Parasite vs Little Miss Sunshine
Parasite vs. Little Miss Sunshine
In today’s podcast, we’ll be talking about Parasite by Bong Joon-ho. This is such an exciting film to discuss because Bong is a master of tone.
What’s happening with tone in Parasite is really unusual. We’ve seen comedic horror movies filled with horror genre elements, like Scream or Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. We’ve also seen hardcore horror movies like Drag Me to Hell and Friday the 13th slasher films. We’ve even seen elevated horror movies like Hereditary or A Quiet Place, films I’ve talked about on my podcast, which are really complicated character dramas built against a horror landscape.
But what Parasite is doing is much wilder, because Parasite begins like a character-driven comedy and ever so slowly evolves into a horror movie.
We’re going to do a two-part podcast on Parasite. Today, we’ll be looking at the film’s use of tone. In the next podcast, we’ll discuss its theme and structure.
Let’s start by talking about how Parasite accomplished this unique tone. How did Bong build a horror movie that satisfied horror fans in a form that looks more like a Sundance comedy? How did he evolve the horror? How did he make that tone work? To explore that, I want to talk about the connection between tone and genre.
Tone and genre are some of the concepts almost every writer freaks out about. Almost every writer who sets out to write a comedy is afraid it’s not going to be funny enough. Every writer who sets out to write a drama is afraid it’s not going to be dramatic enough. Every writer who sets out to write an action movie is afraid the action isn’t going to be good enough.
It’s important for films to have a feeling of genre because genre is what your audience is actually buying, but how we define genre is complicated.
Back in the old Blockbuster video store days, if you’re old enough to remember them, you’d go to Blockbuster, be looking around for a movie, and not be able to find it. This was back in the ‘80s. So, you’d ask the clerk, “Where’s First Blood?” The clerk would reply, “Oh, it’s in the Drama section.” You’d think, “Hold on. Isn’t First Blood supposed to be in the Action section?” You could never quite find the right genre the film was in because it was hard to break the movie down into the one specific genre it belonged to.
Today, the way genre is defined is much more complicated. If you look at what Netflix is doing, they’ll list a film as “a critically acclaimed, gender-bending movie popular in Williamsburg.” It’s that specific. In fact, what Netflix has actually done, and I don’t have the exact number, but I believe they’ve created 278,000 different tags which can be linked together in any number of combinations to define genre. That’s pretty complicated, right?
How are you supposed to think about genre in your movie when movies like Parasite win an Academy Award and seem to not fit specifically into any genre at all?
So let’s talk about genre; let’s talk about tone. First, I want to give you a way of thinking about genre that might be a little bit different than the way you’ve thought about it before.
Instead of thinking about genre as a category or a combination of 278,000 different tags, I want you to think instead of genre as the overall feeling that the movie gives you.
It’s the feeling you’re craving when you go to watch the movie. It’s like going to a Chinese restaurant because you’re craving Chinese food, or if you go to a Mexican joint, you’re probably really craving some chips and guacamole.
If you go to see The Fast and the Furious, there’s a very specific genre to that film.