Bong's Parasite is a Rich Psychoanalytic Meal.

The Reluctant Co-Teacher and I chose Parasite for our Reading Freud class to watch together and discuss.  Actually, the class chose it from a short list we provided.  Few of them had seen it, and they were curious.   In our post-Covid-19 pandemic social isolation world with regular classes shut down, twenty one of us met by Zoom to discuss the film.  The students are writing a term paper due in two weeks that will be based on a work of literature or art of their choosing and the paper will require them to interpret that work from a psychoanalytic perspective.  Thus they were invested in seeing how our reading of Freud this semester would translate into interpreting this film.

We nominated Parasite because it is a timely film about the relationship between the rich (the 1%) and the poor.  While set in South Korea and steeped in the South Korean vernacular, it’s resonance transcends that particular place and speaks to us on the levels of Nations (e.g., the U.S. use of “parasitic” Asian, Latin American, and African nations to provide cheap labor), other cultures (e.g., the U.S. one per cent’s use of cheap domestic labor – labor that becomes essential during the era of Covid-19, raising the question, as this film does, of who is dependent on whom), but also, I think, of the individual – with questions about whether our conscious selves (the 1% of our functional selves) are the dominant or perhaps a parasitic outgrowth of our much larger (and ceaselessly working) unconscious selves.

I had seen the film earlier and was certain that the universality of the theme was part of what made this superbly written, acted and directed film the Oscar winner for best picture.  I also wondered whether its ability to humanize those who can be seen as inhuman was seen by the Academy as a feat worth recognizing.  The movie humanizes the servant class of South Korea who are inhuman to the 1% there – but it also humanizes the South Korean culture and the individuals in the film.  South Korea has one of many Asian cultures that are often indistinguishable and frequently denigrated individually and collectively by a U.S. audience.  The characters in this movie are deeply likeable, each in their own quirky approach to the world.

A word of orientation here before I describe the film.  In Korea, family names precede individual names.  This film is primarily about two families – the Kim family and the Park family.

The Kims folding pizza boxes.

The film begins with our hero, Kim Ki-Woo (Choi Woo- Shik), searching for a free Wi-Fi in the Kim’s half underground apartment.  The internet they have been stealing from a neighbor is now password protected.  He and his sister, Kim Ki-Jung (Park So-dam) discover an unprotected Wi-Fi above the toilet, which is near the ceiling and this allows them to discover that they can make some money by folding boxes for a local pizza delivery business.  They join their father, Kim Kai-Taek (Song Kang-ho) and mother, Park Chung Sook (Jang Hye-jin) in this business to earn enough cash to keep their family afloat.

The Kim Father inspects the Scholar's Rock

As the family is gathered for dinner, looking at the street at eye level, a drunken man in the street begins peeing and, as he staggers, he starts peeing into the Kim home.  The Kim mother restrains the Kim father who would confront the drunk, but just then, the Kim son’s friend Min-hyuk shows up, confronts the drunk – and the mother notes that he has vigor.  Min gives the son a scholar’s rock, which promises to bring wealth to the owner.  He then goes out for a drink of soda with the son and tells him that he is taking time to study abroad and so wants the son to tutor the daughter of a rich family that he has been tutoring.  Min thinks the Kim’s son is smarter than his friends at the University, plus he trusts that Ki-Woo won’t steal the girl away.  Min wants to woo her for himself when he returns from his time away. 

Ki-Woo wants this job, but is not qualified because he is not a University student.  Min reassures Ki-Woo that the mother is simple and there won’t be any problems.  Ki-Woo recruits his sister, who has artistic aptitude, to create University documents and he shows up at the Park’s house to apply to be the tutor.

The Park’s house could not be more different than the Kim home.  It is the house that an architect, Nangoong, designed for himself.  It is a modern architecture style home with very clean lines, lots of open space in the house, and the focal point of the home is a spacious private yard that backs up to a forest on the side of a mountain.  The contrast with the view from the basement window of the Kim’s could not be more stark.

