The Korean film Parasite, which won the Palme d ‘Or in Cannes not long ago, continues the usual style of director Bong Joon ho: strong theoretical character and ideological criticism tendency. Therefore, as far as the film itself is concerned, "Parasite" sacrificed the rationality of the plot to some extent for several clear ideological critical images, or the director may have deliberately created the fragmentation and irrationality of the plot to highlight its critical intention.
At the beginning of the film, the protagonist’s brother, who lives in a semi-basement, is introduced by high school classmates to be a tutor for the daughter of a rich family (because classmates think that he is a loser with no competitive ability and will not replace him in the heart of that big lady). However, my brother quickly took advantage of this opportunity to "parasitize" the whole family in the rich family — — My sister disguised as an art major and introduced her to the younger brother of the rich family as a tutor. My sister then introduced her father as a private driver with rich experience to the hostess of the rich family. After that, the three of them worked together to drive away the housekeeper who had been entrenched in this mansion for the longest time, and let her replace her, and the family of four won the meeting. The first half of the story has the characteristics of a typical commercial drama, and the audience enters the life of the upper class with all kinds of survival wisdom belonging to the bottom people, even though it is not so "moral", and all the way forward is unfavorable.
This upward rhythm reached its climax with the rich family traveling and the protagonist’s family occupying the mansion and drinking freely, and then it was interrupted by the return of the housekeeper who had been expelled — — It turned out that the housekeeper hid her husband in the unknown basement of this mansion for many years. The housekeeper and the protagonist’s family discovered each other’s parasitic secrets, and then the rich family returned early because of the rainstorm. In the panic, the housekeeper was injured by the protagonist’s mother, and then she was put in the basement. The protagonist’s family fled in a panic except her mother. The plot took a turn for the worse, from the relaxed and high-spirited brother’s perspective in the first half to the depressed father’s perspective of Song Kanghao, and the film itself also changed from an entertaining commercial plot to a literary film full of symbolic metaphor and the director’s critical intention. The expectation given to the audience by the intentional overjoy in the first half was intentionally broken by the violent outbreak of the plot in the second half, and the intentional separation of the film’s perspective, plot and atmosphere brought the audience a sharp impact and even uncomfortable viewing experience, which is exactly the intention of Parasite as an author film.
Personally, I don’t like this kind of shooting method very much. The author’s strong intention is to make the film expression almost similar to writing a paper. Watching movies is like doing text analysis, which weakens the impact of the film as a purely presented art and sacrifices the sincerity of the presentation itself. So what I wrote next was not a film review, but the second half of the whole film as an ideological critical text to talk about the director’s critical intention.
1. Crazy man in the basement
The discovery of the crazy man hiding in the huge basement under the mansion by the former housekeeper was the first impact point of the film "Super-expansion". As a classic image in feminist literature, "crazy woman in the attic" represents the dehumanization of women after being suppressed and distorted by the patriarchal society — — Her body is alive, but she has lost the symbolic identity of a woman as a wife, daughter and mother. In other words, a crazy woman is a woman who dies symbolically. She has lost all her place in a patriarchal society and has become a living dead person who is still alive.
The crazy man in the basement in this movie is also trapped in the gap between life and death. After failing to open a cake shop, owing a lot of debts, losing money and shelter, and hiding in this basement, this failed man also died symbolically in capitalist society — — As a man, he lost everything that a man should have as defined by a patriarchal society. Feeding with a baby bottle in the basement is like being breastfed by his wife, and slowly sipping a banana in the way of a child, he becomes a parasite attached to his wife. After being stripped of all symbolic identities, this man only has appetite and lust (bottle, condom package strung on iron tongs), which has become the embodiment of pure drive.
