The wife is easily manipulated by those who are cleverer than she is. The husband is often away on unspecified business the family clearly has money to spend but its sources are never clear. Although they appreciate the status of owning such a home, they have little appreciation for the home’s functions or unique beauty. The wealthy Park family in Parasite inhabit a dwelling designed by a famous architect.
The rich? The fawning servant dependent on them? The impoverished family seeking to cheat the rich family in order to survive themselves? Or all or none of these? And what makes them parasites: their wealth, status, economic dependency, emotional dependency, skills, lack of skills, lack of identity, or something else? Or the feeling of geographic dislocation conveyed by the film for all of them? The audience never knows the city in which they live, other than that the film was made in South Korea by a South Korean director with South Korean actors and the general sense that they are spared the repression of the North albeit not the ravages of inequality. 46 to 49 in South Africa, the country with the highest estimated Gini coefficient, it’s. (The Gini coefficient-a widely used measure of inequality-in South Korea has risen from. However, Parasite, a new film by the South Korean director Bong Joon-ho that won the 2019 Palme d’Or at Cannes, challenges audiences to probe social parasitism amidst growing inequality in a largely affluent country. Talk of the top 2%-or today’s 1%-as parasites may seem merely a historical curiosity to those who were not part of the debates about Maoism in the late 1960s and 1970s. The Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism Online has reprinted an essay published in 1977 by the Workers’ Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought: “The past two years in Britain has witnessed the beginnings of a powerful mass upsurge in which hundreds of thousands of people all over the country – workers, women, national minorities, students, youth and intellectuals – have been drawn into various forms of rebellion and resistance against the capitalist/imperialist social system, against the tiny handful of parasites, 2 per cent of the population who own over 50 per cent of the property, who are holding on to the political power in their hands like grim death.” What is a social parasite? The term was a common one among Maoists who saw rich capitalists as sucking the blood of the working class.