Serious spoiler warning
The parasitic relationship in the film
Obviously, the first parasitic relationship occurred between the Ki Ze family and the old nanny played by Song Kanghao . They were parasitic in the home of the news agency president Park. The Kisak family succeeded in breaking into the wealthy family through their son, Ki Woo, who worked as an extracurricular teacher at President Park’s house—the father became the president’s driver; the mother became the president’s nanny; the daughter became the youngest son of the family. He is a therapist, and is loved by children and mistresses.
The story of the old nanny unfolds through a meeting with the Keize family. Yu Ye, the old nanny knocked on the door of the host’s house, claiming that something had fallen in the old host’s house. The new nanny—Keze’s wife passed her and discovered that there was an underground home in President Park’s house, where there was a man—the old nanny’s husband. It turns out that the old nanny's family has also been parasitic in President Park's mansion for a long time.
The second parasitic relationship is not very obvious, that is , the parasitism of class, status, and prestige by the upper class represented by President Park's family . "When the commodity economy in turn dominates the commodity producers, the society's evaluation of a thing directly determines the evaluation of the person, and people will form a value system and mental state oriented by the exchange value of the thing. "It’s the same when buying things, and it’s the same when hiring people :
His son, Ji-woo, who did not go to college, successfully became the tutor of President Park’s daughter with a fake diploma from a prestigious school. My sister became an excellent therapist and made her a psychological counselor for the president's son, and used painting to give him "art therapy" (예술치료, The Arts in Psychotherapy). In fact, the younger sister is only good at PS and knows nothing about psychotherapy; after the brother and sister succeeded in "parasiting" and gained trust in President Park's house, they packaged the same unemployed mother as an "excellent nanny" and recommended to President Park. Just as President Park was hesitating, Keize said: "The labor company she works for is a membership system and only serves the rich." And handed over a beautiful business card. President Park immediately felt that "this card is very high-end, this is the nanny I should have", so he hired his mother smoothly.
The problem behind the parasitic relationship
The parasitic success of the Kize family reflects the pursuit of status and reputation by the upper class . The criteria for hiring people no longer depend on real talents and abilities, but on their labels. That is, by "hiring such a person" to show that "I have such a consumption ability", so as to reflect "I am in such a social class" and gain a sense of identity .
After the family successfully parasitized, Keize once sighed, "The rich are really naive." President Park and his wife are not naive, but are blinded by desire. Because in the movie, the innocent child discovered the clues earlier than the adults. President Park’s eldest daughter saw his younger sister and brother Ki Ze, who had entered the mansion for the first time, sitting together, keenly sensed that the relationship between the two was unusual and asked if Ke Ze was his girlfriend. After Keize's denial in a panic, the eldest daughter said meaningfully, "It seems that you are still paying attention to her." Wife) immediately said loudly, "The two of them taste the same!" As mentioned later in the movie, this smell is not from the same scent of laundry detergent, but from the body odor left on each other for a long time. It is their cramped basement. the taste of. However, parents in the adult world ignore these details.
The parasitic relationship in "Parasite" also reflects social inequality under class differences.
Shakespeare said in "Tim of Athens": "Gold! Yellow, luminous, precious gold! Only this little can turn black into white, and ugly into beautiful." Marx said "When we live in an environment where everything becomes a commodity, and use the money represented by the price to build the relationship between ourselves and the world, it will cause us to feel very empty, confused, and disoriented."
In "Parasite", we see President Park's family whose eyes are covered by money. In the upper-class society, they respect wealth and status, but ignore the lower-class people living in the dark. The gap between the rich and the poor has increased the antagonism between the two major classes and has become the fuse of the tragedy.
"Smell" is mentioned repeatedly in the movie. In addition to the innocent child keenly pointed out that Keize and his wife taste the same, they have appeared in the film several times. President Park and his wife who had returned from the rainstorm lay on the sofa. President Park said, "How can this smell?"; Song Kanghao, who lost his house after the rainstorm, had no change of clothes, so the smell on his body became more obvious in a clean car. When acting as a driver during the day, he keenly noticed that President Park and his wife smelled an unclean smell in the car. Whether it's hiding under a table in the rainy night or acting as a driver during the day, Song Kanghao will immediately pull the clothes down the tip of his nose and sniff it carefully as soon as Song Kanghao notices the president and his wife's attention to the smell. Perhaps it is because of the "upbringing" of the upper class, the president and his wife have never mentioned this directly.
