|
I think the rich people who like Parasite do understand what it's saying, but they just don't recognize themselves in the Parks. I've tried to articulate it before in the thread, but I just don't think they read as fully human. As a counterexample, I don't know of any rich people who would really enjoy Sorry to Bother You, since Armie Hammer's character in that has much more of a recognizable personality that would cut deep. Then again, a lot of racist libs love Get Out, so I don't know how much my theory holds up.
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 17:50
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 10:11 |
|
|
I can't remember who but I'm pretty sure some white person on stage with either Peele or Kaluuya at an event said they loved Get Out so much they'd watched it three times which is just too perfect.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 19:21
|
|
|
Kangra posted:The entire point I'm trying to make is that they don't think they're evil, and from their ignorant perspective, they aren't. I'd argue the film is trying to show that just as much as it's trying to show that the Kims engage in intentionally harmful behavior because of the system they're stuck in too. This is what I really appreciated about this movie. An American movie would have went too far in romanticizing the Kim's lives and making the Parks seem nasty and cruel. The mother has that great line about wealth ironing out people's flaws, whereas poor people are forced into lives of indignity and violence that polite society--literally in this movie--turns up its nose at.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 19:26
|
|
|
Henchman of Santa posted:You guys know people can enjoy a movie and not fully grasp its themes right? It’s kind of an extremely common thing. That doesn't make it any less funny or ironic in these instances.
|
|
#
?
Jan 11, 2020 20:38
|
|
|
pospysyl posted:I think the rich people who like Parasite do understand what it's saying, but they just don't recognize themselves in the Parks. I've tried to articulate it before in the thread, but I just don't think they read as fully human. As a counterexample, I don't know of any rich people who would really enjoy Sorry to Bother You, since Armie Hammer's character in that has much more of a recognizable personality that would cut deep. I mean, they can’t be that bad - they probably voted for Obama after all.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 00:52
|
|
|
Prince Myshkin posted:Enjoying how many oblivious rich people are praising Parasite. Don't clue them in until it wins best picture 
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 01:01
|
|
|
I think people are being shortsighted if they're just defining the Parks as the rich elites. If you're posting on this forum, you most likely possess some level of privilege over people without access to food and shelter--although I know that's not a universal statement. If you've been judgmental about an uber driver or short with a server, there's a little bit of the Parks that you should be recognizing in yourself.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 15:13
|
|
|
Timeless Appeal posted:I think people are being shortsighted if they're just defining the Parks as the rich elites. If you're posting on this forum, you most likely possess some level of privilege over people without access to food and shelter--although I know that's not a universal statement. If you've been judgmental about an uber driver or short with a server, there's a little bit of the Parks that you should be recognizing in yourself. having food and shelter shouldn't be a privilege, it should be a right, and people like the parks are why it isn't. in this very movie we see two groups of working-class people who turn on each other because rather than recognizing the parks as their common enemy they idolize them. it isn't until the very end that ki-taek realizes that the parks are not human and takes appropriate action
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 16:20
|
|
|
Serf posted:having food and shelter shouldn't be a privilege, it should be a right, and people like the parks are why it isn't.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 17:01
|
|
|
Do you think the Parks would try to get a left-wing candidate elected in Korea? A bunch of us understand our complicity in the system (or that the system has worked out for us due to luck of the draw). It bothers me when I go to the grocery store or a retail store and see these people and know they don't have lives as comfortable as mine (poo poo working retail is what opened my eyes as a younger and dumber person). People like the Parks ARE the enemy. It's not just that the system has granted them unearned wealth/comfort it's that they don't grasp that and don't care. I live around the Parks - a town with a median income ~90,000 that votes Republican despite being in a deep blue state (and it's not like wealthy dems vote all that much better). The Parks are the suburbanites that vote to perpetuate the system. Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jan 12, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 17:06
|
|
|
Timeless Appeal posted:Look man yes it is, but that does not excuse that most of the people who post here are--as I am--complicit in a massively unfair distribution of resources. Nor does it mean that just because that you're not on the top of that wealth distribution that you cannot find yourself taking part in classism and grinding down of people in less privileged situations. And if your takeaway from the parable of the movie is to just draw a line where the movie represents other people and the movie is cudgel to dunk on them then I don't think you're fully engaging with the film's message. you are not particularly "complicit" in a system that you have no power over. because you are poor, your power as an individual is severely limited with respect to what you can accomplish politically. the parks and others of the capitalist class, however, have massive political power and can buy and sell politicians however they see fit. there are certainly plenty of cases of inter-proletarian conflict as you describe, but the primary reason that they exist at all is because the people with power use that power to create and reinforce this system. the movie is trying to show you that the mistake that the kims and moon-gwang/geun-sae make is in not recognizing that the parks are the true enemy.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 17:13
|
|
|
Serf posted:you are not particularly "complicit" in a system that you have no power over. because you are poor, your power as an individual is severely limited with respect to what you can accomplish politically. You're right about the film showing the grotesque worship of the elite--but I think the movie speaks to other components of privilege and specially the power of being seen that I think gets lost when you're dunking on Chrissy Teagan for... let me check my notes... supporting the second most progressive presidential candidate and using her social status to signal for people to see said anti-Capitalism movie.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 17:39
|
|
|
Timeless Appeal posted:You're right about the film showing the grotesque worship of the elite--but I think the movie speaks to other components of privilege and specially the power of being seen that I think gets lost when you're dunking on Chrissy Teagan for... let me check my notes... supporting the second most progressive presidential candidate and using her social status to signal for people to see said anti-Capitalism movie. The gap between Warren and Sanders is a gulf.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 17:43
|
|
|
Groovelord Neato posted:Do you think the Parks would try to get a left-wing candidate elected in Korea? Is any of us here qualified to understand what "left-wing" would mean in South Korea politics?
