The archetypes are in place: the house atop a labyrinth; the father below, both hubristic planner and minotaur; the striving son, inheritor of a cosmology of aspiration (and, mid-flood, a paternal warning against it). Alternatively, we might see a mother tending the buried dead while a son secures his father's rightful place on earth. In either case, the place is green, a site of transformation, restoration. We're on edge, but we've almost forgotten our suspicion of metaphor, stoked explicitly and otherwise over the last two hours. The film is nearly over. Alas, like the father, we should have known better. These redemptive figures, mobilized, have nowhere to go but down.
By my count, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) is the third major film from the last two years in which metaphor is named as an object of class-based resentment or ridicule. The other two are last year's Burning (Lee Chang-dong) and Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski). (Zadie Smith's 2017 short story "The Lazy River" also works for parts of this reading, though I won't address it here.) In the latter two films, snipes at metaphor do similar work: in each case authentic artistic practice and mere cultural capital are held up as opposite numbers, and in each case a character's access to metaphor as a concept stands in for the worst kind of bourgeois pretension. Metaphor in these texts is at best gratuitous filigree, at worst sinister obfuscation, and in any event breezily unachievable -- the marker of a maddeningly matter-of-fact material gap, compounding the semiotic gap metaphor already marks. The problem is grave. What's posed as a remedy to the sickness of mystification seems almost invariably to be an accepted certitude in the form of death. Yet it's not art or even cultural production as such that these films hold suspect. In fact, a willingness to kill -- oneself or another -- seems entwined, almost homologous, with an affinity for the novel or the blues. And for the most part, it's the global proletariat at work on both ends of the equation.
In an early scene in Burning, a charming cipher with Gatsby-esque wealth likens the act of cooking for himself to preparing an offering for a god. His guest, a young woman from a rural village who works odd jobs in Seoul, is nonplussed. He explains silkily, "It's a metaphor"; the confusion becomes generalized. He then shoots a collusive look at the woman's friend, a young man from the same village whose literary hero is Faulkner, and asks him to supply the definition of metaphor. The young man, supremely uncomfortable throughout the scene, does very nearly the opposite: he sidles up to the woman and asks if she knows where the bathroom is. It's worth noting that while Ben (the rich man) is the only character in Burning who cites metaphor by name, Haemi (the young woman) and Jongsu (the young man) clearly do understand metaphor, and are directly involved elsewhere in practices that employ or approximate it. These practical analogies for metaphor circulate across the film. Haemi, for instance, is learning to pantomime and, sounding like a good structuralist linguist, instructs Jongsu in the required habits of cognition: "Don't think there is a tangerine there. Just forget that there isn't one." She later shows a group of Ben's rich friends a ritual dance she learned in Kenya: the dance of Little Hunger and Big Hunger, where material wants fan out into existential longing. The poignant doubleness of metaphor holds these two instances, the pantomime and the dance, in magnetic tension. By nature, metaphor, and therefore language in general, effects an impossibility: it collapses what is and what isn't in a rhetorical sleight-of-hand that can't be reasonably questioned and generally appears transparent. Figure and ground become each other's alibi. Anyone who would cock an eyebrow at Ben's calling himself a god would likely find themselves winningly redirected to the definition of metpahor, even as the content of his comparison and its disturbing implications are precisely the point. (It's interesting that, having seen this film several times and talked to people about the metaphor scene specifically, I can never seem to remember what the actual metaphor was without rewatching the scene. The smooth integument Ben casts over conversation -- and therefore metaphor's mere instrumentality as a prestige item -- seems to work on the viewer as well.)
