Neoliberal Dreaming

Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” (2019) as a Modern Horror Story

The ever-ominous philosopher’s stone. (Pinterest)

The young Kim Ki-woo stands immobilized, held firmly in place by sheer curiosity and awe over the unforeseen arrival of this mystical stone.

The rock felt hefty but liberating in his hands, holy even; there he stood — with his head cocked to the side, wide-eyed, studying with immense purpose this idol of great fortune that fate had finally decided to send his way. “It’s so metaphorical,” he wills to himself. (07:31–08:03) Thousands of kilometres away, an even younger Nigel Tan pokes at a tiny jade guardian lion standing proud and poised on a bed of crimson suede in a clear plastic casing. And in its mouth, a neatly rolled up hundred dollar bill beamed a bright red smile. I scooched over to the rear of the statue, shut my left eye and aimed down the ridges that ran down the centre of its head as if it were a rifle. “It has to face towards the door, son,” my father had told me. “It keeps the bad stuff out, and the money rolling in.” And so I would ensure that it did. This little lion kept the cosmic order in check: promising wealth, health, but more than anything, mobility.

Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 paragon of auteurship Parasite was written to serve as a sobering reminder of the shortfalls our current sociocultural paradigm has us shoulder, and seems to succeed in doing so, not just through critique and analysis of repressive social structures with social allegory, but once again — metaphorically.

Making history as the first non-English film to win an Oscar for Best Picture, and first South Korean film to win any Academy Award amongst other cinematic achievements, the film has very literally become a symbol of challenging the very struggles that plague the story espoused in the work itself. The film engages with a wide range of concepts to varying degrees, but all circle around the central theme of critiquing the structures behind social reproduction that inform the drive to accumulate sociocultural capital in the pursuit of social mobility. Parasite’s story touches upon the significance of the domestic realm as a key variable in the continued survival of capitalism — à la feminist scholars like Fraser and Federici (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018; Federici, 2018) — but delves deeper past that, narratively exploring the idea of, as what Du Bois coined, the “double consciousness.” This is done through elucidating the inextricable relationship between capitalism and credentialism, as well as the underlying mimetic social performance of the everyday. Utilizing the film as well as a few sources outside of it as points of reference, the ensuing essay aims to argue how the burden of social reproduction work has historically, and into the present, been disproportionately shouldered by women, migrant/guest workers, and those of lower socio-economic class within the domestic sphere, and hence translating outward into society at large as well.

The Kim family. (The New Yorker)

FORGOTTEN LABOUR

Social reproduction, as defined by critical theorists, has been, by critics of capitalism like Marx, a long-neglected but central contributor to the continued prosperity, expansion and proliferation of capitalism and capitalist systems worldwide throughout history (Federici, 2018; Weiss, 2021). The Marxist-feminist view posits that capitalism has historically been dependent on not only “productive” economic activities, like waged industrial labour for example, but specifically the gendered separation of the latter from “unproductive” economic activity like domestic work: homemaking and childbearing for example (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018). This inequality-producing cleavage between gender is still present and alive in the current day, but has also taken a new form in the contemporary age through filling this gap with underpaid migrant/guest and cross-class labour instead to minimize labour costs as women gradually get absorbed into the paid workforce (Weiss, 6). This is seen portrayed in Parasite through every member of the Kim family, masquerading as people other than themselves, and finding employment through various domestic roles in the Park household: Ki-Woo as “Kevin” tutoring Da-hye, Ki-jung as “Jessica” employed as art therapist to Da-song, Ki-taek as “Mr. Kim” employed as family driver in lieu of the Park patriarch Dong-ik, and Chung-sook employed as housekeeper in lieu of the Park matriarch Yeon-kyo. Instead of the adults of the Park family taking on the household’s domesticated labour, it is outsourced and “socioeconomically off-shored,” if you will, by the Parks past gender lines and instead across class lines to the Kims. Yeon-kyo, by means of an advantageous wage level, now has a surplus of time to manage and spend on “development-enhancing time” with the Park children, maintaining and reinforcing the household’s privileged social position over others, namely in this case, the Kims for example (Weiss, 9). This also mirrors the precarity of gig work now plaguing South Korea and the world beyond (Shorrock, 2020).

And in consonance with this line of thought, apart from domesticated labour within the household, socially reproductive work also extends out further into societies via shared spaces like parks and playgrounds, or even public institutions like childcare and healthcare facilities (Weiss, 6). Social institutions, in particular, also aid in instilling certain social “principles” and “values” within a culture, perpetuating the inequalities necessary for apex accumulation — key to the efficacy of social reproduction. The church, military, and most specifically, educational institutions, serve this purpose with great intention. The vast majority of children born into advantageous social positions attain the privileges that come with being educated in better-equipped, better-staffed, and most importantly, better-funded schools: paving the way to credentials valued by the jobs of highest demand, and more often than not, at much less tribulation than their less socioeconomically blessed brethren (Weiss, 10). This wicked hunger for credentialism (at least within the South Korean context) is explored throughout the film in both literal and metaphorical ways. Examples of the former is seen through Ki-jung doing up “Kevin’s” degree from Yonsei University in Photoshop (11:02–11:30), or Dong-ik being convinced by Ki-taek of “The Care” as a legitimate VIP service agency just off a few words and a “cool design” (48:20–48:52). The immensely understated power assigned to credential goes beyond just physical manifestations of ink on paper, however, and also assumes the form of social markers like code switching between languages or accents, or the choice of cuisine when engaging in family meals (Shorrock, 2020). The multiple instances where Yeon-kyo intermittently mixes in English in conversation (29:12–29:14), and the Parks’ choice for Western food at the birthday party instead of traditional Korean food (01:41:54–01:41:58) reveals a familiar partiality; a penchant for anything Western equating to superiority — fruit borne from the global success of neoliberal capitalism.

