids, and is unified by the music in the soundtrack, which now is a true piece of baroque music: the aria “Spietati io vi giurai” from Händel’s Rodelinda. At the end of this sequence, Mr. Park comes back home, and his son Da-​song, who goes down the stairs to get a present from him, notices that the chauffeur, the maid, and the art teacher smell all the same. Interestingly, the lower senses of smell, taste, and touch indicate that the penetration of the plebeian Kims into the Park’s bourgeois realm is going on, even though its effects are not still visible or audible. As for touch, Mrs. Park is upset when she sees Ki-​woo taking Da-​hye’s hand during the first English lesson, and she is even more upset when Mr. Kim takes her own hand when they make the putative discovery that Moon-​gwang has tuberculosis. As for taste, the successful infiltration of the Kims is symbolized by the peach taste which was previously unavailable to the members of the family because of Moon-​gwang’s allergy. The plebeian infiltration becomes also visible and audible when the Parks leave on a camping trip and the Kims take full possession of their residence. The camera portrays them feasting wildly as if it were a lumpen version of the last supper (see ­figure 4). Here we can find a scaled-​down version of a situation that Sontag (1966: 45) individuates in science-​fiction disaster films: “In the figure of the monster from outer space, the freakish, the ugly, and the predatory all converge-​and provide a fantasy target for righteous bellicosity to discharge itself.” The Aristotelian narrative structure of catastrophe thus involves an emotional discharge that may remind one the main response that according to Aristotle should be elicited from audiences by narratives, namely, catharsis. The Kims’ banquet is interrupted when Moon-​gwang comes back to the residence to bring food to her husband in the bunker. Mrs. Kim thus discovers the secret of her predecessor, who in turn discovers the secret of her successor when the other three members of the Kim’s family accidentally reveal

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themselves. The two secrets are of the same kind: both maids have infiltrated the bourgeois house introducing their family members in it. Here comes another innovative feature of Parasite as a small-​scale disaster film: a duplication of the perturbation, involving a conflict of disrupting elements which crucially contributes to the overall disintegration. Moon-​gwang and her husband are the perturbation threatening the Kims’s stability just as the Kims threaten the Parks’ stability. The Kims thus fight against Moon-​gwang and her husband, making the house a complete mess. Interestingly, the sequence depicting this fight is unified by the Italian pop song “In ginocchio da te,” which introduces a sharp contrast with the baroquesque music of the two above mentioned sequences in which the Parks were in the possession of their house. The Parks’ residence is now at the mercy of disruptive plebeian forces. However, the bourgeois order is temporarily reestablished when the Parks come back because of a rainstorm. The Kims scramble to clean up the home, lock Moon-​gwang and Geun-​sae in the bunker, and then hide themselves under sofas as if they were bugs. Later in the night, when Mr. Kim and his two sons are finally able to get out the Park’s residence and come back home, they find their semi-​basement apartment flooded because of a monsoon: a natural disaster which, in the symbolic system of the film, rhymes with the social disaster which is about to reach its peak. The day after, the Parks celebrate Da-​song’s birthday in their magnificent garden on a wonderful sunny day with a soprano performing the aria “Mio caro bene,” again from Händel’s Rodelinda (similarly, a television performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni preludes to the disintegration of the bourgeois family in Chabrol’s La Cérémonie). Geun-​sae, upset by the death of his wife, exits the bunkers, hits Ki-​woo with the scholar’s rock, and finally shows up in the garden where the guests are listening to the aria. The party suddenly turns into a carnage. Geun-​sae kills Ki-​jung, and is in turn killed by Mrs. Kim, while Mr. Kim murders Mr. Park. We see the Park’s guests desperately running away from the social disaster just as we saw the inhabitants of the suburbs desperately running away from the natural disaster the night before. The bourgeois paradise of the Park family has been disintegrated. In the epilogue, we apprehend that, after the catastrophe, Mrs. Park and her kids left the residence, which is now inhabited by a German family, while Mr. Kim has taken the place of Geun-​sae in the bunker to avoid being sentenced for the killing of Mr. Park. Thus, some extraneous, disruptive element was in the house long before the catastrophic story started and will remain there even after its ending. This makes Parasite a peculiar scaled-​down disaster film in which the seeds of the disaster precede and follow the arc of perturbation and disintegration that characterizes the

192 Terrone genre. The disaster, Parasite tells us, is not an accidental event that may affect human life at a certain time but rather a constitutive component of it.

References

Aristotle. 1995. Poetics (trans. S. Halliwell). Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library. Aristotle. 2002. Metaphysics (trans J. Sachs). Santa Fe, N.M.: Green Lion Press. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or Paradoxes of the Heart. London: Routledge. Evnine, Simon. 2016. Making Objects and Events: A Hylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas. 1909. Leviathan, or The Matter, Form, & Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, W. G. Pogson Smith (ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kay Glenn, Rose Michael. 2007. Disaster Movies: The Ultimate Guide, New York: Mosaic Press. Ostrom, Vincent. 1980. “Artisanship and Artifact,” Public Administration Review, 40: 309–​217. Sontag, Susan. 1965. “The Imagination of Disaster” in Commentary, 40(4): 42–​48. Spencer, Herbert. 1860. “The Social Organism” in The Westminster Review 73: 90–​121. Thom, René. 2014. Parables, Parabolas and Catastrophes: Conversations on Mathematics, Science and Philosophy (trans. R. Lisker). Toronto: Thombooks Press.