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 17:47
|
|
|
Timeless Appeal posted:The problem is that this line of thinking always opens the door to provide people with permission to draw the line of I'm not the rich one. It's very easy to make $90,000 and not feel rich or privileged partly because that's the insidious nature of capitalism and consumerism. And the fact is that even people who make $250,000 in our nation by and large do not necessarily have the political capital to easily make change even if their potential is greater than many. But of course those people are still privileged and of course they're still complicit and of course they're ultimately more the parks than they're not. so what's happening here is that you're buying into the idea that we are all complicit in a system that we have no control over as individuals. instead of focusing on income, you should focus on relationship to the means of production. park dong-ik owns a tech company, putting him in control of a significant portion of the economy. this may be a small portion in comparison to say, the head of samsung lee kun-hee (who is most likely dead but this is being covered up to allow his heirs time to arrange his assets in a way that will "save" most of them from being taxed), but to the people of the company he owns it is certainly significant. this, in combination with the wealth that he has derived from stealing the surplus value of his workers' labor, fundamentally changes his relationship to power, and puts his family on a level that the parks could never hope to achieve. the parks could use that power to affect change for the better, but they don't because this goes against their class interests. marx would say that because of the nature of capitalism the capitalist is as trapped as the proletarian, because to use their power to improve the conditions of the proletariat would mean eventually being swallowed up by a more ruthless capitalist, and because of this meaningful change can only come from the bottom, or the proletariat. we see this realized toward the end when ki-taek seizes on a moment of opportunity to strike at power, but he is only one man with one knife, just like all of us posters are just individuals with one vote/gun. alone we cannot create change, and ki-taek's act created no change, hell it didn't even manage to break through his own son's conditioning. and the fact that parasite has been viewed by so many people and that the message it has transcends cultural barriers is good. if some brainless rich people want to promote it and sow the seeds of their own destruction, that's fine. once we realize that we're all ki-taek, the sooner we can do what he could not. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 18:02
|
|
|
I think if this movie teaches us one thing, it's that we're all trying our best  I really see a lot of myself in the Park family, in fact. I was talking to my houseboy about this just the other day and I reassured him that I would vote for Elizabeth Warren if she won the nomination so I think he knows I'm down with the struggle.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 23:52
|
|
|
YaketySass posted:Is any of us here qualified to understand what "left-wing" would mean in South Korea politics? The current president of South Korea wants reunification, that's pretty drat left wing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 23:53
|
|
|
HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The current president of South Korea wants reunification, that's pretty drat left wing. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 12, 2020 23:57
|
|
|
HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:The current president of South Korea wants reunification, that's pretty drat left wing. really kinda depends on what that looks like, doesn't it?
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 05:23
|
|
|
The film portrays the Parks as bad people, but not the villains- the villain is capitalism itself, a system which drives people to do bad things to each other in an attempt to gain "the good life". It's nice to imagine that if we kill all the rich that'll fix everything, but as long as we still have a system where you have to get a job to earn money to get food and shelter, inequality will happen and bad things will arise because of it. Prosperity in itself is a corrupting force- the rock which was supposed to bring good fortune is more like a cursed object.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 05:50
|
|
|
If all the rich and cops disappeared overnight I would fill the vacuum with so much violence your heads would spin.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 08:56
|
|
|
I don’t think the message is that every rich person is irredeemably horrible. Also a message from a work of art can be about a group of people without being every one. And a dumb rich person on twitter can like it. There are levels to this poo poo, I mean is Christie Teigen not understanding parasite but still campaigning for women’s health and rights etc worse than someone who wants to stop those things?