The Park Parents

  

The Park family is, as one of the student’s in class pointed out, a double of the Kim family.  Nominally headed by a CEO of an large electronics firm, Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-Kyun); the household is, in fact under the management of the “simple” and quite anxious Choi Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), who is responsible for the educations of her high school aged daughter Park Da-hye (Jung Ji-so), and her rambunctious, spoiled and traumatized elementary aged son Park Da-song (Jung Hyeon-jun).

Yeon-gyo hires Ki-Woo based largely on Min’s recommendation, decides to call him Kevin, but also lets him know that she is worried about her son and thinks he needs an art tutor.  Ki-Woo hatches a plan on the spot and recommends his cousin’s friend “Jessica”, in actuality his sister, to teach art to the son.  Yeon-gyo dutifully hires Jessica, who pretends not to know Ki-Woo/Kevin and both Kevin and Jessica boss their wards around, and, while Jessica bosses the Park mother around, Kevin begins to have an affair with the Park's daughter.

When the chauffeur drives Jessica home and tries to put the moves on her, Jessica intentionally leaves her panties in the car.  When the Park father discovers them, he fires the chauffeur assuming that he has had sex in the car with a wanton woman, and Jessica is able to recommend her father as a driver by pretending that he has been a chauffeur for a family that has moved to the US.  Once the father is hired, the family schemes together to get the housekeeper fired by exploiting her allergy to peaches and making her appear to have TB instead, and they get the Kim mother hired, through a sham high end placement agency they concoct, as the new housekeeper - all of them now pretending, on the job, not to know each other.

The old housekeeper and husband.

So, we now have two parallel families sharing the same austere space.  When the Parks head to a weekend holiday at a camp ground to celebrate their young son’s birthday, the Kim’s take over the house and have a wild and decadent party.  The party is interrupted by the return of the old housekeeper, who reveals a hidden subbasement that her husband, who has been hiding from loan sharks for a decade, lives in.  She is at the mercy of the new housekeeper, until she discovers that the new caretakers are all from the same family and have been scamming the Parks.  She threatens to send the Parks the incriminating video she has made on her phone, gaining power over the Kims, until the Parks call to say that they are returning from the camping trip because they have been rained out – and panic ensues as the Kims try to restore some semblance of order to the house and hide so that the Parks don’t know what has been going on.

When the Parks do return, the parents end up spending the night in the living room on the couch to keep an eye on their son, who has decided to camp out in the yard to finish his birthday camp out – meanwhile the Kims are hiding under the living room coffee table.  As the Parks get frisky on the couch, the Kims try to remain silent, though the Kim’s son is texting with the Parks daughter who is upstairs.

Somehow the Kims sneak out and walk through the continuing deluge down, down, down a series of stairs, beautifully filmed, to arrive at their home, which is flooded.  After saving their most important possessions, they end up in a shelter with their neighbors.  The father announces to the son that he has a plan – it is the son who has been planning all the hijinx to this point – and, when pressed, the father acknowledges that his plan is no plan because plans always fail.  Look around, he says to the son, did any of these people plan to be in this shelter tonight?

The next morning, the three Kims in the shelter are summoned to a replacement birthday party for the Park’s son which the Park’s mother is in the process of whipping up at the last minute.  This party allows the film to reach its climax.  The bedraggled Kims are each to play a role in the celebration, the old housekeeper’s father makes an appearance – violent chaos ensues – and then there is a quiet reflection on what has taken place.

The Reluctant Co-Teacher and I set the frame for the discussion of this film by noting that we both saw the economic distance between the two families as a central motif.  We also noted that the house itself, in addition to the many interesting human characters, played a central role in the film and deserved to be understood as a character in its own right. And we opened the class for discussion.

Hollywood Squares: Original Zoom.

If you have been in a Zoom space with twenty people, it is a tough place to have a conversation.  Some of us were outside, some inside.  We were probably in five or eight states.  People kept their mikes muted so that background noise didn’t interfere with the class and/or to prevent feedback loops, so it was hard to have spontaneous conversations.  A few brave souls offered ideas about themes that were important to attend to in the film and, generally, the Reluctant Co-Teacher and I would respond to them, frequently riffing with them about that theme or perspective.  After a bit, I began calling on people and asking them for a contribution. 

