초록/요약

After winning the Oscar awards for Parasite, Bong Joon Ho’s international status as a movie director has been greatly enhanced, and there have been many discussions his movies around the world. The evaluation and interpretation of the success and popularity of Parasite have become focal questions for movie critics and people in the film industry. Bong himself explained during an interview with journalists that the key to the success of Parasite was the particularities of Korean culture that were initially considered quite difficult for foreign audiences to properly understand. This study begins with this observation by the movie director. Which details can be defined as particularly Korean? We need to identify them and further investigate the Korean contexts underlying diverse aspects such as the objects, events, characters, and narratives of Parasite. What makes Parasite unique and at the same time successful with world audiences are its local particularities, unlike the common genre elements of Hollywood movies made for universal appeal. Parasite instead poses a set of anthropological questions about how individuals of different societies react to existing crises for their socio-cultural survival. To address this issue, I focus on how this movie made use of “sensual” elements in its narrative and delineate those particularities in detail. From smells to sounds, Bong maximizes the use of our bodily senses to drive the powerful events throughout the movie; various sensual elements and experiences were carefully crafted along with the progression of narratives to help build the tensions among the characters of the movie and heighten the spectator’s involvement in it. Despite this powerful and holistic appeal to the bodily senses, the very nature of the key characters of Kitak’s family and their total lack of moral sense surprises audiences. Prior to the final violent incidents during Dasong’s birthday, Kitak never showed resentment and anger toward Park’s contemptuous attitude, and never tried to cross the so-called “line” between him and his employer. Did he ever feel any humiliation but hid his real emotions? Or did he accept the given situation because there was simply nothing he could have done? If his actions reflected neither resignation nor endurance, we must examine these choices more deeply. With many cunning calculations and skills, all four of Kitak’s family successfully gained household jobs and penetrated the Parks’ residential realm, but they never asked more fundamental questions about their life choices. They seemed to accept that there were no social ladders of upward mobility for them and instead legitimized their deceitful actions to become parasites on the Parks. Should we blame them for becoming parasites? I think it is unreasonable to demand them to overturn the existing social gap between the haves and have-nots. They were destined to live precariously under the given social conditions, and it was a more realistic option for them to be parasites. These observations suggest that Parasite is not just a pessimistic and dark cinematic rendition of reality but should be considered to raise a serious question, artfully distorted by Bong Joon Ho, about the future of contemporary society.