#even besides the political violence and exploitation and dispossession

[grouchomarxiste-blog1]

Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite: Marx and Violence

Warning: A majority of this was written pre-pandemic, so please excuse my overly optimistic tone. It was a different time.

Yes, another Bong Joon-Ho film. Can you blame me? The guy’s a genius. Parasite was another one of those great films that will never leave you. You can watch the movie simply without doing a major analysis in your head and you will still agree that it’s a great movie. Which personally, is why I believe it's made its way into the major American awards season. Parasite winning Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes was one of the few decisions I’ve agreed with. I didn’t see any of the winners in the film categories besides Parasite, and I’m very much ok with that. It’s making its way into Hollywood and the favorite lists of celebrities. Elon Musk said he loved Parasite (he also turned Grimes, the former “anti-imperialist,” to the mother of his future child). Chrissy Teigen loved Parasite (a lot can be said about her, so let’s not). Obama loved Parasite (but I have some serious doubts about the authenticity of his yearly favorites list. Mainly because I can’t imagine him listening to Summer Walker). I was completely boggled at all of those tweets. How? How is one so blind? How did one watch Parasite and not feel a thing? After I watched Parasite, I rushed back to school to attend the discussion section of my Political Theory class so I could read and discuss primitive accumulation through dispossession with revolutionary fervor. I recommended it to everyone near me. I even wrote a note to my professor who tucked it into his book. But is that the problem- that all these beloved figures (not mine) end up loving the sheer adrenaline of the story and tweet to their followers about how great the movie is. Those followers, with their favorite celebrities’ seal of approval, watch the movie, not putting it together either. Bong Joon-Ho is critiquing those very figures! In every post-Parasite interview, Bong Joon-Ho has said that Parasite is about America and capitalism, but we have just reduced those statements to memes on Twitter. As funny as they are, Parasite is rich for its class analysis. The Hollywood reaction is just as important. Marx is all over this movie, there's no question about it. I also want us to understand these controversial moments from a Fanonian perspective, again all with relation to Marx. I hope for us to understand that everything about this movie is intentional and every bit of it is worth pages and pages of discussion. I nearing 11 pages as I write this. I also hope that this film can be a way for us to understand economic exploitation in the 21st century. While many celebrities have misunderstood it, it is important that you, us, the people, the working class, grasp every bit of this radical film.

I’m not going to bother with another one of my “brief summary” because I’m assuming, we’ve all seen it. It's on Hulu now and I believe Apple TV. If you don’t want to pay for either platforms, watch a pirated version online, I genuinely don’t think Bong will mind.

I want to talk about the home. I know we all had the same reaction to that beautiful home: awe, admiration, and envy. The Park’s home itself is significant, but also in contrast to the Kims’ home. The Kim’s live in a small semi-basement home, where they have to reach up in order to look out their window and see the street level. Their home is dirty, cramped, just not a place where anyone wants to be. But immediately, I thought of Fanon and the native sector. I know that Parasite isn’t about colonialism, but space is important to Marx (I’ll return to Fanon). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels attribute many things to the process of proletarianization. To name a few: literacy campaigns and public education, the politicization of the proletariat towards the end of feudalism, expansion of media, etc. One that stands out, is the mass migration and urbanization of the proletariat. Through that, the proletariat was concentrated into the poorest parts of the city where they shared their most intimate quarters with workers like themselves (Marx and Engels, 15) One might dismiss this as a historical example specific to Europe, but if we go back to my thoughts on Memories of Murder, we’d note how Korea’s transition to a modern capitalist society, was a fairly recent one (from 1987 onwards). As the agricultural sector suffered, Koreans living in the rural provinces were forced to move into the major cities. Park (Song Kang-Ho’s character in Memories) was lucky enough to become a successful businessman, unlike the Kims who earn their livelihood by holding pizza boxes- the most insignificant work. Along with urbanization, the proletariat also occupied the small space of the factory, where they are reminded of the everyday brutality of their work. The Park’s home is not cramped, but the one scene where everyone is rushing to hide from them, results in Ki-taek, Ki-jeong, and Ki-woo hiding underneath a coffee table overnight. After that lengthy battle with Geun-sae and Moon-gwang, the Kims are exhausted. They do not want to be laying side by side hearing the Parks have sex. My friend Sef also reminded me that the Parks had weird sex as Mr. Park recalled how their old chauffeur possibly had sex with a drugged-up prostitute, a scenario that previously made Mrs. Park scream out of disgust. Revisiting this, I believe this definitely deserves a psychoanalytic analysis.