The Brady Bunch: More Zoom

A conversation about a film or a book or a work of art, unlike a lecture or a formal paper, meanders.  Themes emerge, are discussed, then another theme emerges, and, maybe much later, an earlier theme remerges and is seen in a new light.  The discreet process that emerged as the result of the Zoom organization of the class (if you haven’t used Zoom, one of the ways that people’s pictures are organized is a little like the old television show Hollywood Squares, or the introduction to the show The Brady Bunch.  Unlike both of those, the placement of the people is random –they aren’t in a space where they can relate to each other by looking in the direction of the speaker – they can only look at the screen where everyone is).  So this conversation was more like a patch work quilt than a stream or a river.  Ideas would emerge, be worked over, and then we would move onto the next.

And what a lot of ideas there were!  Both the film and the students proved to have a wealth of ideas that were worth considering.  Many of the ideas that emerged were simply acknowledged as being worth pursuing rather than being pursued.  For instance, one of the thoughts of a student was about the Oedipal configuration of the Kim family.  In our brief conversation about that, we focused on the relationship between the Kim father and son, but noted that, during the meal the Kims ate at the Park’s house, a fight erupted between the Kim father and mother.  It was scary – to the Kim children and to us as viewers.  But the parents were able to resolve it with humor – even though real issues seem to have erupted between them.  So, rather than exploring this perspective in detail, we noted that it could be a topic, in itself, for a paper.  (In fact, as I am thinking now, the topic of food and family meals in the movie could be an interesting psychoanalytically discussed angle on the film.)

Similarly, the doubling of the families was noted by another student to be a fruitful avenue into understanding the structure of the film.  This Freudian concept was articulated in his essay On the Uncanny.  In particular, she noted that the Kims were struck by the Parks – they thought about them a great deal, but the Parks had very little interest or awareness of the Kims or people of their ilk.  The exception to this was the Park’s imagining that the woman that their first chauffeur had (supposedly) seduced and had sex in their car with was a drug user – and remembering this and imagining themselves to be dirty like the drug using hussy heightened their own sexual arousal.

This led us to talk about the ways in which the disavowed underclass is seen as having more powerful sexual desires and a more interesting sexual life than the master group that exerts control across cultures and times.  This clearly has implications about the functioning of the minds of the 1% and of the rest of the culture - especially as filtered through those minds and as they imagine (project their disavowed desires onto) each other.

Another student noted the sensual qualities of the movie – and the importance of the body in understanding the experience of the characters.  This led us to focus on the sense of smell.  The Park’s son – in another exception to the rule that the Parks were not curious about the Kims – noticed that the Kims all smelled alike.  They could not wash off the smell of the basement – though they thought they could change this by using different detergents to give each of them a different smell off.  But the Park father, who wanted the servants to stay on their side of the line, noticed that their smells transgressed that line and that those smells were not the smells of a particular family, but of a class of people.  Ultimately, it was the Park father’s disgust at the smell of those from the underground that led to his demise (I am avoiding specifics here to avoid spoiling the film – if you have seen it, you will know what we were referring to here).

Another student characterized the film as a dream, noting that the role of the servants was to help keep the Parks asleep.  Allowing the Parks to remain unaware of how much effort was required to keep their lives “simple”.  This led us to note how unstable this situation was – how the movie/dream kept reeling towards revealing all of the shenanigans supporting the Park's blissful unawareness, and this was related to the issues of the class differences that were highlighted at the beginning.  We talked about a Marxist revolution that might be lying right under the surface of our current apparent economic well-being, but also noted that the strife between the Kims and the old housekeeper and her family did not bode well for the unity of the servant class against the lording class.

Stairs between classes.

