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KVeezy3 posted:Nowhere did I even insinuate that they are leftist class heroes. What exactly are you saying, that the only good poor people who steal/deal drugs/join gangs are the homeless literally starving to death? At the start of the film they're already eating moldy garbage, and lamenting that Min didn't gift them food, and that's not enough suffering for you? I don’t agree there’s any magical quantity of suffering that gets you a moral get out of jail free card. I think it’s weird you think there is. But really the entire discussion is dumb because the point of parasite is actually not “judge who is good and who is bad”.
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Feb 15, 2020 16:24
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It seems pretty explicit that you do, that they should be starving to death.
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Feb 15, 2020 16:30
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They had enough money to stabilize their situation after getting the tutoring jobs, and I don't think anyone faults them for what they did there since it's more or less a victimless crime (though exploiting fears about mental illness to get more money starts the moral decline). Getting the driver fired and, obviously, causing a potentially life threatening allergic reaction (and hiding her medicine, right?) to get rid of the housekeeper was well beyond just doing what they had to do to survive. Then actually murdering the housekeeper to keep the con going is another step beyond that. The victims of the Kims aren't the Parks, so it's weird to decide the Kims are fundamentally decent people.
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Feb 15, 2020 17:03
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That brings up a good point - what did they do with the housekeeper's body? Did they shove it somewhere in the sub-basement and make the husband walk over it every day?
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Feb 15, 2020 17:25
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They didn't do anything with it, they didn't even know she was dead.
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Feb 15, 2020 17:28
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MorrisBae posted:That brings up a good point - what did they do with the housekeeper's body? Did they shove it somewhere in the sub-basement and make the husband walk over it every day? The dad sneaks the body out at night and buries her.
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Feb 15, 2020 17:31
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Hope the German family doesn’t get a dog
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Feb 15, 2020 17:52
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPf309OP-Zk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTEby_XD90w
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Feb 15, 2020 20:46
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dirksteadfast posted:Just from my personal experience with my in-laws (who are Vietnamese refugees), it’s really jarring that within their own community it’s either “Here’s a loan for $50,000. Just pay me back whenever” or “gently caress you, got mine” with very little in between. Though I have heard from a number of people that some of that is just coming from an environment where trusting the wrong person could get you imprisoned or killed. Parasite but Vietnamese would be a very different and potentially very interesting movie. My siblings and I came to the realization that almost every boomer age person who lived under OG Asian dictatorships, left or right, have deep seated PTSD. Like our dad expects his kids to absolutely betray him at any moment, but otherwise has been very loving and supportive, and we're all pretty sure he had to publicly denounce and privately implicate his own parents during the cultural revolution.
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Feb 15, 2020 20:51
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I watched this last night and it was amazing. My only question is: did Da-Song ever actually have a seizure either time he saw Geun-sae? Or did he just faint? Where did his parents get the idea that they had 15 minutes to get him to a hospital or he'd die? Because Mr. Park's complete disregard for Ki-jeong bleeding out is a lot more forgivable if he has legitimate reason to think his son is going to die if he doesn't get the car keys right loving now.
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Feb 16, 2020 03:16
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From what I remember, Mr Park was out of town during the original incident and I think Mrs Park didn't tell him about it.
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Feb 16, 2020 03:23
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YggiDee posted:From what I remember, Mr Park was out of town during the original incident and I think Mrs Park didn't tell him about it. This radically changes that climax scene IMO.
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Feb 16, 2020 03:34
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Well, she did say he was convulsing and foaming at the mouth, so who knows
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Feb 16, 2020 03:36
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Steve Yun posted:Well, she did say he was convulsing and foaming at the mouth, so who knows I just don't know how to feel about Mr. Park in the scene.
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Feb 16, 2020 03:38
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SpiderHyphenMan posted:I watched this last night and it was amazing. My only question is: did Da-Song ever actually have a seizure either time he saw Geun-sae? Or did he just faint? Where did his parents get the idea that they had 15 minutes to get him to a hospital or he'd die? Because Mr. Park's complete disregard for Ki-jeong bleeding out is a lot more forgivable if he has legitimate reason to think his son is going to die if he doesn't get the car keys right loving now. The 15 minutes thing just sounded to me like one of those medical factoids people hear about and repeat that don't have much basis in reality. Given how easily Mrs. Park is convinced that the housekeeper has TB, it seems like she's probably just not very knowledgable about that stuff.
