I finally got to watching Parasite last night. Going in, I had heard lots of great things about the film, and I was expecting an intellectual gold mine. I watched the trailer for the movie a few months ago, and I got the impression that the movie was a mind-fucky one that would really get me thinking. To be honest, I came out very unimpressed at first. It’s been about 15 hours since I finished the movie though, and I literally can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe the movie was just such a mind-fuck that I needed a night’s sleep to really start thinking about it. In this post, I will share some of my own analysis of the film and how it’s gotten me thinking about different things.
I want to analyze the theme of hope in the movie. At the beginning of Parasite, the Kim family is full of hope. The family is living in a small underground basement, meant to represent their poor living conditions. They still have access to the light of the outside world and even the upper class through a window in their home. The stone that the family receives becomes a physical representation of hope. It’s meant to bring the family good fortune and wealth. With it, lead by Kim Ki-Woo(the son), the family schemes their way into prosperous jobs. While doing so, they don’t even question the potential harm that they can bring to others, which ends up compounding into the results at the end of the movie.
First I want to direct some attention to the scene where Kim Ki-Woo(the son) and Kim Ki-taek(the father) spend the night sleeping in the hospital after their home is flooded. During this time, Kim Ki-Woo can’t stop holding onto the stone. In those times, he won’t let go of hope: the magical future where the entire Kim family is living in wealth. Kim Ki-taek has already given up though. Him saying that “no plan is the best plan” shows that he has no faith that the future Kim Ki-Woo is dreaming about will ever be reality. This interesting dynamic continues to the end of Parasite, where Kim Ki-Woo is still dreaming of buying the house to free his father. Kim Ki-taek, though, no longer even with a window to the outside world, no longer has any future plans.
Kim Ki-Woo’s hope ends up harming his family. Near the end of Parasite, he brings the stone with him to the basement in hopes of either making peace with Geun-sae or killing him. Ironically, this hope is what allows Geun-sae to injure him and kill his sister. The duality between father and son and their views of hope is very interesting. I don’t think the movie explicitly comments on either’s point of view as correct(and I don’t think it should). Personally though, I think it highlights the extremes both viewpoints. It’s bad to completely give up in resignation like the father has. However it’s also bad to be so hopeful of a future that you’d be willing to step on others. The rock (the physical symbol of hope) sets the entire movie’s scenes into fruition by directly corrupting the Kim family and also indirectly corrupting Geun-sae and Moon-gwang to step on others in a struggle to climb the social hierarchy.
Being from Stuyvesant High School (Stuy),where there are a ton of low income kids hopeful of a better future, I think Kim Ki Woo’s view point of hope resonates with me especially. I don’t want to cite anything specifically, but I think at Stuy there was a pretty bad culture of stepping on others to succeed. I was 100% a part of it. Personally, the enticing nature of a hopeful future blinded me from seeing just how much of a fucking jerk I was. Moving forward, I still want to have hope in the best possible future, but I also want to make sure that this hope doesn’t stop me from acting morally.