At this point, Bong starts employing more than just visuals to demonstrate the class contrast. We recommend you to read it only after watching the movie, and not before, in order to preserve the pleasure of the first vision. As Mr. Park observes that the underwear's placement in the backseat suggests that the driver had sex in the backseat rather than in the front, the underwear becomes a symbol for the perversity of the driver in the eyes of the Parks. He will always be stuck at the bottom of the totem pole. In order to get the Parks' driver fired, Ki-jung plants a pair of her own underwear in the back of the car, to make it seem like the driver had sex with someone in the backseat. To find out more, including GDPR Compliance and how to control cookies, see our Privacy, Cookie & GDPR Policy. The flooding scene made me feel physically ill and reminded me of a quote from earlier in the film, when Ki-woo, the son in the poor family, comments on how nice Mrs. Park is.

This is your final warning. Mr. Kim freezes, his daughter bleeding out in his arms.

Parasite: symbols and meanings of Bong Joon-Ho’s film.

Rocks can’t float, so this must mean the suseok is counterfeit in some way. To me, the genius of Parasite is in the way these aspects are conveyed, especially through repeated themes and visual motifs throughout the movie. Having escaped the danger, however, another drama arrives, which opens the tragic segment of the film: the rains that hit Seoul have become torrential and the home of the Kims (meanwhile escaped from the villa) is completely unusable. Treat someone as if they aren’t a person, and they’ll be more likely to react in a way that is base and animalistic. After this delusional final massacre, the film ends with the exit from coma of Ki-woo (who, due to the head injury, has an uncontrollable laugh similar to Joaquin Phoenix in Joker, the other big candidate as best movie in 2020 Academy Awards). Geun-sae — the man who has been living in the Park’s basement — keeps a shrine to Mr. Park and shouts, “RESPECT!” to him even, as he lays dying at his feet.

He makes a face and holds his nose. Learn how your comment data is processed. Those who suffer the most at the feet of billionaires tend to be those who scramble to defend Jeff Bezos on social media, or vote for Donald Trump as a relatable, populist president despite the fact that the amount of money he has can hardly even be conceptualized. In slow motion, Geun-sae lands on them after being stabbed by Mrs. Kim. I doubt anyone actually missed this, but it was so powerful, I have to talk about it.

Graduated in Economics, he follows cinema with passion since he has memory. He writes on Auralcrave since 2017 and he is co-author of Auralcrave cinema books.

The Seul of Parasite follows a very long tradition that starts from Metropolis and continues with infinite variations to the present day: it is populated by very poor people in its slums while the rich are at higher levels, far from the dirt, far from the stench and, above all, apparently far from problems and pain. I was so focused on these details, it took me a few hours post-film to recognize and process the primary metaphor of living underground as a visual metaphor for the lower classes literally being beneath the upper.

The next day, Mrs. Park remarks how lovely the weather is as she plans for an impromptu party, stating, “The rain cleared the pollution away.”. But there’s no way this will happen. After Moon-gwang discovers that the Kims are all related to one another, she takes an incriminating video of them arguing as a family and threatens to send it to Mrs. Park. The Oscar-winning picture goes much further in exploring the depths of South Korean society. In the movie, the lady upstairs figured out how to password protect it.

It’s during these scenes that we discover the rotten face of the Park family, when the two spouses discuss the stench emitted by the Kims, during a sexual foreplay, without knowing that their employees are hidden a few centimeters from them. You probably didn’t actually miss any of these. The viewing stone … Later, they role-play as the driver and his mistress while sleeping on the couch. I especially like your perspective on the floating rock and the line. By the end of the film, after Geun-sae has bludgeoned Ki-woo with the rock and Ki-woo has recovered, the rock becomes a more complicated symbol, a symbol for his desire for upward class mobility that was thwarted and ended in violence.

The most obvious parasitical relationship is that between the Kims and the Parks. Geun-se, however, went mad with grief after the death of his wife: after having managed to knock Ki-woo down, with the same stone that the boy brought the day before (beautiful, among other things, the shot in which the the young man’s blood mixes with plum juice), the man re-emerges from the darkness in which he had been confined for years, while the Parks celebrate Da-song’s birthday in the garden with some very rich friends, stabbing Ki-jung and being killed in turn in the scuffle with the girl’s mother. With a perfect narrative trick, the young man of the Kim family, Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi), receives a possibility of employment thanks to a friend who recommends him as an English teacher for the private lessons of the young girl of the Park family (Ji-so Jung). Don’t read this if you haven’t seen it already.

The video becomes a symbol of her power over them, and she exploits it as a dictator would.

GradeSaver "Parasite Symbols, Allegory and Motifs". If in the end the story of Parasite can appear very simple in its scheme (a comedy-like misunderstanding that turns into tragedy without ever losing the satirical component) and in the perfectly linear plot. In this way, each of the characters is a parasite in some way. Taking advantage of the woman’s terrible peach allergy, the three members of the Kim family manage to convince the wife that Moon-gwang is seriously ill with tuberculosis, causing her to be fired with an excuse and getting their mother and wife to take over. In order to understand the beauty of Parasite, the film by Bong Joon-ho winner of the Academy Award as best movie in 2020, it is enough to think about “a drizzle, and all this rain and drizzle is building up—and when it reaches the suspenseful height, the tempo should feel like a typhoon”. The Kims always eat junk food crowded around a small table, while the Parks eat fruit and expensive sirloin in separate rooms.

To me, the genius of Parasite is in the way these aspects are conveyed, especially through repeated themes and visual motifs throughout the movie. This family, which is anything but Dickensian in its poverty (indeed, from the beginning we understand that the Kims are very well disposed towards the art of scam), will find themselves by a pure coincidence of destiny to come into direct contact with the Park family, the same in composition (father, mother, daughter and son) and completely different in terms of income.

They do not cook for themselves, clean, or drive themselves places. They end up having to scurry on their hands and knees, Mr. Kim at one point even dragging himself along on his stomach, to hide under a table and overhear Mr. and Mrs. Park talking about them. Screenshots below: Not really a symbol, just a mirror of reality. They are objects bearing the weight of metaphor.

GradeSaver, 21st Century Haves, Haves-not: Bong Joon-Ho's Commentary on Contemporary Class Divide in Parasite.

Following the film’s major twist, Parasite continues in a far darker tone until it’s ending.In our Parasite movie analysis, we found that although the tone and style change, the themes at play remain consistent from the first half to the second half, and continue to be developed further as the film progresses. It’s been a personal frustration of mine how even large organizations are cavalier about passwords. The video, and the blackmail power it has, represents something like a war and a tense struggle for survival.

His target is to tell and analyse the most fascinating movies of our times.