This isn’t their breaking point, but also hearing Mr. Park say that Ki-taek smells like the subway is a factor. Once making their break they run outside where it's raining heavily. They come to their home which is flooded and destroyed. Here is where I’ll start talking about Fanon. [READ NOTE]. Again, I know the colonial system is not the case in Parasite. Fanon was a Marxist and expanded on Marxist theory in the colonial context. I just want to warn you that I am using Fanon as carefully as possible, not using concepts that are distinctly racial. I know there’s probably also much more relevant work out there on spatiality and violence, but I think Fanon’s prose style in The Wretched of the Earthis quite appropriate for the film. Let’s consider the colonial bourgeoisie as the Parks and the natives as the Kims. Fanon calls the colonial world, a “compartmentalized world.” The colonists’ sector is clean and protected whereas the native sector is overcrowded, envious, and starving. Sounds about right so far.

The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonizer’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then again you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth., without a pothole, without a stone… The colonized’s sector or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place, inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of each other. (Fanon, 4)

This becomes extremely relevant when the Kims run out of the Parks’ home in the pouring rain. I kept noticing that they were all barefoot, only focused on getting out of there. My toes curled in the movie theater watching that. Running away from that traumatic house to find your own home destroyed, relocating to a displacement camp, THEN going to work the next day for your unaffected employer who has the audacity to audibly take a sniff of you. I don't know about you, but to me, this sounds like the conditions for a proletarian revolution. Besides the literal allegory, the tone sharply shifts. One could argue that it began to change when they found Geun-sae in the bunker or when Moon-gwang hit her head but that was just some good old dark comedy for me. After the flooding, things are different. Ki-taek has this unmoving face. Things turned grim and we knew something climactic was about to happen. Fanon’s most famous chapter, “Concerning Violence,” maintains that decolonization will always be a violent event because colonialism is a violent system itself. Something that I absolutely love about this chapter is that it isn’t some dense, theoretical work. It’s a revolutionary call to arms for all colonized people. It has a strategic pace which parallels Parasite so well. He sets the scene- the compartmentalized, Manichaen world. He slowly intensifies the antagonistic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, until this culminating point:

The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breathing and his heartbeat are the same as the colonist’s. He discovers that the skin of the colonist is not worth more than the “natives.” In other words, his world receives a fundamental jolt. The colonized’s revolutionary new assurance stems from this. If no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but i am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that he will no longer have any solution but to flee (Fanon, 10)

