#like i still struggle with the easys not enough leetcode

[bipidin]

applying for internships has me too stressed out to do homework

[irarelypostanything]

“Parasite” - is upward mobility a lie?

There’s this podcast I really love called “How I Built This,” which is about entrepreneurs who attained fame and wealth.  Nothing about it is fiction, so to speak, but the interviewer does have a way of framing the interviews more like dramatic narratives, with plot and constant conflict and climax, and less like traditional interviews.  He tends to focus a lot on stories that came from places of hardship, and it creates hope.  Some of these people were born wealthy...most of them weren’t.  They’re ex-criminals.  Children of immigrants.  Kids with parents unable to buy them gym clothes, or broke college students running websites out of dorm rooms, or most commonly 20-somethings whom no one takes seriously because they have no sort of experience at all.  But they do it.  They succeed, they find wealth, they find fame.

Roll credits.

And I still love the podcast, but it’s gotten me thinking about something,  NerdWriter discusses the opening shots of Parasite, and how they focus really well on this one image: A basement that has a single window.  That window - and it’s a real construct in Korea for places made during the Cold War and converted into homes - provides only a half hour or so of sunlight on any given day.  That’s enough.

It’s enough to make working class families believe that they can climb their way out of poverty, and ruthlessly step over one another in the pursuit of that desire.

*Spoilers*

Why is the Kim family in Parasite so unlikable?  It’s because they don’t have compassion.  They remain completely oblivious to how the “basement-dwellers” are actually their equivalents, and both respective “teams” in this working class struggle have the opportunity to level with one another and realize their common goal.  But they don’t.  The Kim mother wants to call the police and wavers only when the former housekeeper gains the upper hand; she, in turn, shows no sympathy for them when the tables turn.

Why is it not easy to despise the Parks, in their ludicrous wealth?  Because they care about each other.  They try to take their son camping, enjoy walkie talkies, worry about their daughter.  Yet the detestable things about them are everywhere.  Wisecrack, in their podcast, talk to how their son’s fascination with Native American culture was a nod to how he failed to understand their complex history and only saw it as something to play with; Binging with Babish, in his signature style, cooked the noodle dish from the movie and only briefly commented on the symbolism it served: The son enjoyed cheap noodles that are worth about 50 cents, but the mother refused to allow him to eat something so low-class and put a special kind of steak in it.  This steak, Binging with Babish explained, is more expensive than wagyu and is kind of the equivalent of putting extremely expensive truffles in your Big Mac.

Is upward mobility a lie?  Well, not exactly.  But the director of Parasite called the final shot a “kill shot” - instead of ending with the ambiguous image of him trying to buy the house, it ends with the realization that he will probably never be able to actually get it.  We’re not supposed to root for him...we’re supposed to doubt him, and his final glance at the audience is supposed to make us ask ourselves if we fall for the same illusion.

But....oof.

It’s a complex problem with no easy solutions.  Maybe that’s why people like this movie so much.  It doesn’t just turn to the audience and say “Rich people are actually miserable, you don’t want to be them!” or “Poor people are in a bad situation...they should rise up and overthrow the system!”  NerdWriter runs through his entire career, focusing mostly on Parasite and a significant amount on Snowpiercer, which is less of a “there are no villains and no heroes” sort of movie and more of an all-out-revolution sort of movie.  It, without spoiling too much, highlights some of the flaws in the “us for them” thinking.  Fight Club does the same thing.  Dark Knight Rises does the same thing.  When a movement becomes more oppressive and violent than the system it was originally invented to destroy, then you have a problem.

Hunger Games also tried to do this, but I personally think they were less successful.  Even Dark Knight Rises fell flat to some degree...but those ending shots were AWESOME.

The conclusion?  There isn’t one.  I’m just sitting here with this lamb and sake, which...if anyone asks...is an awful combination I love for some reason.  I made a bean stir fry.  I might watch Netflix or try my hand at Leetcode tonight.

I’m middle class - some might say I have too little and should be more ambitious, some might say I have too much and should be more grateful...but I’m in the middle.  If one wants to see a movie that depicts middle class life, he/she need look no further than American Beauty - a great movie in its own right.

So I watch a movie like Parasite, and I think...what do I do now?

The answer is probably nothing, but the allure of extreme wealth and/or fame is still tantalizing.  And other possible interpretations jump up, like being more happy with what I have or paying more attention to movies or donating to more homeless shelters...and none of that, I really believe, are the intended meaning of the movie Parasite.

It just comes out and it says: Here is a problem.  It can’t paint a solution, but it can show us those little creases and wrinkles that make the world a way that isn’t what we wish it to be.  And we can try to think of a solution, or solutions, and try to work together to solve it.

...Or we can just keep ripping each other part, staring into that half hour of light, completely oblivious to where we really are and where we’re really going.