­c hapter 15

Symbiosis, Interruption, and Exchange Parasite after Serres’ The Parasite

Michael Weinman and Shai Biderman Taking its intellectual departure from Michel Serres’ The Parasite (1982), this chapter situates Bong Joon Ho’s fantasy-​nightmare of late capitalist exploitation and class conflict within its classical horizon. Bong constructs a cinematic parable in which characters and locations bifurcate and swap the roles of guest and host and of site and para-​site, instantiating and expanding Serres’ model of the parasitic relation as well as its metabolic, economic and static aspects. More than this, Bong’s self-​conscious staging makes clear that the title of his film refers both to action within the artwork and to the work itself and its creators, including the filmmaker himself who is both host and guest of the occasion that is our experience of that parable as it flows. For this reason, the ultimate addressee of the central question the film raises –​how are parasitic relations of host/​guest, creditor/​debtor to be contracted and regulated? –​is the film itself, in its complex positionality in relation to its creator and viewers. More simply: Parasite stages itself as the ultimate answer to the question of who (or what) is the parasite that is named in its title. 1

Parasites and Para-​sites

We begin by observing that “the term ‘parasite’ derives, etymologically, from parasitus (Latin) and parasitos (Greek), meaning ‘a person who eats at the table of another,’” and thus may be taken to “mean ‘feeding beside’, from para (beside) and sitos (wheat, flour, bread, or food)” (Braune 2020: 16). Analyzed within this frame, sitos carries a multiplicity of senses, from food to noise to, sometimes, excrement. This multiplicity emanates from and is processed within one site, the mouth, which “makes one’s own what is in common and what will soon be even more one’s own, the living body” (Serres 1982: 144–​45). Serres observes how the parasite appears through the aperture that is the mouth as an agent of often violent exchange through which biological form and social interaction flow. In Parasite Bong dramatizes this homology between the biological function of the parasitic organism and economic function of the

© Michael Weinman and Shai Biderman, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004521513_017

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service worker –​most especially in scenes of feasting that violate the norms of private property; scenes that are, crucially, interrupted. The moment where an unexpected guest interrupts the meal of the now-​host –​a logic we will observe in three instances from the film –​performs a synecdochic figuration of the biological and economic model of parasitic relations, in which “we don’t know what belongs to the system, what makes it up, and what is against the system interrupting and endangering it” (Serres 1982: 16). The parasite thus functions as a form of life and not as a specific entity. If we ask: “who (or what) is the parasite named in the title of the film?” our answer embraces a series of entities that occupies oscillating nodes in the parasitic relation of host/​guest. First and obviously the Kim family in its competition with former housekeeper and her debts-​evading husband for the resources of the Park family. Yet Park Dong-​ik, the family patriarch, is also framed as a parasite who feeds on Seoul’s global elite. That global elite, meanwhile, is in parasitic relation to the other residents of the deeply unequal city, especially its underclass, depicted in the dramatic flood scene that divides the second and third interrupted festive meals analyzed here. But again, that underclass itself (of which the Kims are part) is in parasitic relation to the city’s concentrated wealth, with reversal upon reversal of the directionality of the parasitism. Still, there’s more: starting again from within the Park family mansion, Park Yeon-​ kyo, the family matriarch, can be seen in parasitic relation to either or both to her husband or her housekeeper (either the original one or the ersatz that Chung-​sook becomes). Their daughter Da-​hye seeks a form of benefit in relation to Ki-​woo as tutor and perhaps lover, following on her ambivalent interaction with Min-​hyuk that, too, appears as parasitic; surely no more so however, than Ki-​woo’s relation to his friend Min-​hyuk, the original tutor/​lover of Da-​ hye. Bong shows, in other words, just how promiscuous the parasitic relation is. Parasite thus advances an argument made by Serres: that which is named “host” at one moment in a parasitic relation, will be named “guest” either at another moment of the same relation or in relation to some “host” that itself is in relation to some other entity as guest/​host anyway (see Serres 1982: 8). It helps Serres, but is not necessary for his argument, that in French the same word names both host and guest. Bong demonstrates this promiscuity through a cascading and chiasmic crossing of guest/​host relations, where guests become hosts and hosts become guests as interruptions of a single flow of exchange in the service the economy of a global capital. This flow can be seen in the myriad forms of “unskilled” labor life that a global city demands, and in the physical metabolism that manifests in the sewage system that pervades the film’s montage. This flow, ever turbulent, is constantly interrupted –​dis-​turbed –​by the static noise (the third of Serrres’s three senses of parasite, which is lost in the

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translation to English but is nevertheless endemic to parasitic relations). This flux comes to be physically embodied in a flood that “flushes the rats out of their sewers,” in multiple senses both literal and figurative. Together with this sense of parasite as “feeding alongside,” which “denotes the sycophantic or Machiavellian implication of a ‘hanger-​on’ (from 1539 onwards)” and which “is the dominant (but not exclusive) meaning used by Serres,” we can understand the parasite as the para-​site, that is “a site that can be found beside the original –​a site that contains the meaning of the original as simulation” and “can be considered the epiphenomenon of the phenomenon” that “manifests as the unconsidered supplement” (Braune 2020: 16). Both of these senses of parasite undergird the critical and satirical presentation of Ki-​woo and his family as having entered into a parasitic relationship with the Park family. This becomes especially clear when we bear in the mind the ways in which the Kims must compete with Geun-​sae and Moon-​gwang for the resources of the Parks, and how Geun-​sae’s physical position hidden within the recesses (bowels) of the Park family mansion not only drives the dramatic action of the cinematic narrative but also reconstructs the setting (the site) of that action. The para-​site, then, is both the hidden shelter beneath the Park mansion –​the “site that contains the meaning of the original as simulation” –​ and the occupant(s) of that site, or those who believe they are “hosts” for it, but indeed come to be defined as those who can only persist insofar as the parasitic organisms are themselves the “rats” in the basement, are hosting their perfect upper-​class lives. For Serres, the parasite both embodies the symbiotic system of production/​ consumption upon which biological life and economic exchange depend and disrupts that symbiosis as the static and ambient noise that the apparatus of late capitalist relations requires and incessantly attempts to externalize. Parasite instantiates and extends this model, transforming the classical parable of “the uninvited guest who comes to stay” into a cinematic moment of parasitic relation. The artistic creation we believed we were inviting into our consciousness, a stylized horror film, defies expectations, presenting us with a picture of the mundane and infinite extension of bourgeois values, displacing –​yet delivering –​the horror. Bong’s Parasite, an intermedial moment of screened thinking, interrupts the standard flow of artistic production and consumption where film viewers enjoy a “genre piece” and satiate themselves on the symbiotic enmeshing of the expectations held by the host (here, the viewer) and the offering made by the guest (here, the film). It thus joins a tradition of films from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998) that think and enact the unbridgeable social gaps constantly reinforced by the distortions inherent in global capitalism, which defy host-​guest