As corny as it sounds, when I first read that, it brought me to tears. I’m not sure if it was just because I was up for three days straight writing my midterm and I was finally breaking, or because it just meant that much to me. But that section in which the colonized discoversthat his life is worth as much as the colonizer is such a crucial moment. This parallels the infamous birthday scene. Geun-sae gets out of the bunker, stabs Ki-jung, the Park’s kid (I’ll look his name up later) has a seizure, and Chong-sook is wrestling with Geun-sae. Shit is going down. If we recall, Mrs. Park mentioned that it takes a few minutes for her son to die after a seizure and needs to go to the hospital immediately. So much is going on and Mr. Park starts screaming at Ki-taek to give him the keys. Ki-taek is immobilized at this point. His daughter has been stabbed, son attacked, wife almost killed, the Parks’ got him dressed up in some cultural appropriation, Hollywood Indian regalia. In fact, I find it very fitting that he’s dressed up as a Native American at this moment. I see this as Bong’s satirical nod to old ultra-capitalist Hollywood. But if enough wasn't going on, Mr. Park sniffed. He got close to Geun-sae, a man who’s been living underground for 3 years and audibly sniffed him in disgust. The same way that he sniffed Ki-taek. Of course, there’s probably a difference between a “subway” smell vs. “I haven't showered in 3 years” smell but at the moment it feels as if it's almost the same thing. In my initial viewing, I thought what happened next was because of that, but no. Ki-taek realized that his life was worth the same as the Parks, and their presence no longer bothers him, but he is now plotting against him, and the time of action is now. Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park and flees. Annoyingly, the YouTube section for this clip is filled with people feeling bad for the Parks and discussing how what Ki-taek did was wrong. Of course, the average viewer will view the Parks as some sympathetic rich suckers who only treated the Kims kindly. The casual reader who picks up Fanon for the first time would also dismiss his theory of violence as immoral in comparison to non-violent methods like Gandhi’s. A lot can be said about Gandhi, but Fanon says that non-violence is a strategy created by the colonizer to deter decolonization and paint the colonizer as a gentle ruler who wants peace. This is not the case. Colonialism is a violent system. Capitalism is a violent system. Colonialism can only be undone violently. Capitalism can only be undone violently. Now I don't mean to make this all about colonialism, as my friends say I often do. But the similarities are clear. The question isn’t whether the murder of Mr. Park was a justified act, but what were the conditions that forced Ki-taek to murder. Geun-sae killed Ki-jung, but no one in the comment section is having a debate on whether his murder was ethical. Because in our heads we feel bad for him, and the life that he’s lived- why don’t we feel the same towards Ki-taek? Geun-sae and Ki-taek are two sides of the same coin. Geun-sae’s exploitation is naked. He’s confined to the basement, controlling the lights of the home. A feature of the house that Mr. Park doesn't even pay attention to, never mind considering that there is someone manually operating it. A clear example of how our labor is alienated. All while blindly worshipping Mr. Park- a man who knows nothing of his existence. Honestly, I hope some of you see yourselves in Geun-sae the next time you defend billionaires online. But Ki-taek is just another exploited worker. I understand this can be hard to understand in our current understanding of the world. How is Ki-taek exploited? Him and his family conned their way into their jobs and leech off of the Parks. Again, we must return to the system as a whole to understand. None of this wouldn’t have happened if the Kims weren’t desperately poor in a capitalist society, which enables families like the Parks, to live a life of excess at the expense of the Kims. Capitalism is a system of exploitation; we cannot forget that. Quite simply, no one is rich without thousands that are poor.

