Parasite-socioeconomic differences
The film Parasite is a story told through a poor, lower class family who seem to be living in the slums of South Korea. A friend of the eldest son of the family recommends him to be a tutor for a wealthy family who lives in a massive house. The movie displays the gap between poor and rich in South Korea and shows their struggles and how they are treated by society. There are many scenes and examples showing the difference of quality of life between the two families but a specific scene I wanted to analyze was towards the climax of the film.
While the wealthy family is away on a camping trip a heavy storm comes in and forces them to return to their residence early, where the poor family was staying unbeknownst to the family for the duration of their trip. After successfully escaping the residence without the family catching them there, they return to their home to find it flooded from all the rain causing them to live in a storm shelter for the time being. This scene displayed how different events affect every person differently. For the wealthy family, the storm was a minor inconvenience, and they just spent the rest of the night inside their home while for the poor family, they had to relocate entirely, losing most of their possessions in a flood rendering them homeless. A difference in social class has a massive effect on how different people live their lives in their country and this film beautifully showed that.
I felt this film could be connected to many different concepts we discussed in this course for example the inequality of social status leads the poor to be represented as the Other or the subaltern because things that have a negative impact on them was dealt with in a silent struggle with no assistance. The lack of knowledge and care from the wealthy family about the poor family’s situation brought upon a sense of hatred and envy from the poor family that lead to a major disconnection between them because in the poor family’s thoughts they believed that the other family was so happy and nice because they were wealthy while the wealthy family had no real interest in learning about the poor family as it did not concern them.
