Parasite:Crawling up the Ladder

Rating: 9/10 (27 February 2020)

There is hardly any doubt that with every discovery and innovation we are inching towards a drastic change simultaneously progressing as well as transgressing. Some people like to call this the end of the human race. However, there is a lot of churning and grinding that remains before one finally reaches the highest level of degeneracy or supremacy. To put it succinctly, Parasite is an animated movie with humans as lead characters and in fact, it is a movie with 'animals' as its prime audience. And animals don't 'see' ; their primary sense is instinct and avoiding all sorts of dangers, their major interest. The question that needs to be posed here is not who is blind but to what degree is one blind. Parasite can't be seen. This particular movie poster is interesting as everyone is blindfolded somehow implying that everyone is blind.
Subterranean Views
On the surface the Park family has a prosperous life; they possess a huge villa along with a driver, housekeeper and tutors. The Teks, on the contrary, stay in a sub-basement infested with pests. Both their dwellings have severed ties with the outside world and provide an incomplete picture - the sub-basement only allows visual access to the lower half of the lane where passer-bys mindless of the fact that corners where they were so shamelessly urinating could be a home to a family whereas through the French windows of the villa, one has an idyllic panoramic view of the pruned garden which in its own way is a slice of manufactured reality as it is guarded by high walls on all sides.
Picturesque Panorama
The movie does explore the disparity between the 'haves' and 'have-nots' but not simply in a matter-of-fact way; it goes beyond realistic depiction and shows how in this post-modern day and age the dividing lines between these two classes become blurred. What seems as a prosperous household is in fact rife in conflicts.
Basti-esque
One of the rudimentary manifestations of this can be seen in the rich son, Da Song who is supposed to have internalised the American Indian, the essence of experience that he captured from his previous expedition. This in any case would have been any other nine year alone indulging in make-believe; however, for Mrs.Park this seemed to be erratic behaviour which had to be kept under check. She likes to think of his artworks as 'Basquiat-esque' and justifies his eccentricity as genius. Neither the mother nor the father try to address what could be the root cause of this problem, instead they keep hunting for a tutor. On the other hand, his sister, Da-hye doesn't seem to be a predominant subject of parental concern.
Da song as American Indian
Ki-jeong and Ki-woo act as foils to the rich siblings as at least superficially they seem to have a better control over their lives, it's the lack of resources wherein they are challenged. In spite of not having completed their studies, they are quite adept to take on the world. Needless, to mention here that Ki-woo invests a lot of faith in his father's plans unlike Ki-jeong about whom the family unanimously concurs that she doesn't belong with them and was meant to be the first deserving candidate to acquire a higher strata.
Mrs.Park comes across as a docile homemaker ,the centre of gravity of the household but that partially is shared by the housekeeper as Mr.Park says that his wife had no talent for housework and that she was bad at cleaning and her cooking was awful and he was thankful to have Ms. Mun Kwang who cooked awesome braised ribs and kept the house in order. On being asked by Ki Tek,if he still loved his wife ,Mr Park sneered it off by saying let's call that love.
The husband is highly class conscious and and in his interactions with his driver he makes it evident that he doesn't like his workers crossing the line. Unfortunately for him,the smell that Kim Ki-tek's family reeks of, doesn't adhere to the class boundaries that Mr.Park is vehemently determined to keep intact.
Subwayers' Stench
Kim Ki-Tek, the poor dad, on the contrary, is not class conscious but oblivious of his reality as a result of which he keeps coming up with make-shift plans, plans that lack planning as a cure to the daily problems that his family has to grapple with. To put it very crudely, he is a hopeless romantic who up until the climax retains his calm and composure. Soon, he is at the verge of losing this presumptuous pensive facade post climax when the story takes a riveting turn.
Plan is a common thread that runs throughout the movie especially for the working class family that is the only hope that keeps them going on in their lives, However, the nature of these plans are to be questioned as they are short term, based on addressing immediate needs and oblivious of the cries of posterity. Ultimately, the so-called plan boils down to its nascent state and ceases to exist as Kim-ki Tek says that the kind of plan that never fails is to have no plan at all.
Therefore, Parasite is an apt title for the movie as it shows how the bourgeois as well as proletariat family exist as parasites, in case of the working class it is quite evident and the complete transformation corporeally too takes place on the night when the Parks' birthday plan to take Da song for camping fails and they have to return home and we see the Tek family hiding under the couch and they have to crawl out sneakily. Also, in the first few scenes when Ki-jeong and Ki-woo are hunting for the wi-fi signal, they sit huddled together in a corner beside the pot is also a visual simulation of pests hiding in a corner. Perhaps the underlying rule of the coexistence of these two classes bourgeoisie and proletariat is that they remain blind and follow their routine day in and day out.