Well, lots of people live underground.

Rating: 9/10 (6 March 2020)

Parasite comes to us in an age where the intersection between art and politics seems to be reaching fever pitch; the moving screen has become a battleground for representation and polemic, and the arguments that stem from the validity of just that become their own dogfights. Films wrest for their spotlight via the award season. The media chimes in with their own ceremonies and ribbons. Every man and his dog and his dog's twitter account has a voice, and those tweets may well qualify for Rotten Tomatoes critic status. And at times, the noise surrounding a film can impair our ability to discern its true qualities.
Todd Phillips' Joker made the biggest splash throughout 2019, with an array of voices vying for control of the narrative. Some critics derided its dangerous allure to the Arthur Flecks of our time, ticking time bombs waiting to pull their own talk-show stunts, whereas the director himself bemoaned the 'woke culture' that had ruined the comedic genre. While he's not wrong about the disconnect between imagined violence and real crime (in the end, no clowns armed with AR-15s showed up at the premiere), surely Phillips has to realise the slippery slope of interpretation that his film endorses. As a straight-forward character study of Fleck's descent into unhinged derangement, it's sympathetic enough, if not clumsy in its social commentary, mimicking the aesthetic of its Scorsese inspirations from the New Hollywood era in exchange for diluting its contemporary relevance. But as serious critique it's laughable, simplifying society's sickness to a scattershot of seriously specific symptoms. These range from a gang of teenage hooligans hunting clown sign holders (and only clown sign holders) to a pair of cruel Wall Street bankers who coinkidinkily happen to know a full verse and chorus of Send in the Clowns, a song that has zero relevance to the scenario other than its title - that's Glee level, Todd. While Scorsese's camera turned away out of embarrassment for Travis Bickle, Joker revels in its final triumph, consoling its audience's edgiest sympathies. A brief glance at the YouTubers serenading the 167th Street stairs confirms this. It's brand store nihilism, broad enough for anyone to latch onto with their worldly angst.
Relatively, Rian Johnson's Knives Out is more consistent in its overall delivery, spinning social parable from the familiar yarn of a classic whodunnit. The moral is solidified in the final frame, where the immigrant carer surveys her new estate (a labyrinthine, Clue-esque mansion) from its top balcony, towering above the former employers who held her family ransom. But although its interactions strike truer (it's gratifying to see the Thrombey clan cajole Marta as 'part of the family', only to sharply change tack when she is granted their entire inheritance, exposing their actual priorities), the story places the othered outsider on such a pedestal that it feels obligatory to side with her. Marta can't even tell a lie without vomiting, wielded by Johnson as a clever plot device, and yet also a characteristic approaching noble savage levels of patronising. The spatial metaphor isn't dissimilar to that of the staircase in Parasite, but you wish that it had a shade more nuance, and that she wasn't just the straight character in a pulpy film where the rest of the ensemble seems ripped out a 21st century version of Clue. In this edition of the board game, Marta wins by playing the moral high ground at every turn. But real life isn't that easy, or that simple.
As far as Bong Joon-ho is concerned, politics has always been entwined with the big screen. Because the latter is designed to captivate the popular audience, surely it must be a reflection of their general wants and needs, universal concerns and priorities. Some of his more pointed 'monster movies' take direct aim at the injustices of the world: the ramifications and pitfalls of American exceptionalism in The Host, and the cruel disregard for animal rights by multinational conglomerates in Okja. From his worldview, profit rises above the rest, leaving all behind. But Parasite isn't as straightforwardly didactic, or as easy to summarise. Just when you think you have the film's measure, that the Kims have beaten the system by assuming their mantle on the throne of the Parks, it swerves violently to the left.
From the very beginnings of his career, Joon-Ho has been taking genre films and twisting them into social satire, and while the first half of Parasite could operate as a straight thriller on its own, the latter half upends its foundations beyond a merely literal sense. The cast is uniformly excellent, and it is through the Kims that Joon-Ho begins to form his thesis; that class is performative, that being is a constant state of code-switching, and that anyone could find themselves at the bottom of the basement or the top of the stairs, at one point or another in the twisted prism of capitalism. There is an entire wealth of nuance in the formal and informal registers of Korean that will be forever lost to foreign audiences, but their body language and tone tell a whole story of their own; how Ki-woo is seduced by the allure and esteem of a university tutor and in turn seduces Ji-so, feigning aloofness while in awe of her status, or how So-dam's dialogue pokes through upper class formality (while her father fails to bridge this gap), or how Chung-sook swells above the former housekeeper when she talks down to her, scolding the unemployed for not knowing their place. When the new head of house nudges the old aside as if she were nothing more than a pesky mosquito, our laughter is smothered quickly by the crack! of her head against concrete, a testament to both the film's careful drip of dark humour and the lateral cruelty inflicted at the bottom tier of society, driven by a desperate yearning to ascend and escape.
Joons-Ho's visual style is a slick, almost insidious thing, willing you subconsciously in the direction of the narrative and to where the power resides within the scene. Consider the opening shot of his debut, Barking Dogs Never Bite, which pulls back from an idyllic forest line to trap the protagonist within the frame, imprisoned in a cage of unemployment and yelping neighbouring dogs. The closing shot pulls the same trick, presenting his success at scoring the coveted title of a university professor, before pulling back to replace the old bars of his apartment with a new set. He has won, but at what cost? Parasite begins literally below ground level, showing you the world as the Kims see it, the veritable vermin of the underground. The camera squeezes in with them hunched around their dining table, the long lens compressing the planes, evoking a feeling of claustrophobia. When Ki-woo makes his initial ascent, the frame expands, dwarfing him in the gated community of the Parks, bathing him in angelic natural light. Only when their gambit is exposed do they scurry back into their murky sewers like rats, flushed out by the same waters that preserve the pristine pastures of their employers. And yet, they commit the same sins, and are guilty of the same transgressions they scorn the Parks for.
Parasite finishes with a door slam of an ending, exposing the elusiveness of social mobility as absolute. In truth, I prefer the agony of the close in Burning from compatriot Lee Chang-dong, which achieves the same order of anguish that Joon-ho tapped into with Memories of Murder (its impact somewhat lessened by the recent revelation of the real-life perpetrator). In the end, it is infinite obsession which reigns over the resolution of the plot's puzzle, laced with the poison of class envy; it matters not who Ben really was. Parasite more or less deals with a similar crisis of identity, in which the working class protagonist eventually succumbs to the lure of the nouveau riche and their shiny new world. If you pull back, you'll see that this doubles for the broader anxieties of a country coming to terms with its rapid economic and social growth after civil war. Winning the nation's first, second, third, and fourth Oscar in one fell swoop is a significant boon for Asian representation in the West. And as for working class representation? Perhaps not in the gilded, gated halls of the Academy. Even in fantasy, Ki-woo's triumph barely nudges the status quo. He merely wins by joining them.