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Feb 16, 2020 03:51
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Steve Yun posted:Well, she did say he was convulsing and foaming at the mouth, so who knows Didn't he sneak down and eat some birthday cake when he saw the guy coming out of the basement? The second time I watched Parasite I caught that and thought that the 'foaming at the mouth' thing was he had a mouthful of cream/icing/whatever and it was just the mum freaking out over it, as it helped reinforce her beliefs of how dangerous it was and he needed medical attention RIGHT NOW at the expense of everything else because he is so special and fragile.
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Feb 16, 2020 04:19
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Ogmius815 posted:It’s impossible to draw a clear moral distinction between the Parks and Kims, and any analysis that has one in a “good” category and the other in a “bad” category is a misreading. [...] Leftist heroes of the class war these people are not. Ogmius815 posted:This is good and honest. In the twenty first century, any honest person can see that capitalism, in the form practiced in the twentieth century, while it has produced enormous advances in the quality of life for almost everyone on earth, is failing to deal with crises of rising inequality and climate change. But the traditional stories of resistance to capitalism have also failed dreadfully, and the fairy tale of Marxist revolution has become nothing but a juvenile fantasy, mostly repeated by the disappointed scions of the middle class. That’s all terribly facile, and lame. Like you’ve just encountered a satire for the first time: “whoa the movie doesn’t present anyone as having the right ideology. How... mature.” Beside the fact that you’ve fallen into the same trap as a lot of pseudo-progressives and concluded that such things as clean drinking water are bourgeois (because rich people have them), your own ideological failure is in blaming the Kim family for having ‘middle-class aspirations’, rather than understanding that the very concept of a middle class is imposed on them to keep them in line. As Zizek notes: “The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability.” In other words, the Park family (however unconsciously) pays relatively high wages to their household staff purely to generate a promise of security and thereby prevent the outburst of violence we see near the end of the film. But the Kim family is not middle-class; they are poor. The basic premise of the film is that, unbeknownst to the Parks, the Kims are (using scare-quotes here) “lumpen”-proletarians: criminals, unemployed and unemployable, always an instant away from complete destitution. It’s extremely eye-rolling to see ostensible leftists writing “oh but the Kims aren’t starving; the Kims have cell-phones” - as if they themselves have been duped by the Kims’ impressive ability at ‘code switching’. The Kims are implied to be badly in debt. The four of them, working together illegally, still can’t even afford a marginally-better apartment at the end of the film. Let’s get more concrete here. Parasite specifically deals with the rise of ‘immaterial labour’, i.e. the production of new social and interpersonal relations. The focus is on both intellectual labour (e.g. the production of virtual reality software by the company’s programmers), and affective labour (e.g. all the babysitting done by the Kims). There is very little like “hard” industrial labour in the film. As industrial labour declines in prominence, we get two related phenomena: a rise in unemployment, and the gradual disappearance of the traditional bourgeoisie. In the first case, “it is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse. Or, to put it differently, the chance to be exploited in a long-term job is now experienced as a privilege” (Zizek, my bolding). It’s the basic joke of the characters doing a complex heist just to earn a wage above subsistence level, and it’s because of this specific point that the Parks can feel comfortable allowing these people into their home. The Kim family can be safely exploited because what are they going to do? Go on strike? Again, the threat of abject poverty is always hanging over them. A huge chunk of the film then deals with new and varied types of unemployment under these conditions. “The category of the unemployed has ... expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations and states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.” This, as it happens, is the entire point of presenting Mr. Gook (the man in the secret chamber) as akin to a fanatical North Korean. It allows us to extrapolate this singular case of unemployment out to the geopolitical level; North Korea is perhaps the most prominent example of a geographical ‘blank space’. (I’m thinking of the satellite images showing that, from space, no light can be seen there). But anyways, in the second case: the traditional bourgeoisie is being gradually replaced by a subset of workers who earn a surplus wage. That is, as mentioned earlier, workers who are just arbitrarily paid above ‘minimum’ wage to ensure the existence of a middle class and therefore social stability. But those earning surplus wages exist on a spectrum from comfortably-paid managers (the ‘salaried bourgeoisie’) to those paid so little as to be effectively part of the proletariat, and it is on the latter that Parasite focusses its attention. That’s why the mood entirely changes after the discovery of the abject Mr. Gook and the corresponding flood of sewage that ‘infects’ the Kim family. Call it class consciousness. The debate over the morality of all this is not even remotely interesting. Are the Parks idle and self-absorbed? Who cares? The actual question of the film, expressed at the end, is how a man (or German family) can end up enslaving another man without even being aware of it. This is where Parasite is ultimately an accelerationist sci-fi film along the lines of Chappie, taking the depiction of human survival under capital to a logical extreme. “It pushes to the end of the full monstrosity of the body of Capital,” as Steve Shaviro describes the short story Phylogenesis (in which humans genetically engineer themselves to survive as literal parasites inside of the massive, all-consuming aliens that have consumed the Earth). It’s this sci-fi scenario of becoming an insect inside a mansion that demands the most attention. In Zizek’s terms: “what unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure.” This leads to my concluding point: it should be trivially easy to extricate Mr. Kim from the bunker, or for him to simply leave. He doesn’t leave because he understands the above truth, and is working to pass it on to others.
