Parasite Crawls and Wiggles Foreign Films into the Mainstream

The Oscars is a strange beast. In one year it can award it’s highest prize to Green Book, a, though crowd pleasing and uplifting, soft and safe film that seems made to be shown in High School classes when a substitute comes, and in the next year to Parasite, a foreign language South Korean film that is daring, brilliant, unique, and that has something to say about modern society and says it with through the fresh original vision of a real auteur director, Bong Joon Ho. How the same voting body can be so bland one year and so bold the next is beyond me.

One should never pay too much attention to the Oscars, who normally choose something more mediocre and uncontroversial in favor of really great works, but there is no denying that they bring a larger audience to the films they award. Because of the influence they have over film viewers, they really should more often award films like Parasite. They should put a spotlight on great cinema that may not have been seen by many audiences were it not for its awards success.

Of the best picture winners awarded in the past 20 years, perhaps only Moonlight and The Hurt Locker stand out against more commercial films. Other winners, some of them also masterpieces like 12 Years a Slave, No Country for Old Men, or The Return of the King, probably did not need the Oscar boost they were given as badly, while Moonlight and The Hurt Locker, going up against La La Land and Avatar respectively, were better works that wholly deserved to be enjoyed by a larger audience.

Let’s hope that Oscar’s choice to award an international film adored by film scholars, critics, and audiences alike will be a precursor to a new Academy that awards quality over the safe popular option. While Parasite is the first non English language film to win best picture, last year almost saw Alfonso Cuaron’s beautifully filmed domestic epic drama Roma take home the golden statue. The fact that Green Book finally won was probably a combination of the fact that Roma is a slow difficult watch, that it was produced by Netflix, which many members in the industry are hesitant to accept to say the least, along with the fact that it was subtitled.

With or without his recently won Oscars, Bong Joon Ho is a director that deserves all the attention he is getting. With Park Chan-Wook he is the poster boy for modern Korean cinema, and his films have been internationally renowned for some time now. Bong’s films are highly stylized with shades of Hitchcock and Almodóvar, though he has a style all his own. His films always have a social/political undercurrent and they are a strange mix of comedy, drama, and sudden shocking violence.

His monster movie The Host was the first film that brought him international recognition. The Host, like all of his Korean based films, is about a poor family whose economic problems are at the forefront of their identity. Their problems are then amplified when one day a river monster suddenly emerges from the Han River and attacks and kills park goers, finally kidnapping Hyun-seo, the daughter of the family who operates a trailer shop on the river. But the monster does not come from nowhere. The man eating creature is the product of a member of the US military forcing his Korean subordinate to dump bottles of formaldehyde down the drain directly polluting the Han River.

At its heart The Host is a monster movie and is most concerned with delivering some fun, shocking, CGI devouring action fun, but under the surface there are moments of parodic criticisms on the US and South Korean governments and class divide. One of the most biting attacks on the US is the name of the chemical ‘cure,’ Agent Yellow, that they are going to use to kill the virus, a virus which one US medical doctor admits the government knows does not even exist. Agent Yellow is of course takes its name from Agent Orange, the chemical weapon used by the US in the Vietnam War. Like the formaldehyde incident, it seems the US is content to dump chemical pollutants into the water and air not so much for diabolical purposes, but out of a whimsy that serves no purpose. The polluting done by the US in the film is not done for good or bad. It is polluting for the sake or polluting. Bottles of formaldehyde are dumped down the drain because the outside of the bottle is covered in dust. Agent Yellow is released in the air to kill a virus that is imaginary.

After the huge success of The Host, Bong’s next film Mother is a drama about a dedicated mother whose mentally disabled son is accused of a crime and finds that she is the only one who will fight for his innocence. Only reading its plot it sounds like any old run of the mill thriller, but like always, Bong has some tricks up his sleeve that make it much more interesting. The film opens with the unnamed mother walking in a tired, distressed manner into an open field before breaking out into an improvised dance looking towards the camera. It brilliantly prepares the audience for a thriller that is anything but ordinary. In the next scene he expertly edits a scene of the mother cutting something as she looks through the door at her son playing with a dog in the street. With each stroke of the blade she gets closer and closer to her fingers and as she is about to cut herself a car brushes past her son and kills the dog in the street. She runs out to see him and notices he is bleeding. But is the blood his or her own?

Another distressingly tense scene sees her break into her son’s friend’s house who she believes could be the real murderer. He comes home while she is in the house and she is forced to hide in the closet. As he is sleeping the mother tiptoes out of the room, slowly dodging objects step by step as quietly as she can. Finally, she accidently knocks over a water bottle, and the water starts to spill out onto the floor. It creepily and unstoppably moves towards the end of the tip of the boy’s finger before wetting it. Will he wake up? What an intense, exciting, and original scene!