          The levels of the home are also this unforgettable feature. I just want to make this quick note about the issue of the ghost. Did you forget about the ghost? Da-Song didn’t (yes, I finally looked his name up!). I find the story of the ghost such an interesting touch. Not just as a way for Bong to warn the audience about Da-Song’s history of seizures. When Mrs. Park tells Chung-sook of the story, she says “they say a ghost in the house brings wealth.” This, of course, is true since the exploitation of those like Geun-sae are responsible for the wealth of the Parks, in the larger picture. I’d like to look further into this. There's a twofold meaning to this. I do believe that this ghost is symbolic to the exploitation of the Kims, and the proletariat in general, but that’s Mrs. Park’s understanding of this ghost. The way she understands this ghost, is as a source of wealth. Maybe Mrs. Park isn’t as ditzy as we imagine- she to some degree, understands her class position. But like most, she doesn’t question the ghost, or her class position. She knows that if she looks into either, it would result in the ugly truth. Da-Song, however, is just a child. He’s too young to really understand the economic and social relations which are responsible for his wealth. He’s also too young to consciously suppress any desire to investigate the matter like his mother. He is a child after all and is naturally curious. But his first encounter with the ghost was the one that resulted in a near fatal seizure. This can be his body’s reaction to the life-threatening figure of a ghost. The ghost isn’t just a threat to his mortal life, but his wealth, some may argue that these are the same. Mrs. Park pays for therapy for his “trauma” so he could forget the event, but he still knows. He saw this ghost and is the only one to seriously consider its threat. Mrs. Park knows it's real but chooses to not think about it. I want to return to the Manifesto. Let's hear these famous words: “A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism… Two things result from this fact: Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers itself to be a power...” (Marx and Engels, 8). Don’t think I’m just including this because he’s talking about a specter, in fact, I think this story of the ghost is an intentional allusion to the specter of communism. Da-Song represents this figure of the bourgeoisie who is in constant anxiety over the threat of his wealth. When he reappears at his birthday party, he has another seizure. Also, at this time, the family, and all of their guests are witness to the horrors of their wealth and what it's created. This naked, hideous display, this moment of confrontation is a pivotal point in the dialectic. Of course, this murderous moment is not seen as a success to the viewer with Mr. Park, Ki-jung, and Geun-sae dead, Ki-woo presumed to be dead, and Ki-taek missing. This just shows us that the bourgeoisie are their own gravediggers- to again invoke the Manifesto. On a larger scale, this would be the moment of a revolution- but we don’t. Ki-woo survives with Chung-sook and is put on probation. Ki-taek is missing to the police, but Ki-taek realizes that he’s living in the bunker in hiding. Ki-woo declares that he will make enough money to buy the home and free his father. At first, I wondered “why couldn't he just sneak him out of the house when the new owners were asleep?” “Why did he have to buy the home?” As much as I wanted to portray the Kims to be revolutionary figures, Ki-woo has the common fate of most. Instead of usurping power from the bourgeoisie, he believes he can free his dad from the home, by owning the house. Everyone who lives in the basement is stuck there for a reason, because someone is forcing them to stay there. A perfect allegory for the relations of production as I have repeatedly mentioned throughout this text. Ki-woo desires a bourgeois life (as most working-class folk do!) in order to lift his father out of the despair of poverty. He believes the only way he can save his father is to own the home, which could easily be seen as the means of production. A nice touch which I had to look up, was as Ki-woo tells us of his desire to buy the home, a song plays called “546 years”- the amount of time it will take for him to earn enough money. I wish this song title was more obvious for the American viewer. I am not trying to take away from this film by saying that, but for a viewer who knows Korean or the song title, they’ll understand the tragic nature of his dreams. Whereas the American viewers will sympathize with his dreams- as we’ve done with immigrants and “the American Dream” or the bootstrapping mentality of some people. In some way I do think Bong didn’t want an overtly revolutionary ending. I don’t think the average viewer, especially in this day, could handle an ending like that. Not to say that we don't understand class inequality and such. We are not living in, say the 60s/70s where there were Marxist movements all throughout the world. I don’t think we have the conditions for a revolution at this moment, although I do think the mass unemployment and the other severe economic consequences of this virus will radicalize the working class in large numbers, to a degree that we haven't seen in a long time. But to make my point, I feel that we are living in historic political times and we are coming to understand ourselves in a liberating way.  It is my hope that films like Parasite will awaken the revolutionary potential in us all.

Note: I wanted to use Fanon’s theory of violence and diagnosis of colonialism as a violent structure, in relation to capitalist society. I don’t want us to interpret his writings as something that can be isolated from the racial structure of colonialism, but i do think it is a beneficial guide to understanding this film.

Work Cited:

Philcox, Richard, translator. “On Violence.” The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 2004.

Joon-Ho, Bong, director. Parasite. Barunson E&A, 2019.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. International Publishers, 1948.

[8-intergalacticbutterfly-8-blog]