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relations, specifically through the visual and auditory presentation of a guest’s (unexpected and unwanted) offering. 2

Three Interrupted Festive Meals

Min-​hyuk Interrupts the Kim Family’s Subterranean Celebration of Wi-​Fi The multiple meanings of parasite –​both within the context of the drama of Parasite and under the horizon of life in the global late-​capitalist city of which that drama is a cinematic parable –​is clear from film’s opening. Just six minutes into the film, we come across a salient moment that follows two other scenes of parasitic relation (the Kim family’s struggle to pirate Wi-​Fi and their attempt to provide for themselves by folding pizza boxes in their basement home for a chain pizza restaurant that outsources that part of their business). Here (at 6’21”), we encounter the Kim family sitting down at their very modest table in their grungy, dank, basement kitchen, in order to celebrate “the reconnection of our phones, and this bounteous Wi-​Fi,” as Kim Ki-​taek puts it in a very grand style. No sooner has Ki-​taek finished speaking, however, then we are met (at 6’33”) with the image of a drunk man urinating on the sidewalk directly in front of and above us, seen from the pov of the Kim family at their kitchen table. Crucially, as this moment of interruption proceeds (6’35”-​6’55”), our view alternates between shots of (i) Ki-​taek and Kim Chung-​sook, as well as their daughter, Ki-​jung arguing about what –​if anything –​can be done to make the drunks stop urinating, essentially, on their window on the world and on their home itself and (ii) the drunk man stumbling and singing to himself as he urinates and threatens to vomit. This invites us to watch the family as they watch the drunken man threaten to urinate on their household at precisely the moment that Min-​hyuk, a friend of the film’s protagonist Ki-​woo, arrives as an unexpected guest. For his part, Ki-​woo has been passively silent as his father argues with his mother and sister about what can be done to prevent being urinated and vomited on (mother: post a sign; sister: shout at him/​them; father: a sign just makes them urinate more; don’t shout). Min’s arrival in the scene comes, crucially, before he enters the Kims’ home, meaning that we watch this next sequence (6’56”-​7’22”) from the Kim family’s point of view, which is to say, we watch Min-​hyuk as the Kim family does, through their window which is elevated above their eye level: this gives us the uncanny sense that the Kims are watching a movie –​the same movie as we are –​as they follow the dramatic confrontation with the drunk, where it looks 2.1

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as though the drunk might begin a physical altercation. Bong here juxtaposes sharp dialogue and grainy street footage reminiscent of familiar cinematic motifs with a self-​reflexive presentation as a cinema show seen on a window in the cinematic world that is itself a window on the real world. Both the linguistic and dramatic content of this sequence –​Min says “what are you staring at”; the drunk replies: “come here you little shit”; Min-​hyuk taunts and reprimands the drunk (“this is not toilet; get away from there; get a fucking grip”) and ultimately chases him off –​and the feeling that one is viewing a screen within a screen contribute to that metafictional conceit. In this way, Parasite instantiates itself as screened thinking, referring to its bifurcated status as both the representation of a fictional world and an object within the real world, which itself is only ever known as the resolution or conflict between multiple projections of different experiences from different perspectives. Crucial here, both for the driving action of the plot and for the class analysis and comment on bourgeois values it aims to provide, is how Ki-​taek, Chung-​ sook, and Ki-​jung praise Min-​hyuk: “that is an impressive friend”; “college students have a real vigor to them”; “not like my brother.” Our pov as this unfolds also merits attention: the perspective shifts back and forth between watching (i) Min-​hyuk and the drunk through the window, with the uncanny sense that, along with the Kims, we are watching a film that happens to be “screened” through their window rather than be projected on a screen that has about the same proportional dimensions and (ii) the Kim family itself in a tight-​angle shot that has the feel of family sitcom. Moreover, we find that Ki-​woo has stood up and has an inscrutable but dour expression on his face as his three family members praise his friend –​and belittle him –​while remaining seated. As we will discuss further in the analysis of the second interrupted festive meal, this “spotlighting” of Ki-​woo as a failure and possibly as a scapegoat for the family’s ills –​as well as a sort of shadow-​Min –​is integral to the rising tension of the dramatic action. The recurring motif (in these scenes and others throughout the film, including the dramatic moment where Da-​hye first kisses Ki-​woo during tutoring [24’25”-​25’45”]) is that Ki-​woo could be like Min-​hyuk, or even be Min-​hyuk: that he could study at university; could be Da-​hye’s lover; and could, perhaps, even marry Da-​hye and bring the Kims not merely into bourgeois respectability but even into the haute bourgeois elite. For this reason, it is relevant that throughout this scene Ki-​woo has been standing by in silence as the rest of his family takes stock of Min-​hyuk approvingly: he seems to accept this praise of his friend as a condemnation of his own failures. A point that comes across all the more strongly when Ki-​woo finally does speak, in order to say just one word (“No”), in answer to his father’s question (7’23”): “But is he coming here? Did you invite him?” With Ki-​taek’s stress on “here” (he