The final climax of the film is also triggered by the "smell". On the day of the incident, the president's wife finally couldn't help but open the window of the car because of the smell in the car. Apart from embarrassment, Song Kanghao's expression became more solemn. When the husband of the old nanny ran out of the basement to take revenge, Song's wife knocked him down with a barbecue fork. President Park asked Song for the car key to escape, but the car key was unfortunately pressed under the blood-stained man. President Park turned the corpse over and took the key. He looked at the blood in the place and mentioned the smell again with disgust-"This smell...". This sentence completely angered Keize, who had just lost his daughter, and his anger and hatred made him stabbed the bayonet at his former employer desperately.
From the above, we can see that the smell symbolizes the contradiction between the rich and the poor. The taste that made President Park's family sensitive was the taste of the Keize family, the taste of their small and cramped basement, and the taste of the lower class. In addition to the contradictions of the opposing classes, money also exacerbated the internal contradictions of the lower classes.
The beginning of the film explains the living conditions of the Kize family-living in a crowded basement; financial distress and no money to pull the network cable, can only use the neighbor's WiFi; the only source of income at home is to discount takeaway boxes at the pizzeria. The burden of life makes people breathless and makes their expressions numb. When the insecticidal spray filled the room, Song Kanghao still folded the paper box blankly. Without money, survival is hard to maintain, so what is health? After the family parasite succeeded, the economy began to improve, and the audience saw a slight relaxed expression on Song's face.
The pizza shop where Keize works seems to be a “high-level” employer. It can be achieved through poor quality tomato sauce (the only sauce provided by pizza is a tomato sauce that is as thin as water but bright red) and a bad business environment. It can be seen that the pizza shop is also out of the "lower class" in the industry. Although in a similar situation, the pizzeria is in a dilemma just because it has a slightly higher status than the Keizer family. In addition to making it difficult for the pizza box to be folded unqualified, when serving pizza to the Kize family, he threw the plate on the table, showing his contempt and contempt for the Kize family.
There was an interesting conversation between Keize’s wife and the old nanny in the basement. At first, the old nanny didn't know that the whole family of Keize was parasitic in President Park's house, and thought that they had been caught with the pigtails, and begged the current nanny of President Park's house-Keize's wife to let them go.
Sister, please, it’s not easy for us, we are poor...
Keeze's wife interrupted her:
"Who is your sister, who do you call!"
After the parasitic secret was discovered, the dominant party in the conversation changed. Song's wife knelt beside the old nanny:
"Um, sister..."
Yo, who is your sister?
After discovering the secret, the old nanny used his mobile phone to record the video for his own survival and planned to pass it to President Park and his wife. This action completely urged the Kize family, and killed the old nanny in a panic.
The people at the bottom are fighting for limited resources for their livelihoods, so they persecute and hurt each other.
There are people who want to break through this darkness, such as brother and sister Jiyu. The children kept asking their father Keize what plans for the future. After the torrential rain, my father lay in the shelter and said, life, no plan is needed. Whenever you have a plan, something suddenly interrupts it.
But in the end, in the letter to his father, the son said: "I have a plan now." A series of shots showed us his son's plan. Finally, the shot returned to the mansion of President Park's house—according to Ki Woo's plan. , In the end he will buy this mansion.
After the plan is realized, you can walk out of the ground.
Then back to reality, it was still a dark basement.
Even if Ki Woo buys a house and achieves a class leap, can he get rid of this tragedy?
Every parasitic person is a tragedy. This is both a tragedy of fate and a tragedy of character.
The criterion for evaluating a movie is more than just "authenticity" and "narrative sense." Although this movie still has the most distinctive feature of Korean movies-seeing the shadow of facts in the movie. But what is striking is that compared with the previous "Memories of Murder", Feng Junhao injected more poetry into the movie this time.
When I first came to Korea, I heard the news from my teacher: a man lived in the house of a woman who lived alone. When the woman is at home, the man hides under the bed; when the woman goes out, the man crawls out from under the bed to secretly eat the food in the refrigerator and help the woman clean the room. This continued for several months until it was discovered.
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