 So, but I do want to get while it's fresh in my mind, I want to do this review of the movie Parasite. I think it's an important movie. I think it's very reflective of the time. It's stunning. It's a movie that has won all these awards. I mean, it's basically won everything. It won the Cannes Festival Top Movie Award. It won Foreign Film with all the various awards that are happening in the United States. Parasite won all kind of the foreign film awards. And then in Oscars, of course, it's the first foreign film, the first non-English film, to win the Oscar for Best Film, for Best Director. So truly, from a awards perspective, a stunning achievement. So I had to go see the movie. I had to find out what the deal is. And so I watched it on the plane coming home. And somebody warned me that I should really watch it on a big screen. And they're probably right. The movie has some stunning visuals. And I think the movie is very visual in many respects. It's got a really, really bad theme. But the movie uses visuals to portray the theme, which is really good filmmaking in that respect. It is, I think generally the movie is well made. I think it's well integrated. It took me a long time to figure out. It took me really chewing on it for two days to figure out what the theme was. But the more I thought about the visuals, the more the theme comes into focus, the more you realize what the movie is trying to say. And it's basically trying to say what the director, in this case, is saying it's trying to say. So in this case, an artist's metaphysical value judgments are coming across. And he can explicitly state them. So the theme is more political, but it's definitely a, the theme is, well, it's got a metaphysical aspect, but a theme is real. And, you know, so do I recommend watching the movie before we get into the review? So a few things. One, the review is going to have spoilers. Lots of spoilers. Because I can't review the movie without really telling you what the movie is about and what happens in the movie, including the end of the movie. The movie I'm talking about, for those of you joining late, is Parasite. So including the ending of the movie, because I think the ending of the movie kind of capsulates the theme and the whole sense, the whole sense of life and the whole perspective of the movie is encapsulated by it. So there are going to be spoilers. I warn you of that. We're going to go through a little bit of the storyline. And then I want to describe the visuals that I think are most significant in the movie. And again, I, you know, if you're interested in cinema, I definitely encourage you to watch the movie. It's got elements that are painful. And certainly, there is a climatic scene that is extraordinarily violent. It's short. It's short, but it's very violent and very shocking, right? Very shocking. You can kind of sense that it's coming or something like it is coming. I don't think I quite expected the rush of violence. But of course, the theme ultimately necessitates, ultimately necessitates that kind of violent climax. So do I recommend the movie? You know, if you're interested in movies, if you're interested in cinema, then yes, because I think it's a very interestingly made movie. I think, you know, the director here is very strong visually. He really has an understanding of space. He uses space really well. He conveys the fundamental theme of the movie through visuals, through visuals and people's movement through the scenes. So it's, I think it's very powerful in that sense. The theme is a negative one. It's not a pleasant movie. There's nobody, I mean, nobody good in the movie. There are no good guys in the movie. So there's nobody positive in the movie. It's typically modern in that sense. It has no heroes. It has no characters you can look up to. It has no positive message. The message is overall absolutely unequivocally negative. It's a very, at the end of the day, a very depressing movie. A very, you know, negative sense of life, depressing movie. But again, if you like movies, if you like cinema, then it's interesting to watch. It's an interesting how it plays out. It's interesting, again, what the director does with the movie. I've only seen one of the movie by this director. I didn't even realize it when I saw it. Only afterwards, when I was looking him up, did I realize, but I saw a movie years ago, a movie came out in 2013, called Snowpiercer, which is a science fiction movie that I saw. And what's interesting is the two movies are very similar themes. That is clearly this director is motivated by a particular view of the world. And that view of the world comes across in both Snowpiercer, which is a sci-fi movie I can talk about after we talk about this movie. And Snowpiercer and Parasite have very, very, very similar themes to the movies. Okay, so I want to talk about, let's first talk about, I'll give you a quick summary of the story, the story of the movie. And then I want to talk about the particular visual that if you're going to watch the movie, I would focus on. Now again, I'm going to give you a lot of spoilers to the extent that you like to be in suspense in the movie, then you should probably leave the podcast right now. And if you intend to watch the movie and not listen, if you've seen the movie, I think this will be interesting to you. And even if you're going to see the movie, but you know, mine spoilers, that is, it's not that important to you that you don't know where the movie is heading, then I would encourage you to continue listening to the movie. All right, so here's the story in short. So you've got a poor family, father, mother, son and daughter. They live in, I guess what's fairly common in Korea in the slums, they live in a basement type apartment with a window looking into the street and windows play. Windows are very important in this movie. Window looking in the street, but it's like, it's like on the top, right? There's a window she can look and you can see the feet of people, you can see the people standing up. But the apartment itself is underground with only this one portion of the window above. Again, very important that the apartment is underground and that it generally is underground and that they're looking up through these windows. Anyway, there are a lot of work. So you've got the son and the daughter they seem like post college. The son has also been in the army and they are out of work and a friend, a rich friend of the