The Parasite and the Awards Host

While the endorsement from the Academy certainly bears cultural weight, Parasite was not a movie that needed the Oscars. More people might have been swayed to see the film after it swept the season — but it certainly had no shortage of fans beforehand, even in the West. (Not a big moviegoer, I saw the film long before the Oscars nominees even came out.) The Academy’s choice to elect Parasite was essentially a vote for itself: a safety-line for the survival of an industry indolent, self-indulgent, and frankly, dying. This isn’t to say that Oscar-goers didn’t love the movie — but the reason Parasite stirred such ferment is because, in an industry grown stilted, and centered around story-telling, Parasite’s win would introduce a fresh new storyline. Witness: the audience chanting “Up! Up! Up!” as the lights dimmed during the Parasite’s Best Picture speech. The time limit rule was originally introduced to eliminate what show organizer Bill Mechanic termed “the single most hated thing on the show”: long and embarrassing displays of emotion. But clearly the audience wanted sentiment now. Indeed, the Academy Awards audience, representatives of the movie industry, seemed almost to be engaged in an act of filmmaking as they clamored for lights—camera, action. Parasite’s win is a fairytale story indeed — with the role of the white knight clearly preordained.

It’s not that the Oscars don’t matter at all. Clearly, it’s still a source of pride. “And the winner is…a movie from South Korea!” pantomimed an indignant President Trump at a recent rally. “What the hell was that all about? We’ve got enough problems with South Korea over trade!” To a president with the soothsayer’s skill of seeing decline everywhere, America’s film industry is clearly another arena that needs to be made “great again.” And in their Best Picture speech, Miky Lee, the executive producer of Parasite, made clear how much their win meant to South Korea: “Without you, our Korean film audience, we are not here. Thank you very much.” No doubt Parasite swept because it came in at just the right cultural moment: class criticism is currently tearing through Korea at the same time that Bernie Sanders is storming through the US primary, that the UK prepares for Brexit, that countries around the world face some of the worst levels of income inequality to date.

But the power of Parasite is also in its incredible particularity. Though it may have succeeded in the Academy Awards because a Western audience can relate to its central themes, much in the film is also lost on it. A Korean audience, for instance, would likely get the joke when Ki-woo “directs” Ki-taek’s performance: Ki-taek clutching a script and gesticulating, Ki-woo telling him, “Cut, cut! Dad, your emotions are up to here,” (hand above his head) “Bring them down to about here” (lowering his hand). Song Kang Ho, the actor for Ki-taek, is one of Korea’s biggest stars, while Choi Woo Shik, who plays Ki-woo, is a newcomer – if anyone should be coaching, it’d be the other way around. And the presence of the scholar’s rock, which is introduced early and sets a mysterious theme throughout, would register to a Korean audience as a strange: families don’t typically gift each other scholar’s rocks. A Western audience, on the other hand, would likely Orientalize the rock as a normal part of the experience of Korean-ness — much like Harvey Weinstein so easily believed that Bong Joon Ho’s father was a provincial fisherman, rather than one of Korea’s most famed poets.