Relationships: Part II – I’ve Heard You Shouldn’t Make Homes Out of People

Thinking more about the problems and questions I posed in the first part, I felt it necessary to make some distinctions. Although I condemn the use of pain to hurt others in person-to-person interactions, I do not believe the same can apply at other “levels” or “layers” of social and historical existence. When we speak of structural violence, we often refer to social institutions that perpetuate discrimination, exclusion and marginalization through various processes. These “processes” are composed of social practices and beliefs that, through their simultaneous operations, create the kinds of worlds in-and-through which we, as social subjects, come to see ourselves and others. The term “structural” can be interpreted as “networks” that coordinate themselves according to shifting condensations of economic, social, cultural and human capital – a “push” here, for example, might necessitate a “pull” there. In this way, no singular person could be said to serve as a point of absolute origin for the forms of violence that people experience in their day-to-day lives. Instead, power comes to embody the shape of conglomerations, of clusters, of interconnected nodes in network societies. Based on this particular understanding of power, authority and violence, the finger of blame cannot be pointed at a singular subject. Or, in other words, the problem does not necessarily lie with, for instance, “white people” themselves but with whiteness as a network of social institutions, ideologies and practices that maintains people who identify as (or even look) white in a structural position of relative privilege (whiteness also affords power to people who align themselves with these same institutions, ideologies and practices – of which my writing as an academic trained in elite institutions is complicit with).

 So, what do we do with statistics such as these:

 “In Australia, indigenous youth are 28 times more likely than non-indigenous youth to be detained (ABC News, 2011), while in the US black and Hispanic youth face harsher treatment at each stage in the criminal justice system (The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, 2000). While black youth represent 5 per cent and Hispanic youth 19 per cent of the juvenile population in the US, respectively they account for 45 per cent and 25 per cent of the incarcerated youth population (Saavedra, 2010).” (Andy Furlong, Youth Studies: An introduction, 2013, p. 191)

 Clearly, there are groups of people that are structurally pre-dispositioned to be kept in certain social segments (e.g., physically in jail cells [issues of space/place]; migrants kept waiting for the right to have rights [issues of time/temporality]). There are specific histories of economic dispossession, social displacement and cultural genocide that help explain why brown and black communities (this isn’t exclusive to issues of skin color, though colorism can and does affect how people experience their lives) are over-represented in prison populations. To move from an individual level (the person-to-person engagements I addressed in “Part I”), to a structural level, means having to reckon with suffering and exploitation in ways that consider the larger contexts that inform how people think and act. At this level of social experience, attempts to count and leverage “coins” of pain in a group’s “historical jar” cannot be simply reduced to selfish acts of vengeance or egotistical demands for attention and care. At a structural level, socially afflicted communities are often cornered into political positions where there is little wiggle room to act “ethically” according to existing frameworks of morality and legality (morals and laws that often contribute structurally to more violence and marginalization, than to support or assistance).  

 I’ve heard that you shouldn’t make homes out of people.

 My discussion of relationships in Part I begins to carve out the reasons why this statement might be true. “Hurt people, hurt people,” as the saying goes. The violence people embody often gets displaced onto others because they lack the capacity to hold the unbearable weight of histories (simultaneously distant and personal) that both connect and separate them. I think this is why we often “snap” at those whom we consider to be the closest and most intimate—we expect them to serve as our personal punching bags (after all, they love us, right?). This is also why people, amidst their busy schedules and right to live their lives, can sometimes only offer a share on Instagram or a status update on Facebook when confronted with global atrocities—including those sponsored by their “own” governments and countries (which also means, economically-speaking, their taxable incomes). The line that separates virtuous resistance from complicity to oppression is becoming increasingly thinner and thinner in social worlds where the clothes we wear and the foods we eat come to us from disparate locations, near and far, and often by exploitative means.

 Is anyone innocent?

 If one shouldn’t make a home out of people, perhaps it is in part because our insides mirror the wars taking place outside. There are terrible, invisible battles inside people’s hearts and minds that twinkle like guns fired all over the world—past and present. I believe change at a structural, systemic level requires social retribution for historical debts that persistently and perniciously feed current forms of inequity across differences of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability and nationality. At an interpersonal level, however, I fear these same demands fuel further alienation, splinter coalitions and build a general distrust of people who are different from “us.” Is there a way to mediate the two positions without falling into extreme forms of nationalism and territoriality, or empty “inclusions” that simply reproduce and reinforce social hierarchies? I return to an often-cited quote by Subcomandante Marcos: “El mundo que queremos es uno donde quepan muchos mundos;” “The world we desire is one where many worlds can fit.” I highlight this demand not to romanticize indigenous Zapatista politics, nor to offer a solution to planetary disarray, but to suggest that a haunting question/reality remains with many communities today: Are people capable of letting “difference” live with integrity and on its own terms? Or are certain organizations of political and communal life automatically hostile to one another, preventing any “sincere” or “authentic” compromise from emerging? It is important to note that difference has many forms: ecological environments; non-human animals and plant life; cultural and political systems; spiritual and religious beliefs and practices; gendered and sexual diversities; and the list goes on.