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is coming here?!),” Bong thematizes the manner in which parasitic relations of host-​guest/​guest-​host are integrally connected with interruptions and the defiance of expectations and customs: of social (cultural and economic) and symbiotic systems. Even as Ki-​woo defies the expectations of the family “to make something of himself,” his friend-​double defies expectations not only by arriving at their (very) humble home and addressing Ki-​woo’s father as “Sir” –​ as though Min-​hyuk was “among his own,” though it is perfectly obvious to all involved that he is not, but also without knocking, choosing to let himself in, as though he “rules the roost.” Further interweaving the multiple forms of parasitism that intersect in this interaction, we learn (7’33–​35”) that Min-​hyuk had texted Ki-​woo to alert the latter of his intention to visit, but Ki-​woo (looking at his phone at this moment) had not gotten the text –​either, presumably, because of the interruption of their pirated wi-​fi, or because he needed to try to wheedle a job out of the boss of the pizza place in order to make up for the family’s recent loss of added income. And, when Min-​hyuk –​suddenly thinking perhaps it was rude of him to barge in this way –​asks if they were eating, Ki-​taek is quick to say that they were not. This is, in a sense, true: they were drinking beer and eating only some bagged snacks, as there was no “sit down dinner” this evening. All the same, Ki-​taek is of course lying; they were eating, after their custom or to extent that they could provide themselves something to eat. The only question, which is left unanswered, is why he lies: to prevent having to acknowledge that this is all he can provide the family to eat? to ease Min-​hyuk’s discomfort at having interrupted him? to avoid the awkwardness of there being nowhere to offer Min-​hyuk to sit? As the scene concludes (7’55”-​8’35”), Ki-​woo makes clear that he would rather Min-​hyuk not enter their home, and surely not the kitchen. Min-​hyuk, full of sincerity and politeness, presents himself as both the house-​guest and the stranger-​enemy who bears an unrequested gift: the scholar’s stone. This putatively auspicious gift, which later injures and nearly kills Ki-​woo, Min-​ hyuk explains, was given to him by his grandfather to bring to Ki-​woo and his family: his own house is full of them, “they bring material wealth to a family,” Min-​hyuk says he was told. After Ki-​taek’s states (portentously) that this is in “a very opportune gift” for which Min-​hyuk “must extend our thanks to your Grandpa,” Chung-​sook declares “food would be better.” With those words, the scene ends and we next find Ki-​woo having a drink on the corner with Min-​hyuk, who offers him a position (or at least a job interview) as a tutor in the Park household, and the plot begins to unfold from there. What is striking about the choice to end this first interrupted feast in this way, however, is neither the satirical humor in the Kim matriarch’s response nor

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the undeniable impression that she is correct with which we are left. Rather, we find in this retort the film’s awareness that the static and economic dimension of parasitism are themselves parasitic on the metabolic: a point which is driven home in each of the next two scenes of interrupted feasting to which we turn now. 2.2 Moon-​gwang Interrupts the Kims’ Picnic in the Park House The second interrupted feast takes place in a much more comfortable and –​ as Ki-​taek notes himself (57’11”) –​“classy” setting: the Kims have traded the sewage-​stained and pest-​riddled bleak basement kitchen for the modern austere opulence of the living room on the main level of the Park residence. Still, however much better off the Kims appear at this all-​too-​brief moment in the dramatic action –​which comes just before their literal and figurative downfall, they elect to hold their picnic and drinking party spread out on the floor in the living room, and not seated at the formal dining room table. Given the point that Ki-​woo makes a few minutes into the scene, we must note that Ki-​jung is seated on the sofa, elevated above her family and given an air of nobility or even royalty, while the rest of the Kim family is “where they belong” on the floor. This choreography suggests that no matter how high the Kims may (temporarily) have risen, they are still bottom-​dwellers –​and bottom-​feeders, who seem to drink more than they eat. Also, crucially, our perspective throughout this scene alternates between a narrow-​focused shot on the family sitting and drinking (and sporadically eating) and a wide-​angle shot that shows the exterior of the structure in which the family interacts through a window whose dimensions reproduce the familiar wide-​screen proportions of the cineplex. In this way, Bong stages the bifurcation in the (here cinematic) narrative where positions of host, interrupter, and guest “are interchangeable” (Serres 1982: 19). Why interchangeable? As the shifting camera angles show: whether we put ourselves in the position of the Kims on the floor of the Park residence; or in the position of Park family whom the Kims seem to feel as a present absence just on the other side of the mansion that shelters them from the ongoing storm; or in the position in which we actually are as nameless observers of the dramatic action –​whichever these nodes we occupy, the same parasitic relation of host and guest obtains. One particularly striking instance occurs at the moment when Ki-​jung chastises Ki-​taek and Ki-​woo for foolishly wasting time ruminating about what has become of the Park family’s former driver, Yoon, whom Ki-​jung and Chung-​ sook have conspired to have fired. First, we watch Ki-​jung as she chides: “Don’t think of driver Yoon, but me, please.” Then, as lightning strikes and thunder roars, Ki-​taek makes a note of the timing and Ki-​woo remarks on how “she

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speaks and lightning strikes (60’55”-​61’10”). Immediately thereafter, Ki-​woo muses about how his sister seems to belong in the Park residence, unlike the rest of the family –​“like she’s lived here for years,” he says. As he speaks, what we see is not Ki-​woo, nor Ki-​taek, to whom the observation is addressed; rather, as if to make Ki-​woo’s point for him, the camera shows us Ki-​jung laying on the sofa rolling the whiskey around in its bottle, laying back, closing her eyes, holding her forehead –​all in movements that echo those made by Yeon-​kyo in an earlier scene that presented her as both a creature of the opulent house and a prisoner within it, during which she notes the (apparent, and both true and false it seems) similarity between Ki-​jung and her younger self: the interchangeability of guest and host is again dramatically presented. This moment of serenity for the Kims –​soon disrupted by the arrival at the residence of the dismissed housekeeper Moon-​gwang, which rapidly brings the central conflict of the plot to a head –​concludes with an echo of the first feast: the family entertains and rejects the fantasy in which Ki-​woo takes on, in all respects, the attributes of his successful (“impressive”) friend Min-​hyuk, including the latter’s courtship of the Park family’s daughter. As if to underscore the point about the interchangeability of positions within parasitic relations, Ki-​woo literally speaks the words about Da-​hye that Min-​hyuk had said about Da-​hye to Ki-​woo himself when they first hatched the plan for Ki-​ woo: “When she enters university, I will officially ask her out.” Leaving aside the fantasy of Ki-​woo successfully wooing and marrying Da-​hye, Ki-​taek points out that “we live here right now”; they are occupying and enjoying this “cozy” home. As with the first feast, Chung-​sook bursts the bubble, comparing her family to the cockroaches who scatter when they turn on the lights at their ugly basement home. Her point could not be more plainly attuned to parasitism: just as the cockroaches are permitted to occupy their own home when the Kims (the host) are not actively using the kitchen or bathroom; so too are the Kims permitted, like cockroaches, to use the Park residence while the host is absent. But should the host return, the guest/​cockroach/​Kim is shown for what it is: a parasite. Point made. Yet, two seemingly small, insignificant and fleeting moments complete this scene before the doorbell rings –​an interruption, an unexpected guest once again –​and Moon-​gwang makes her appearance and the all-​too-​real violence begins (63’20”). First, Ki-​taek feigns fury as a response to Chung-​sook’s satirical deflation of his romanticization of their lot, grabbing her shirt and raising his hand as if to strike her. The children are both fooled for a moment (as are we?), before mother and father both begin laughing, commenting on how they fooled both siblings. Second, even easier to pass over, Ki-​jung realizes that she was eating the beef jerky that was meant to be a treat

