Parasite

Parasite is a 2019 movie that most people watched during lockdown. I ambiently understood that it was a widely acclaimed movie, that it was tense/funny, that it featured some social commentary, and that it was somehow relevant to a worldwide pandemic and lockdown, but overall I managed not to watch Parasite until this week.

The film starts with a con family --- daughter, son, mother, father --- who incrementally replace the staff of a richer family (same 4-person composition). This is a little funny, a little devious, and brings attention to class inequities. The poor family is willing to work and has a lot of skills (forging documents to be qualified as a tutor, providing elementary-school art therapy/instruction, driving skills, cooking), but nevertheless rigid social structures mean that they must cheat in order to have their skills pay off and help their lives to improve. They literally live in the lowest point in the city, at the end of a street, where neighbors regularly piss against their front windows and the entire city's sewage overflows and floods their apartment in a rainstorm. By contrast, the wealthy family live at higher elevation, have very few apparent skills, and are shown using their money to make their lives easy and low-effort. If this was set in England, the upstairs/downstairs dichotomy would be the strong social commentary; I am not conversant enough with Korean social conventions to dissect everything going on here. The first half of the movie arranges these details for the viewer to do a sort of self-assembly of a social commentary on which family is truly the parasite.

Then the movie takes a sharp turn.

The movie starts revealing the displaced previous housekeeper's misfortune as a collateral victim of the scam, but pulling on this thread unravels an insane byzantine set of scams and counter-scams all precariously stacked into a house of cards which the main family has disrupted with their up-and-coming scam. Suddenly the movie jumps the rails --- it's still funny, it's still social commentary, but also it is unexpectedly dark, psychological, tense, and ominously, threateningly violent. I did not anticipate any of these twists and was surprised, delighted, horrified, and on the edge of my seat. Many details from the beginning of the movie are revealed to have secondary and tertiary meanings, with layers of significance that the viewer has to unpeel. The end of the movie is unsettling, possibly a hypothetical, possibly reality, and everything remains a loose end. The story is unsatisfying, like stepping off the end of a staircase where you expected one more step.

This was great. The accolades are completely deserved. There are layers here for people who want to think about meaning, layers of filmmaking and angles, layers of which shots were reality and which were memory and which were imagined, layers of lies and scams and trying to get ahead while society wants everyone to stay in their assigned place, even if that place sucks.

I highly recommend Parasite, but I don't think I'll watch it again (the tension and violence were unexpected and visceral).

This post's theme word is cumberground (n), "a useless person." Every character seemed at first to be a cumberground but later showed their skill in their particular niche.