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Feb 16, 2020 09:26
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Why was the son taking the rock down into the basement at the end when he was sneaking down to check on the tied up captives? Considering how the rock is used to bash his head in I can’t help but think he was planning to kill them with it and ironically got what he deserved. I mean, what else was he doing with it?
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Feb 16, 2020 18:25
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why was the son taking the rock down into the basement at the end when he was sneaking down to check on the tied up captives? Considering how the rock is used to bash his head in I can’t help but think he was planning to kill them with it and ironically got what he deserved. I mean, what else was he doing with it? He was going to kill them with it. I believe that scene was preluded by the father having "no plans for the future" indicating that he's given up. So it is up to his son to be proactive and take action for his family.
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Feb 16, 2020 18:36
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Why was the son taking the rock down into the basement at the end when he was sneaking down to check on the tied up captives? Considering how the rock is used to bash his head in I can’t help but think he was planning to kill them with it and ironically got what he deserved. I mean, what else was he doing with it? This is my interpretation also.
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Feb 16, 2020 19:29
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Remember how when Min showed up with the rock and the mom muttered under her breath “should’ve brought food instead?” Remember how the mom almost sent down Kijung with some food, but then Kijung got called away by Mrs Park? And then Kiwoo went down with a rock
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Feb 16, 2020 19:58
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Steve Yun posted:Remember how when Min showed up with the rock and the mom muttered under her breath “should’ve brought food instead?” Was it to murder them with though?
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Feb 16, 2020 21:10
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I assumed so. Or maybe a combination of wanting to kill them and also using it as a security blanket.
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Feb 16, 2020 21:26
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Was it to murder them with though? 100% yes, I don't think this was meant to be ambiguous.
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Feb 16, 2020 21:57
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My mom saw the film and didn't like it. She said it was weird. She also felt bad for Mrs. Park as she was clueless and was likely cheated on by her husband. She was also confused about the smell part and thinks it had to do with the family being in a semi-basement. How can I explain the film to her?
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Feb 16, 2020 22:02
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punk rebel ecks posted:My mom saw the film and didn't like it. She said it was weird. She also felt bad for Mrs. Park as she was clueless and was likely cheated on by her husband. She was also confused about the smell part and thinks it had to do with the family being in a semi-basement. How can I explain the film to her? Tell her to vote for bernie
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Feb 16, 2020 22:09
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punk rebel ecks posted:My mom saw the film and didn't like it. She said it was weird. She also felt bad for Mrs. Park as she was clueless and was likely cheated on by her husband. She was also confused about the smell part and thinks it had to do with the family being in a semi-basement. How can I explain the film to her? Well to be fair, the daughter literally does say "It's the semi-basement smell. We need to leave this home to lose the smell"
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Feb 16, 2020 22:20
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Sinteres posted:100% yes, I don't think this was meant to be ambiguous. There was a very brief moment I thought "oh, he's sick of the chaos that loving rock has brought, so he's giving the basement-dude a cool looking rock as a peace offering" But the way he creeps down, dude was definitely gonna bash some heads in.
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Feb 16, 2020 22:35
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I assume it okay to not spoiler the movie anymore. I am very happy this movie exists. It is great. I also appreciate how clever the lower class has to be to survive. It reminds me a lot about Pakistan and how sharp and clever one has to be to advance and manage in what is basically survival of the fittest in a 3rd world country. That gives them an edge, outwitting, having skills to forge, etc. and helps gets them in. The rich have a degree of comfort and are oblivious to most all this going about them and they live in their mundane business. They can afford to be pleasant in so far as "line is not crossed" and for Mr. Park even a smell is a line to cross, like WTF. The blatant disregard for a dying girl as he holds up his nose, Jesus, he could take her and his son to the hospital but is expecting the help to disregard her. When things all went to poo poo, anyone just cared about themselves or their immediate family and no one helped. As the underclass fight each other to get scraps from their table. It also spoke to how some of the underclass think or view some of the rich as worthy of worship that their lofty position is something to be respected to that degree which is also the case for the conservatives that support GOP/Republican/Libertarian policy and are willing to give into fascism for the hate of their fellow man in their own standing. There were some brilliant shots in the movie, the descent being a highlight as was the ghost part. I almost expected the son to be taking the rock down to the basement to give them some luck as the rock was meant to bring it and make amends but I don't have much to go on. Just an extension of the mother being sympathetic, regretful, and hoping to work it out by sending food.