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for the Park family dog. It would be easy enough to exclude these two seconds-​ long shots from our consideration of a second interrupted feast; yet it is worth remembering both as they try to break this scene of intense parasitic relation –​ which comes to us in a synthetic bundle of the metabolic, economic, and static figures of parasitism –​into analytic parts in order to observe how Bong builds on and expands the three intertwined aspects of parasitic relation identified by Serres. The metabolic aspect asserts itself in Ki-​jung’s consumption of the dog treats, in the comparison of the Kims to cockroaches, and by the constant presence of eating and drinking during this moment, and (in retrospect, once we know what happens when Moon-​gwang opens that door to the basement) in the, literally, cryptic comment when Moon-​gwang says that she “forgot something in the basement under the kitchen” (64’35”). Though the economic aspect pervades every aspect of this scene, we see it most urgently in the concern that Ki-​woo and Ki-​taek share for the dismissed driver Yoon, and then again in Moon-​gwang’s chilling observation that Chung-​sook is her “successor” during her (as it were) televised appeal for access. The noise (or static) can be found not only in the increasingly irritating doorbell chime that seems to build and build as the Kims try to wait out the interruption as Moon-​gwang rings more and more persistently, but also in thunder claps to which the dialogue turns our attention, the heavy rain that persists precisely as background noise, and which will also precipitate further dramatic action downstream in the narrative flow. Bearing in mind the challenge to “separate the signal from the noise,” we can also identify Moon-​gwang’s presence as a two-​dimensional talking head on the video display of the intercom system, itself part of the moving sound image that is the cinematic narrative we are watching as parasitic in this sense. 2.3 Geun-​sae and Ki-​taek Interrupt the Birthday Feast for Da-​song All of these aspects, which interact and overlap in the second interrupted feast scene, constitute the dominant sense of parasite in Serres’ analysis (namely, that which feeds alongside). To this, we still must add the parasite as para-​ site, the location that comes along with the central locale, which in this case would be the basement shelter that has been there alongside the Park residence all along, but which only enters our field of vision when Moon-​gwang brings Chung-​sook (and us) downstairs to see precisely what she “forgot in the basement.” The ensuing scene introduces us to Geun-​sae, husband of Moon-​ gwang and failed Taiwanese pastry shop owner. Along with Chung-​sook, we learn from Moon-​gwang that the home’s former owner, for whom she had also worked as the housekeeper, was apparently ashamed of the existence of the

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shelter and never mentioned it to the Parks while making the sale. This gave her the chance to smuggle her husband into the basement and shelter him there from both the loan sharks who threatened them both and from the Parks who were blissfully unaware of not only the parasite living among them, but also of the para-​site in which he lived. This overlaying of the parasite and the para-​site itself advances the static sense of parasitic relations that drive the film’s dramatic action, as the overlapping but partial knowledge horizons of the Park family, the Kim family, Moon-​gwang, and Geun-​sae become the engine of a series of reversals and reversals of reversals that disrupt all the plans that come into dramatic conflict in the film’s second half: the Park family’s plan to go camping for Da-​song’s birthday (not knowing that all their employees are actually members of one family, which is occupying their house in their absence, nor that the storm that has come will rain them out); the Kim family’s plan to camp out in the Park mansion (not knowing that the storm will interrupt the Park family’s plan, nor what parasite is lurking in the para-​site); Moon-​gwang’s plan to bribe the current housekeeper to continue to provide food for and hide her husband in the basement shelter (not knowing anything of the secrets that housekeeper, and the rest of the Kim family, is hiding). For this reason, that while much of the drama of the third fourth of the film happens inside the shelter, we feel its presence as para-​site most strongly in the scene where the perspectives of various nodes in the host/​guest relations within the cinematic narrative and ourselves as viewers of that narrative come most strongly together. When the overlapping zones of ignorance come the greatest into contact and hence the parasitism presented is most intense. This occurs when Ki-​woo and Da-​hye seek refuge from the third interrupted feast, from Da-​Song’s birthday party, in her upstairs bedroom, which also functions as para-​site. Both confess to each other their perception that the other is not “really there” with her or him, even as they kiss and Da-​hye encourages Ki-​woo to stay with her in the room longer. This elicits from Ki-​woo an almost-​ frank presentation of the parasitic relations in which the two of them –​and the other members of both families –​are embedded. We see this acknowledgement, first of all, in his bemused awareness that Da-​hye and all the guests who have gathered in the garden are all so cool, fabulous, and beautiful while he wonders –​again, viewing the garden party through a window from a vantage point we share with him and which emulates the perspective a cinema attendee has on a cineplex screen –​“do I belong here?” We can see in Da-​hye’s expression that she is uncertain if this is really a question that he is asking her or more of a general statement, as she silently nods affirmation; Ki-​woo is unconvinced, as is, it would seem, the film itself, which knows better.

