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Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite: Marx and Violence

Warning: A majority of this was written pre-pandemic, so please excuse my overly optimistic tone. It was a different time.

Yes, another Bong Joon-Ho film. Can you blame me? The guy’s a genius. Parasite was another one of those great films that will never leave you. You can watch the movie simply without doing a major analysis in your head and you will still agree that it’s a great movie. Which personally, is why I believe it's made its way into the major American awards season. Parasite winning Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes was one of the few decisions I’ve agreed with. I didn’t see any of the winners in the film categories besides Parasite, and I’m very much ok with that. It’s making its way into Hollywood and the favorite lists of celebrities. Elon Musk said he loved Parasite (he also turned Grimes, the former “anti-imperialist,” to the mother of his future child). Chrissy Teigen loved Parasite (a lot can be said about her, so let’s not). Obama loved Parasite (but I have some serious doubts about the authenticity of his yearly favorites list. Mainly because I can’t imagine him listening to Summer Walker). I was completely boggled at all of those tweets. How? How is one so blind? How did one watch Parasite and not feel a thing? After I watched Parasite, I rushed back to school to attend the discussion section of my Political Theory class so I could read and discuss primitive accumulation through dispossession with revolutionary fervor. I recommended it to everyone near me. I even wrote a note to my professor who tucked it into his book. But is that the problem- that all these beloved figures (not mine) end up loving the sheer adrenaline of the story and tweet to their followers about how great the movie is. Those followers, with their favorite celebrities’ seal of approval, watch the movie, not putting it together either. Bong Joon-Ho is critiquing those very figures! In every post-Parasite interview, Bong Joon-Ho has said that Parasite is about America and capitalism, but we have just reduced those statements to memes on Twitter. As funny as they are, Parasite is rich for its class analysis. The Hollywood reaction is just as important. Marx is all over this movie, there's no question about it. I also want us to understand these controversial moments from a Fanonian perspective, again all with relation to Marx. I hope for us to understand that everything about this movie is intentional and every bit of it is worth pages and pages of discussion. I nearing 11 pages as I write this. I also hope that this film can be a way for us to understand economic exploitation in the 21st century. While many celebrities have misunderstood it, it is important that you, us, the people, the working class, grasp every bit of this radical film.

I’m not going to bother with another one of my “brief summary” because I’m assuming, we’ve all seen it. It's on Hulu now and I believe Apple TV. If you don’t want to pay for either platforms, watch a pirated version online, I genuinely don’t think Bong will mind.

I want to talk about the home. I know we all had the same reaction to that beautiful home: awe, admiration, and envy. The Park’s home itself is significant, but also in contrast to the Kims’ home. The Kim’s live in a small semi-basement home, where they have to reach up in order to look out their window and see the street level. Their home is dirty, cramped, just not a place where anyone wants to be. But immediately, I thought of Fanon and the native sector. I know that Parasite isn’t about colonialism, but space is important to Marx (I’ll return to Fanon). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels attribute many things to the process of proletarianization. To name a few: literacy campaigns and public education, the politicization of the proletariat towards the end of feudalism, expansion of media, etc. One that stands out, is the mass migration and urbanization of the proletariat. Through that, the proletariat was concentrated into the poorest parts of the city where they shared their most intimate quarters with workers like themselves (Marx and Engels, 15) One might dismiss this as a historical example specific to Europe, but if we go back to my thoughts on Memories of Murder, we’d note how Korea’s transition to a modern capitalist society, was a fairly recent one (from 1987 onwards). As the agricultural sector suffered, Koreans living in the rural provinces were forced to move into the major cities. Park (Song Kang-Ho’s character in Memories) was lucky enough to become a successful businessman, unlike the Kims who earn their livelihood by holding pizza boxes- the most insignificant work. Along with urbanization, the proletariat also occupied the small space of the factory, where they are reminded of the everyday brutality of their work. The Park’s home is not cramped, but the one scene where everyone is rushing to hide from them, results in Ki-taek, Ki-jeong, and Ki-woo hiding underneath a coffee table overnight. After that lengthy battle with Geun-sae and Moon-gwang, the Kims are exhausted. They do not want to be laying side by side hearing the Parks have sex. My friend Sef also reminded me that the Parks had weird sex as Mr. Park recalled how their old chauffeur possibly had sex with a drugged-up prostitute, a scenario that previously made Mrs. Park scream out of disgust. Revisiting this, I believe this definitely deserves a psychoanalytic analysis.

