When You Got Nothing, Do You Got Nothing to Lose?

The film Parasite asks: "When You Got Nothing, [Do] You Got Nothing to Lose?"

[Original lyrics by Bob Dylan from "Like a Rolling Stone."]

'Parasite' by Bong Joon-ho

Source: YouTube official trailer

Parasite is an exquisitely formed social and aesthetic attack on class inequities. It was written (story and screenplay) and directed by the gifted Bong Joon-ho.

At 2 hours and 12 minutes, with a few brief false endings, we are close witnesses to how being desperate (destitute, uneducated, homeless, and hungry) breeds actions that seem unconscionable, yet fit the moment and the circumstances.

As a good friend mentioned after we saw the film, "…it was like watching a car wreck... and there is nothing you can do to help [the victims]." He had felt the story’s emotional impact, I thought.

It was a bit later that I thought Bong Joon-ho also had delivered his audience a derivative experience. He was bringing us face-to-face with the ageless dilemma, almost imponderable except through art, whether our world, Eastern (South Korea in this film) or Western, can ever escape the corrosive effects of class and the indignity and injustice it breeds.

None of the characters are portrayed as “bad people.” We meet two families. The Parks* are a hugely prosperous Korean family with two children, living in a vast, stone fortress of a home, an architect’s creation laden with interior art, and engulfed in an exterior of exquisite landscape beauty. The Parks are kind people, heavily insulated from the raw realities that abound about them.

And the Kims** (also a father, mother, daughter, and son—though a bit older). They are squatting in a hovel at the end of a Seoul slum alley. Once again, this family is without work or prospects; they can see no imaginable escape. Yet, two things distinguish the Kims: First, they all are very competent people prepared to work hard, and second (to set the plot racing), while their food supply may be low, their guile is abundant.

Both the Parks and the Kims are intact families, without the dissolution and distancing extent in so many households nowadays. This protects the viewer from any pity or disdain since it is not them but their respective circumstances that have fated their lives.

Mr. Kim gives staid expression to the fatalism that class breeds. He says, late in the film (before all the hell of the film’s end sets in), supine with his family on the floor of a huge makeshift shelter (after a flood), that there is no sense in “making a plan—since plans never go the way you wish." He urges his son, don’t try to make a plan. The father is not explicit about any alternative to their troubles; he cannot be since there never can be a viable plan. The answer is simply to put one foot after the other, using each step, presumably, to judge the next, all the time effectively blindfolded.

Can this cinematic (or other artistic) experience move us even one millimeter closer to humanity? Therein, I suspect, lies the answer to whether any of us go to see an artistic “car wreck,” even when so elegantly and brilliantly portrayed. Having an aesthetic is not enough. It must draw its power from the narrative, lest it become hollow and cosmetic. No worries, in Parasite, the narrative is amply embroidered by the beauty (and suspense) of this cinematic creation.

But to return to the heart of the matter, there never is “nothing to lose.” That may play well as a concept or a tune. But life is not that forgiving or generous, neither for rich or poor, young or old. And across the broadband of cultures, races, and ethnicities that inhabit our Earth. The film’s final scenes make sure we know there is always something (substantial) to lose. Escape from the consequences of our actions is not in any of God’s plans.

This film’s moral message may go down our psychological hatches a bit more readily than if it were set in Western culture. Because it is not about “us.” It is not about somewhat proximal Appalachia, Brownsville Brooklyn, or rural Oklahoma. A degree of separation can help with our bearing the unbearable.

Parasite exposes us to what is societally unbearable. When the unbearable, the morally unconscionable is revealed, in careful doses and pace—sometimes, if we are lucky, with beauty—we are poised to move toward the grace of equity and dignity. This, I imagine, is how art (and life) can gently pry open a portal into an alternative universe not as barbarously beset. That, in the end, was my experience of Parasite.

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If that is how it happens, person by person, how does societal and culture change happen?

How are pervasive racial and social inequities remedied? How are the noxious, visceral experiences of class differences (smell in particular) subdued? How is hope, even faith, instilled in people who have little reason to hope? I suspect, one person, one moment at a time. Anything greater suggests a plan, which has never been known to work.