Like The Host, Mother is riddled with social commentary without being explicitly about social change. The mother is extremely poor and is forced to perform acupuncture illegally to get by. They live in such squalid living conditions that she sleeps in the same bed as her son (though whether this is also by choice is left up to the viewer). And her son, who is clearly suffering from a mental handicap, is completely unaided by the society that surrounds him and is often subjected to insults and belittled. The final twist where the police come to a conclusion on the case shows just how little defence the mentally disabled have in this community. The police are depicted as incompetent throughout the film, and even when it seems like they finally have it right, they could not be further from the truth.

Bong then made the jump to America to make his first films in the English language, Snowpiercer and Okja. They are both much more in your face and obvious about their political message on class society, environmentalism, animal rights, and corporate food production. As The Host was a monster movie with a message, Snowpiercer is an action film with a message. While in The Host Agent Yellow is released to kill a fake virus, in Snowpiercer another gas is released to reverse the effects of global warming that is finally making the world unliveable. However, the deployment of the gas goes horribly wrong, and the Earth becomes uninhabitable and is ultimately plunged the world into another ice age. The only survivors are forced to live on a train that constantly circles the globe, and they are arranged into living quarters on the train, with the poor living in squalid conditions in the last carriages, and the rich living in the first ones, with the God-like figure of the architect occupying the head of the train. The train serving as a metaphor for class society is brutally obvious, as is its revolutionary uprising that sees the proletariat carriages violently move forward one carriage at a time and encounter the different purposes of each car and the people who inhabit them.

The film is an exciting, violent action film starring none other than Captain America, but it is so refreshing to see such a film unabashedly take on these political issues with as much fury and precision as it executes a shoot out. Firstly the film is a brilliant mismash of people of various cultural and national backgrounds including The US, UK, South Korea, and Germany, a break from the typically all American or British characters of similar disaster films. And the film concludes with an ending as unambiguous and wonderfully political as its plot. The train crashes and only two survivors remain, a young South korean woman, and an African American little boy. They leave the remains of the train and walk into the snow and look around them. Suddenly in the distance they see a polar bear, showing that life is now beginning to return to planet Earth. The polar bear, now king of this new world, is of course a tragic symbol of our current environmental crisis and is in very real danger of disappearing. Bong’s choice of survivors is also refreshingly original. As the famous macho actors are killed off one by one, finishing with the redemptive death of Chris Evans, we are left with two minorities from the back of the train who will be charged with the task of repopulating and restarting human civilization.

Bong’s second English language film Okja, is his Netflix animal rights film that critiques the corporate food industry with a story about a chemically engineered pig raised in South Korea for slaughter unbeknown to the little Korean girl who sees it as her pet. Like his previous film Bong deals with very serious political subjects in such a colorful, exciting, absurd, and violent way, and his argument, though obvious, never feels tiring, heavy handed, talky, or boring. He is first and foremost an entertainer, and a great director of action with a strong sense of space and an expertly controlled camera. Though Snowpiercer and Okja may have had their problems, they should be respected for their mixture of genre and politics, entertainment and critical thinking, and their multicultural view of the world.

All of Bong’s talents would converge together like an expert mastering his trade in his most recent and Oscar winning film Parasite. With Bong’s return to South Korea he created a more focused critique of class society than his American efforts which at times felt all over the place. Though more concentrated, the film is just as absurd, shocking, and thought provoking as his previous efforts. Again, Bong’s metaphors and comparisons are far from ambiguous. As the title suggests, he represents how the poor are forced to live parasitical lives, feeding off the rich to survive. Both classes are purposely exaggerated to comic satirical effect. The Kim family though lower class are expert conmen. They carefully wiggle their way into the house and lives of the rich Park family. They not only represent the low citizens of society, but they geographically live in the lowest part of the city which floods at one point in the film due to a rainstorm. As they sneak and crawl around the Park’s incredible house to hide, they even move like insects, and when they encounter a man who has spent years living in tunnels under the house, even his eyes are buggy. The poor are not simply living off the rich like parasites, but their physical appearance and behavior is buglike.

On the other side of the economic spectrum the Park family, though not obviously horrible people, do not know how good they have it. The man cannot stand the smell of his new driver who literally reeks of poverty. The woman is childlike and demanding, and the children are privileged and have anything they want within their grasp. This rich family is not evil, but the system is, and they are the benefactors of a system that gives them everything until the parasitical like organisms forced to live off them finally show their discontent with the unchangeable unfairness of the situation.

Parasite is tense, thrilling, entertaining, and necessary critique of the global economic disparity between rich and poor that is now a reality. Thanks to its Oscar recognition Parasite and Bong Joon Ho are getting deserved recognition, though lets not forget that in a year that also offered Dolor y Gloria, Monos, And Then We Danced, Les Miserables, L'Atlantique, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Parasite is but a sample of the richness to be offered by international cinema. Trump may not understand it, but many film goers sure do.