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The ultimate reckoning with “the ugly truth” of the byzantine linkages of parasitism begins in earnest while we are still with Ki-​woo in the privacy of Da-​hye’s bedroom. The dramatic focus, both visually and metaphorically, is the scholar’s rock that Ki-​woo has brought to the party for use as a weapon with which to confront Geun-​sae (the parasite) when he descends to the underground shelter (the para-​site). The camera forces our attention on the rock’s emergence from Ki-​woo’s satchel, as we share his and Da-​hye’s tremulous awareness of this highly cathected inanimate object. The coming phantasmagoria of sudden and spasmatic violence once Ki-​woo leaves Da-​hye’s room and heads for the shelter naturally attracts attention. But let us here focus rather on this moment of suspended tension just before that dramatic climax and falling action. Specifically, we are discussing the very brief moment (107’07”-​28”) after Ki-​ woo shares his self-​doubt with Da-​hye and she tries to deflect that doubt and maintain the connection with him, both emotionally and physically (her arms are wrapped around his waist), and before he heads down to the shelter and sets off the chain of impulsive events that ends with multiple murders and the satiation of bloodlust. What we see in these 20 seconds is Ki-​woo extracting the scholar’s stone from the bag, while standing by the desk at which he and Da-​hye held their tutoring sessions and upon which he has placed the bag, while their gaze seems to alternate between the stone and one another. As we watch this unfold, we hear an exchange that embodies both the intimacy of their connection and their complete and unbridgeable distance from one another:

da-​h ye: ki-​woo: da-​h ye: ki-​woo:

Just stay with me. I have to go down there. Why go to those boring people? Can’t you stay with me? Not to those people. Down lower. [Ki-​woo embraces the stone, looking off] da-​h ye: Wow, what is that?

We find the crystallization of the entire drama of Parasite in this exchange if we consider both the visual and auditory signal of this brief interlude as screened and what we learn from its semantic content in reflection. Even though Da-​ hye and Ki-​woo are physically conjoined, there is an unbridgeable distance between them; even though Ki-​woo is trying to be honest with Da-​hye, it is impossible for him to communicate those things that need to be said most: all sorts of interruptions and bifurcations are possible in the systemic flow, but certain positions cannot be traded, and certain relations cannot be constituted.

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Crucially, Da-​hye’s question “Wow, what is that?” is never answered, and –​it would appear –​cannot be answered within this film. Why not? What could be easier than to stipulate the facts concerning this unexpected gift from Min-​ hyuk’s grandfather, handed to Ki-​woo’s family by Da-​hye’s former tutor and suitor, Min-​hyuk? The trouble is that beneath those bare facts is precisely the fault line of all the permutations and substitutions in host/​guest relations that the secret entanglement of the Park and Kim families can no longer maintain. 3

Conclusion: Parasite Itself as an Interrupted Festive Meal

The substitution of one entity for another –​Ki-​woo for Min-​hyuk (as Da-​hye’s tutor and lover), cockroach for human (as the unwanted guest who is permitted to feed alongside the host, within limits); human for dog (in consuming the beef jerky); Park Dong-​ik for Namgoong (as the owner of the mansion, and, unwittingly for Park, the shelter/​para-​site); Chung-​sook for Moon-​gwang (as housekeeper to the mansion and its owner); Ki-​taek for Geun-​sae (as the fugitive hiding in the shelter); Ki-​jung for Yeon-​kyo (as the woman who is at home in a mansion, drinking from boredom and the waste of her talents) –​both drives the dramatic action of Bong’s film and demonstrates the unbridgeable gap that divides the central figures in the film from one another. Parasite knows this is not only true of the cinematic parable it presents but also of our experience of that parable. We noted in our reading of the first interrupted festive meal that we meet Min-​hyuk through the window of the Kims’ home, self-​consciously presented to us in its similarity to the cineplex screen. The same approach to alternating the pov, we later observed, is integral to the second such meal, where the camera draws back for a moment in the dark living room and it appears that we are looking at the backs of the heads of the Kim family members as they are watching a film, screened on what is actually the sliding glass door to the backyard. In the film’s closing sequence, which features a voiceover narrated by Ki-​woo, these two cineplex screens become one. We are here, crucially, at a moment of extended silence (126’01–​127’25”, partly broken by a piano score that begins at 127’05”) that divides Ki-​woo’s closing monologue into two parts. In the first part, we hear Ki-​woo narrating a fantasy of becoming fantastically wealthy and buying the Park mansion while we watch Ki-​taek slowly emerge from the shelter into main residence, and then walk across the kitchen into the living room and then to the floor-​to-​ceiling window, which is also a door, and which is open on the garden. In the second part, which is much shorter, after a brief fade to black, we see the street outside

Symbiosis, Interruption, and Exchange

205

the Kims’ home, illuminated by streetlight, through that same window where we first saw the drunk man urinating and Min-​hyuk arrive on his motorcycle. The camera slowly pans down into the dark room, and finally shows us Ki-​ woo composing the last words of the monologue. Just before the brief fade to black that divides these two movements of the coda, and in near-​total silence, we watch as Ki-​taek actually walks through the window/​cineplex screen and hugs Ki-​woo. This hug happens only in fantasy (“screened” on the Park mansion door/​window) and not in reality (“screened” on the barred window in his subterranean hovel, living alone with his mother). As the monologue ends, we hear Ki-​woo say “So long, take care till then,” and then, repeated, after a pause, “so long,” as the screen fades to black and the end credits appear, beginning of course with the name and signature of Bong himself. The admonition “take care till then” thus figures as both the son’s last communication with his father but also as Bong’s last communication with us. Parasite, thus concludes with a reminder of how the parasitic relation obtains not only within its cinematic narrative but also between Bong and us as the guest-​host and host-​guest of that relation.

