Study Guide for Parasite
Parasite. 2019. CJ Entertainment. Neon. Directed by Bong Joon Ho. Written by Bong Joon-ho and Jin Won-han. Cinematography: Kyung-pyo Hong. Production Design: Ha-jun Lee, Won-woo Cho. Costume Design: Se-yeon Choi. Music Score: Jae-il Jung. Editing: Jinmo Yang. 132 minutes.
Cast: The Kims (poor family): Song Kang-Ho (Kim Ki-Taek) (father); Jang Hye-jin (Kim Choong-sook) (mother); Woo-sik Choi (Kim Ki-woo) (son); Park So-dam (Kim Ki-jung) (daughter). The Parks (rich family): Lee Sun-Gyun (Park Dong-ik) (father); Cho Yeo-jeong (Park Yeon-kyo) (mother); Jeong Ji-so (Park Da-hye) (daughter); Lee Jeong-eun (Moon guang) (Housekeeper); Park Myung-hoon (Geun-se) (Housekeeper’s husband); Park Keun-Rok (Driver Yoon).
In our four-part unit on film editing we began with the continuity editing perfected in the Classical Hollywood Era (in short, classical editing; 1916 and later; 1930 and later, for sound). We’ve continued through Soviet Montage juxtapositional editing (silent Soviet cinema, 1923-29), European Art Cinema-style discontinuity editing (1959 and later), and finally neo-classical editing (1990 and later). The latter assimilates a variety of earlier styles, classical Hollywood foremost among them, but includes the styles of New Wave, American Independent (Indie, for short), classical Hollywood, European Art Cinema, and what Bordwell & Thompson term “intensified continuity.” Director-writer Bong Joon Ho (b. 1969), one of the leading directors in a vibrant South Korean film industry—and the best known in the United States—made Parasite as a genre-defying social comedy, which descends—literally—into tragedy. So think of Bong’s style as an elegant pastiche of the rigorous Euro-postmodernism of Michael Haneke and Tom Tykwer, the dark comedy of Joel & Ethan Coen (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, Inside Llewyn Davis), the cultural studies revisions of Todd Haynes (Safe, Far from Heaven, I’m Not There), the sudden tonal shifts of Paul Thomas Anderson (There Will Be Blood, The Master, Phantom Thread), the drama of manners of Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, The Bling Ring), and the elegant whimsy of Wes Anderson.
We’ve learned that editing expresses four kinds of relations: graphic, rhythmic, spatial, and temporal. We know that while classical continuity editing uses all of these to tell stories that play out in linear time, in myriad spaces, with a rhythm that suits the mood, expresses the movement of the narrative, and suits the action. As films tell their stories in images, it is important that the editing show in graphics—in images—the information, ideas, themes, and emotions that the filmmakers want to convey. Parasite, as a narrative built on social contrasts depends upon a vivid mise-en-scene, dynamic camera movement, and crisp, contrastive continuity editing. Somewhat like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Parasite shows the continuing importance of Classical editing along with the influence of the slower, more mise-en-scene oriented American indie film style.
Parasite, Bong’s seventh film and his first in ten years made in South Korea and completely in the Korean language, provides us with exemplifies the ways editing works with mise-en-scene and camerawork, as well as with editing and sound, to move a narrative into new transitions and to accentuate movement and rhythm. Critic Inkoo Kang writes that the Seoul semi-basement where the impoverished Kims live, and the showcase of the Parks, built by a famous (fictional) architect, both resemble widescreen aspect ratio. Kang also compares the first hour of the film to a “heist comedy” like Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven (2001). The Kims “may be manufacturing false identities to make more money than they’ve ever dreamed of, but, even in this bit of asymmetrical class warfare, the grand prize they’re after is still just the privilege of being the help.”[1]
Bong Joon Ho is known for combining tropes of popular genres with topical, historical, cultural, and sociological themes. For instance, Bong’s third, and until Parasite, most successful film, 2006’s Gwoemul (Creature) (U.S. title, The Host), recalls the original 1954 Japanese film, Godzilla. Godzilla’s concept was that fallout from the World War II-ending nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused the formation of a gigantic, hideous monster. In a 2008 American Quarterly article Christina Klein observed that in choosing The Host as the English title of Gwoemul, Bong implies “that Korea has let itself become a ‘host’ to a parasitic United States” (Italics mine).[2]The Host took its concept from a scandal involving an American morgue employee, Albert McFarland, who in 2000 at the massive U.S. military base in Seoul ordered a Korean employee to dump twenty gallons of embalming fluid down a drain into the Han River, which runs through the city. Thus, writes Meera Lee, “As both a physical and social setting, the morgue underscores the U.S. military’s geopolitical control over Seoul.”[3]
The concept for Parasite stems from the sense that although the Kims become con artists extraordinaire; they aren’t frauds, so adeptly do they blend with the roles previously played by people who aren’t perceptively more talented or skilled than themselves. A brutal job market, and a lack of money for education, shuts qualified people out of positions and forces them into criminality. The Kims exercise initiative in going after opportunities denied them in more legitimate means. Ki-Taek (Song Kang-ho), a man in the prime of life, is robbed of purpose in the economy that collapsed in the crash of 1997. As S. Nathan Park explains in Foreign Policy.com, this was a collapse as catastrophic as the 2007-09 Great Recession in the U.S.[4] After the failure of his “chicken joint” restaurant, which he, like thousands of laid-off former corporate workers, had launched with his paltry severance, the best job Ki-Taek, his wife, and grown kids can find is folding pizza boxes. Parasite takes off from the Age of Inequality, as well as the global digital divide, the dependency of the much of the world’s population on its cellphones.
