The Smell of Men Living Beneath the Ground
Visual & Olfactory Depiction of Class Structure in Bong Joon-ho’s Korean film ‘Parasite’ (2019)
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Bong Joon-ho is known among film buffs for a couple of excellent films he made: Memories of Murder (2003) and Mother (2009). The film, Memories of Murder, was based on the true story of serial murders. It depicted police brutality and incompetence during the hunt for the mysterious killer. Mother (2009) was a disturbing film about a widow excessively protective of her son afflicted with intellectual disability. Parasite, Bong’s recent offering, has bagged a number of awards including the Cannes Palme d’Or and four Oscars — one of them, the Best Picture, given for the first time to a non-English film. It ran in Indian theaters as part of the Oscar film festival and it was shown in the Bengaluru International Film Festival (BIFFES) too.
In Parasite, the family of Kim lives in a “banjiha”, a semi basement, the kind in which thousands of people reside in Seoul, the South Korean capital. All the four in Kim’s family — Kim, his wife, son and daughter — are unemployed and they manage to survive by doing odd jobs. It is hilarious to see the son and daughter moving about holding their phones close to the roof, trying to steal wifi. The son’s friend presents him a “scholar’s rock” that is supposed to bring wealth and tells him that he can take over from him as tutor for a rich girl by producing a fake college degree.
**Article contains spoilers**
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a refreshing contrast from films on poor people which show them as victims. The unemployed family of Kim would do any trick to earn a living. They get hired exploiting the naïveté of the mother of the Park family as though they are unrelated to each other. They are all over the house, when the Parks are on a camping trip, reveling in its luxuries. This is somewhat reminiscent of the scene of the beggars breaking into the house of their benefactor during her absence and having a riotous party there in Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1961). However, the main theme of the two films are quite different.
Influences on Parasite
Bong has given a list of five films that influenced Parasite in response to a question in an interview with the website, The Playlist. The Korean film Housemaid (1960), made by Bong’s mentor Kim Ki-young, is one of them. It is a middle-class family that is disturbed by the entry of a maid in Kim Ki-young’s horror thriller. With its upper-class employer, the class divide is wider in Parasite, but Bong has talked about how staircases play an important role in visually showing the sense of infiltration in Parasite and referred to Housemaid that features a staircase in one of its pivotal scenes.
Two films, La Cérémonie (1995) and The Beast Must Die (1969), by Claude Chabrol, the “French master of crime films”, figure in Bong’s list of influences. La Cérémonie is about a maid rebelling against her rich employer, instigated by her postal clerk friend. Parasite doesn’t touch upon culture, an important aspect in Chabrol’s film. However, the two films have the common factor of class difference. Bong’s film is a mixture of black comedy and thriller genres. Perhaps he has listed The Beast Must Die because it is a thriller. Otherwise, it has very little in common with the Bong film.
Yet another influence mentioned by Bong is The Servant (1963). This was a film made by Joseph Losey, the blacklisted American filmmaker who had to live in exile in Europe to continue his career. The Servant is one of his three films that were critically and commercially successful with screenplays by Harold Pinter. The manservant in Losey’s film gets his lover employed as a maid in his wealthy employer’s house introducing her as his sister. The way they dupe their employer and encroach upon the house must have been an influence on Parasite. In Losey’s film the manservant and his lover go to the extent of reversing roles with their employer and his fiancée.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) is the fifth film Bong has listed pointing out that “Norman Bates’s house is also a two-storey home with a staircase that leads to secrets lurking underneath.” This brings to the most fascinating aspect of Parasite. About halfway through the film the audience comes to know that there is a man hiding in the basement bunker for four years to avoid getting caught by loan sharks. The wealthy Park family lives in an architect designed palatial house while the poor debtor stays secretly down beneath unbeknownst to them.
Visual Rendering of Class Difference
There have been films which visually portray the class difference among its characters. In Jean Renoir’s classic, The Rules of the Game (1939), during the weekend retreat to the country estate, “La Colinière”, the upper-class host and his guests stay in the first floor while the servants stay in the ground floor. Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2001) is inspired by the Renoir film and uses a similar strategy. Parasite’s lower-class people dwell beneath the ground somewhat like the workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) Park’s mansion is in an elevated area whereas Kim’s banjiha is in a low-lying area which gets flooded. The first shot of the film shows the road through a window and then the camera goes down to show the son of the Kim family in the basement beneath the level of the road. The poor debtor stays in a bunker shelter built by the previous owner of the glamorous house of the Parks for hiding during a possible attack from North Korea or for escaping from creditors. He is locked up in a netherworld. The dichotomy in Bong’s film is between the affluent living above the ground bathed in sunlight and those who dwell beneath it in dingy surrounding.
Olfactory Depiction of Class Difference
Not content with this visual contrast, Bong has come up with an olfactory device too in Parasite. Kim’s employer complains to his wife about the smell emanating from him. The son of the Parks too finds out that it’s the same smell that comes from the Kim family members. Kim’s daughter explains that it’s the semi-basement smell which will stay with them as long as they dwell in the banjiha. Park likens it to the way it smells sometimes in the subway. While the man who comes out of the bunker still respects Park, his smell puts off Park which leads to him getting killed. Bong’s Memories of Murder and Mother are more intriguing than Parasite, however Parasite creatively uses the recurring theme of smell to bring various strands together for staging a climax.
Recognition for South Korean Cinema
For about two decades South Korean Cinema has been making waves globally. Compared to Romanian cinema which has come up with artistically satisfying films, South Korean cinema has popular elements too reason why it is commercially successful. At the Oscars, Parasite was expected to get the award for the best foreign language film (now renamed the Best International Feature Film) which it did. The awards for the Best Original Screenplay and the Best Director too went to Parasite. The Best Picture award has been handed over so far only to an English language film. This tradition was broken, and it went to Parasite, a non-English film for the first time. The Oscar awards are given by members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which has widened its membership by including industry professionals from other countries. This has helped in making the awards global although it may still need millions of dollars to influence the right voters to bag an Oscar. Notwithstanding the political and dubious aspects of Academy awards, winning four Oscars by Parasite is a sign of recognition for South Korean cinema even if it is yet to scale the heights the best of world cinema has already touched.
Closing Thoughts
The man hiding in the bunker is taken to be a ghost by Park’s son. Cut off entirely from the outside world, he lives like a ghost. The film is complex in showing how the lower-class families fight against each other resulting in the killing of Kim’s daughter. It’s the scholar stone gifted to Kim’s son by a friend which brings prosperity to the Kims as it’s supposed to do but it also brings their ruin and near death for Kim’s son. There is an ambiguity regarding who are the parasites. While the Kims appear to be so, even the Parks may be called the same as they cannot function without the hard labour of the Kims for a pittance. Parasite is perhaps the best film of 2019 as its visual and olfactory depiction of class structure is extraordinary.