Metaphor in Burning is aspirational, not only thematically but dispositively. A character's ability to cite and expound on metaphor socially places them. But it's metaphor's scuffless conviction and unimpeachability, the innocence of figure from ground and ground from figure, that make it essentially pre-bourgeois, aristocratic. The metaphors of the poor conspicuously leak. Big Hunger needs Little Hunger, and not as a discrete referent; the grandeur of the search for meaning extends choreographically, anatomically, from the earlier dance of destitution, like wings in flight from a resting position.1 For all her artful self-invention, Haemi can't divest her metaphors of this other meaning, the master signifier of Little Hunger. Late in the film, Jongsu discovers a possible reason for Haemi's elusiveness: she's drowning in credit card debt and frequently relocates to stay ahead of collectors. "Forget that the tangerine isn't there": the debt economy as metaphor par excellence.
For his part, Jongsu is a writer whose favorite author penned the line "My mother is a fish." His problem isn't that he doesn't know the word "metaphor"; he just can't fathom a life that includes bandying it about while cooking pasta in soigné digs in the Gangnam District. Jongsu spends the final act of the film trying to achieve this aspirational certainty of reference. He sets out to unravel a mystery, ultimately gathering a jumble of contingent associations -- clues -- under one fixed and deadly meaning.2 Incidentally, Jongsu's reading rests on a suspicion that Ben has been using metaphor (the titular one of the film) to conceal violence -- the quintessential instance of figure concealing ground, such that there's little daylight between metaphor and lie. That Jongsu himself finally overcomes his writer's block when he commits to this interpretation is the final turn of the screw. The infernal endgame of the film is the endpoint of aspiration.
In Cold War, two lovers, Zula and Wiktor, defect from Soviet-era Poland and, after some stops and starts, eventually make a life together in mid-century Paris. Transplanted to a spiritually etiolated bourgeois world, their passionate relationship quickly wilts. The two are musicians, and even the jazz they make together doesn't sound true to one another anymore. In a key moment, Zula bristles at a translated line in a song she's to record with Wiktor. The translator, a highly regarded French poet and Wiktor's former lover, has rendered the original sentiment illegible to Zula, and she refuses to sing it as written. Later at a chic party, Zula confronts the poet with her expertly fatuous translation -- "The pendulum has killed time" -- and asks for an explanation. Like the glossy psychopath of Burning, Wiktor's poet replies, "It's a metaphor." "To mean what?" Zula asks. The poet: "That time doesn't matter when you're in love." We hear no response from Zula but a muted "Hmm." The camera, which we would expect to cut back to Zula here for a reverse shot, holds on the poet's face for a protracted silence as we wonder how Zula's reacting. Perhaps she hears the words as a threat from this more sophisticated woman, or as a doleful reminder of the current state of her relationship. Zula is not happy, the silence says.
But the delayed cut holds knowledge Zula doesn't yet have. Here, in the world of falsity and suffering, a world synecdochized by this protracted shot of her rival, Zula is hearing the truth: her bond with Wiktor will ultimately survive separation by repatriation, imprisonment, death, even capitalism. The shot, a purely cinematic condensation of time's potency -- its power to wound and to restore -- belies the need for metaphor, or at least this particular metaphor. Later, at the nadir of her relationship with Wiktor, a desolate Zula performs a heartbreaking rendition of a jazz standard at the recording studio. Wiktor interrupts, insisting that her performance is "blank." In Burning, the central questions raised by metaphor are about who has access to metaphoricity as a practice and how this "who" alters the possibilities stored within metaphor itself. In Cold War, metaphor is a way of life, and acceptance of life on these terms is enough to damn you to a lapsed state in which truth itself will look vicious and sound blank. Metaphor for Zula and Wiktor is the truthlessness of capitalism itself, and it is only at last by surrendering himself, as Zula momentarily does, to the depredations of time that Wiktor proves himself worthy again of truth.
In Parasite, metaphor again takes some brickbats to the skull. Most notably, our protagonist, Ki-woo, gleefully remarks on two separate occasions that his family's current situation "is so metaphorical!" In the first instance, his friend, a college student, has ventured down into the Kim family's squalid semi-basement apartment and gifted them a "scholar's rock," intended to bring fortune. This visit sets off a chain of events that sees the Kims gradually embedded in a deep con, their sights set on a tony life above ground. Eventually their dreams of ascent come crashing back to earth, with some help from the (now considerably less metaphorical) scholar's rock.
