Even if they live in the same building, residents on the upper floors wake up in the sun shining into their beds at 7:00, and the lower floors may be cloudy all day long. How can it be said that you and I live in the same world. The modernization process has successfully created a kaleidoscopic world of different levels and dimensions in the same space. At the same time, what is broken down is our consciousness, and the consequent dissolution of the individual will. These are times of confusion and powerlessness.
split of consciousness
In "Parasite", Feng Junhao pierces the illusion of life: we all live in the same (beautiful) world . The rich Pu family and the poor Jin family live together in an independent villa designed and supervised by artist teacher Nangong Xianzi.
In this regard, the film uses a lot of (nearly) symmetrical mirror image contrasts, which is a good representation of the treatment and explanation (this is also one of the "parasites" that has been criticized as "too clear". slot).
There are many examples of mirroring contrasts in the movie, ranging from the villa designed by the artist, to the ordinary family structure, the windows of the Jinpu family, and to the subtleties of the family members' personalities, which are woven layer by layer by the director like a Russian doll suit. into the movie.
We can see the "real self" through the "self-like" (undifferentiated individual) in the mirror. This "self-like" in the mirror is a "deceptive appearance", in which lurks every The nature of a person that has been altered by the forces that haunt the ego.
This mirroring analogy is not difficult to understand.
An example: Because they "live" in a villa and the family sits in the living room drinking heavily, Kim Ki-taek (dad) thinks this is their home. He knows his name is not written on the title deed of the villa, but he thinks/believes this is their home.
In modern society, people's consciousness is constantly being separated, and consciousness is divided into interconnected, relatively separate but contradictory levels.
Did the Jin family know they were poor before they crossed over with the Pu family? of course I know. But this kind of knowing, and the subconscious self-level identification, are two different things.
After long-term contact with President Park's family, they really knew their "poor".
President Park's family and the villa that represents the wealthy class have become the "like me" of the Kim family in front of the mirror, in which Kim Ki-taek can see his unwillingness (by discussing love with President Park) and despair (finally). The out-of-control murder), Ki-woo sees (false) hope in it (hoping to really fall in love with Da-hye or even get married, hoping to buy a villa through his own efforts to save his father).
Reality splits consciousness into separate spaces, and it also plays the role of bonding them together. This bonding of consciousness spaces will allow the subject (person) to have a brand new view of the real world that he is familiar with in the past. , and often with a strong sense of inauthenticity.
This kind of fragmented cognition of the world is the inevitable confusion of individuals in a modern society where the creation of illusions is the main driving force of economic prosperity.
It is not that this confusion is brand new and has never been seen before, but the refined operating rules of modern society have led to the fragmentation of consciousness to the point where it is visible to the naked eye.
Social rules, customs, and regional culture are no longer limited factors that suppress self-power. Industry and media subdivisions have become a powerful force that separates consciousness in the new generation, just like the smog in Beijing. , people can not see five fingers, in a short life, unable to live in peace.
"Parasite" starts from a simple social phenomenon, and explores this kind of vulnerability about self-knowledge, illusion and its influence on personal will.
An example: Although we know that it is impossible, most of us subconsciously believe a lie that is so strong and strong that we will believe it accidentally: we think we can use the circle of friends to locate and punch abroad, and the same ins net red spot map , Meitu Xiuxiu beauty filters, and partial composition can build a "good life" that is not equivalent to our actual life.
This urge to look just to make yourself (and your life) beautiful hides not just beauty, but a desire to (effortlessly) rank yourself with a life you can't support No.
SNS social networking sites/apps such as ins, Weibo, and Moments are constantly fragmenting our level of consciousness, creating unreal mirror fragments and making our lives miserable.
To put it aside, H&M, Zara and Uniqlo were able to become commercial giants before. Isn’t capital accumulation based on these unrealistic delusions?
Similar to it are Blue Bottle, Muji and other lifestyle coffee/home brands, which have now become civilian brands Ikea and Starbucks. When they entered the Chinese market early more than a decade ago, they also used this kind of cheap cost. of good life.
The success of Ikea and the failure of Muji are two opposite examples of the impossibility of such unrealistic delusions to last.
The success of Ikea is that it has always positioned itself as a civilian brand, while Muji, which is also a civilian brand in Japan, attempts to build a middle-class life brand in China, but the parent company's brand premium (even across a country) cannot support it from such a position.
