The Popularity of *Parasite* Through the Eyes of a History Teacher

For several days, Bong Joon-ho’s film, which won four Academy Awards, drew the media spotlight. That seems only natural. But as expected, the articles the media ran on *Parasite* and on director Bong Joon-ho were uniformly full of praise, to the point that it was difficult to find any critical commentary on the film. That too was understandable. Given the history of the Academy Awards, it seemed only natural.

But again, as expected, among that media attention there were also articles that revealed one side of Korean nationalism. The most representative example was the coverage claiming that the American journalist Jon Miller had disparaged director Bong’s film. In fact, the Korean media outlets that reported this mostly devoted more space to John Legend’s criticism of Jon Miller than to what Jon Miller had actually said. Yet John Legend’s remarks were not especially meaningful; they were mainly focused on mocking Jon Miller’s comments. In other words, over the past few days Koreans seemed unwilling to tolerate any criticism that belittled director Bong’s film.

The original text of Jon Miller’s tweet saying, “These people are destroying America,” was very short. Most Korean media, citing some American media reports and John Legend’s remarks, interpreted the ambiguous subject “these people” as referring to foreigners such as Koreans rather than Americans. But later, Jon Miller clarified through his own tweet that “these people” meant Hollywood filmmakers who award prizes from the perspective of class conflict. In the end, the essence of Jon Miller’s comment was a criticism of the left-wing outlook prevalent in Hollywood and, today, in American cultural circles more broadly.

This phenomenon seems similar to what happened a few years ago when *Moonlight* won the Academy Award. Whether *Moonlight* truly had greater artistic merit than its competitor *La La Land*, with which it contended that year, would have been a subjective judgment by the film jurors. But as Jon Miller’s tweet also suggested, I remember thinking that the judges were trying to signal that they were intellectually awakened people who were conscious of phenomena and concepts such as social discrimination and social justice. In fact, this phenomenon is not limited to film awards. The Nobel Prize is no different. Leaving aside the Nobel Peace Prize entirely, I cannot shake the impression that even the Nobel Prize in Economics tends to favor pro-left economists.

Ordinary people, unless they are experts in those fields who can sense how politics operates within them, would find it hard to know the inner workings of the awards mentioned above in detail—and there is no need for them to know. Even so, Korean society looks far too naïve. It is not merely naïve; it also displays an emotional side excessively inclined toward nationalism. I feel that Koreans are living in an age of collective emotion, in a sense an age of romanticism. I strongly worry whether, in such a society, there is really any place for the independent individual, for a person expected to bear responsibility as a private agent. This is why I feel more pessimistic about Korean society than even about the United States or Europe, where the cultural world, academia, and the media also lean left.

I will not discuss the artistic quality of *Parasite*. But the film’s social view, whether the director intended it or not, clearly rests on a left-wing, socialist perspective. Hollywood had a similar film last year as well: *Joker*. At their core, the two films vividly reveal a shared tendency to associate morality and humanity with class. In both films, characters are created on the assumption of the immorality of the wealthy, with no real interest in that immorality itself, while the immorality of the poor is explored with endless sympathy through social factors and social constraints. The socialist logic that approaches the existence of the haves and the have-nots in society not from the perspective of competition and choice but from that of exploitation and oppression naturally focuses on how the morality and humanity of the have-nots are destroyed by that exploitation and oppression.

Understanding society through conflict between the haves and the have-nots, this consciousness of class—the left has not changed since Marx. Marx may have seemed to be making some attempt at scientization by borrowing mathematical logic, but in reality it was merely a mode of reasoning suited to the distinctly 19th-century intellectual atmosphere in which applied sciences such as eugenics and phrenology, tailored to popular sentiment, were in vogue.

For example, 19th-century British society, where all kinds of social reform—moral reform, institutional reform, and so on—were the central themes, was certainly a space where free ideas erupted like a live volcano. The newly grown middle classes expressed and shared, in diverse and passionate voices, their ideas for a more “moral and intellectual” human society without hesitation. Not only star-level thinkers with enormous popular recognition such as Mill, Bentham, and Spencer, but also numerous organizations of many different kinds held public lectures and assemblies in response to such demands.

It had meaning, but it was also, in another sense, a festival of hypocrisy. The aspiration to become more moral and intellectual human beings came to be challenged by the scientific findings of the 20th century, through which humanity came to understand more accurately what kind of animal it is. In the end, the lesson of 20th-century world history was also a political one: idealistic aspirations that ignore what human beings are can bring about tragedy. Of course, Korean education, which leads people to view history only through the romantic thesis of the independence movement and the nationalist movement, ignores such lessons. In fact, one of the most fatal problems in Korean history education is that it treats the cause of the Korean War too superficially. It is not enough simply to say that Kim Il-sung started the war. We must properly learn the philosophical causes of this war—why this tragedy came to happen.

I hope more and more people come to recognize that it is time to move beyond the reductionist, conflict-centered way of thinking that judges human beings and discusses social ideals through mathematical and humanistic sentiment, rather than through observation and analysis of humanity’s ever-changing social interactions. People sometimes say, “Escaping brainwashing is in proportion to intelligence,” but in my view, the only path out of the matrix of left-wing collective emotion is to begin by looking at ourselves as human beings more coolly and accepting with humility the limits of weak and contradictory human nature.

Bae Min

History Teacher, Soongeui Girls’ High School

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Original title: 역사교사로서 바라본 영화 ‘기생충’의 인기

Author: Bae Min

Date: 2020-02-13

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=free_opinion&pn=15&idx=22382