Neoliberalization in South Korea was not only a desperate ploy to save capitalism from a crisis of its own making, but also an offensive against the movement of workers and students who ended three decades of military rule just years before the financial crisis. Nearly half of South Korea’s workforce are irregular workers, the result of two decades of steadfast assaults on labor stipulated by the IMF in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. From the onset, Bong and Han deploy English to chart South Korea’s neoliberal class system from below. “Penalty” and “brand image” are invoked by the boss to discipline the family’s labor. “Pizza” and “box” indicate the products the Kims create as irregular workers. The very first, “WIFI” refers to something the family doesn’t own yet relies on for their livelihood. When the Pizza Shidae manager discovers poorly constructed boxes, she disciplines the Kims with a “penalty” for the harm that could befall the company’s “brand image.”Įvery English word in the first five minutes of Parasite establishes the Kims’ class position in South Korea’s contemporary economy. Once they connect, they check for correspondence from “Pizza Shidae,” a pizza chain that contracts the Kims for “box” assembly. Ki-woo and Ki-jung, the Kims’ adult children, open the film with a search for their neighbor’s “WIFI” signal from their semi-basement home. This is most immediately established through the use of English.Įnglish is the contemporary language of capital in Parasite, it delineates class and maps power. The United States’ presence is thereby marked by its absence, which paradoxically illustrates the totalizing nature of its hegemony. Rather, Americanness is an aspirational status. No single character exemplifies Americanness definitively. This lens takes Parasite from an allegory of “class conflict” to one of imperialism, and illuminates the film’s recurring motifs of English, militarization and appropriated Indigenous material culture.Īs Korea’s present colonizer, the United States is implicated throughout Parasite. Examining the film as a story of class in the neocolony shifts it from a decontextualized tale of rich and poor to one of compradors and the colonized. Bong’s social critique concerns the international conditions of globalized capitalism, but particular to Korea’s neoliberal and neocolonial present. This is not a charge against any attempt to relate Parasite to other contexts. Parasite has made history never mind how history has made Parasite. Consequently, the more Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is regarded, the more it seems to vanish in the spectacle of its acclaim. The emphasis on universality is achieved through a negation of the particular in a typical display of liberal chauvinism. Dargis’s review isn’t particularly egregious, but it’s emblematic of the conceit of many critics, exceptions notwithstanding. In other words, the film has to be made applicable to “Los Angeles or London” to become legible. In an early and emblematic review, Manohla Dargis notes in The New York Times: “The story takes place in South Korea but could easily unfold in Los Angeles or London.” Parasite’s setting is rendered an obstacle that must be transcended as a precondition to its recognition. Recognition itself hinges on the gaze, and the imperial variety suffuses Parasite’s critical reception. Parasite has made history, which is a euphemism for achieving Western recognition - history’s qualifier.
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