Rear bushes

Rating: 9/10 (15 November 2019)

The window looks like a movie screen. At the outset, filmmaker Bong Joon-ho immediately evokes Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window", the 1954 mystery thriller about the man in a wheelchair who diagnoses a neighbor's murder plot against his wife from across the courtyard of an urban apartment complex. On a subtextual level, photographer L.B. Jeffries(James Stewart) is a voyeur; he glimpses scenes from ordinary people's lives that were never meant for his eyes. Film theorist Laura Mulvey, in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", linked with moviegoing with voyeurism. We like to watch, more or less, is what Mulvey surmised. When Lars Thorwald(Raymond Burr), the surveilled man, does nothing integral to the cover-up of his wife's murder, Jeffries naps with his body faced away from the mini-dramas unfolding in each apartment square. Ki-woo(Choi Woo-shik), in "Parasite", the 2019 winner of the Palm d'or at Cannes, would rather squint at a tiny screen, as demonstrated by the camerawork, a downwards tilt, in which we see the young man staring into his phone instead at the world outside from the sofa of his family's semi-basement apartment. Just like everybody else, Kim Ki-Woo would rather watch a movie on a five-inch screen, instead of the communal experience you get from traditional movie exhibition. But Bong, for the sake of contrast, replicates Hitchcock, with four voyeurs, not just one, watching a man urinate in their alleyway, a nod, perhaps, to Italian neorealism. Later, the same man returns to relieve himself, but this time, Ki-woo's college friend, Min-hyuk(Park Seo-joon), defends their garbage area with thrown bottled water. Both projections of liquid, the water and retaliatory pee, are subjected to slo-mo, transforming narrative into spectacle.
Ki-woo is unemployed. So are his parents and older sister. To pay the rent, they fold pizza boxes; they copy the woman on the pizzeria's website. This repetitious task may look mundane, proletarian and unsexy, but there are people with fetishes, and these fetishists with a predilection for androgynous-looking women who convert cardboard into boxes are voyeurs, too. The Kims don't use Microsoft cell phones, but if they did, the Lumia would run Windows, an apt description of what Jeffries sees from his vantage point; open windows, which run in diametrical opposition to his rear window. Mulvery recognized that the photographer with a leg cast was a peeping tom. Jeffries ogles a woman he identifies as "Miss Torso"(Georgine Darcy), who does calisthenics in what looks like a proto-sports bar. The moviegoer identifies with Jeffries; the moviegoer also likes to look at women in various states of undress in the dark. The "male gaze", as she coined it, because of wireless streaming, no longer, in filmic circumstances, is no longer confined to a theater seat; the female image went mobile and saw light. The woman who is good at making pizza boxes has no control over her own image.
Min-hyuk tutors the girl of a very rich family. Ki-woo's old high school buddy needs a replacement, somebody he can trust, while the English-speaking student attends college abroad, in America. To get the plum job, Ki-woo can't show that he's overawed by his luxurious surroundings. At the Park family's domain, he has to be Ki-woo in italics, an actor; a cool customer. Yeon-gyo(Cho Yeo-jeong), the girl's mother, insists on observing Ki-woo conduct her daughter's first, and potentially, last college preparatory session. When Da-hye(Jung Ji-so) errs on a practice test question, the tutor grabs this rich girl's wrist with two stern fingers, and reprimands her for lacking confidence, which, in effect, levels the playing field for Ki-woo by being the man made out chutzpah, not money. Ki-jeong(Park So-dam), Ki-woo's sister, hired as an art therapy teacher for Da-song(Jung Hyun-joo), the Parks' young son, is even bolder; she banishes the micro-managing mother from the room. Yeon-gyo would never guess that this pair of young adults live in the ghetto. If she knew how disparate the socioeconomic gap between both families were, both Ki-woo and Ki-jeong would probably be fired on the spot. Along with the meditation on voyeurism, "Parasite" shares with "Rear Window" the depiction of class-consciousness. Although Lisa Fremont(Grace Kelly), a Manhattan socialite, gives L.B. Jeffries an inferiority complex, this strained relationship withstands the photographer's emasculation, because the female fashion tastemaker, a seeming first lady of haute couture, believes that "there can't be much difference between people and the way they live". In "Parasite", however, it's not just class consciousness, it's class warfare, since money matters to both the Park and Kim family alike. Park Dong-ik(Lee Sun-kyun), an information technology firm CEO, talks repeatedly about lines that the "help" can't cross. The chauffeur, Ki-taek(Song Kang-ho), Ki-woo's father, overhears Dong-ik telling his wife that he smells; an odor which could be more metaphoric than literal. In "Parasite", all the compromises to fit in are made by the Kims, whereas in "Rear Window", it's Lisa who has to change, slumming she does, as exemplified by being interested in the book "Beyond the High Himalayas", for the sake of the fragile male ego. She has to remake herself in L.B. Jeffries image of an ideal woman. That's not how the world works anymore. All the splendor in this rich family's house turns the Kims into parasites.