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 11:24
|
|
|
JBP posted:If all the rich and cops disappeared overnight I would fill the vacuum with so much violence your heads would spin. well that's an oddly revealing statement anyways, the point isn't to have a wizard disappear every capitalist pig and bootlicker and then just see what happens, its to build a mass movement that can get rid of them while at the same time altering how society works. parasite is a tragedy on several levels, but one of them is in how the kims don't work with the bunker family. if they had cooperated with one another they could have kept up their ruse and benefited mutually. their error is in idolizing and emulating the rich
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 12:19
|
|
|
Serf posted:well that's an oddly revealing statement while i think that that's a big aspect of the film (that they mutually ensured their destruction rather than cooperated) the main drive of the film is that despite the perceived benefits, working for the parks is fundamentally a raw deal, and by extension, cooperating yet still "keeping up the ruse" would be a net loss for all of them.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 19:01
|
|
|
teacup posted:I don’t think the message is that every rich person is irredeemably horrible. Also a message from a work of art can be about a group of people without being every one. And a dumb rich person on twitter can like it. There are levels to this poo poo, I mean is Christie Teigen not understanding parasite but still campaigning for women’s health and rights etc worse than someone who wants to stop those things? The message is that the Parks are not individually the most morally reprehensible people on the planet, and that means jack-all in terms of their complicity in the system that oppresses the poor families. I'm sure Mr. Park makes lots of big tax-deductible charity donations, and maybe he champions teaching kids how to code or something. Both of these are nice, but they don't erase the fact that the Parks' wealth is immoral and unsustainable in terms of broader society and the onset of climate change. The rich may not be evil, but the system is, and they are willing participants until they actively fight against the interests of their class.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 19:27
|
|
|
God Hole posted:while i think that that's a big aspect of the film (that they mutually ensured their destruction rather than cooperated) the main drive of the film is that despite the perceived benefits, working for the parks is fundamentally a raw deal, and by extension, cooperating yet still "keeping up the ruse" would be a net loss for all of them. unlike its sister works "sorry to bother you" and "the first purge", this film does not recommend a course of action that goes beyond facile propaganda of the deed. nor should it, since it has an entirely different aim
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 22:40
|
|
|
I don’t know, portraying people doing something bad and against their own self interest is a kind of roundabout way of broadly advocating an action isn’t it?
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 23:06
|
|
|
youcallthatatwist posted:The message is that the Parks are not individually the most morally reprehensible people on the planet, and that means jack-all in terms of their complicity in the system that oppresses the poor families. I'm sure Mr. Park makes lots of big tax-deductible charity donations, and maybe he champions teaching kids how to code or something. Both of these are nice, but they don't erase the fact that the Parks' wealth is immoral and unsustainable in terms of broader society and the onset of climate change. The rich may not be evil, but the system is, and they are willing participants until they actively fight against the interests of their class. I think it’s very deliberate that the father isn’t trapped under the parks in the end, he lives under an unnamed German family. The parks are interchangeable with anyone that would own that house.
|
|
#
?
Jan 13, 2020 23:53
|
|
|
Timeless Appeal posted:You're right about the film showing the grotesque worship of the elite--but I think the movie speaks to other components of privilege and specially the power of being seen that I think gets lost when you're dunking on Chrissy Teagan for... let me check my notes... supporting the second most progressive presidential candidate and using her social status to signal for people to see said anti-Capitalism movie. Lmao. Are you some kind of idiot? Prince Myshkin fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jan 14, 2020 |
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2020 13:55
|
|
|
JBP posted:If all the rich and cops disappeared overnight I would fill the vacuum with so much violence your heads would spin. I firlmy believe every man secretly yearns for the neolithic
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2020 16:47
|
|
|
teacup posted:I don’t think the message is that every rich person is irredeemably horrible. Also a message from a work of art can be about a group of people without being every one. And a dumb rich person on twitter can like it. There are levels to this poo poo, I mean is Christie Teigen not understanding parasite but still campaigning for women’s health and rights etc worse than someone who wants to stop those things? Not being the worst thing you could possibly be in the cosmos doesn’t make you a friend to humanity.
|
|
#
?