This isn’t their breaking point, but also hearing Mr. Park say that Ki-taek smells like the subway is a factor. Once making their break they run outside where it's raining heavily. They come to their home which is flooded and destroyed. Here is where I’ll start talking about Fanon. [READ NOTE]. Again, I know the colonial system is not the case in Parasite. Fanon was a Marxist and expanded on Marxist theory in the colonial context. I just want to warn you that I am using Fanon as carefully as possible, not using concepts that are distinctly racial. I know there’s probably also much more relevant work out there on spatiality and violence, but I think Fanon’s prose style in The Wretched of the Earthis quite appropriate for the film. Let’s consider the colonial bourgeoisie as the Parks and the natives as the Kims. Fanon calls the colonial world, a “compartmentalized world.” The colonists’ sector is clean and protected whereas the native sector is overcrowded, envious, and starving. Sounds about right so far.

The colonist’s sector is a sector built to last, all stone and steel. It’s a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers. The colonizer’s feet can never be glimpsed, except perhaps in the sea, but then again you can never get close enough. They are protected by solid shoes in a sector where the streets are clean and smooth., without a pothole, without a stone… The colonized’s sector or at least the “native” quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place, inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of each other. (Fanon, 4)

This becomes extremely relevant when the Kims run out of the Parks’ home in the pouring rain. I kept noticing that they were all barefoot, only focused on getting out of there. My toes curled in the movie theater watching that. Running away from that traumatic house to find your own home destroyed, relocating to a displacement camp, THEN going to work the next day for your unaffected employer who has the audacity to audibly take a sniff of you. I don't know about you, but to me, this sounds like the conditions for a proletarian revolution. Besides the literal allegory, the tone sharply shifts. One could argue that it began to change when they found Geun-sae in the bunker or when Moon-gwang hit her head but that was just some good old dark comedy for me. After the flooding, things are different. Ki-taek has this unmoving face. Things turned grim and we knew something climactic was about to happen. Fanon’s most famous chapter, “Concerning Violence,” maintains that decolonization will always be a violent event because colonialism is a violent system itself. Something that I absolutely love about this chapter is that it isn’t some dense, theoretical work. It’s a revolutionary call to arms for all colonized people. It has a strategic pace which parallels Parasite so well. He sets the scene- the compartmentalized, Manichaen world. He slowly intensifies the antagonistic relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, until this culminating point:

The colonized subject thus discovers that his life, his breathing and his heartbeat are the same as the colonist’s. He discovers that the skin of the colonist is not worth more than the “natives.” In other words, his world receives a fundamental jolt. The colonized’s revolutionary new assurance stems from this. If no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him. Not only does his presence no longer bother me, but i am already preparing to waylay him in such a way that he will no longer have any solution but to flee (Fanon, 10)