More often, though, aesthetic distancing in Parasite takes the form of theatricality. Theatricality requires the inaugurating gaze of a spectator and a generative distance between spectator and scene, and here as with metaphor, it matters who's in the driver's seat. The wealthy Park family lives in a warmly lit modernist house designed by famed (fictional) architect Namgoong. At the end of the living room sits a fourth wall in the form of a floor-to-ceiling window, which opens out onto a spacious, sun-soaked lawn ringed by trees. Beyond the proscenium arch, on the lawn, semi-staged scenes play out with the stated purpose of healing a traumatized son.
By the film's midpoint, this house has been "infiltrated" by all four members of the Kim family, who have connived their way into prized tutoring, chauffeuring, and housekeeping positions while posing as strangers to each other. The daughter, Ki-jeong, provides "art therapy" to the Parks' young son, Da-song, who compulsively draws pictures of a bug-eyed horror (self-portraits, according to Mrs. Park). As we discover soon after, the subject of these pictures is Geun-sae, the husband of the Parks' former housekeeper, Moon-gwang (rousted by the Kims). Unbeknownst to anyone but his wife, the now slightly feral Geun-sae has been squirreled away in the house's secret bunker for years, dodging loan sharks. A few years ago, Da-song was sent into an epileptic seizure after an accidental late-night encounter in the kitchen with Geun-sae's basilisk gaze (a ghost, according to Mrs. Park).
The Parks' affection for their son is genuinely touching in its way, and they hitch their hopes for his mental and emotional restoration to the transformative potential of their own Arden: the lawn. The Parks use theatrical distance and role-playing paradoxically to enact intimacy within their family, and in particular between father and son. Mrs. Park is rarely as solicitous about her teenage daughter's well-being as about her son's, but she insists on planting herself in the room as a vigilant audience member when Ki-woo first plays English tutor to her. Mr. Park seems to be constantly introducing yet more theatrical frameworks that both separate and connect himself and the other Parks. Within his family, this takes the form of the walkie-talkies he uses with his son; his encouragement of his son's "playing Indian" in the tent on the lawn, as he and his wife play spectators; his initiating sexual role-play with his wife in which they pretend to be a lower-class couple, specifically his former chauffeur and his fictional drug-addled girlfriend; the odd earlier scene with his wife in which he superciliously plays detective, having found a pair of women's underwear (actually Ki-jeong's) in his chauffeur's car, and stage-whispers in her ear about drug use as if there were someone present who could overhear and be scandalized. Theatricality is the emotional operating principle of the Park household -- a reality underlined again and again by the film's signature punctuation mark, Mrs. Park's dramatic intakes of breath. Within the Parks' domestic world, Mr. Park manages the form of theatricality (intimacy through distance) while Mrs. Park embodies and contains its traditional content (emotional excess).
Hence the lawn: both inside and outside, civilization and wilderness, the site of excess and control, of culture as accruable and stageable and symbolic meaning as materializable, a place where trauma returns ostensibly in order to be exorcised through charades. In another of Parasite's rich contradictions, the theatrical space of the lawn is where the Parks attempt to confront the only real danger they've ever been aware of: their son's unhappiness. In the film's climactic explosion of violence, the Parks' carefully stage-managed war games, with Mr. Park and Mr. Kim outfitted as someone else's bad conscience ("bad Indians"), conjure this danger after all. The unconscious of the Park household, the figure embedded in the house and in Da-song's memory, erupts across the cordon sanitaire of garden party theatricals and "art therapy." The Parks' belief that the world consists of resources to populate their stage, that skilled work and emotional repair can be thrust in across the transom without ever, as Mr. Park repeatedly intones, "crossing the line," fails to account for all the apertures in their lives. The secret entrance to the bunker where a minatory presence waits to discharge his debts is just one. The floor-to-ceiling window with a sanative view onto the lawn also invites a more libidinous gaze from without.When someone says they haven't seen #Parasite pic.twitter.com/27rsTrLDTM— Parasite Gifs (@ParasiteGifs) January 1, 2020
While we're provided with shots from both inside and outside the Parks' living room, the Kims' semi-basement window only ever frames the flyblown street outside from within (the Parks' window is a two-way theater, the Kims' a smartphone screen, complete with slow-motion). For better and worse, the Kims' private lives are not organized by the same theatrical principle as the Parks'.
