Parasite

I spend a lot of time thinking about what money actually buys, mostly because I can’t find out for real. Sure, your life is fancier, maybe easier, less stressful and more comfortable. You definitely buy afford to buy fancy toilet paper instead of stuffing as much as you can into your pockets every time you go to the library or McDonalds. At a certain point, though, you just can’t get any fancier or more comfortable, and amassing more money is just about separation from those who have less. That’s how a lot of people judge things, by the display of the shit they buy. Those are the signifiers of how far the gap between you and them are.

Those rich fuckers are even trying to physically separate themselves by buildings colonies in space, leaving the cesspool they made their fortunes polluting to you and me. I bet they’ll hate it up there on the moon where everyone has money and they can’t dazzle anyone with their fancy shit. Or, they’ll just start a whole new class system, and some God damn genius will find a way to sell them Rolls Royce moon buggies or freeze-dried Waygu beef in a vacuum bag so the richest among the rich can still show off.

The thing is, the richest person in the world (which according to my calculations is probably a tie between Daryl Hall and John Oates), can’t ever fully separate himself from shitheels like me and you, no matter how much money someone has or will ever have. (I assume only shitheels read this, because rich people must have access to some way better Internet with better porn, better streaming services and better critics than me). Rich fuckers can have a nicer bed, but they still need to sleep. They may have electric toothbrushes, but they still have teeth that must be cleaned. They still need to shit. Even on the moon, rich fuckers will get diarrhea and still have to wipe their asses. It’s higher quality hot brown rangus, for sure, and if it’s bloody they can afford to see a doctor. Fucking is fucking, rich or poor. Quantity and quality may be different, but a rich guy who likes being peed on gets pretty much the same golden shower you used to get behind the Arvada Tavern for five bucks.

Rich assholes are still human. Or, rather, despite their privilege and money, they can’t stop the rest of us from being human. That probably pisses them off. Even with the tens of billions of dollars they made from “Your Kiss is on my List”, Hall and Oates cannot ever be any more human than me, a guy whose biggest payday was a 150 bucks for eating lead pellets for a laboratory test. Even as they perform intimate, acoustic sets in a coffee shop on the moon for Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Daryl and John know deep down inside that the burning in their asses from eating too many eggs is the exact same pain the rest of us feel.

Parasite isn’t exactly about what I’m talking about here. That’s because writer/director Bong Joon Ho is a fuck more talented than I am. More confident too. You probably already know about this movie. It’s a Korean drama/comedy/sort-of-horror. The title is about the relationship between the wealthy and the rest of us. A poor family, living in a basement apartment with cockroaches, slowly insinuates itself into the home of a very wealthy family. First the poor son cons his way in as an English tutor to a teen. Then the daughter as the “art therapist” to a troubled kid. Once in, they concoct stories to force out the driver and housekeeper, positions the poor mother and father take.

Nobody respects anyone. The poor resent the rich and want all their nice stuff. The rich hardly consider the poor human. Rather, they are tools to make their life as easy as possible, and tools who should sacrifice to make the lives of the rich better, no matter how shitty it makes their own existence.

The first half of the story is a class comedy as the struggling family tricks these dumbass and gullible rich people into opening the door to them. It sets up the relationships and it hints at what’s to come. The second half of Parasite is dark as fuck. The poor family’s basement apartment is destroyed by a flood that merely looks like a picturesque thunderstorm from the windows of the wealthy up on the hill. Water, like shit, rolls downhill.

Worse for the con family, though, is that the previous housekeeper, whom our poor family got fired, returns to retrieve something she left behind. That something happens to be her husband, who has been secretly living in a subterranean safe room for years because they could not afford a home, and whom she couldn’t get out when she was fired suddenly.

The old housekeeper returns while the wealthy family is gone and the new poor family are taking advantage of run of the house. It leads to an epic battle not of classes, but of poor against poor. Sort of like the Korean version of bum fights. More polite, but every bit as violent.

When the wealthy family returns, the poor seem to have realized how dehumanized they have become, and how little they are valued as humans. Meanwhile, the wealthy are fucking oblivious. They just keep milking the function and usefulness of the poor, all the while getting richer and more useless themselves. Then the blood starts to flow.

Ho has made a pretty fucking great reminder of class divisions and of how we let the rich dehumanize us. We marvel when the wealthy rub elbows with us filthy turds. We admire the ones who stick up for our rights. We capitulate to them to make our decisions, and then are thrilled when they actually choose ones that benefit us. We’re so fucking cowed by their wealth and their separation from us, that we let them suck us dry just for the privilege of being in their presence.

That’s what Ho’s saying, and he says it effectively. He’s stacked it with examples and sly digs, like a rich kid obsessed with American Indians and a servant forced to dress as one. The movie is atmospherically perfect, stark and cold, precise as a Japanese slide rule. I don’t know that the movie hits every note just right, and it feels long to me. But there is no doubt Ho made exactly the movie he wanted to make. It’s like the very rare times when you think of drawing something and it ends up on the paper exactly as you imagined it. Maybe nobody else is as excited as you by a line art penis wearing a sombrero, but it’s precisely the ick you envisioned.

What’s most remarkable is that Ho has a very sharp point to make about the dehumanizing nature of class division, but he does it so entertainingly, and so expertly, that the movie is entertaining first, and polemics second. That’s something he failed at with two of his other movies, Snowpiercer and Okja. Those felt like shitty shameful TED talks. It’s a fantastic reminder that the rich can be fucking assholes, but we must not let them dehumanize us and use us. We are people too, just like them That’s why I think about Hall and Oates every time I get the runs. Nothing makes me happier than a burning butthole to remind me that deep down, we’re all the same. Four Fingers.