Sure, you might be able to pair Uniqlo, H&M, and Zara well (there are plenty of people who make their first pot of gold with their excellent matching ability), but a picture on a social networking site alone is never enough. will live the life of someone who can afford the luxury. Because what they are wearing and what they are holding in their hands is only the tip of the iceberg compared to their actual cost of living, but we think that is the whole of a good life.
And you think, with this picture in front of the phone, you can get closer to this kind of life. Although it is cruel, although the T-shirt you buy with 100 yuan may look the same as someone else's T-shirt for 1W yuan, behind the price tag behind this T-shirt are two distinct life circles.
It is disrespectful to oneself to try to claim a life without difference through a T-shirt that looks the same.
The discussion here is not about effort and class traversal, but about the fault of consciousness that we are trapped in the mirror image of fragments, because if we are not careful, we will be trapped in these fragments and unable to extricate ourselves.
dissolution of will
Kim Ki-taek's predicament is that the freedom he thinks is not real freedom, and the connection he feels he can build (with the Park family and the wealthy class they represent) does not actually exist. At least, it doesn't exist in him.
In a larger category, the absolute "human freedom" that Sartre believed in, the pure freedom based on the self, does not exist.
On the contrary, each of us is limited from the moment we are born, our hands are bound, we are caught in a cobweb of language, habits, assets and customs beyond our control, Just as Kim Ki-taek was firmly suppressed by President Park's "subway smell".
Even though he managed to sit in the living room of President Park's house and drink heavily, he still had a "subway smell" on him.
Kim Ki-taek's personal will melted away with the knife that was inserted into President Park's chest. From then on, he could no longer (gou) live in this world. Not only because of judicial pursuit and social pressure, but because of his (once) meaning of existence in this world, he was smashed into pieces and could no longer be put together.
His attack on President Park was not his resentment and dissatisfaction with the wealthy class, but an expression of his unwillingness and an unconscious act driven by despair.
In this way, in the end, he chose to return to the basement of the villa, which is not difficult to understand - it is a space without time and reality, and it is the best shelter for those chaotic souls.
In my opinion, Ki Woo's will was also dissolved in the end.
The boundaries of Ki-woo's fantasy at the end of the film are ambiguous: it's debatable whether the line of imagination begins with putting the rock back on the river or seeing the twinkling lights.
But the movie doesn't give a clear answer, and stops abruptly when Ki-woo wakes up.
It is understandable for Kim Ki-taek to escape back to the basement, but being discovered by Ki-woo and determined to work hard to enter the wealthy class, buy a villa to save his father, (combined with the final awakening reversal), the treatment looks more like A commercial movie trope (if it's true) that has a shocking effect, but that's about it.
If we say that this is a hope left by the director for the audience, this hope is too vain and seems powerless.
This reversal of the time of waking up has greatly reduced the carefully constructed mirror images in front of the director and the meaning behind them. above, the reason far below "Burning".
I prefer to believe that it was Ki Woo returning to the scene of the tragedy day after day that created the illusion that his father lived in the basement and was able to communicate with him using Morse code. After all, how long does it take to communicate such a long series of letters with Morse code? It is very difficult to achieve when there are new people living in the villa.
Ki-woo, like his father, is trapped in a fractured sense of freedom.
I am not saying that it is impossible to cross classes, nor that it is wrong to pursue a better life (there is nothing wrong with despair), but under the broken consciousness, searching for the meaning and freedom of life in a kaleidoscope is tantamount to seeking fish from the woods.
What I want to borrow from "Parasite" is that those who have been domesticated by (history, power, discipline, culture, customs, capital, etc.) have long since " lost their original animal vitality " and become a modern economy. The undifferentiated individuals in the machine " have lost even the ability to escape ", let alone change and resistance.
All they have is to play games with mirages in the desert, exhausting their energy, and never get on the fool's ship that sails to the wild.
As the inevitable result of the fractured consciousness, the dissolution of Kim Ji-taek's personal will is also the psychological root behind his "theory of "unplanned life".
Do you know what plan will never fail? No plan. Why? Life can never go according to plan. Look here, are these people planning to sleep together in the gym tonight? But now, including us, we all sleep on the floor together. Therefore, one should not have a plan. You can't go wrong without a plan. If you don't have a plan in the first place, it doesn't matter. Murder or betrayal, it doesn't matter anymore, you know?
brave of life
The only person who truly sees herself clearly is Zhongshu. She knows that as long as "the lights are turned on, their family will scatter back to the dark corners like cockroaches", and only she who sees the world clearly and clearly can survive the crisis. Underneath, she can also have the courage to defend her family, instead of collapsing completely at the moment when reality and illusion collide, like her husband.
