Parasite: Theme, Tone, and Structure
The transcript is edited for length and clarity.
Parasite: Theme, Tone, and Structure
In my last podcast, we discussed Parasite and the way tone is used in the film. We compared Parasite to Little Miss Sunshine, another Academy Award-winning film that uses tone in interesting and unusual ways, and we talked about the difference between tone and genre and how that plays out in both these films.
In this podcast, I want to dive even deeper into Parasite and look at the place where tone meets theme. I want to look at how the theme of Parasite ends up informing the tone and structure of the film.
Bong Joon-ho, the writer/director, created this film without even knowing where he was going or what happens in the second half of the story. We’re going to talk about how he achieved that, by allowing tone, structure, and thematic exploration to help the movie unfold in front of him.
Parasite is built around a question: Who is the parasite?
Previously, we talked about how Bong was interested in the idea of infiltration when he started writing the script. But in the title, Parasite, he really focuses on the meaning of that theme. This is a story about parasitic infiltration. This is about the way our society views each other as parasites. It’s about the way the rich view the poor as parasites, the way the poor view the rich as parasites, and the way the poor view the underclass as parasites.
In a way, what he’s really looking at is our political situation and the ongoing class wars we’re experiencing around the world.
The question Bong is asking is one that he doesn’t necessarily fully know the answer to, and that’s what makes his exploration so interesting and compelling.
Many writers, especially political writers, confuse the concepts of theme and moral.
They think they’re exploring a theme, but what they’re actually doing is trying to impose their moral point of view on the audience. Often, the result is very bad movies– movies that not only fail dramatically but also fail to influence anyone politically, at least not anyone who doesn’t already believe what the writer believes.
A great writer, instead of pretending they have the answer, admits it’s never that simple. They try to instead pose a question to themselves that they’re not fully capable of answering, a question they’re going to have to wrestle with on the page in order to make some sense of it.
When you work in this way, you not only take the audience on a journey, you take yourself on a journey.
You force yourself to challenge your assumptions and easy answers and to look for something closer to the truth. Along the way, you’re going to end up writing a movie or TV show that’s a lot more convincing to your audience, especially to those who may believe something different than you.
The bad version of Parasite, from one political point of view, might say, “You know what the problem is? The problem is the rich.”
It might say “The rich are parasites living off the poor, sucking up all the resources off the backs of the good, poor, hard-working folks who just want to do right. These rich parasites are taking everything for their own selfish aims. Those nasty one-percenters.”
The bad version of this movie from the opposite point of view, says, “You know what the problem is? The problem is the poor. The poor are parasites feeding off the rich. They need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps because anyone can make it. I started with nothing, and now I’m a one-percenter. The poor just need to stop thinking of themselves as welfare cases and take responsibility for their lives. They need to stop being parasites.”
A more complicated, but also bad, version from this point of view would be, “You know who the problem really is? It isn’t the middle class.