son, comes to them and says, look, I'm tutoring this girl of a rich family in English. You can take my job. I'm going off to study abroad. You can come and take the job. But in order to do that, you have to pretend to be a college student. You have to pretend to be wealthy. You have to pretend to be from a good family and you have to pretend to have a college degree. So the son, with the help of the daughter, forges all the documents necessary. He goes, does the interview and gets the job. Then he discovers that the son, oh, so he gets a job at this rich family. Now, the rich family lives in a beautiful modern home, right? A beautiful modern home, which we are told in the story was designed by some architect who used to live in it and is left. This beautiful modern home has big windows looking out into this amazing garden and then out into kind of the meadows and the hills and just a beautiful view, right? So it's just a gorgeous view and you can sit in the living room and look out into the spacious, beautiful thing. Again, big window looking out into this amazing garden. But in this home lives a wealthy man, CEO of some company, his wife, a son and daughter. Son and daughter are younger. The daughter is in last grade in high school, not very bright, needs help with her English. The son is a confused kid that they don't know what exactly to do with and at some point it becomes evident that they would like to get him some kind of art teacher. So the poor kid suggests, oh, I know an art teacher and he makes up the story about a girl that he knows was an art teacher, went to this art academy and goes to these schools and goes here and there and is really, really good. And the wife, the rich wife says, oh, you know, this is great. Let's get her. So again, they forge her documents and this is his sister and he brings the sister into the house as now the teacher for the young son. Anyway, they then manage to get the driver, the father's, the father, the rich father is, has a driver who takes him to work, takes him back, the family has a driver and they manage to get him fired and they get their father to replace him. And then they manage to get by again, creating havoc and lying and deceiving through deception, they manage to get the housekeeper in this house who's been in the house forever, including when it was owned by the architect and they get her fired and she is replaced by the mother. Now, in no, in none of the cases, they say this is my father, this is my mother. There are supposedly four different people who don't really know, who have some connection to one another but don't really know each other, certainly not all members of one family. So here, the poor family has been very resourceful, has come up with a plan of deception in order to get their jobs and the elements of this that are funny and it lead, indeed, the movie at the beginning of it seems like a comedy and seems like it's going to develop as a comedy. It becomes a tragedy very quickly but it is presented as a comic drama, a comedy tragedy kind of a movie and the beginning seems like this comedy where these poor people are basically deceiving the rich people and the rich people are portrayed as kind of naive, kind of childish, kind of silly, kind of empty and easy to manipulate, easy to manipulate. So not a very, not a very admirable family, very detached from reality, detached from the real world. So they're all in place, everything is running smoothly until one day the rich family goes off on a camping trip and the housekeeper comes back and the housekeeper comes back and she says there's something I have to do, please let me into the house. So they let her in and they discover that in the house there is inside the cellar, there is a secret door that leads down into this shelter, basically a shelter built by this rich family just in case of a nuclear war with North Korea. So there's a shelter underneath the basement and it's a secret door nobody knows about, the common owners and in the shelter the woman's, the old housekeeper that was kicked out's husband lives in there and he lives there and she basically feeds him off of the food from the rich family and he basically stays there and never goes out and he's there because he's lost the job and the whole thing is the poor family lost their jobs, they've worked and they've lost a job, the father has had many jobs over his career but keep losing them, the mother hasn't had many jobs but keep losing them. So it doesn't present them as people who don't want to work, they clearly want to work but they have no job, there is no option and this one guy is stuck in the basement and they have nothing, they have no property, they have nothing, she works as a housekeeper, she lives in the home and her husband's in the basement, really really really weird but basement, basement is important, really deep shelter you know bunker basement really really important again visually, we'll get to that. Anyway these guys the housekeeper and husband discover that the four people are actually related that they're not separate that they're actually one family, they threaten to tell the family so they can get, she can get her job back. Mayhem ensues during that mayhem basically the housekeeper is killed and then while all this is happening the family announces that they're coming back and so everybody's scrambling, they're locked down in the basement with a dead you know the guy and his wife are locked down in the basement with the his wife that's now being killed in this all this mayhem, the others scatter, they hide, the housekeeper's the only one who's there and you know everybody else is hiding and the family comes in and they have their clues, they have no clue that these people have been potting in their house, they have no clue that everybody's been there, they have no clue that all this is going on, they're completely clueless as to what's happening which is a continuation of this idea that these rich people are completely clueless and have no sense at all of what's going on. Anyway a bunch of stuff happens and we'll get to what happens in the meantime but the housekeeper stays, the other kids manage to escape the house. Now in the meantime massive rainstorm, a monsoon happens and the family, the two kids and the father walk back, they basically walk back from this rich family house to their apartment and when they get to their apartment, their apartment is completely flooded with water, of