References

Braune, Sean. 2020. Language Parasites: Of Phorontology. Goleta, CA: Punctum Books. Serres, Michel. 1982. The Parasite (trans. L. Schehr). Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Index 386 Generation 23 3-​Iron (film: 2004) 115 abiogenesis 1 abject 34, 35, 37–​40 Academy Awards 18, 21 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 126 Aftab, Kaleem 99n5, 101 Alien 100 allographic art 151 anarchism 14 appearance 193–​194, 204 Aquinas, Thomas 133 Architectural Parallax Spandrels and Other Phenomena of Class Struggle 180 architecture 8–​10 architectural parasitism 9 Arendt, Hannah 47, 57–​59 Aristotle 1, 48 Peripatetic 145, 148n13, 147 authenticity (and inauthenticity) 12, 63, 71 Bakunin, Mikhail 14 banjiha (semi-​basement apartment) 149, 155 bare life 47, 49 Barking Dogs Never Bite (film: 2000) 11, 121 Barrett, William 64 Bean, Travis 68 Being-​in-​the-​World 61, 69 Benjamin, Walter 159, 164, 168 Bergson, Henri 65 biopolitics 34, 37, 38, 162, 163 black comedy 117, 120 Bloch, Ernst 158, 160, 161, 168 Bong, Joon-​ho 102–​3, 105–​6, 109–​13 Borges, Jorge Luis 110 bourgeois 90, 93, 94, 98, 99, 100, 195, 197 Braune, Sean 194–​5, 205 Brecht, Berthold 159, 168 bunker 115, 119–​122, 124–​126 Burning (film: 2018) 116 Burns, Robert 65

capitalism 19, 20, 25, 68, 72, 99, 100, 101, 170, 173, 174, 178, 179, 181, 193, 195–​196 care 196, 205 Carroll, Noel 121, 126 catastrophe 183, 185, 186, 188, 190, 191 Chang, Chung-​yuan 64 chaos 13 cheonman yeongwha 34, 36 Chrysippus 147 Cicero 154n23 cinephilia 41, 43, 44 cj Entertainment 126 class 157, 158, 161, 162, 166, 167 class struggle 10, 193, 196–​197 class consciousness 132 coevolution 9, 12 Cold War 20 communication 56, 201, 205 Communist Manifesto, The 94 Confucianism 48, 51–​54, 56 Connors, Chuck (“The Rifleman”) 70n3 control 163, 169 cosmos 69, 70, 71 crossing a line 95, 96, 97, 97n4, 99 cruel optimism 38 Darwinism 15 Dasein 134 De Morgan, Augustus 82 debt 193–​196 decadence 86 Default (film: 2018) 116 Deleuze, Gilles 5, 103–​9, 112–​3, 157, 161, 162, 163, 168, 169 Difference and Repetition 103 A Thousand Plateaus (with Guattari) 110 Derrida, Jacques 2, 39 desiring machine 161, 162, 163 Didi-​Huberman, Georges 40n5 dignity 131 Dionysius Thrax 146n8 disaster, 183 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 disintegration 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191

208 Index Dostoevsky, Fyodor 2, 47, 49–​50, 74–​86 Notes from the Underground 64 double bind 38, 39 double consciousness 97 dreamlike 64, 66, 67, 71 ecological crisis 173, 174, 175 economy 131, 193–​195, 198–​199, 201 education 51–​52 Elias, Thomas 62 Elsaesser, Thomas 42 Engels, Frederick 94, 99, 100 Epicurus 145–​148 eudaemonia 91 excrement 193 existence 62, 64, 69 false consciousness 5, 12 family 198–​200, 202, 204–​205 filial piety 51–​53 flattery 145 form 184, 185, 189 Foucault, Michel 162, 163, 169 Frank Lloyd Wright 9 Frase, Peter 95, 101 friendship 148 genre 183, 187, 192 Girls (tv show: 2012–​2016) 116 global cinema 41, 44, 45 God 132 Godard, Jean-​Luc 102, 112 Great Recession 116 Greek tragedy 70 Green, David 70 Guattari, Félix 5, 157, 161, 162, 163, 168, 169 guest 194–​196, 198–​200, 204–​205 han (grief or resentment) 50 Händel, Georg Friedrich 150 happiness 147, 152 hard ethics 39 Hardt, Michael 157, 162, 168, 169 harmony 53 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 59 Heidegger, Martin 69, 71, 133, 134 Hell Joseon 116 Heraclitus 1, 144, 155n25

hierarchy 54, 75–​76, 79 Hitchcock, Alfred 126 Hobbes, Thomas 48 homelessness 57 Homer 1, 147, 154n23 hope 158, 159, 160, 161, 168, 169 horror 117, 119–​120, 123, 195, 186, 189 hospitality 21, 22–​23, 24, 27, 39 host 133, 194–​196, 198–​200, 204–​205 Hu, Kemin 62 human nature 129 humiliation 50, 55 Husserl, Edmund 70 Iamblichus 107 identity 170, 170, 172, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 180, 181 imf Crisis 19 Indefinite Dyad 107 inequality 9 insect 48 intelligible matter 107 intention 28, 29, 30 interrupter 152–​153, 194, 196, 204–​205 iterability 28, 31 Jaspers, Karl 69 Jews 15 justice 70 Juvenal 154n23 Kafka, Franz 67 Kakao 19, 21 Kant, Immanuel 108–​9 Kim Ki-​duk 115 Koreanness 18, 20, 31 La Capra, Dominik 68 labor 58 Lacan, Jacques 55 Lee Chang-​dong 116, 127 Lee, Mickey (Lee, Mi-​kyeong) 126 Lee, Nam 121, 124 Lincoln, Abraham 64 Living in the End Times 170, 172, 180 loneliness 59 Lotte Entertainment 126 Love 54–​55, 142