Not that the Kims aren't virtuoso performers when the audience are their potential employers and social models. The scenes of the Kims consummately hornswoggling the Parks are hilarious and widely remarked. With each other, though, the Kims seem to form an organically coherent and intimate group, though their coherency may be an effect of their unidirectionality of purpose. Their family dynamic doubles as a kind of naturalized class unity, as the bunker-dwellers' must and the Parks' needn't. Yet there are fibrillations. Mr. Kim, though only ever treated to affectionate ribbing from his wife, is still perpetually the odd man out. He's the 25% of the family who bungled the pizza box-folding; his businesses, like Geun-sae's, went belly-up; he's reminded that his children, not he, paid for lunch at the drivers' cafeteria; his wife, a former champion shot putter, playfully makes it known that she would cream him in a fight; he's the only family member who doesn't nail his performance right away, putting so much mustard on it while rehearsing that his son must emphatically redirect him toward naturalism; and his "smell" is the first to offend, penetrating the barrier threshold between the driver's seat and Mr. Park. On the night of the deluge, Mr. Kim comforts his children: he's their father, and he has a plan. Later the same night, on a crowded gym floor surrounded by other poor bastards flooded out of their homes, he admits to his son Ki-woo that there is no plan; that the only plan is no plan; that the motive force behind the course of action that's upended their lives, aspiration, is a gag written for an indifferent audience.
It's here that the subterranean narrative throughline of the film emerges in earnest. The Kims' grasping towards an affluent future is also ultimately a matter of redeeming the past of an abjected father. If a distancing theatricality at least provides the axes along which the Parks can inhabit their relation with each other, the Kims, in their practical clannishness and feverish verticality, have no mechanism by which to articulate these kinds of relations within their family, nor any need to do so -- until Mr. Kim's descent.
It transpires that amid the mayhem at Da-song's party, Mr. Kim, after killing Mr. Park, flees to the Parks' bunker and permanently takes up Geun-sae's old position. We learn this from Ki-woo, who wakes up from brain surgery -- the scholar's rock had gone to his head -- and furtively returns to the Namgoong house to find his father tapping out a Morse code message on the entrance light. The remainder of the film is overlaid with Ki-woo's voice-over narration of his handwritten response, a letter promising his father a future free and above ground. The bunker, we now realize, is not only a parasitic nest or Gothic tomb; it's a carceral space. Once a debtor's jail for Geun-sae, the bunker has now effected a seizure of Mr. Kim's body under the guise of refuge. Communication has to be encoded and smuggled out. The bunker exists, the film suggests, to be occupied, and release is only possible if the world resting atop it can be bought.
So we come to the crashing sadness of the film's final sequences. In addition to the Kims' overt play-acting as skilled workers, Ki-woo, as we know, is associated with an additional type of theatrical distancing -- expressing aspiration in the language of metaphor. There's Ki-woo's explicit exaltation of metaphor mentioned above, and then there's the device that sets up the film's ending: prolepsis, the representation of a projected future event as if it had already come to pass. When his sister Ki-jeong forges a university record for him, Ki-woo tells his father that he doesn't consider it a forgery; it's a stand-in for what he'll eventually accomplish. The counterpart to the Parks' spatialization of intimacy through theatrical distance is Ki-woo's, and implicitly all the Kims', intimacy with an imagined future through temporal collapse. Prolepsis has an interpretive power that's essentially theological for those who live in semi-basements. The Kims' spatial imagination may hinge on the fear of falling further and a hope of climbing higher, but for Ki-woo, the present only has meaning and reality when read through the lens of a redeeming future.
