Parasite (2019)

directed by Bong Joon-ho

Rivka Yeker

I walk outside and January has finally risen, it is a moment where I can feel the presence of divinity. Peace in its simplest form: Sunday morning after a physically and mentally exhausting week, coupled with the absolute silence of snow covering the ground. Not a single cloud in the sky or footprint tainting this serene, Midwestern still. During this venture, I experience some sort of clarity. This happens occasionally, these split seconds of something more; I’ll call it hope.

In Bong Joon-ho’s film Parasite, a family creates a plan for a way out of poverty. They do what they need to do to survive by executing a plan to infiltrate a wealthy home. This looks like getting each family member hired to work for the Park family, one by one. The film is set up to leave you uneasy, make you believe that whichever path you’re on is the wrong one. In a sense, it is mimicking the rocky terrain that Capitalism presents to people without generational wealth.

This morning, my father and I were texting about politics before 10 a.m. At one point, he said to me, “Your last phrase sounds like a slogan from the Soviet Union’s Pravda newspaper of my youth.” Papa, also known as Jeff also known as Fima, was born in Minsk, Belarus in 1963. He and his family, my totya Sveta, otherwise known as my aunt Cindy and my babushka Rachel and dedushka Villen, immigrated to Chicago as Soviet Jewish refugees in the early '80s. My mother and babushka Lilya came here from Dushanbe, Tajikistan in the late ‘80s. My parents eventually met in Rogers Park, the northernmost part of Chicago.

In the beginning of Parasite, the Kims’ house is being fumigated, though it is to their dismay. In their basement home, they look at each other, each of their bodies glistening with sweat, and question this seemingly rare happenstance. Ki-jeong, the daughter, instructs to shut the window so the poison doesn’t filter in. Her father, Ki-taek, instead says, “Leave it open. We'll get free extermination. Kill the stink bugs.” Two-in-one, their health a secondary concern.

Over the last few years, I have rejected Nihilism. I am too much of an optimist, I’d say. But, Nihilism doesn’t mean the end of everything—it just means that everything has an end. Since I was a kid, I have been obsessed with the root cause. Why does something happen, and can I derive meaning from it? It is why I fell into philosophy, film and theory; it is what brought me to this. Existentialist thought and Nihilism fall oppositely on the spectrum, although they could not exist without the other. What Existentialism can’t quite finish, Nihilism does with unsatisfying closure.

After the Kims find themselves in an uncompromising scenario—something of total chaos, and without a plan—the first climactic night continues to unravel in misery. With each intercut of the outside storm, the suspense increases. The Parks’ previous housemaid, who the Kims strategically replaced, is hiding her husband downstairs in a secret bunker; he is escaping debt collectors. There is tension between two distressed, poor families. What does one do in times of complete desperation? There is violence in the way everyday people would inflict violence on each other: imbalanced, unsure and impulsive. Father, son and daughter manage to flee after continued, unbearable moments of quiet agony. Mother, Chung-sook, the current housekeeper, finishes a requested batch of Ramdon, which only Yeon-gyo, the seemingly naive Park mother, eats.

My father is wary of my politics—and so am I. It is because I do not believe in them wholeheartedly, the same way I do not believe in anything with my entirety. I am skeptical of what others believe is truth because I have seen the way people destroy the plans they write down on paper. They shout these values proudly, and when they come alive, they lose their self in the ideology; reality vanishes and becomes dangerous. The problem with an obsession to cure humanity without seeing what caused the illness, and instead, either blaming it on masses or on an unnamed “system of power,” is that the purpose is lost in translation. On each side, there is a man who is hungry.

When the Kims get back to their home after a night of unforeseeable events, everything is flooded. People are evacuating, and going somewhere dry to sleep. This is a moment where any sense of safety is snatched, a hole in an already unstable boat is now exposed. Ki-woo asks his father about the plan that he had previously mentioned to his family, something to keep everyone believing there is an answer to man-made atrocity. Ki-taek says to his son in this overcrowded building, “Ki-woo, you know what kind of plan never fails? No plan at all. No plan. You know why? If you make a plan, life never works out that way. Look around us, did these people think 'Let's all spend the night in a gym?' But look now, everyone's sleeping on the floor, us included. That's why people shouldn't make plans. With no plan, nothing can go wrong and if something spins out of control, it doesn't matter. Whether you kill someone or betray your country. None of it fucking matters. Got it?”

When we think of a foundation, or something’s root, we think of a system. What system, and who poisoned it? An infiltrator, a faulty basis. Capitalism is a tool that is used for a larger, more poisoned condition; a parasite. When I think about religion or philosophy or politics or theory, I think about who needs me to rely on this belief in order for their world to continue. When I look at my family and their trauma, the way they react to feelings of fear, guilt and shame, I think about who caused them this pain. It always stems from something larger than just their mother and father. It is the War that traumatized a child, that left him without love or a home. It is about him growing up to marry a woman, who too was orphaned because of the War. It is about two orphaned adults, and no resources to heal, having a child. It is about this family forced to leave their home again to enter somewhere entirely unknowable, with the promise that it is better. It is about the chaos in between. The intercuts of outside storms, the other distressed, poor families they confronted. It is about what perpetual survival mode does to the psyche, how our entire world has been trying to catch up while pellets of cold rain violently hit the pavement.

With all the combined Soviet superstitions and feelings of guilt that live in my gut, I do not know what is true, except for what I believe in the moment of believing it. To have a plan is foolish, not because there is some greater plan for all of us (and even if there is), but because a plan implies that there are expectations. With expectations, you get crushed. In each crevice of the world, there is a story for why it is there, even if the story is missing. There is nothing without meaning, even if that meaning provides you with unsatisfying closure.

Rivka Yeker is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Hooligan Magazine, a Chicago-based writer, and an event organizer. Rivka is usually forming new theories on communication + media, absorbing and critically assessing film, writing essays about the Soviet Jewish diaspora, reading comics, asking too many questions, and reading poetry in front of strangers.