209

Index Lucian of Samosata 1, 90, 92, 98, 101, 144–​145 De Parasito 145–​149, 152, 154 De Mercede Conductis 154–​155 luck 131 Manicastri, Steven 95, 101 Manifest Destiny 178 Maoism 15 market logic 33, 41, 42 Marx, Karl 4–​5, 7, 58, 68, 69, 94, 99, 100, 101 mathematical metaphor 102, 106, 108 melodrama 23, 25, 26, 30 Memories of Murder (film, 2003) 23, 121 mental health 171, 172, 176 metabolism 193, 199, 201 metaphor 21, 25–​26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 63–​ 4, 66, 57 micropolitics 157, 161, 162, 163, 168 Mitnick, Kevin 144 mode of production 97, 100 monstrosity 117, 119–​123, 125–​127 Moon, Jae-​in 126 morality 66, 68–​70 multiculturalism 179 multitude 157, 162, 168, 169 narcissism 99 narrative 195, 199, 201–​202 Native Americans (American Indians) 65 and 65n2, 68, 122–​124, 178, 179 Negri, Antonio 157, 162, 168, 169 Nelson, Stephanie 70 neoliberalism 4, 10, 171, 172, 177, 181 Newton’s laws 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 14, 16, 69, 74–​86, 135, 142 Thus Spake Zarathustra 71 “last man,” 71, 72 “Will to Power” 135–​137, 138, 140, 141 Noh, Min-​jung 124–​125 noise 119–​120, 157, 165, 194–​195, 201–​202 objet petit a 40 Okja (film, 2017) 11, 121 Olympiodorus 146n8 One, the 107 ontological difference 133, 135, 137, 141 order 157, 165, 167, 168

organic 7, 48, 193, 205, 129, 133, 135 architecture 9 Oscar 1 Paiella, Gabriella 97 n4, 101 parable 193, 195–​196, 204 Parasite Rex 15 Park, Ju-​Hyun 124 part of no part 157, 165, 166, 167, 168 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 102–​7, 111 Theorem 102–​107, 111 Salò 103, 105 performative 27, 28 performative self-​contradiction 44, 45 Peripatetic School 145, 147 perspective 194, 199, 202 perturbation 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 191 pharmakon 45 phasmid 40, 40n5 phenomenology 70 Plan, the 64, 66, 137–​139, 140, 142 Plato 1, 48, 146n8, 148n14, 145, 154n24 Gorgias 2n1, 67 pleasure 147–​148 Plotinus 107 Plutarch 2n1 polarization 35, 39, 45 post-​ethical 5 postmodern 4, 7 pov (point-​of-​view) 196–​197, 204 poverty 157, 158, 159, 162, 165, 166, 167 power 159, 162, 163, 164 precarious labor 35 problem-​solving 103–​5, 107–​8, 111–​2 Proclus 106–​8, 112 Psycho 126 psychoanalysis 68 psychology of parasitism 93, 94, 95 Pythagoreanism 107 Raising Hope (tv show: 2010–​2014) 116 Rancière, Jacques 39, 157, 167, 168, 169 rat parable 118 ren (Humaneness) 46 resentment 4–​76, 84 resources 130, 137, 139–​140 respect 12

210 Index revolution 142 rhetoric 145–​146 rhizome 110 rogue 49 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, “No Exit,” 67, 72 Being and Nothingness 68 satire 120 Schecher, Lawrence 119 Scheler, Max 74–​75 Schmitt, Carl 134 scholar’s rock, see suseok Scorsese, Martin 83 screen monopoly 126 screen-​frame 36 screen-​window 36 self 197, 203–​204 semi-​basement house 36, 41, 42, 118, 121, 125–​126 Seoul overclass 88, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99 Serres, Michel 9, 40n5, 82, 117–​120, 145, 151, 152–​154, 155, 157, 164, 165, 168, 169, 193–​ 195, 199, 201 silence 197, 204–​205 Simon 90, 91, 92, 98 slavery 64 smell 13, 79–​80 Smith, John 71 Snowpiercer (film: 2013) 11, 95 n3 Socratic dialectic 145 soft ethics 39 solidarity 95, 97, 121–​122 Sophists 67 sovereignty 34, 37, 39, 42 speech act 27–​28 Spinoza, Benedict de 103, 106–​8, 112 sponging 90, 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98 static 193–​195, 199, 201–​202 Stoics 146 apprehensions (katalipsis) 145, 146–​147, 149, 155 art (techne) 144–​146, 148, 150, 153, 155 end (telos) 146–​147, 151, 155, logos, 150 system (systema) 146, 153 substance 184, 185 suicide 171, 172 superfluous man 50

suseok (scholar’s rock) 21, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 62, 63n1, 67, 89, 90, 150–​151, 155, 170, 177, 178, 198, 203 symbiosis 39, 41, 45, 194–​195, 198 Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (film: 2002) 115 sympathy 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 symptomatic reading 26, 30 Syrianus 107 system 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168 Taoism 64, 65 n2 Tartuffe 153 The Coachman 115 The Company Men (film: 2010) 116 theorem proving 103–​5, 107–​8, 111–​2 time 199 totalitarianism 56–​57 Trump, Donald 20, 21, 29 truth 136, 141–​143 Turgenev, Ivan 49, 54 Two Broke Girls (tv show: 2011–​2017) 116 Tychiades 90, 91 uncanny 37, 37n2 underclass 132, 139 underground (subterranean) 66, 67, 71, 72, 77–​79, 84–​85, 196, 205 underground man 75, 77–​79, 81, 83–​85 universal 30, 31 Up in the Air (film: 2009) 116 upper class 132, 139 Upstairs, Downstairs (television series, 1971) 7 utopia 34, 40, 45 van Gogh, Vincent 71 Verhaeghe, Paul 171, 172, 179 villain 23, 25 violence 24, 25, 29, 200, 203, 117, 119, 124 virtue 156, 147, 148n13 von Praunheim, Rosa 159 Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (film: 2010) 116 Waterfield, Robin 67 wealth 194, 198

Index Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Žižek) 175, 176 woman 50, 53 work (ergon) 148, 152 Xenomorph 100 Xenophon 153n22, 154n23

211 Zeno of Citium 145, 146, 149–​151, 153, 155 zero-​sum strategy 90, 95 Žižek, Slavoj 80, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181 Zumbrunnen, John 69