On ‘parasites,’ Taal volcano and alienation
Life isn’t being “too metaphorical” for two basement-dwelling families in Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite.”
It is, a viewer would soon realize, a reflection of the lived reality of working-class families grasping at every faint spark of hope and benevolence.
Yet even the dictionary does not find it hard to compare a person of their social stature to an organism that feeds off the existence of others: a parasite; a person who exploits the hospitality of the rich.
But in the film, the families were not only stripped of their right to a decent living. They were also robbed of their dignity and self-respect — as they could only look through the glass walls outside of the rich’s impenetrable dimension that they so wanted to be a part of.
That we have conveniently attached a term to people living in precariousness feels oddly familiar. There’s familiarity in the Kim family’s boundless desire to survive — by leeching off their neighbors’ Wi-Fi, taking odd and menial jobs or believing that resourcefulness can be an antidote to poverty.
When Geun-sae, trusted helper of the wealthy Park family, and her husband borrowed money from a loan shark to open their own business, we see the faces of other families who were pushed to self-employment due to the lack of stable and full-time jobs, hoping they could achieve financial security and consequently build themselves a life of comfort.
But reality cannot be mythical. The speech of the oppressed, says Roland Barthes, is monotonous and immediate, expressing their actions, announces itself openly and abolishes myth. It is a language of desperation.
Days before the Feast of the Black Nazarene, the city government of Manila had cleared the sidewalks from ambulant vendors, most of them bereft of other means to earn a living.
One of them, a poor middle-aged woman, begged the city mayor not to confiscate her goods. She needed them to buy her medicine, she said. But she was repeatedly told to respect the government’s law.
The mayor eventually bought her goods before telling her to leave — said he was being “lenient,” that it was a show of humanity. And they expected her to be thankful.
Instances like this show how the working class internalizes the logic of late capitalism, like what Max Balhorn wrote in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine: that the poor were conditioned to “regard poverty as consequence of their own failings, not the result of a system built on exploitation and perpetual precarity.”
Yet for the society’s “parasites,” it wasn’t hard to find strength in solidarity.
A day after the eruption of Taal volcano, vendors in nearby Santo Tomas town in Batangas chose to give up a day of earning their income to provide food to evacuees. In Lipa City, a mother from a small village sewed 200 pieces of face masks for free when she learned that the supply for N95 masks was running low.
“It is the small entrepreneur who showed the true spirit of being Filipino and of Bayanihan,” Justice Marvic Leonen wrote on Twitter. “Hope the big corporations do the same. Profit is nothing compared with the goodness of human souls.”
In the movie, Korean families like the Kims had to endure the precariousness of low-income settlements, such as the recurring flooding in their neighborhood that once led them to stay in an evacuation center.
Similarly, in a Third World country like the Philippines, the urban poor, the working class, members of the informal economy and other families at risk will always have to thread the uncertain and the unforeseeable.
This unstable grasp of reality also characterizes alienation in modern society. “You know what kind of plan never fails?” the Kim patriarch told his son in the film. “No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned.”
It turned out to be both a form of resistance and total surrender.