course the water flows down and floods their apartment, they land up going into shelter, anyway they're in the shelter, they get a call from the rich woman and she says oh I want to put on a party tomorrow, birthday party, I need you all to come and she calls them all back to the house to set up this party, okay so this party's happening and this is where the climax happens and the violent climax happens. Anyway the guy in the basement pissed off that his wife is dead, upset at this family, sees them out there partying, you know helping with the party and everything, takes a kitchen knife and goes out and stabs the poor daughter, right, stabs the poor daughter, basically she's bleeding out. She's bleeding out, I guess the son of the kids got hit so they're they're kind of waving and the rich father wants, tells the driver who's the father of the girl dying that he wants him to drive the kid to the hospital, forget about the girl. So the rich guy shows complete disregard for anybody else's life, for anything else going on there, his kid just got hurt a little bit and he needs to rush him to the hospital. At this point and again another issue I'll get to in a minute, the poor father takes the knife and stabs the rich guy and kills him. He escapes, lands up hiding from the police in this bunker, they never find him, he stays in the bunker and the rest of the family, you know the daughter dies and the other two, they just, I'll tell you afterwards how it actually ultimately ends. Okay so that's kind of the outline of the story, pretty random, pretty crazy, pretty insane, pretty nutty action. So what's the theme of all this? What's the theme? Well let's go back to a few of the images. One poor family lives in a basement with this little window they can see out into the street and their main concern with this window is that there's this drunk guy that always pees on their window, right, life really really sucks. They're trying hard, they're trying hard to the point of conceiving a plant to deceive people and finagle them but they're trying hard, they've been fired from every job they can conceive of, not because they were bad at the job but because that's the nature of the world, you know, businesses go out of business, jobs get replaced and people lose their jobs and they're just, they're just down on their luck. So they live in this basement apartment. The other family, the other poor family we know of, live in a bunker, the guy basically lives in a bunker under a rich people's home. So, and the rich people live in a house basically on top of a hill that has beautiful windows in which you can see the world and just gorgeous spread and they are sheltered from the rain and they are sheltered for anything. Their house never floods, their house is just beautiful, right, and it really is a beautiful house. It's a modernly designed house. They built the house, it's basically a set house, right? They built the house for the movie, for the purpose of the movie. So in that sense, every angle, every layout, every piece of furniture is thought out and this is one of the positive things about the movie. It's all really thought out. It's all figured out how it all lays out. So upstairs is where the rich people live. Downstairs is where the poor people live and it's clearly an upstairs downstairs, downstairs upstairs is a huge theme in this movie. We're constantly going down the stairs to the cellar and up the stairs and down the stairs to the basement apartment and up the stairs to the nice house. The house itself has stairs but less important but it's that rich people, poor people, poor people live down, rich people live up and the camera often spans up and down. Maybe the most illustrative, the two illustrative scenes of this, even, so when the rich people come back, come back after they've gone camping and everybody is hiding, well, they're hiding under a table, under. The rich people above them on the sofa, you'd think they'd see them but again, the rich people are clueless and portrayed as completely clueless. So they're under the sofa, on the sofa and under and they actually have almost sex I guess they make out on the sofa, the rich couple. The kid is outside in a beautiful modern tent while it's raining and the poor people are under the table. The poor people are always under the rich people are almost over. Then the scene where they walk in the rain from the rich house to their basement apartment which they find flooded is a beautifully filmed scene. It's pouring rain and they go down a hill, downstairs, down a road, downstairs, down a road, downstairs, down, down, down, down. It's clear that you've got the class, class hierarchy, class positioning is central to this movie. That is the whole point of the movie is a illustration, visual and in the story of the relationships between classes, the relationship between the rich and the poor. It is striking how many times you see that up, down, rich up, the poor down. The rich are safe, the rich are warm, the rich are comfortable, the poor are in the modernity that they return to their basement apartment is it flooded but they're sewage spewing out everywhere. Nothing they can do about it. Nothing will stop it. They live in filth. They live with people urinating on their windows. They live underground. All the poor people in the movie live underground. They're forgotten. They're unknown. Nobody cares about them. Now the movie doesn't romanticize poverty. The poor family are not good guys. They're clearly deceiving. They're clearly and in one case because they get the driver fired and they get the maid fired, the housekeeper fired. They're clearly hurting other people in the same economic class that they are. So it's not that they are good guys. It's that they have no choice. Class is beyond choice. Class is what it is. The rich family is rich. We don't know how they got rich. We don't see the father working particularly hard. There's one scene where he's at the work. It's not clear. He's sitting there making you know with a bunch of people surrounding him kind of I guess making decisions but there's nothing substantive about showing his work or showing the kind of decision making he's making. The poor families are poor and nothing they do. Nothing they do changes the fact that they're poor. They get the jobs. They've got money but they screwed up. They messed it up. They discovered bad stuff happens and back to poverty they go. So it's inevitable. The