As corny as it sounds, when I first read that, it brought me to tears. I’m not sure if it was just because I was up for three days straight writing my midterm and I was finally breaking, or because it just meant that much to me. But that section in which the colonized discoversthat his life is worth as much as the colonizer is such a crucial moment. This parallels the infamous birthday scene. Geun-sae gets out of the bunker, stabs Ki-jung, the Park’s kid (I’ll look his name up later) has a seizure, and Chong-sook is wrestling with Geun-sae. Shit is going down. If we recall, Mrs. Park mentioned that it takes a few minutes for her son to die after a seizure and needs to go to the hospital immediately. So much is going on and Mr. Park starts screaming at Ki-taek to give him the keys. Ki-taek is immobilized at this point. His daughter has been stabbed, son attacked, wife almost killed, the Parks’ got him dressed up in some cultural appropriation, Hollywood Indian regalia. In fact, I find it very fitting that he’s dressed up as a Native American at this moment. I see this as Bong’s satirical nod to old ultra-capitalist Hollywood. But if enough wasn't going on, Mr. Park sniffed. He got close to Geun-sae, a man who’s been living underground for 3 years and audibly sniffed him in disgust. The same way that he sniffed Ki-taek. Of course, there’s probably a difference between a “subway” smell vs. “I haven't showered in 3 years” smell but at the moment it feels as if it's almost the same thing. In my initial viewing, I thought what happened next was because of that, but no. Ki-taek realized that his life was worth the same as the Parks, and their presence no longer bothers him, but he is now plotting against him, and the time of action is now. Ki-taek stabs Mr. Park and flees. Annoyingly, the YouTube section for this clip is filled with people feeling bad for the Parks and discussing how what Ki-taek did was wrong. Of course, the average viewer will view the Parks as some sympathetic rich suckers who only treated the Kims kindly. The casual reader who picks up Fanon for the first time would also dismiss his theory of violence as immoral in comparison to non-violent methods like Gandhi’s. A lot can be said about Gandhi, but Fanon says that non-violence is a strategy created by the colonizer to deter decolonization and paint the colonizer as a gentle ruler who wants peace. This is not the case. Colonialism is a violent system. Capitalism is a violent system. Colonialism can only be undone violently. Capitalism can only be undone violently. Now I don't mean to make this all about colonialism, as my friends say I often do. But the similarities are clear. The question isn’t whether the murder of Mr. Park was a justified act, but what were the conditions that forced Ki-taek to murder. Geun-sae killed Ki-jung, but no one in the comment section is having a debate on whether his murder was ethical. Because in our heads we feel bad for him, and the life that he’s lived- why don’t we feel the same towards Ki-taek? Geun-sae and Ki-taek are two sides of the same coin. Geun-sae’s exploitation is naked. He’s confined to the basement, controlling the lights of the home. A feature of the house that Mr. Park doesn't even pay attention to, never mind considering that there is someone manually operating it. A clear example of how our labor is alienated. All while blindly worshipping Mr. Park- a man who knows nothing of his existence. Honestly, I hope some of you see yourselves in Geun-sae the next time you defend billionaires online. But Ki-taek is just another exploited worker. I understand this can be hard to understand in our current understanding of the world. How is Ki-taek exploited? Him and his family conned their way into their jobs and leech off of the Parks. Again, we must return to the system as a whole to understand. None of this wouldn’t have happened if the Kims weren’t desperately poor in a capitalist society, which enables families like the Parks, to live a life of excess at the expense of the Kims. Capitalism is a system of exploitation; we cannot forget that. Quite simply, no one is rich without thousands that are poor.