Yet another student was taken with the beauty of the images of the steps that connected the place where the Parks lived with the place where the Kims lived.  We wondered about the stairs as a metaphor – for instance for the idea of education – an education that was not perhaps economically available to Ki-woo – as a connector between the classes – one that presumably would lift those from the lower classes to the higher classes.  This was certainly Ki-woo’s fantasy at the end of the film, but it had the quality of a fantasy that was unrealizable and we talked about how the US’s class system, which used to use education as a leveler, is increasingly making higher education available to those with a background that requires support – so our class system is becoming more impermeable.

This led the Reluctant Co-Teacher to reflect on the different physical levels represented in the movie - with the upstairs - the private part of the home, serving as a place from which to spy on what was going on downstairs.  Meanwhile there was a total lack of awareness of what was going on in the subbasement.  But there were also levels that were created by the tables - with the Parks above the table while the Kims cowered beneath it, listening to them having sex.

This leads, now I realize that my mind is reorganizing the patchwork of the class into a flow, to an observation about the symbolism of water, rain, flooding and sewage.  The Parks, as representatives of both wealth and consciousness, are able to remain high and dry – while the unconscious and the poor are saturated with the visceral qualities of water – not as a shower, but a deluge, and one that carries with it the waste of everyone higher.  At one point in the rainstorm, the Kim’s toilet was repeatedly vomiting black waste into the already flooded space.  The Kim's daughter, "Jessica", nonchalantly closed the toilet, and climbed on top of it as the black waste now spit sideways out from under the seat.  A brilliant image of managing the traumatic material that shoots up from below – whether that is the sewers or the unconscious.

And this, in turn, was related to an observation about trauma in the movie.  The Park’s son had been traumatized on an earlier birthday when he saw a ghost emerging from the basement.  Of course, this was the housekeeper’s husband who was sneaking upstairs to get some food.  We talked about this as the return of the repressed, another Freudian idea that could be used to organize this film.  Especially as that relates to the party at the end, which the Park mother imagined as a reparative party – the "trauma recovery party" – that turns into the trauma to end all traumas with the reappearance of the old housekeepers husband.  There seemed to be a powerful moral lesson – a function of the superego – that would have emerged from following this trail to its logical conclusion.

I could go on – there were other useful avenues into exploring the meanings of this dense and horrifying (the Reluctant Co-Teacher pointed out that it used many horror film tropes in its construction) and funny and lovely and loving film.  The poignant ending, with the lovely fantasy that would allow Ki-woo’s father to be repatriated with what was left of his family, provides a hopeful option for what is largely a tragic masterpiece, and the role of hope in surviving horror could be another avenue into this work.  As I think about it, as a tragedy of the lower class, this is not so much about the discovery of one's own abilities to escape the fates as it is about the discovery of the limited ability of cunning and guile to help individual's escape the cage of their social class.

The array of possible entry points – lifting the curtain and peaking in – maybe taking a few steps inside – mirrors my experience of writing as the Reluctant Psychoanalyst.  The post that I create on any given day is the result of the mixture of the work I am writing about, which dominates, I think, and my own personal context – the person that I bring to that work on that day, including the particular analytic perspective that I take on the work.  On another day, I would enter the work in a different way.  On a few occasions I have found, after a post has been up for a few days, that a different entry point tugs at my sleeve and I write a second take on it.  Asymmetry is a recent example where I took a first pass and then a different second pass.

I hope the class learned, as I have, that there are many analytic understandings of any work of art.  My hope in writing a post is not to provide a definitive take, but a preliminary one, one that will, I hope, stimulate the reader to share a point of view, but also to use what I have to offer as a point from which to launch into novel and idiosyncratic perspectives that are their own.  The joy of applied psychoanalysis, whether in the consulting room, on the web, or in the classroom (now redundant with being on the web) is that there is a simultaneous meeting of minds – moments of intersection and shared understanding – mixed with moments of private appreciation – private moments that are able to arise because of a relational, emotional, and ideational context that supports them.  We are able to appreciate that we live in a world with others that can understand and connect with us, and that we live in the world that is also very much our own private universe.

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