In February 2020 Parasite made history by becoming the first film in a language other than English to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Bong had lectured the audiences for the Golden Globes in January 2020, “Once you overcome the one-inch barrier of subtitles, you will introduced to so many more amazing films.” Little did most Oscar-watchers suspect that the diverse new Academy membership would take up the Korean director on what must have sounded to them like a dare. Parasite, a comic-tragic kaleidoscope of complicated early-21st century emotions, emerged out of the envelopes as the kind of movie, it turned out, that the Academy seemed to say Hollywood should be making. David Bordwell, co-author of our textbook, wrote in an October 2019 post on his website, that Parasite belongs to the shrewd craft of constructing a movie that develops a situation in precise, logical, yet surprising ways . . . Bong plants significant motifs through the film. He forgets nothing. Cub scouts, Morse code, peach allergies, and the smell of poverty pay off in comedy while supplying thematic resonance . . . the impulse toward tight construction, full motivation of characters’ actions (usually guided by a goal), and a rising arc of conflict leading to a decisive climax-these design features, so manifest in the well-made play, have carried over to the cinema since the rise of the feature film in the 1910s. Today’s films have a look and feel that seem of our moment, but their underlying “engineering” principles are surprisingly indebted to a long-running tradition.[5]
Questions:
A. Like most films, Parasite introduces its plot and themes early on. Its opening scenes may even recall Vertigo in the cogency of the characters’ initial problem: a search for wi-fi, and the way the possibilities that open up the film are brought to Ki-Woo, the son whose relatable ambition is to better himself and his family. Ki-Woo’s introduction to the “landscape stone,” thought to “bring material wealth to families,” as Min, the friend who trusts Ki-Woo to take over his job tutoring teenager Da-Hye while he takes a college year abroad, kicks the whole scheme into motion. However, Ki-Woo and Ki-jung show their true colors even earlier, asking the pizza forewoman if she can’t just fire her current assistant and put Ki-Woo in his place.
1.) How would you break down Min’s entrance to the end of the scene in the Kims’ home? How does the combination of camera movement, shot/reverse shot, reaction shot, articulate the action and begin to tell the story/plot?
2.) At the same time, in the scene with Ki-Woo and Min, the apparently wealthy friend whose proposition kicks the plot, in every sense of that noun, into motion, shows the way intensified continuity in contemporary cinema works. In this sequence, which extends to Ki-Woo’s first meeting with the rich mother and teenage daughter, how does Bong’s cinema obey conventions such as the 180-degree rule (except when it doesn’t)? How does the filming and editing eschew conventions like establishing shots (except when it adheres to them), while sticking to the point of the view of the protagonist (who is clearly Ki-Woo)?
Where is the 180-degree rule violation?
Show at least one example of how Bong avoids conventional shot/reverse shot (and eyeline match/reaction shot) form while adhering broadly to establishment/breakdown/reestablishment order, especially in articulating the new location, the wealthy Park home, where the bulk of the film will play out.
B. Key events are articulated in what amount to narrative montages. Ki-jung cleverly plans to get Driver Yoon and Housekeeper Moon-guang discharged and replaced with her parents. We see as Ki-jung hatches the plot and begins to unveil it before her incredibly willing, unwitting mark, Mrs. Park. First, Jae-il Jung’s deceptively simple score underlines the beginning of the plot. Once the scheme gets fully going, we see Ki-jung, her brother Ki-Woo, and father Ki-taek brought into the ruse in order to make it work.