Zhongshu is a real life hero. Her personal will is not shaken by the changes in the living environment. There should be a gap between the sky and the earth between the poor married life now and when she was a national gold medal athlete, right? But it is rare to see her reminiscing about the good life of the old days.
Unlike Kim Ki-taek who spends the rest of his life in chaos (if this ending is not part of Ki-woo's imagination), after the incident, Chung-sook, who is accused of murdering the criminal's wife, not only has to face the tragedy of the white-headed man sending the black-headed man alone, The society's reviled and contemptuous eyes, but also to take care of the injured son.
Parasite is not essentially a story about the gap between the rich and the poor, but a story purely about poverty and the splintering of consciousness under modern illusions until the will of the individual is completely dissolved.
In the end, each of us will become a willless little part of the globalized economic machine. Occasionally, glitches that get out of control and rise up, but no amount of glitches can be easily repaired by the big society in an instant.
After all, glitch is just an unconscious deviation behavior, which is not affected by personal will.
The work of the same Korean director, "Parasite" is indeed very commercial, and there is no maverick paragraph like "Burning" (the sunset dance of half-naked and full Zhongrui is too poetic and beautiful), but this does not represent the quality of the former. It's bad. On the contrary, those echoing elements that run through the whole film are also very worth talking about.
Visible mirror comparison
window
The windows of the two families are a very clear contrast.
3/4 of the scenes of the movie take place in the living room of the villa. The living room of President Park's family has a high floor-to-ceiling window in the whole movie. At the same time, it is an indispensable prop in the whole story and promotes the dramatic development. Covered the most "thrilling" part of the whole film:
It is precisely because of the transparency of the floor-to-ceiling windows that the Parks decided to spend the night in the living room to take care of their young son who insisted on camping in the courtyard, while Ki-woo, Kit-ting and Ki-taek were trapped under the table in the living room like cockroaches.
But this floor-to-ceiling window is not only a necessary prop for the plot, its role is far beyond the production design level, but is based on the entire mirror design principle, which has a symbolic meaning with the living room window of Jin's living room that is level with the ground level. symmetry.
The four-frame-length window of Jin's family, which is at the same level as the horizontal line of the road, has no substantial plot effect except to strengthen the economic status of Jin's family; in the film, what the director wants to express through this window is more thematic of.
In these four-pane long windows, the director arranged a very warm splashing battle, recording the only, so to speak, genuine and heartfelt happy time of the Jin family in the entire film.
This perception is more real than the "happiness" of them sitting in the Park's living room drinking together. It seems that at a certain moment, they feel a certain absolute (but fleeting) freedom, and life is moving towards a certain A great future is on the way.
basement
The villa that President Park bought has an unknown basement. The existence of this basement alone makes the original designer and owner, Teacher Nangong, ashamed. This reluctance to admit is so strong that he is unwilling to let the next person Buyers know it exists.
This kind of disgust is consistent with President Park's shunning of the subway smell emanating from Kim Ki-taek. They live above the bright surface; on the other side of the city, the Ki-woo family lives below the surface.
Mobile phone signal
Ji Yu found the signal of the new merchant "Coffee Kingdom 2G" in the corner of the ceiling of the toilet. The villa designed by Mr. Nangong, even in the basement with an almost closed environment, the signal is still good enough to allow the nanny to send a "packet capture video" with one click. "To President Park.
family leader
There is another similarity between the two families, that is, the family has a strong leader. The Kim family is Chung Sook's mother, and the Park family is President Park.
At the beginning of the film, the director gave a close-up of the medal for the winner of the gold mother women's hammer project, which corresponds to the news reports of President Park that appeared many times later: Nathan Park Hits Central Park (Park's enterprise invaded Central Park in the United States), the individual won ENN Technology Award...
I always feel that people who can have skills can better handle themselves and find their position more accurately in interpersonal relationships and society. Of course, this is just my personal opinion on the image of Zhongshu in the movie.
President Park's family leadership is very obvious, and in the Kim family, Zhongshu's position is unshakable. She decides all matters in life, and Jin Jize can only follow her command and occasionally be a thug.