          The levels of the home are also this unforgettable feature. I just want to make this quick note about the issue of the ghost. Did you forget about the ghost? Da-Song didn’t (yes, I finally looked his name up!). I find the story of the ghost such an interesting touch. Not just as a way for Bong to warn the audience about Da-Song’s history of seizures. When Mrs. Park tells Chung-sook of the story, she says “they say a ghost in the house brings wealth.” This, of course, is true since the exploitation of those like Geun-sae are responsible for the wealth of the Parks, in the larger picture. I’d like to look further into this. There's a twofold meaning to this. I do believe that this ghost is symbolic to the exploitation of the Kims, and the proletariat in general, but that’s Mrs. Park’s understanding of this ghost. The way she understands this ghost, is as a source of wealth. Maybe Mrs. Park isn’t as ditzy as we imagine- she to some degree, understands her class position. But like most, she doesn’t question the ghost, or her class position. She knows that if she looks into either, it would result in the ugly truth. Da-Song, however, is just a child. He’s too young to really understand the economic and social relations which are responsible for his wealth. He’s also too young to consciously suppress any desire to investigate the matter like his mother. He is a child after all and is naturally curious. But his first encounter with the ghost was the one that resulted in a near fatal seizure. This can be his body’s reaction to the life-threatening figure of a ghost. The ghost isn’t just a threat to his mortal life, but his wealth, some may argue that these are the same. Mrs. Park pays for therapy for his “trauma” so he could forget the event, but he still knows. He saw this ghost and is the only one to seriously consider its threat. Mrs. Park knows it's real but chooses to not think about it. I want to return to the Manifesto. Let's hear these famous words: “A specter is haunting Europe- the specter of communism… Two things result from this fact: Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers itself to be a power...” (Marx and Engels, 8). Don’t think I’m just including this because he’s talking about a specter, in fact, I think this story of the ghost is an intentional allusion to the specter of communism. Da-Song represents this figure of the bourgeoisie who is in constant anxiety over the threat of his wealth. When he reappears at his birthday party, he has another seizure. Also, at this time, the family, and all of their guests are witness to the horrors of their wealth and what it's created. This naked, hideous display, this moment of confrontation is a pivotal point in the dialectic. Of course, this murderous moment is not seen as a success to the viewer with Mr. Park, Ki-jung, and Geun-sae dead, Ki-woo presumed to be dead, and Ki-taek missing. This just shows us that the bourgeoisie are their own gravediggers- to again invoke the Manifesto. On a larger scale, this would be the moment of a revolution- but we don’t. Ki-woo survives with Chung-sook and is put on probation. Ki-taek is missing to the police, but Ki-taek realizes that he’s living in the bunker in hiding. Ki-woo declares that he will make enough money to buy the home and free his father. At first, I wondered “why couldn't he just sneak him out of the house when the new owners were asleep?” “Why did he have to buy the home?” As much as I wanted to portray the Kims to be revolutionary figures, Ki-woo has the common fate of most. Instead of usurping power from the bourgeoisie, he believes he can free his dad from the home, by owning the house. Everyone who lives in the basement is stuck there for a reason, because someone is forcing them to stay there. A perfect allegory for the relations of production as I have repeatedly mentioned throughout this text. Ki-woo desires a bourgeois life (as most working-class folk do!) in order to lift his father out of the despair of poverty. He believes the only way he can save his father is to own the home, which could easily be seen as the means of production. A nice touch which I had to look up, was as Ki-woo tells us of his desire to buy the home, a song plays called “546 years”- the amount of time it will take for him to earn enough money. I wish this song title was more obvious for the American viewer. I am not trying to take away from this film by saying that, but for a viewer who knows Korean or the song title, they’ll understand the tragic nature of his dreams. Whereas the American viewers will sympathize with his dreams- as we’ve done with immigrants and “the American Dream” or the bootstrapping mentality of some people. In some way I do think Bong didn’t want an overtly revolutionary ending. I don’t think the average viewer, especially in this day, could handle an ending like that. Not to say that we don't understand class inequality and such. We are not living in, say the 60s/70s where there were Marxist movements all throughout the world. I don’t think we have the conditions for a revolution at this moment, although I do think the mass unemployment and the other severe economic consequences of this virus will radicalize the working class in large numbers, to a degree that we haven't seen in a long time. But to make my point, I feel that we are living in historic political times and we are coming to understand ourselves in a liberating way.  It is my hope that films like Parasite will awaken the revolutionary potential in us all.

Note: I wanted to use Fanon’s theory of violence and diagnosis of colonialism as a violent structure, in relation to capitalist society. I don’t want us to interpret his writings as something that can be isolated from the racial structure of colonialism, but i do think it is a beneficial guide to understanding this film.

Work Cited:

Philcox, Richard, translator. “On Violence.” The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 2004.

Joon-Ho, Bong, director. Parasite. Barunson E&A, 2019.

Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto. International Publishers, 1948.

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Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder: The Fifth Republic and Modernity

I was hesitant on deciding to write about a movie that I’ve only seen once, especially since I saw it in theaters and it’s not accessible anywhere else. I’ve been thinking about this movie since I saw it, which was last Wednesday, so not too long ago. But I told myself that if I’m going to write about this, I might as well do it while it's somewhat fresh in my brain. So here it goes: Bong Joon-Ho’s Memories of Murder.

 When I think of South Korea today, I think of K-Pop, skincare, 5G, plastic surgery culture, and a whole bunch of colorful, glamorous things that Bong Joon-Ho sees through. This is the third Bong Joon-Ho I’ve seen so far, and he constantly reminds us that Korea is not that. Class was everywhere in Snowpiercer. Class was everywhere in Parasite. Can I just note how it's interesting that Snowpiercer’s class structure is visible through a literal horizontal setting (the bullet train) while Parasite is vertical (through the levels of the home). One can argue class is everywhere (period) but Memories of Murder does not emphasize class distinctions the way that the other two does. Although there is something to be said about its historical and political significance. Before I give you my analysis, let me give a brief summary.        