No wonder President Park’s youngest son was scared to death by him, leaving a psychological shadow — — The reason why the lens with only a pair of nervously wide-eyed eyes exposed in the darkness is disgusting and uncomfortable is precisely this: those eyes are completely inhuman, and they belong to the naked life of zero level. For the boy, the encounter with those ferocious eyes is exactly the encounter with the impossible real world, and it is the encounter with Otherness that he can’t understand at all. However, this otherness did not arouse Levinas’ ethical responsibility, but caused trauma: what the little boy witnessed was not other people’s faces, but the wound left by the whole symbolic order after cutting the subject, a small moving and bleeding surplus outside the social body.
Symbolic order once cut this man into various social identities — — Judging from the Chinese books in the basement, he probably studied law and had a certain degree of knowledge of history and social sciences. However, after entering the basement, this cutting completely failed, but it did not restore him to a "natural person" or a "free man" in a pre-social state. Instead, it left him with nothing, making him an extra piece of flesh and blood in the social body. This flesh and blood is redundant with the wounds left by the cutting, but it is still "alive". Symbolic order once parasitized him, dominating and arranging all his desires, but when he hid in the basement and got rid of this parasitism passively, he completely lost everything as a person and himself, leaving only the forced repetition of eating and sexual desire — — Like a living piece of meat.
However, this living piece of meat still bears the hollow wound left by the parasitic symbolic order. This man, deprived of dignity, wealth, responsibility and all noble possibilities, is still trying to respond to the call of the Other: he posted a rich and dignified photo of President Park as the head of the family in the basement, turned on the light for him, said "Respect" to him, and placed his photo among many celebrities in history. This is the part where this man is "crazy" in the psychoanalytic sense (not the part where he kills with a knife at the end of the film): he creates an illusion for himself. By respecting and serving President Park, who "provides him with food and shelter", he is willing to endure the humiliation and trauma brought to him by the symbolic order, and fills his symbolic lack with this illusion, and even wants to live with this illusion all the time.
2. "no plan" twice
The play talked about "no plan" twice. The first time, when the hero locked his former housekeeper in the basement, he asked the crazy man in the basement what he was living in this hellhole for. Do you have any plans? The crazy man said, there are so many people living in the basement in South Korea that I am nothing special, so I have no plans. Please let me continue to live here. The second time was in the gymnasium after the rainstorm. Facing the possible bankruptcy of the family’s "parasitic upper class" plan, my son asked his father what his plan was. His father said that without a plan, "life can never follow the plan, so people should not have a plan". "If you don’t have a plan at first, it doesn’t matter what happens, whether you kill people or betray the country, it all fucking doesn’t matter, understand?"
Two "no plans" just constitute the hero’s journey through the illusion: the first time the hero asked the crazy man what his plans were, he was still in the trust of the illusion of "planning", and he still trusted the rational planning ability of the subject and the symbolic order itself. The crazy man, too, lost his symbolic identity but was still addicted to the false identity of the illusion.
By the time the father answered his son’s "no plan" for the second time, the man had "crossed the illusion": he understood that "plan" itself was a deceptive and false illusion, and it disguised the social confrontation and division that could not be eliminated as a class climb that could be achieved through cunning and money — — You are poor and fail because you don’t work hard enough, have a "plan" and plan well enough. As long as you are smart enough and have a plan, you can become rich and solve all the problems that plague you in this world. As the play says, "The lives of rich people are ironed out by money."
It is almost the most common illusion in contemporary ideology to have a "plan" and become rich, just like the song by teacher Mao Bu: "I became rich and all my troubles were left in the horizon. When I become rich, I become rich, and then I sincerely say that money is not everything. " The interesting thing about this song is that it literally praises the great magic of the illusion of "becoming rich", and at the same time highlights the essence of the illusion of "becoming rich" with an idiotic naive tone. As a social illusion, "becoming rich" is actually a means for ideology to cope with its internal division and failure in advance. The stagnation, failure and confrontation of society itself are distributed in bulk on each individual, and the illusion turns its head and tells the individual: "No, it’s not the fault of the world, it’s your fault. Your fault is that you have no plan and no money." The illusion thus establishes the subject’s desire: through the "plan", the protagonist’s family will become "parasitic upper class" rich, and all suffering and oppression will disappear.