On the hunt for a wi-fi connection. (The Guardian)

PROLIFERATING CLASS STRUGGLE

Finally, and what I would argue is the most pressing and disheartening point stressed upon in the film and the argument at hand, comes the apogee of the literal and metaphorical social struggle. The first half of this point is as Marx has long emphasized: the dominance of capitalist logic pressures those in favourable social positions to accumulate surplus capital ad infinitum, and those in unfavourable social positions are pit against one another in the hopes of subsistence (Weiss, 9). This in-fighting of the proletariat is seen represented in the intergenerational scuffle between the old and new housekeepers of the Park household. They get lost in their hubris and attempt to “out-perform” one another, and the violence that unfolds snowballs exponentially, and results in several deaths from all parties (01:53:10–01:55:48). The second half of it however, is the way in which this Sisyphean struggle leads to an internalization of class, embedding deep within each agent’s psyche the role to perform subconsciously on the “stage” of social hierarchy. As the Kims are left sleeping on the floor of an indoor community gymnasium after a huge flood, squeezed in with hundreds of others who had their homes drowned in rain and sewage water as well, Ki-taek lectures Ki-woo on his nihilistic worldview; that he no longer makes any plans in life to avoid being disappointment or failure, and that nothing truly matters (01:39:10–01:40:38).

But this isn’t to say that this internalization of class as a social role is exclusive to those of lower socio-economic class. We can see in the editing, mise en scène, and dialogue, numerous instances throughout the film illustrating how lines, boundaries and borders are drawn in physical and metaphysical spaces between characters. To start, we see clever usage of lines as a recurring visual motif symbolizing when characters are figuratively separated by a line/boundary, like the fridge door handles striking vertically across the screen when Yeon-kyo is interviewing “Kevin,”(14:43–15:40) and even several occurrences where characters cross this “line,” like the corner of the glass window when Moon-Gwang wakes Yeon-kyo right before this interview (14:22–14:33), or the wardrobe door in the background as Ki-woo leans in to kiss Da-hye in the foreground (25:01–25:18). We see this reflected in the mise en scène, with the blocking of characters moving up and down between the Kims’ banjiha and lower-class neighbourhood and the Parks’ mansion and upper-class neighbourhood (01:32:14–01:35:08) and within the Park home itself, between the basement and ground level (02:03:31–02:06:25). Dong-ik lets slip multiple times throughout the duration of the film his fixation on the separation between the Parks and their domestic workers: that they all are not to “cross the line,” wrenching from ideology into reality his almost cosmological view of schism between class, as if it were a fact of reality that had to simply be obeyed as such (01:27:26–01:28:40).

CONCLUSION

The story of Parasite, as mentioned at the beginning of the essay, seems to have served its purpose of warning the masses of the dangers of our current socioeconomic structures. Despite this, however, as Song Kang-ho said about the film: “I think the story is about coexistence and how we can all live together.” (Shorrock, 2020) Will there ever exist a world in which we have a truly equitable economy and world order? We would perhaps first have to work towards tackling the crux of the issue through progressive taxation and redistribution policy in an effort to challenge income and wealth inequalities. Greater investment in public assets and institutions would incentivize lessening the desire for privatized domestic work through migrant/guest labour and in turn, not just reducing inequality within states, but between them as well. But most importantly, reform in social structures, be it through actual reformative policy or simply rethinking how we are educating the next generation, and thus, ourselves, on social reproduction, and the importance of intersectional thought as we approach these topics with care. But until then, Ki-woo sits alone, eyes awash with a deep blue, slouched over on the soggy couch in his subterranean banjiha as the snow piling up on the street struggles to find its way in through the meshed windows.

“Take care until then. So long.” (02:06:39–02:07:16)

WORKS CITED

Bong, J.H. (Director). (2019). Gisaengchung [Parasite] [Film]. Barunson E&A; CJ Entertainment. https://media3-criterionpic-com.proxy.lib.sfu.ca/htbin/wwform/006?T=MK20101&ALIAS=MK20101_EST.KF&M=0_nv3eav61&DSTYLE=0#multimedia_resources_MK20101

Federici, S. (2018). Marx and Feminism. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, 16(2), 468–475. https://doi.org/10.31269/triplec.v16i2.1004

Fraser, N., & Jaeggi, R. (2018). Ch. 1. Conceptualizing Capitalism. In Capitalism: A conversation in critical theory (pp. 13–60). Polity Press

Weiss, H. (2021). Social Reproduction. Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.29164/21socialrepro

Wi-Fi as Metaphor: Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite Reveals South Korea’s Class Divide — The National Interest. (2020). Retrieved October 16, 2025, from https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/wi-fi-metaphor-bong-joon-hos-parasite-reveals-south-koreas-class-divide-120026?fbclid=IwAR2rb1_Mttas1To_5dJSahpww8cc-JcFmVYbNzhO7w0uZFOGEXGl6I39MUk