In a rural province in 1986, two women were found bound, gagged, raped, and murdered in a field. Chief detective Park is frustrated due to the contamination of evidence, the media, and the severity of the case. Park’s wife tells him about a mentally disabled boy, Kwang-ho, who used to follow one of the victims around before she died. Park and his hot-headed partner, Cho, beat Kwang-ho and secretly record him describing the murder in detail, corresponding to the autopsy’s result. Park’s technique to finding a criminal is by staring at them and looking into their eyes. He thinks that Kwang-ho is the murderer. Seo, a detective from Seoul, comes down to assist Park with the case. He immediately dismisses Kwang-ho as a suspect because his webbed fingers couldn't match the level of sophistication of the other murders. Seo also dismisses the confession as Park and Cho rehearsing the murder with him, so they can close the case quicker. Seo’s more refined detective skills causes him to disagree with Park’s more traditional and laid-back methods. They establish the pattern that the killer only goes after women wearing red on rainy nights. Another officer also realizes that the local radio station gets a request to play a song called “Sad Letter” every rainy night, shortly before the next murder is committed. Park meets with a fortune teller who sells him a gimmick ritual item to use at the scene of the crime. Him and Cho return to one of the many crime scenes where they also find Seo independently investigating. They all hide separately when a man wearing red lingerie pulls out a bra and underwear and begins to masturbate over it. Cho steps on a twig prompting the man to run away. Park, Cho, and Seo chase the man who hides among construction workers. Despite it being unlikely that he is the murder, Park and Cho proceed to torture him.

Seo follows a local schoolgirl’s rumor of a woman who cries on top of the hill near the school. The traumatized woman managed to escape the killer alive but did not see his face, only remembering that he had soft hands. Seo clears the construction worker suspect due to his rough hands. Another night it rains and “Sad Letter” begins to play on the radio. Park and Seo get the station to give them the address of the postcard requesting the song, which brings them to the home of a factory office worker, Hyeon-gyu, with soft hands. Park and Seo listen to Kwang-ho’s confession where they realize that he's speaking as if he witnessed the crime and was describing the scene. They rush to find him at his father’s restaurant where they find Cho drunkenly fighting the patrons who made fun of the police on the television. Kwang-ho runs away and gets hit and killed by a train, before they can question him. They also find semen on a victim and send it to the United States to see if it matches Hyeon-gyu, because Korea doesn't have the forensic technology to test it. The next body is found and Seo realizes it was the schoolgirl who helped him earlier. Frustrated and angry that they haven't found the murderer, he drags Hyeon-gyu to a tunnel getting ready to shoot him. Park stops him carrying the documents from the United States. Seo reads the documents in disbelief, which says that the semen does not match Hyeon-gyu. Park looks him in the eyes but is unsure. He reluctantly lets him go. The movie shifts to 2003 where Park now has a family and has become a rich businessman. Park stops his driver while passing by the field where the murders occurred. Park looks down into a ditch where the first woman was found. He’s interrupted by a schoolgirl who asks him what he's doing to which he responds he’s “just looking.” She says that it's weird because awhile back she saw another man looking down there, and when she asked him why “he said he remembered doing something here, long ago. So he came back to take a look.” He asks her how he looked, to which she simply replies, “ordinary.” Park is visibly shaken by this, to which he turns to the camera and stares.

Ok, so I understand this was by no means a brief summary, but this is a murder mystery, so every moment counts. I don’t even know where to begin. First, I should mention that this is based off of South Korea’s first serial murders, which was unsolved until 2019. I should also say something about the political situation, I left certain things out of my “summary”, mainly the scenes of political unrest which were sprinkled throughout the film. We see scenes where tanks roll into the street, Christian groups protest outside police departments, people casually denouncing the police for their unethical tactics. The more unnerving scenes depict missile sirens going off, where civilians must perform a drill in case of a North Korean attack which includes everyone turning off their lights and hiding in the nearest buildings. Bong doesn’t give much background to the political situation beyond this. Memories of Murdertakes place in 1986, towards the end of the Chun Doo-hwan dictatorship. The Fifth Republic of Korea was created after the political instability of the Park Chun-hee dictatorship and was meant to transition Korea into a democracy. Chun orchestrated the coup d’etat that assassinated Park and made him the president, before any elections took place. Under Chun, all political parties were banned besides his own, the Democratic Justice Party, and ruled as a one-party state. Chun continued to squash pro-democracy protests despite nationwide support, until the June Democracy Movement forced Chun to hold elections, which ushered in the democracy of the Sixth Republic in 1988.

