The rich people’s house in Parasite has a son, self-confidently lost in imagination, running, jumping, whooping in costume shooting arrows throughout the house. His mother, whose wealth allows her subconscious to be consumed only with the world-drenching anxiety and what-if game that having children brings (so they tell me). Her voice ringing in faux agitation, réel adulation as she calls for him to settle down, clearly celebrating behavior she feels is all the healthy glow of genius, that she is of course responsible for bringing into the world. The rapid, fragile nods as she agrees to pay for four weekly sessions of art therapy. Looking at how she hoped to examine and manage her child’s little brain down to the last neuron made me feel like I was looking at America, at myself.
It was the same with the low-volume, deadpan derision of the looks on the faces and sounds of the voices of the poor brother and sister as they tore into their caper, the performance within the performance. The deliciousness they felt, and projected into the audience, as they engaged in cold manipulation and criminality. As the whole family lay on the wrong couch delighting in their raw, exquisite juicing of wealthy obliviousness, so did we. Quiet, knowing schadenfreude — sadism?– struck a chord with a very cynical, minor key, roll-your-eyes realness and irony in response to injustice and inequality that I see all the time in Americans, three generations after the onset of the age of the suburbs and the Salk vaccine, who have nothing left to feel exuberant about.
The other Korean film I saw in the last year, Burning, had similar themes, rich vs. poor. But not in ways that fit so satisfyingly with the objects and tone of American dissatisfaction with inequality; less a sense that they are looking at the same things and feeling the same way about them. The clean condo and fancy group dinners and Italian wine rang true; the over-the-top sports car and the serial killer insinuations did not. An image of wealth and inequality that was powerfully symbolic but a little exaggerated, cartoonish. It made for terrific drama but didn’t connect as much in an earthy, we-touch-the-same-objects-and-rad-the-same-Slate-articles sort of way as the big house, the sacred children’s birthday ritual, the aborted camping trip, and the understated drip of sarcastic resentment that they are asleep to. And while Burning is (obviously) not an offensively stereotypical portrayal of Korean culture, it does have plenty of the unfamiliar — the young women performing song and dance in miniskirts outside a grand retail opening; the main character bowing deferentially when he meets the older villain.
Parasite reflects an emotional response to an unequal world that feels so warm and familiarly American it could have come out of a microwave under a thin film of plastic. I love it: taking Korea and positioning it not across the ocean, but across the street, or even across the living room; showing that we are both not only in the OECD, we also laugh ruefully and pessimistically at our historically plentiful 2019 societies in the same ways. That’s a deep connection indeed.