However, the illusion is an illusion after all. On that chaotic rainy night, the hero heard President Park’s contemptuous evaluation of him, witnessed the tragicomedy of another bottom-level family parasitizing the underground, escaped from the mansion like a cockroach with his children, was flooded by the rainstorm, and finally slept in the gym with people who also lost their shelter. The moment when the hero passes through the illusion is the moment when he confirms that he has no plan. The hero says, "If there is no plan, it doesn’t matter whether he kills or betrays the country." This sentence is the key for the hero to see through the ideological machine: it is not his "plan" that parasitizes the upper class, but the symbolic order and ideological machine that parasitizes him. The free and active subject implied by "planned" is false, and the prohibition of killing and betraying the country is nothing more than a ban. The inherent social confrontation and alienation of the subject are basically indelible, and the violent imprint imposed on him by the symbolic order is just like the "poor smell" of their family, which is invisible and inseparable, and they have never planned it.
Therefore, "no plan" in the gymnasium means the hero’s insight into the lack and emptiness of symbolic order, and also means his complete abandonment of the whole hypocritical ideology — — To use a classic villain line, it is "not my fault, but the fault of the world." This also paved the way for the hero to finally stab the knife.
3. Pure violence
The knife that Song Kanghao finally stabbed President Park was the breaking point of the film’s climax. At President Park’s youngest son’s birthday party, the crazy man in the basement came to the ground for revenge because of his wife’s death. He first smashed the son of the protagonist who wanted to kill him, and then stabbed the daughter of the protagonist with a knife. In the chaos, the mother of the protagonist’s family fought with him and stabbed him. At this moment when the situation has been controlled, President Park’s action of covering his nose when turning the crazy man to find the car keys broke out, and he picked up the crazy man’s knife and stabbed President Park.
As a pure violence, this knife is really hard not to remind people of Zizek’s explanation of Benjamin’s Divine Violence: this pure violence is completely meaningless, and there is no plan or plan in this knife, not to solve the previous troubles, but it seems to be purely emotional — — Because of President Park’s action of covering his nose, at this moment of covering his nose, the hero seems to be the most direct and explosive embodiment of anger at all the bottom and all the "filth".
But what needs to be resisted here is the temptation to explain it as the jealousy and revenge of the poor or the weak against the rich, and then criticize the impulse of the hero and the "moral kidnapping" of "you are weak and you are right". This explanation completely missed the director’s intention. As far as the plot of the film is concerned, President Park has almost nothing to criticize in the sense of common sense: he is generous and kind to his domestic helpers, a rich generation who runs a technology company, a good boss, a good father and a good husband, and has never even expressed malice and discrimination in private, and his most biased evaluation of the hero is just "He crossed the line" — — Because as a driver, the hero made two comments on his private life, the closest point to the moral flaw may be that when the crazy man stabbed the protagonist’s daughter, he still seemed to be in a hurry to get the key and give priority to sending his son to the hospital.
The setting of President Park shows that the director’s narrative intention is very obvious: he just wants to make the victim so "perfect" to highlight the indescribable anger of the hero. Just the action of covering your nose, just airily saying that the driver crossed the line, just living in a mansion that won’t be flooded by heavy rain, and just thinking about saving your own son in a crisis, can these constitute the guilt that President Park must die? Did the hero swing that knife out of jealousy or hatred to retaliate, punish or even kill President Park as a person?
The answer is obviously no. As many viewers perceive, these reasons for killing President Park are far-fetched. It is by paving these far-fetched reasons that the director opposes any possibility of interpreting this knife as revenge against President Park as an individual. The director just wants to make this knife seem completely unreasonable, completely a passionate killing by the side, and completely a direct manifestation of nameless anger, which does not need to be explained by common sense and refuses to be explained.
