Two Nouns #20 -- "Rest of World"
I've spent 2020 so far sitting in the dark watching movies -- the most wonderful time of the year! Here I wanted to write about Parasite two ways -- like double cooked string beans.
***
You likely know that the 2020 Oscar best picture winner from South Korea hijacks the upstairs-downstairs genre for the purposes of comedy, drama and terror. The title withholds ethical judgment -- the wealthy Park family, which falters without the support of underclass laborers, is as parasitic as the poor Kim family, sucking the exhaust fumes of affluence for a contact high. As a raiser of class consciousness and a portrait of malicious envy, it’s a more sumptuous version of Booker Prize winner The White Tiger, a more explicit Talented Mr Ripley, a sinister update on 1950s children’s series The Borrowers, a reason to never speak of Downton Abbey again.
Though wildly original it's also a study in traditional filmcraft I've enjoyed going deep on. The production team achieved its modest budget (just $11 million) because the main sites of action are interior -- a hovel at the bottom of a city and a shining house on a hill. Director Bong Joon Ho wrings great meaning from his single locations, especially the sleek, gajillion-won home where most action takes place. With camera as pen, Bong slowly draws viewers a working blueprint of the house’s layout, its trapdoors, its blind spots -- so that we can appreciate the cat and mouse plotting of its second and third acts. Of course, this delicate lesson in interior geography depends on our voyeurism, now finely tuned by the indulgences of Instagram.
The kitchen leading to the garage leading to the cellar.
Bong gives us both permission and context to worship the good life -- to understand the lengths to which anyone might logically go in its pursuit. I’m not spoiling anything when I say those lengths can be extreme. We know mobility is declining in rich countries, and that the politics of class are overtaking dozens of societies. Steve Waldman has written an essay, “Predatory Precarity,” on the messy trap of status anxiety under late capitalism.
In a stratified, liberal capitalist society, the ability to command market power, to charge a margin sufficiently above the cost of inputs to cover the purchase of positional goods, becomes the definition of caste. When goods like health, comfort, safety, and ones children’s life prospects are effectively price-rationed, individuals will lever themselves to the hilt to purchase their place. The result is a strange precariot, objectively wealthy, educated and in a certain sense well-intended, who justify as a matter of defensive necessity participation in arrangements whose ugliness they cannot quite not see.
Parasite’s anthropology confirms this. The Parks are building a moat against reality, buying "positional goods" and labor but also, as one character notes, serenity. It’s this liberty from resentment and "ugliness" the Kims are chasing. Meanwhile the Parks literally cannot see the disaster underfoot -- because, as Matt Stewart wrote on aristocracy in 2018: "delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents."
Parasite also spotlights the high class habit of outsourcing care – cooking, childcare, tutoring – once performed by intrafamily or community groups. This disintegration of kinship under privilege makes the Parks easy prey. It’s not a coincidence that the poorer family demonstrates greater dynamism, resilience, and above all cohesion. They must! Mia Birdsong, whose book How We Show Up, explains that with less wealth, "black families are expansive, fluid, and brilliantly rely on the support, knowledge, and capacity of 'the village' to take care of each other." This is the same hustle I explored in my book on Africa, and see in Parasite. But I am a bit afraid to celebrate the tribalism born of precarity. As the film shows, it's a recipe for chaos.
***
Poster for "Parasito" in CDMX.
If relevance across geographies is one of the triumphs of Parasite, its release and reception in 39 countries is also notable. I'm always good for a dinner party rant about the fragmentation of IP across borders (often after trying to watch an Hulu program in the UK). Note this film came out in South Korea in May 2019, France and most of Europe in summer 2019, and American theaters in October 2019. It launched at Christmas 2019 across Mexico and South America, on hundreds of screens in India on 31 January, and was out on DVD and on in-flight entertainment consoles in the Americas before it finally hit theatres in the UK on 7 February. Like a week ago! Ugh.
Maybe this was a great decision. Curzon, the distribution company who bought the UK rights at the same time as everyone else, set the release for just after the BAFTAs, hoping awards buzz would provide free marketing -- and indeed, Parasite had the largest first weekend for a film in the company's history. I think this release strategy is the end of an era.
I think this because at work I’m focused on a special project on the summer Olympics, the ultimate event to understand how media works. I recall watching American women dominate gymnastics live from Atlanta in 1996. The Beijing 2008 opening ceremony is still one of the most watched live television spectacles of all time. I caught London 2012 on television, albeit at a beach bar on the Swahili coast, cheering when the Kenyan flag came onscreen. But by Rio 2016, it was over. Tens of thousands of clips and highlights and live streams flowed digitally onto smartphones, with the best moments rising to viral prominence. With millions of others on YouTube, I rewatched Allyson Felix lose a gold medal, and Tonga man strut his stuff.
A star of the extremely online 2016 Opening Ceremony.
Yet the highly fragmented, choose your own adventure version of the Rio Olympics apparently made rights holders more money than the 2012 version. Sure, advertising made a big leap to digital and mobile in the intervening years, but the outcome follows the logic of long tails. The massive number of new people who can be reached with a la carte content creates real value.
Which brings me back to Parasite’s distribution, and the content economy generally. When assessing why some stories don’t travel, it’s easy to fixate on subtitling* or cultural Venn diagrams that stop IP from crossing borders. But it's the business models for film doing most of that damage. Even as highlights, binges, and supercuts are expanding the broadcast model, the conventional movie path has been based on engineered scarcity -- forcing a single access point among a few wealthy markets.
As late as the 2011, US films sluggishly trickled to Brazil, India, China, or other countries known in the business as “rest of world.” For an eternity, Hollywood sales agents didn't know or didn't bother, and fears of piracy consolidated this attitude. Then the surge of people exiting poverty in China created the world's largest entertainment market (the coronavirus has shuttered 70,000 Chinese cinemas representing perhaps $1 billion in lost receipts). But it was only in the past 18 months (!) that "rest of world" started to get American movies like Black Panther or Star Wars in a shorter window.
It's not like a $200 million market for a Korean black comedy about house help has magically appeared -- globally distributed consumers have been there all along. Last year Avengers: Endgame did $1.2 billion in ticket sales in a single weekend, a record -- but with only 50% of the take in the US and China. Once taken seriously, the “rest of world” created $600 million in value in five days. Finding ways to make legal IP available everywhere would be an egaliarian achievement and probably lucrative, as global platforms are learning daily.
In all this I'm aware that we are losing something communal. (As a weird hobbit who goes to the movies alone if necessary, I am unfussed.) But I hope the Parasite example can now live alongside Avengers as an example of what the "rest of world" can teach the entertainment industry. At least so we can talk to each other about what we see.
Dayo
*Some other non-English films I have loved in recent years include Shoplifters, This is Not Berlin, and forever fave Wild Tales.