The window at the Park residence looks like a movie screen, too; and this window is in the backyard, a rear window. Nothing but green grass, a perfect lawn with tastefully chosen plants and flowers at its borders. But then, after the Park family comes home from a camping trip ruined by rain, Da-song pitches an Indian tent, transforming the performative soundstage into a western. Now there is a genre film waiting to happen, a western, just like how "Rear Window" turns into film noir, when he realizes the machinations of Lars Thorwald. The point-of-view shots in the Hitchcock film all come from Jeffries' perspective; the audience never sees L.B. from Thorwald's vantage point. In other words, Hitchcock doesn't employ the shot/countershot when Thorwald understands that somebody is watching his every move. Joon-ho, on the other hand, shows the Park house interior, not as a POV shot, but as a reverse shot; an omniscient one, in which only the real audience, not a diegetic audience of one, sees the melee between the Kims and Moon-gwang(Lee Jung-eun), the former housekeeper, and Geun-sae(Park Myung-hoon), her husband, who lives in a bunker secreted away within the house. Although Moon-gwang and her imprisoned husband share the same class status as the Kim family, the ex-housekeeper, who once doted on the house's famous architect, judges not just her former employers, but the help staff, as well, for being philistines. Moon-gwang narrates a flashback scene in which we see herself and Geun-sae not just inhabiting the place like riff-raff, but experiencing the living room as aesthetes. With a great sense of nostalgia and loss in her voice, Moon-gwang describes the sunlight, when it hits the glass, the reflection then casts a lovely glow upon the entire house. It's coded talk for celluloid. A reminiscence that is starkly contrasted to the mis-en-scene, in which the aesthetes and philistines fight over incriminating digital footage on Moon-gwang's cell phone. You can watch "Rear Window" on a cell phone.
Ki-taek tells his son: "You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all. Because life cannot be planned."
Lisa goes off-script. Stella(Thelma Ritter), L.B.'s housekeeper, tries to stop her, after they discover no evidence to support foul play when they dig up the courtyard flower bed. She climbs the exterior staircase to Lars Thornwald's apartment. Lisa crosses the line, echoing Dong-ik's words, but in an extra-diegetic sense, as she transforms herself from spectator to subject; another actor in L.B. Jeffries' movie. He watches his girlfriend find proof, Ms. Thornwald's wedding ring, just before the murder suspect returns. Lisa's ad-lib results in the conviction of Lars Thornwald. Conversely, in "Parasite", the lay of the lawn is sandwiched between a rear window and, quite pointedly, rear bushes, where Ki-taek and his boss hide, dressed as Indians for Da-song's birthday party. Unlike L.B. Jeffries, his cross-generational counterpart, Ki-taek, despite being positioned as a voyeur among voyeurs(his wife and children), never was the spectator, because the relationship between spectator and subject is a fluid one, always interchangeable, the two positions. Technology transformed the world into a movie screen. The Park family is an aggregate of Lisa, but unlike the clotheshorse, Dong-ik, the IT CEO, especially, believes that there is a difference in how people "eat, talk, drink, laugh, and wear clothes". In the chauffeured car, Dong-ik sits in the rear seat, a barrier, but at the birthday party, hiding behind the rear bushes, without a visible barrier, Ki-taek knows that it still exists, even though they are dressed identically as Indians.
The voyeur doesn't have to sit in a darkened theater anymore. It's not 1954. The voyeur carries with him a cellphone. The Park living room, metaphorically speaking, is the theater. But nobody has to be on the sofa to watch the ensuing melee, in which Ki-taek crosses the line and stabs his employer in the heart with a large knife. Films are mobile now. The voyeurs are in the backyard, close to the murder; spectators and subjects, sometimes one, sometimes both.