poor poor, the rich rich and there's a sudden appeal to a theme like this in South Korea because Korean society was very very what's the what's the term feudal really well into the 20th century. Clear classes. You're born into classes. You're born into a particular class. It's almost a caste system not quite but if you watched Mr. Sunshine which I highly highly highly recommended and you should have watched you could see the class structure of Korean society well into the 20th century and it's reflected now in the 21st century in Parasite at least that is the understanding that the movie conveys about the classes. The rich are rich because they just are the poor poor because they just are and nothing the poor do has any chance of bringing them out of poverty. They are doomed to that and indeed the conflict the primary conflict that happens is the conflict between the two poor families the housekeeper who comes back and her husband in the basement and this new that is the the the pie as the movie sees that the pie is so limited that the poor families are fighting over a very limited pie. They're fighting over the little crumbs that the rich leave them. The two poor families have to struggle to survive at each other's expense. They cannot both exist off of the little crumbs that the rich family sends their way. So not only the poor poor but they're all fighting against each other and eating each other up and damaging each other's chances of success. Yeah I mean somebody in the chat mentions one scene in the movie where the family before they get these jobs with the rich people they they're trying to fold pizza boxes to make a living. So the pizza company is willing to give them a pizza box to fold. So they're folding these pizza boxes the whole family sitting they're folding pizza boxes and they get 25% of them wrong. They damage them so they can't even do that properly. So these are not again the poor are not romanticized here. It's life sucks and the thing is that life sucks for the rich as well. The rich are portrayed as naive easily exploited easily taken advantage of. The rich are portrayed as suffering as ultimately suffering from the actions of the poor and from their own actions. So the father the rich father is killed in the end and that's important because I think the theme of it the theme of the movie is that inequality or class structure right the vast differences between the classes only results in horror for both the poor and the rich. So class inequality results in horror for both rich and poor. But class is also inevitable according to the movie class is inevitable according to the movie. So I think I think the movie is well made. It's well acted. The particular issues are well dramatized. The sense of the movie gives of the inevitability of class the inevitability of disaster then the inevitability of the inevitability of class. Well of the horror of murder of bloodshed. It's all inevitable. There's nothing to do about it. The movie offers no alternatives no options no out indeed at the end of the movie the son the poor son who's schemed this whole idea up in his constantly a schema it writes to his father who stuck in the remember in the in the you know bunker but underneath the house. He writes to the father he writes this letter saying you know one day I'm going to go down I've got a plan I'm going to go study I'm going to go work hard I'm going to make a lot of money I'm going to buy the house that all this happened in this rich house and I'm going to free you from the basement I'm going to free you from the bunker and there's this dream like scene where he comes into the house and the father comes out of the bunker and they hug and then the camera cuts away from that and brings it back into the basement apartment where the kid is writing and it's obvious that's never going to happen that's just a dream that's just another one of this kid's fantasies at some point the father the poor father tells the kid don't plan there's no point in planning everything sucks everything fails whether you plan or you don't plan failure is inevitable the unexpected always happens good stuff cannot happen to us so the movie is saying there is no mobility in the world doesn't matter if you're poor you're rich if you're poor you're rich in a sense you're born into that there's nothing really you can do about that there's no sense of mobility in this movie the richer rich the poorer poor they stay that way and to the extent that those classes exist everybody is going to suffer so yes it's very deterministic in there choices don't matter so if you could you could say inequality or class differences inevitably deterministically lead to horror for both the rich and the poor for everybody involved for people in every class so there you have it that is my review of the movie it is a terrible theme it is a depressing movie it is a depressing idea it's uh it's got nothing to recommend it and it but it's very indicative again of a culture particularly of Hollywood where inequality is they're they obsess about it the left obsesses about inequality this movie reinforces all of their most basic primary ideas and primary beliefs their idea and a kind of determinism their ideas of lack of social mobility their idea that you're born into a particular class and that is inevitable and their idea of a tragic a tragic the inevitability of tragedy the inevitability of tragedy so depressing horrible as social commentary really really bad but very well made and again I you know if you see the movie pay particularly attention to this idea of upstairs downstairs this idea of above and below the superiority of some to others and that that positioning that is very visual so it's it's this is a good movie for those of you who are studying cinema for those of you want to see how to use visuals how to use visuals in order to tell a story tell a story using the super chat and I noticed yesterday when I appealed for support for the show many of you step forward and actually supported the show for the first time so I'll do it again maybe we'll get some more today if you like what you're hearing if you appreciate what I'm doing then I appreciate your support those of you who don't yet support the show please take this opportunity go to your own book show dot com slash support or go to subscribe star dot com your own book show and and and make a kind of a monthly contribution to keep this to keep this going I'm not sure