President Park is innocent. His family and all the decent people who came to the party are innocent. Even if they only think about their own people or run away in times of crisis, they are still innocent. But it is precisely this innocent and President Park’s unconscious nose-covering action that completely broke out the hero. It is this absolutely unreasonable outbreak that the director wants the audience to focus on in the second half of the whole movie.
If the film criticizes some kind of violence, then this innocence and ignorance is the biggest violence it criticizes. The vast majority of people parasitized by ideological machines are innocent and ignorant. They are dominated by the objective violence of symbolic order, and they willingly fill their flesh into the grid of order, and are divided and dismembered by it, incarnating the diploma, qualification certificate, ID card, real estate license and banknotes that define who you are, and also find a value orientation in them — — Noble and lowly, upper and lower, rich and poor, wisdom and stupidity, all words are marked with value meanings and automatically attached to each subject. In this way, people like President Park accepted the appointment of the symbol machine in an "innocent" way, and sincerely added the illusion of fairness and justice to it.
This innocence and ignorance angered Song Kanghao. At that moment, he further realized that he was the one who was humiliated by the whole symbolic order, that is, the crazy man hiding in the basement. He smelled the smell that he used to take for granted. He once surrendered unconsciously like President Park and the crazy man, and now he turned into a mockery of himself. Covering one’s nose, drawing boundaries, the superior residential area of the superior people and the inferior residential area of the inferior people, these things that are not "violence" in the daily context are precisely the structural violence produced by the symbolic order, and it is this objective and symbolic violence that induces the pure violence of the hero wielding a knife.
The most uncomfortable and even unbearable shock in the movie comes from the pure violence of the hero. Pure violence is a meaningless symbol, it is only a symbol of injustice and social unrest in the world, and it represents a complete negation: at the moment when the hero wields a knife, he has assimilated himself with the crazy man in the basement — — They lost their wives and daughters respectively, and they were completely excluded from the symbolic order structure, tearing the false consistency of society by violence.
Pure violence rejects any sublime or individualized explanation. This knife is not the bottom revenge of justice, nor can it be explained by the intolerance of individual temperament — — Let’s remember once again that the knife presented in the film is completely a symbol. If we try to trace the vagrant’s whereabouts and the gold driver’s usual personality like the media at the end of the story, then we will completely miss the meaning of the film.
The impact effect of this knife is to expose and tear the ideological illusion of innocence and ignorance, showing the incompetence of the other and the impossibility of social consistency. The moment when pure violence breaks out is the moment when the real world breaks through the symbolic order and the moment when the activated death drive appears. The object of revenge by this knife is not any specific person, but the heavy rain that fell from the sky, which is a suffocating symbolic order deeply parasitic on all people. It is like heavy rain from the sky, which seems to fall fairly and stick to everyone, and then it surges downward, drowning the poor in low-lying areas and confusing the rich in high places — — The rich man stood on a high place, thanking God for his gift. The man on the high place said, "It’s fair for the clouds to rain."
Step 4 set sail again
At the end of the movie, a new journey through the illusion set sail again — — The audience’s perspective returned to my brother, who fantasized that he would make a lot of money in the future and buy the unreachable mansion, so that his father could come out of the ground and the family could reunite, and the transshipment landscape stone that caused all the humiliation and misfortune was put back into the pool — — Everything is ironed out by the illusion of money again. But this fantasy is not the director’s kindness but the director’s ridicule. Living in that mansion, giving the body to the symbolic order and being castrated and dismembered again, the truth will be forgotten forever, and nothing seems to have changed.
This film is indeed highly landscaped. It seems that the whole story is strung together as a landscape stone, and the director’s critical intention and the whole ideological operation structure are concentrated in the basement of the protagonist’s house-the mansion of President Park’s house-the basement of the mansion. This concentration has caused many unreasonable plots, which has weakened the overall expression of the film to some extent. However, Parasite is still not a bad movie. The shock, strangeness and discomfort it brings, like Song Kanghao’s knife, force everyone to think about the possible truth of this social parasitism. (He Yingting)
