You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Why did God create parasites?
Pairs of socks, clipped on a clothes hangar, dry in the middle of a cluttered half-basement studio apartment. The camera scans a family as if looking out from the cul of a cul-de-sac, situated in a literal and existential urban dead-end. The camera pans to Kevin, the son, who, standing on a toilet, searches for Wi-Fi access from the upstairs neighbors. Stinkbugs pollute the air. It appears that the family has multiple talents in scamming the system — such as avoiding payment for electricity bills and piggybacking on phone circuits for their own benefit. Living in the epoch of late-stage capitalism, they have mastered the art of the hustle, transforming mass-produced commercial junk into second-hand, reusable refuse.
The viewer will begin to understand, as the film narration evolves, that the family are gleaners of garbage. Director Bong Joon Ho stages the opening scene with a family — father, mother, son, and daughter — eating their “Pizza Generation” lunch while looking out a wide-angle window, watching a half-drunk man urinate into a pile of trash. Here, in this first sequence of the film, Bong introduces key production values, deadpan humor, family relationships, the omnipresence of filth, and what will become the axes of horizontal and vertical spaces.
One might even call Parasite a tale of two houses and two families (each including a son and a daughter), the Parks (rich) and the Kims (poor),1 who come to live with each other in a kind of convoluted intimacy. When Kevin, the toilet boy from the basement setting, enters a fashionable house to be interviewed for a teaching position, the viewer, as well as Kevin, observes