This era of repression is represented by the desaturated image of the rural provinces. During the Fifth Republic, the liberalization of the Korean economy expanded the role of major cities like Seoul, while rural areas suffered. Korea became dependent on foreign agriculture and livestock. In the original case, the victims were found in different locations but in the film, Bong places them in the fields. Perhaps the placement of their bodies alludes to the death of the Korean agricultural sector. The film begins in daylight, something we don’t see until the end in 2003. This grim period ends when the film flash forwards to 2003. The absence of Park’s life within the 17-year transformation allegorizes the rapid urbanization which prompted mass migration into major cities. 1988 marked a new era of Korea, not bound by the remnants of authoritarianism but a more liberal, globalized nation.

This urbanization also modernized Korea. Park and Cho’s approach to detective work comes off as backwards, even comical to the audience. We have Cho whose primary method is to beat anyone out of a confession. Park employs numerous techniques like going to a fortune teller, going undercover to bathhouses, and most importantly- looking into the eyes of the suspects. As Tony Montana once said, “the eyes, Chico, they never lie”, a line Park would very much agree with. This contrasts the more scientific Seoul-trained Seo, who trusts that “the documents never lie.” There's much to be said about facts, that Joseph Jonghyun Jeon goes into in his analysis of the movie, but I’m unqualified to summarize. The essential detective story depends on the facts, the desire for truth. Throughout the film, we’re searching for that. As a generation fed on Law and Order, Criminal Minds, CSI, and a whole bunch of crime dramas, we’re well versed with the dos and don'ts of an investigation. While I’m not familiar with Korean crime scene procedures, I’m sure that eating ramen with a suspect, beating them, and literally anything that Park and Cho did, is not ethical. As an audience, I’m sure we all held on to those feelings of hope we received after the pattern was established. Early on we found out that women wearing red were targeted on rainy nights, shortly after “Sad Letter” played on the radio. After that, not much progressed in the investigation. In fact, it was extremely frustrating watching so many women go murdered after that. Although most of us were rooting for the broody Seo to put the investigation on the right path, and find the murderer, he didn’t do much. Yes, his contributions were valuable, but in the end, he did not solve the case. Park and Seo’s relationship represented a dialectical opposition of ideas. Park’s eye contact method couldn’t tell if Hyeon-gyu was the killer, and Seo’s documents were inconclusive. Does Bong think that Korea cannot be exclusively traditional or exclusively modern? That their needs to be a synthesis of the two? I should also note that I am also too unqualified to invoke the Hegelian dialectic.

It almost feels unfair to stop here but I should because I’m impatient and I want to have something posted. Honestly, I could have written so much more. I’d go into police brutality in the Fifth Republic, the violent nature of Korean society, the murder case itself (but let’s be honest, I’m too scared to read into the details at 3 am). I just want to talk about one last scene, the actual last scene. Despite being the scenes of such grisly crimes, towards the end, the field gave me a sense of relief. The warmth of the fields made me feel comfortable, almost nostalgic. Before I forget, Jeon also extensively details the significance of nostalgia and the title, so you should check that out. Back to the fields, they made me comfortable. Have you ever gone to the beach and dipped your body in the water, changed your clothes and gone home? That feeling of wet hair, bits of sand on your body. No matter how great that beach day was, the car ride in that state is an extremely uncomfortable one and all you want is to go home, get in the shower, and wrap up in a blanket and go to sleep. That’s what that last scene did for me, it was me wrapping up in that blanket. But how can you go to sleep? After having a little girl deliver the news that the murderer still lives and remembers his crimes. Park must have spent those 17 years forgetting his failures with the case. Even visiting the crime scene wouldn’t have affected him the way that the universe did when it sent him that girl to taunt him. What really got me was when Park turned to the camera. If you had/have the pleasure of seeing it in theaters like me, Park stares at the audience, which I didn't think much of. Then I remembered that the case was still unsolved in 2003, and there was a chance that the actual murderer was in the audience, and Park was making eye contact with us to see if he was amongst us. And that's what had me fucked up.

Further Reading:

Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. “Memories of Memories: Historicity, Nostalgia, and Archive in Bong Joon-Ho's ‘Memories of Murder.’” Cinema Journal, vol. 51, no. 1, 2011, pp. 75–95., doi:10.1353/cj.2011.0065.