Poverty Has a Smell

Parasite a film by Bong Joon Ho.  With Kang-ho Song, Sun-kyun Lee, Yeo-jeung Jo, Woi-six Choi.  *****

Parasite is a movie about the vast gap in wealth that exists in the world today.  It takes place in South Korea, but could take place any number of places, including this country.  It begins as a whimsical comedy, then turns dark at about the three-quarter mark.  It’s so plot driven that it’s hard to write about without giving things away.  But it is an absolutely brilliant movie, one of the most striking and original films I’ve ever seen.  If there was ever a must see, this movie is it.

Two Korean families live in Seoul in vastly different circumstances, one in an incredibly luxurious house, built by an architect as a place for him to live, another in a basement apartment where everything is jumbled up: the one toilet is up on a weird platform, the family has to hold their phones toward the ceiling to get Internet service, and—as the movie opens—they are making a living folding pizza boxes.  There’s no feeling that one of these families is more virtuous or even more intelligent than the other; one got lucky and the other didn’t.  In a country where, as the poverty-stricken father says, every job as a chauffeur has fifty applicants from college graduates, it’s almost impossible to change your fate.  You have to catch a break.

And the poor family does.  The teenage son, Kim Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi), has a friend who has been tutoring a wealthy young woman in English, but he is going off to travel for a while, so he gives his friend a recommendation for the job.  Kim feels inadequate, but his friend encourages him, saying he has ample English skills, also that the wealthy family’s mother is oddly naïve.  And as soon as Kim wanders into the job, he shows a mastery that is startling.  Before long he’s not only making good money tutoring this beautiful young woman, but has found employment for his entire family, his sister as a tutor to the rich family’s young son, his father as a chauffeur, his mother a housekeeper.

There is an air of unreality to this part of the movie, as if this good fortune is too good to be true.  This shy unsure-of-himself young man suddenly becomes a confident, almost diabolical con-man, and his beautiful sister is, if anything, more cunning than he (she knows nothing about art therapy, which she is teaching, but has Googled it).  His father suddenly knows how to drive an extremely luxurious automobile, and his mother goes from folding pizza boxes to acting as a superb housekeeper.  In succeeding this way, of course, they’re putting other people down, but it’s a dog eat dog world and they’re doing what anyone would.  They got their break, and they’re making the most of it.

But one of the people they screwed over comes back to haunt them.  By this point in the movie it’s unfair to mention plot at all, because the surprises are so startling, one after another, that they’re a major part of the pleasure.  The plot twists are really just a matter of karma: you screw somebody over and it comes back to haunt you.  Or, as we say in the West, what goes around comes around.

There are two themes that repeat, and pop up at the movie’s most significant moments.  One is when the chauffeur says to his employer, about his beautiful naïve wife, “But you love her, right?”  The man stares at him for a long moment, then laughs almost incredulously.  The same line occurs later in the film, when both men, for reasons that would require a lot of explanation, are wearing Indian headdresses.  But that question, and the wealthy man’s cynical reaction, seem important.

The other theme is that poverty has a smell.  The little boy, the one who is getting art therapy, notices it first.  All of these employees, who as far as the rich family knows are from different families and different circumstances, have the same smell.  Then various people react in various situations to the smell of the father.  He notices those reactions and is puzzled and shamed by them.  The last time puts him over the edge.

Two-thirds of the way through the movie, there’s a huge rainstorm that has different effects on the two families.  For the rich family it’s a minor inconvenience, cutting short a camping trip they had planned for their son’s birthday and causing the parents to sleep on the living room couch while the boy stays in the back yard in his Indian teepee.  For the poor family it’s a disaster, flooding their basement apartment and sending them to a rescue shelter for the night.  The scenes of that flooding are nothing short of dazzling.

It is while the poor family is lying on cots in this rescue shelter that the father says words that contradict everything that’s happened so far.  Up to then his children had had a plan for how things would go, and it had been working well, for their father and everyone else.  But in the shelter, lying on his back, he calls all that into question.

“You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. Look around you. Did you think these people made a plan to sleep in the sports hall with you? But here we are now, sleeping together on the floor. So, there’s no need for a plan. You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?”

Whether he’s right or not, it’s at that point that the film takes a dark turn (though an earlier scene, where the poor family was sitting around having a booze party in the rich family’s house, laughing about how stupid they are, also seems crucial).  They continue being employed, but we suddenly see how exploited they are, doing backbreaking labor to support the whims of their employers, running themselves ragged after a night when they got no rest.  The rich family seems trivial beyond belief, staging an elaborate party with no concern for the cost or for how difficult it is to put together.  To say that things go terribly wrong at this point is a vast understatement.  What seemed a whimsical comedy becomes altogether different.

At the very end there is a sequence where Kim Ki-woo imagines how things all might be different, how he might skip college but nevertheless earn vast amounts of money and get his family out of their final difficulties.  We see a fantasy where he accomplishes that, then come back to the hard reality of his life as it is, the same basement apartment, socks hanging on a hanger to dry.  To me the suggestion is that the movie’s whole fantasy was too good to be true, the very idea that so poor a family can improve their lot is preposterous.  In that way the ending seems sad.  It’s a cold hard look at the way our world actually is.

There is also a suggestion, as my wife pointed out, that this situation of vast inequality cannot end well.  A violent confrontation seems inevitable.

Bong Joon Ho made this statement about his own movie:

“For people of different circumstances to live together in the same space is not easy. It is increasingly the case in this sad world that humane relationships based on co-existence or symbiosis cannot hold, and one group is pushed into a parasitic relationship with another. In the midst of such a world, who can point their finger at a struggling family, locked in a fight for survival, and call them parasites? It’s not that they were parasites from the start. They are our neighbors, friends and colleagues, who have merely been pushed to the edge of a precipice. As a depiction of ordinary people who fall into an unavoidable commotion, this film is: a comedy without clowns, a tragedy without villains, all leading to a violent tangle and a headlong plunge down the stairs. You are all invited to this unstoppably fierce tragicomedy.”

To my mind, the film leaves us with a final question: which family is the parasite?