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Feb 17, 2020 02:00
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Steve Yun posted:This movie got me to start giving money to beggars on the street again. It’s terrible how much we demonize the poor. Even if they’re lying to us with made up sob stories... if they’re begging for a buck or two they probably really need it I've been told many times too "They're going to spend it on booze and drugs." but in my head I ask myself "Ok, but I can't control that. I should just do my part and extend what help I can." In Pakistan there are "clever" people who run schemes to make money on the street and that's seen as an excuse to not help anyone, even if some of the people are caught up in it not of their own will. Gatts fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Feb 17, 2020 |
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Feb 17, 2020 02:02
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Gatts posted:I almost expected the son to be taking the rock down to the basement to give them some luck as the rock was meant to bring it and make amends but I don't have much to go on. Just an extension of the mother being sympathetic, regretful, and hoping to work it out by sending food. So when he saw the housekeeper’s head sticking out from behind a wall, and started to creep toward it, what did you think he was about to do?
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Feb 17, 2020 02:12
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Ogmius815 posted:So when he saw the housekeeper’s head sticking out from behind a wall, and started to creep toward it, what did you think he was about to do? He didn't see her die to my recollection, he was going over to check on her.
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Feb 17, 2020 02:16
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It’s possible that he took it down to “protect himself” And when he saw the slumped housekeeper he was checking to see that she was ok But upon knowing that he brought down a rock, Geunse didn’t see any possibility but murder
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Feb 17, 2020 02:19
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I just saw Okja tonight and it's an really engrossing film. What's people's takes on the theme of the movie in terms of the ending and solutions to the animal cruelty in the factory farming process? Is it Extreme activism doesn't work, because business only respects money, and it's up to individuals to save animals, even if only one by de-incentivizing factory farming through not buying into it? We had one friend being horrible at the last act that takes place in New Jersey and didn't realize that all the slaughter house scenes were cribbed from real life methods of factory farming cows and pigs
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Feb 17, 2020 02:26
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Industry is so big that it can’t be totally defeated The system is set up so that people can’t afford to have a conscience. The butcher felt bad and wanted to help, but he can’t lose his job to be kind The only incentive to be kind that business understands is money “Woke capitalism” is just capitalism with branding None of this should make you give up or stop you from trying to be kind in little ways
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Feb 17, 2020 02:37
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As late as 1965, Hormel put out promotional videos like this one because people weren’t as squeamish about butchery as they are now If you have half an hour to spare, check out kids watching pig carcasses broken down similarly to Okja and going gee willikers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G-UUhpkMkU
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Feb 17, 2020 02:46
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Nahhh he was totally going to bash her head in with the rock. He thought it was what he needed to do to secure his position with the Parks.
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Feb 17, 2020 02:46
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Why did he need the rock as opposed to anything else available to him? Is there a symbolic meaning to using that? His fortune to bash the head in of his competition? Or could it be it depends on how you see other people and your interpretation, i.e. if you give benefit of the doubt/think there's good in people vs not.
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Feb 17, 2020 02:49
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Gatts posted:I've been told many times too "They're going to spend it on booze and drugs." but in my head I ask myself "Ok, but I can't control that. I should just do my part and extend what help I can." In Pakistan there are "clever" people who run schemes to make money on the street and that's seen as an excuse to not help anyone, even if some of the people are caught up in it not of their own will. I will probably come across as the world's biggest rear end in a top hat, but I never give to panhandlers. Just organizations and food banks.
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Feb 17, 2020 02:50
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punk rebel ecks posted:I will probably come across as the world's biggest rear end in a top hat, but I never give to panhandlers. Just organizations and food banks. That works too. You're giving and hopefully the organization is doing their part. Most of the time I've bought food for panhandlers but in instances I can't, I do give cash.
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Feb 17, 2020 02:56
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