We are set up for the wrenching bait-and-switch of the final cut from Ki-woo's imagined future to the real present in at least three ways: 1) the scene with the forged document, 2) analepsis, i.e., the flashback of Geun-sae and Moon-gwang dancing in the Parks' living room, and 3) Ki-woo's involuntary laughter upon awaking from his operation. Ki-woo's rationalization of the forgery is touchingly unrealistic but also, in its practical dishonesty, functions in the moment as comedy. The softly-lit flashback of Geun-sae and Moon-gwang dancing around the Parks' living room with a sweet air of ownership takes place while the couple hold the Kims hostage in the same room. What's worth noting is the anti-realism of the sequence. The fantasy isn't sealed off in the past, but is scored by the diegetic music playing in the present and punctured in the end by the couple's sudden startled reaction within the flashback to events transpiring now -- cut to their getting ambushed by the Kims. (The only other depiction of non-diegetic events in the film, apart from Ki-woo's fantasy, is Mrs. Park's narration of Da-song's encounter with Geun-sae. This scene is similarly anti-mimetic in its necessary display of something Mrs. Kim has never seen: Geun-sae's face.) Finally, Ki-woo's uncontrollable laughter, said to be an effect of brain surgery, seems to erupt only during somber moments of public ritual: when he's being Mirandized; during his and his mother's trial; while he and his mother visit his dead sister's urn. These moments, along with Ki-woo's observation upon waking that the doctor didn't look like a doctor and the cop didn't look like a cop, register the accepted theatricalities of everyday life as hysterical incongruities. Even this mundane role-playing won't do anymore.
The penultimate shot of the film, then, allows or forces us to inhabit the same temporal disjunction as Ki-woo, but in a state of compulsory innocence, without the comfortable distance of laughter or the overt anti-mimetic gestures of earlier scenes. The archetypal narratives I mention above -- Icarus and Daedalus, son as Christ-like redeemer -- occur to us retrospectively, but while watching, we're captured and held in the moment by the realism of the scene. Ki-woo narrates his eventual acquisition of wealth and purchase of the Parks' former house. We watch as the full emotional cartography of the film is brought to bear on a final scene of redemption: the stationary camera allows the floor-to-ceiling window to act like a permeable screen while the green space of transformation, the lawn, finally restores in linear time what's been taken from a traumatized son. The theatrical potential of the Parks' lawn is needed to orchestrate this moment of return, to flatten the temporal distortions of aspiration-as-metaphor into a single, all-conferring tableau. In the moment, we believe in this scene not because we think it's realistic, but because it's aesthetically realist. Ki-woo's fantasy even ends with a fade to black: ascent achieved, father redeemed, finis. The devastating drift back down into the present is effected with a visual rhyme of the opening descent into the semi-basement: the present is sutured to the past, without even the gap that metaphor and theatricality typically allow.
The opening and closing shots of #Parasite pic.twitter.com/JPwabAHcMs— Parasite Gifs (@ParasiteGifs) December 21, 2019
At the end, a son makes a promise, the implied promise that inaugurated this journey in the first place. The season has changed, but the dream remains the same. The real feat of Parasite is, after the sanguinary carnival of class rage, the cartoonish butchery and hysterical laughter, to return us at the very end to the exact same dream of ascent, the same vow of redemption, and one can only guess the same grotesqueries to come. We're settled back into the exquisite plan or delusional vision, but it now displays the resting attitude of all aspirational fantasy: the incomparable cruelty of realism.
1 Thanks to the brilliant Ben Tam for his observation about Big Hunger's dependence on Little Hunger.
2 Elaine Freedgood writes memorably about metonymy, metaphor, and sleuthing in The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel.