Jan 14, 2020 17:39
|
|
|
I just got out of seeing Jojo Rabbit for the first time and Parasite for the second and they're really a perfect pairing. With Jojo you have your very Western liberal portrait of redemption where we just need to get together and talk and we can dig deep enough to revel in our shared humanity. It has very solid comedy beats and setup punchlines shot brightly and gorgeously, but also this surreality that you can read as fantasy. Parasite, on the other hand, is a dark condemnation of people and the wretched society we've built. Capitalism has alienated us all from our humanity, into beings incapable of understanding each other, with no hope redemption or solidarity. It also has these long setup and allisive jokes but there aren't the traditional comedic beat punchline setup like Jojo. It's this biting, throwaway lines organically part of the story. And while full of symbolism, the darkness and groundedness of the images in the subterranean gives Parasite an earthiness and reality that work with its contemporary setting, unlike Jojo's vampy period piece. Both are very well acted and directed, it just depends on how you want to view humanity: a hopeful, reassuring story we tell each other, or our fictions peeled back and tunneled into our real core. Good times!
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 07:25
|
|
|
Saw the movie, totally blind about the premise. I liked it a lot. I would like to know more about the Special Rock that Min gave the family at the beginning. I took it as one of those status adornments that rich people like to litter their houses with, just some expensive thing that they can point at and brag about how much it cost to get it. I found it interesting that the Kim family actually does have better economic luck when they get it, and that the moment it all starts crashing down is when the storm starts, which we later find out that it caused their basement house to flood, and the son having to fish the Special Rock from among the sewer flooding. I took it as symbolizing the son's, and also the family's, dream of becoming rich, but that in the end it cannot withstand the harshness of real life and how it can literally be used against them by others because they would rather cling to it against all reason, hoping that there's still a minuscule chance that their dream can still be obtainable.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 14:21
|
|
|
Is there any significance to the dad being actually good at his job? The son seemed adequate as an english tutor but seems to literally have given up teaching 5 seconds in to date the girl. The daughter is a faking everything about art therapy and not doing anything. They never show the mom really working but she never is indicated to have any cooking or cleaning skills at all. But the dad they go out of their way to show that even though he needs to hang out in a car dealership to know how a nice car even works actually is apparently a master driver. Mr Park makes a big deal about how good his turning is. Is it just a plot wise thing where if he drove poorly he'd be fired more instantly than everyone else, or is there a bigger reason they single him out as being actually specifically great at the job he scammed into where everyone else is shown as really phoning it in and faking it?
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:02
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:Is there any significance to the dad being actually good at his job? i think this is an unfair characterization of the kims. we see no indication that they are actually bad or sub-par at their jobs. ki-woo is a legit tutor, ki-jeong is performing childcare and chung-sook is good enough at housekeeping that she successfully fools the parks into thinking she is from an elite agency specializing in that work. what's interesting about it is that the kims may have scammed their way into getting the jobs, but they're good at actually doing them. this is important, imo, because it shows that they are not lazy or unambitious. they are not poor because of their own failings, but because of the system that they live in and accident of birth to me it drives home that the titular parasite is the parks, not the kims
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:09
|
|
|
I think it's interesting that the dad is the best at his job but the worst at playing the role the rich family expects him to. His smell and "going over the line" make them the most dissatisfied with him. It's yet another criticism of how advancement in a capitalist society is based much more on how good you are at inveigling scraps from the rich than any other sort of meritocratic climbing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:13
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:But the dad they go out of their way to show that even though he needs to hang out in a car dealership to know how a nice car even works actually is apparently a master driver. Mr Park makes a big deal about how good his turning is. Is it just a plot wise thing where if he drove poorly he'd be fired more instantly than everyone else, or is there a bigger reason they single him out as being actually specifically great at the job he scammed into where everyone else is shown as really phoning it in and faking it? Mr Park doesn't know poo poo about driving, he's just implicitly reminding Mr Kim that his continued employment is based on him meeting Mr Park's standards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:37
|
|
|
josh04 posted:Mr Park doesn't know poo poo about driving, he's just implicitly reminding Mr Kim that his continued employment is based on him meeting Mr Park's standards. Didn't the movie establish that he had previously driven a cab?
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:41
|
|
|
Sure, but the point is that while he has the bare essentials of driving down, the concept of being a 'luxury' or 'premium' driver or w/e is just theatre to persuade the rich folk that they're paying for something they otherwise wouldn't get if they 'just' hired some guy who drove a cab once.
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 6, 2024 10:11 |
|
|
interestingly, ki-taek is the only one we ever see the parks express any discomfort with. first when he has that outburst at another driver while driving park dong-ik, then again when dong-ik reminds him to keep his eyes on the road, again when dong-ik talks about his smell, and lastly when he can't keep up the act at the birthday party towards the end. afaik we never see any other member of the kim family receive any criticism from the parks at all
|
|
#
?
Jan 15, 2020 15:49
|
|