 My point, I suppose, is that even if we consider the brief, yet deeply complex scale that is a human life, an individual person’s biography, we will eventually reach a point where violence feels inevitable, even natural: to live in societies so entrenched with bloody histories, as is the case with the United States, can anyone truly say they exist free of charge? If we do, in fact, live in social networks, does this kind of (globalizing) cultural existence not implicate practically everyone? And if it does, are people touched by violence in the same way? I think the answer would be “no,” especially if modern histories of genocide, enslavement and dispossession are to be taken seriously at all. To equalize oppression, as when one claims that “All Lives Matter,” is to commit an error of magnitude and proportion, for people of color, women, and queer and trans* folks have served historically as collateral for the “civilized,” modern lifestyles that citizens, noncitizens and second-class citizens get to live in the here and now—whether they enjoy it or not, find it meaningful or not, is beside the point. It seems to me that across the tenuous spectrums of oppressor/oppressed, there runs a loud silence, a dazzling absence that grounds the very existences of people as social individuals: systematic death as a contemporary common origin – but not one from which everyone benefits equally.

 Which brings me to another question: can trauma purify?

 What does an inheritance of collective pain at an individual level do? Consider the following scenario: a third-generation indigenous girl accompanied by her Mexican-American father is called “Pocahontas” by an elderly white woman at a Whole Foods in Southern California. The woman looks down at the girl and repeats her observation with a warm smile – “You look like her [Pocahontas]” –, only to be met with an uncertainty that gleams from the girl’s eyes as to the significance of the claim, of the way in which she is being interpellated by the woman as looking “native” (I won’t go into the problematics of basing native and indigenous identity on Disney representations). So, what happened here? Are these innocent, everyday exchanges? Or has certain damage been done (again)? And, if so, who’s at fault? How ought one to respond? One way to reply to these questions—arguably the most obvious—would be to assume a binary approach: the woman is the oppressor and the girl is the oppressed; each is a symbolic condensation of histories of colonial violence. But we can also just as easily say that the woman is not a willful oppressor (her comment, from her perspective, was not meant to be offending). Likewise, the girl does not willfully assume the position of the victim or the oppressed (in fact, the woman’s comment might not even make an impression amidst other priorities and preoccupations). Rather, both are given to larger and deeper structures that, before they even happen to bump into each other at an aisle in a grocery store, already situate and render meaningful interactions in ways that seem to necessitate an implicit, and thus explicit, hierarchy.

 This is the distinction that I highlight between the pain people wage on one another through interpersonal contact, and the suffering that people as communities depend on, and must therefore politically mobilize, in order to make claims for social justice. The two levels co-exist and constantly inform each other—this makes the problem of historical trauma particularly tricky to frame. Through this distinction, violence demonstrates the paradoxical and contradictory ways in which an emphasis on trauma might prove necessary on one level of social experience (the systematic nature of social institutions), while possibly detrimental on another (everyday encounters with people).

 At the end, however, we are still left with questions of justice and ethics. How might the woman be made accountable for her supposed “innocent” remarks based on, and supported by, the structural privileges afforded to whiteness in the U.S.? Relatedly, how might the incident be made conscious to the girl in a way that does not propagate a victim mentality or an inferiority complex, but instead affirms the dignity of her identities and her right to exist as a person? I do not have answers to these questions. They might be questions for policy and lawmakers; for researchers and scholars; for grassroots activists and organizations. The issues I raise do not have singular, once-and-for-all remedies (or at least not any that I can personally identify) – they are symptoms of the immensity and the difficulty of existing in a world haunted by the debris of chance encounters gone terribly wrong, whether they happened in 1492 or last week.