When the pizza box went wrong, she appeared to communicate with the delivery staff; when the whole family faced a life-and-death crisis, she fought calmly and bravely for the family compared to the collapsed husband; she was also the only supporting force. to sustain the traumatized family.
Invisible mirror tipping point
In the mirror comparisons above, the director also clearly drew the critical point of this "like me"/true self very vividly (this is also a point where the movie was criticized as "too clear").
President Park mentioned Kim Ki-taek's (almost) cross-border issue more than twice. Driver Yoon, who was framed by the Kim family before, also expressed similar disgust:
Why do you want to be in my car, just be in the front seat of yourself, why cross the line?
" The unique taste of people who take the subway " is a detail that Feng Junhao repeatedly portrayed in the middle and later stages of the film with dialogue, character performance and makeup. A simple, everyday visible detail that is extremely easy to perceive and resonate.
This resonance is so strong that most people subconsciously smell their necklines after watching the movie.
In this series of shots about taste, the details of the hostess's tall feet are inserted, which is also an reinforcement and irony of this unique taste of different classes.
But it is more worth discussing why the older Kim Ki-taek reacted most strongly to this strict distinction between the rich and the poor than the director explicitly constructed this critical point of vision and smell .
Not just because he is the subject of President Park's long discussion, but the deeper reason is that compared to his two children and his wife, Kim Ki-taek is the oldest and an economic contributor in a conventional family/society. In the past, I must have experienced a lot of efforts with good wishes to try to cross the class (such as running an ancient cake shop), and finally ended in failure.
If he is still young, like Ji Yu and Ji Ting, he is still in the early years of his life when he is full of energy and does not fully understand the solidification of class and the difficulty of advancing, the impact of this kind of slap in the face of his identity will only be limited to him. A little loss of dignity will not lead to questioning the whole meaning of life, no hope for the future or even instant collapse.
Or an individual who enjoys himself and doesn't care about the concept of class, but Kim Ki-taek obviously does not have this kind of personality that sees through class.
At his age and ability, he can only try to build the illusion of an equal dialogue with the wealthy through small but essentially useless details.
Taking the initiative to shake the hand of President Park's wife, or repeatedly questioning the relationship between President Park's husband and wife, etc. These are all behaviors that have no effect on establishing a real dialogue qualification, but they are the only things that Kim Ki-taek can think of. , or the only act that is capable of doing so that comes closest to this desire.
This behavior is common.
For example, when they are still young, ordinary young people will try to integrate into the life circle of the rich second generation, or simulate this way of life on social media, hoping to achieve equal dialogue on the virtual network.
This vain hope can be seen in one of Ki-woo's descriptions of Kit-ting:
Lying in the bathtub and watching TV is like living here for a long time.
This is not just vanity at work, but the act of owning a mirror image of wealth. It seems that you are also involved, but you are not. The behavior of incoherent consciousness is very figuratively reflected here.
This kind of misunderstanding and pursuit, which is extremely socially shaped, is one of the sources of the great sense of gap in life. Instead of pursuing the most rooted qualifications and rights of being a human being, they exhaust their efforts in social status.
Such a person does not care about equality, but is on the side of the scale that occupies social resources, so Jin Zeji's view of the hostess of the Park family is "rich but kind" (in other words, if he himself becomes a rich man A rich man, may not necessarily be able to do like her).
This leads to a basic question: whether the equality we seek is the equality of personality, the right to subsistence, the ascension channel, or just the simple and rude equality of wealth.
Use of repeating shots
In the use of mirroring techniques, the repeated shooting of the same scene has become the most obvious and important processing method in "Parasite". Different applications continue to reinforce the intensification of this mirror image.
storage room stair entrance
Among them, the most frequently repeated is this very iconic backlit storage wall. The hostess of the Park family, Kim Ji-taek and the strange uncle in the basement all appear in the same role, and the strange uncle can be selected as the annual The most terrifying picture.
Kim's window
The four-pane window of the Kim house has quite a lot of shots, and there are already four close-ups, and it also covers the beginning and (reversal) end of the film.
Ancient style cake shop
This magical Korean start-up was also mentioned twice by the director, once on Kim Ki-taek and once on the strange uncle in the basement.
Park's bathroom
The bathroom of the Park family is also used as a mirror image for comparison. The two scenes of President Park and Kiting have no difference even in lighting and color temperature.
Feng Junhao's addiction to the mirror technique has made "Parasite" a unique textbook for this technique to a certain extent, but besides preparing for the exam, who would go through the textbook twice.
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