3.) a.) Discuss the sequence that completes the Kim family’s scam, explaining how it works as essentially a narrative montage.
The sound, cinematography, camera placement and movement, and simple in-camera effects such as slow motion all play a role here. I don’t mind at all if you refer to Nerdwriter’s analysis of this sequence, so long as you utilize it in an analysis of your own. The music score shifts to a Baroque- style composition that matches the rhythm and tempo of the shots and the actions within them.
b.) How do you find the editing stitching together the elaborate completion of the con?
4.) Think back to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, our introduction to classical editing and to the idea that good film directing involves variety. It keeps the spectator engaged, keeps a sense of sameness and exhaustion from taking over a film, and, probably most importantly, marries scene with appropriate technique. With this in mind, watch this scene, the second between Ki-Woo and Da-Hye. How do the framing, the mise-en-scene, and the meeting of content and form coalesce in a way helpful to the scene?
C. The concepts of social ascent and descent, which comes from the civic topography of Seoul, with the wealthy enclaves up in the hills and the poor masses down in the valleys, reach their apotheosis in two masterly sequences of cross-cutting (a.k.a. parallel editing). The first (which I won’t ask about) is the flood, intercut with the flailings of the original housekeeper and her husband, a man who originally went into the rich house’s underground bunker to hide out from his creditors and ended up living there.
5.) The second is the morning-after, when Yeon-Kyo calls and texts Ki-Taek, Ki-Woo, and Ki-Jung on the smartphones that essentially cause the film’s narrative in the first place. (Remember too that Park’s tech company (with the English name, “Another Brick,” apparently makes cell phones and other consumer technology.) The scene cuts between the gym where the flood victims have been moved to en masse and Yeon-Kyo’s preparations for the snap-birthday party that she has decided to throw for her spoiled little boy.
Look at the cross-cutting in terms of suspense, contrasts, and the tensions it creates, for instance in the one tracking shot toward the dark, forbidding door to the underground and all it represents to the Kims and to us. Look at the contrasts in light, dark, and the performances—the demeanor of the carefree Parks with all their money, versus the demoralized Kims who are caught in between their real lives and the lives that they have falsified their way into. What does “It Is Sunday Morning,” a march for children’s chorus, which seems so far in the background, through all the scene’s milieus–gymnasium, supermarket, backyard party that one wonders if it’s diegetic (i.e., part of the scene, as opposed to the clear non-diegetic score that is heard in the rest of the film)—do for the sequence? (On the track on the soundtrack album, linked to above, it can be heard in all its unhinged creepiness, clearly toned down in the film itself).
6.) Most fundamental to Parasite are consequence and social contrast. A parasite is “an organism that lives in another organism, called the host, and often harms it. It depends on its host for survival.”[6]Even the studio that financed the film fretted that the title, Parasite, might lead audiences to expect a horror film, since Bong Joon Ho had made The Host (2006), a film that embedded social commentary into a horror-film narrative. Why is the film entitled Parasite, and not, say, The Parasite or Parasites? Who or what, then, is the title’s “Parasite”?
7.) To go back to our favorite exercise, the famed Four Levels of Meaning, how would Parasite break down for you. sentence or two describing Parasite along the lines of:
Referential:
Explicit:
Implicit:
Symptomatic:
[1] Kang, Inkoo. “Parasite: Notes from the Underground,” Current, Criterion.com, 30 October 2020. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7158-parasite-notes-from-the-underground.
[2] Klein, Christina. “Why American Studies Needs to Think about Korean Cinema, or, Transnational Genres in the Films of Bong Joon Ho,” American Quarterly vol. 60, no. 4 (December 2008), 890.
[3] Lee, Meera. “Monstrosity and Humanity in Bong Joon Ho’s The Host,” positions vol. 26, no. 4 (November 2018), 723.
[4] Park, S. Nathan. “Parasite Has a Hidden Backstory of Middle-Class Failure and Chicken Joints,” Foreign Policy 21 February 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/21/korea-bong-oscars-parasite-hidden-backstory-middle-class-chicken-bong-joon-ho/.
[5] David Bordwell. “The Trim, Tight Movie: Three Variants at Vancouver,” Observations on Film Art, David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, 4 October 2019. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2019/10/04/the-trim-tight-movie-three-variants-at-vancouver/.
[6] Yvette Brazier, “What to Know about Parasites.” Medical News Today, February 16, 2018.
