On the Absurdity of Parasite Being the Best Movie of the Century

Reflections on The Times' list

I try not to get pulled into these things, but who can let a Times ‘best of’ list go by without being indignant?

So let’s start with a few caveats. First of all, a list like The Times’ has every right to exist — The Times is reasonable generator of informed opinion. Its methodology of asking different filmmakers and journalists to compile lists of their own seems fine. Sam Jennings’ suggestion on this platform that The Times go full avant-garde and select films like Krupnick’s Girl Walk/All Day, Assayas’ Demonlover, Marclay’s The Clock is amusing but of course not really serious — how many subscriptions would that sell, Sam? There is a place for safe, bourgeois opinion (which The Times has to a T) just as there is for more radical film studies sensibilities. Second, the list itself is actually not that bad. We can toss out films like Bridesmaids, Superbad, and Anchorman as The Times — with whatever level of corruption went into the making of the list — trying to be sure that comedy was represented. The upper end of the countdown is a bit of a mess (and where’s Avatar, by the way?) but the lower end basically makes sense. Mulholland Drive, Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind, and Get Out, for instance, are all pretty much where they should be.

A word comes in about the usual perniciousness of The Times standing in as the voice of authority when it’s really just a collection of people beholden in their different ways to institutional thinking, but I’m tired of making that point. This essay is strictly limited to Parasite — to Parasite’s being a bad movie and its placement at the top of the list pretty much invalidating the entire exercise.

A couple of other caveats are in order. Parasite isn’t terrible in the way that, like, Promising Young Woman is terrible. The underlying dramatic structure of the Kim family infiltrating the Parks is interesting enough. The twist [SPOILER] of the family living in the basement is genuinely shocking and brings the film to another level. And the final image of the son standing in the driveway looking for his father (and knowing exactly where his father is) is eye-watering.

But the rest of the movie is an implausible disaster. The transformation of the Kim family from total deadbeats to, in a flash, being the resourceful super agent types taking over the Park family, moves the film in an instant outside of any kind of psychological solidity. If they’re all like this, and have all these skills in their back pocket, why weren’t any of them doing anything to make money before? The Gook family living in the basement are done as broad comedy and are never interesting after their initial appearance — and, at a certain point, the film descends into chasing-each-other-around hijinx. Bong Joon Ho, the director, seems to sense the problem and tries to save the movie at the end by suddenly elevating it back to a different level of portentous seriousness — but, since he’s been mired in shtick for so long, the only way he can do it is to turn everybody, all of a sudden, into a raving maniac. [SPOILERS] That’s sort of set up in the character of Oh Geun-sae, who has been locked away in a basement for decades, but not at all for Ki-taek, the Kims’ father, who responds to the stabbing of his beloved daughter by a a maniac by — of all the stupid things in the world — stabbing his boss because his boss at some time earlier made a mean comment about his smell. With that scene, we lose any pretense of being anchored in the psychology of actual human beings, and if we’re trying to be nice about the movie we have to look for its values elsewhere.

Where the movie seems to rest is on what Harry Schiller, in an essay for The Republic of Letters, calls “sociologism literature.” In sociologism literature, what matters isn’t so much human psychology but the building blocks of social relations. Characters are who they are because of their class determination, and their actions are understood in — I guess, one could say, sort of Marxist or at least Durkheimian terms‚ as an extension of where they are at that moment in the social exchange. Here would be a few examples of sociologism, as taken from throughout literary or cinematic history. In Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, a noted highwayman standing at the gallows and delivering his final words discreetly pickpockets the hangman’s watch. In The Icelandic Sagas — this same motif reappears in Kill Bill — a warrior having the top of his head sliced off has the professional acumen to ask about the provenance of the sword before expiring.

The kind of high-water mark for this approach is Jean Genet’s The Maids. In The Maids, it is entirely understood that the lower-class maids’ greatest fantasy is to murder their employer. This is far from the only fantasy they have — they also want to dress up in her clothes, and to seduce her lover, and to abuse their own maids in turn — but it’s the killing that is the abiding lower-class fantasy. That motif appears again in, for instance, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger and is close to being an archetype. The preposterous ending of Parasite is to be understood kind of like the head-slicing in Kill Bill. It’s not about how anybody would ever plausibly behave — it’s about expressing the structural truth of a dynamic, and doing so usually in the most extreme, grotesque way possible.

The problem with Parasite, compared to The Maids, is that Parasite isn’t consistent in what its themes are. The Maids is about this dynamic and only this — it is a whole, coherent work of art, in which everything else is subordinate to that. If the guiding idea of Parasite is the resentment of the employees for the employer — which is fine — it then darts off into a series of completely contradictory directions: the alacrity by which the Kim family take on their jobs in the Park household; the madness of the Gook family hiding in the basement. The film seems not quite to be able to decide whether it’s in a world of social mobility — the son, Ki-woo, really is moving up the class ladder — or in a world like The Maids, where class is absolutely fixed and fantasies of homicide represent the only form of mobility. Because the film is never really anchored in a narrative, or even a fictional world, all it can do is flail about — and, here, it moves from something like sociologism literature to something more like a cartoon. Very often, it feels like the guiding thrust of a scene is just whatever is most dramatic, whatever is the character’s deepest desire — whether that’s at a stroke to become an upwardly-mobile housekeeper or else to brutally murder the head of the household — but the result of mashing all of these impulses together is to lose any kind of melody or thread, and to just have, in scene after scene, the kind of wish fulfillment of a cartoon, or a 20-year-old’s music video, without really understanding how it fits together into a whole.

But if we try to understand why Parasite topped The Times’ list it has very little to do with its merits as a work of art. It’s really not great, but it does have its points. The reason it vaulted to the top of the list is that it’s like Lincoln Logs of liberal guilt carefully stacked on top of each other. There’s the sense of guilt for the insuperability of the class conflict — White Tiger, a similarly shallow work, was a bestseller for the same reasons. And then that’s compounded by the guilt that American audiences have for having gone most of their lives without watching a subtitled movie, and also for the limited amount of time Americans spend thinking about South Korea (which, at the time of Parasite’s release, was a national average of about 5 seconds per year). For some reasons having to do with the woke movement, but also the globalization of cinema, South Korea suddenly emerged in the 2010s as a cinema that Americans could feel good about themselves for watching but that wasn’t as tedious as, frankly, a great deal of the French New Wave had been — and the over-the-top violence of Parasite and then especially of Squid Game blended in very nicely with the American palette. When Parasite reaches the top of the list of movies of the millennium, that’s really what we’re honoring — and to a much lesser extent the aesthetic interest of the cartoonish, sociologism, garish style.

There are, at the moment, worse things going on in the news than Parasite topping the list, so there’s not much point in getting worked up about this. But it seems important to be at least a little indignant. The triumph of a film like Parasite plays into a narrative that realism is basically dead and the future is in this kind of cartoonish desire-gratification, which comes at the expense of the coherence of the narrative as a whole. But that’s a problem, since the world doesn’t actually look all that much like Parasite and it helps drives filmmakers and artists into renditions of the world that don’t have much to do with psychology or even sociology but only with gestures of raw violence.

Sam Kahn writes Castalia .