Kill James Bond! - S4E6.5: Parasite [UNLOCKED]

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

This week, you on the free feed are getting a little treat here. We've been wanting to talk about Bong Joon Ho's Parasite for some time now, but we've never felt like we could do it alone. We've always been hunting for that perfect guest to survive the KJB Gauntlet where we invite learned academics on and then absolutely refuse to let them get a word in edgewise for anywhere up to two hours. This week, we are delighted to say that the gauntlet is being run by Olfactory Ethicist Dr Ally Louks! If you've not long since abandoned X dot com the everything app, you'll be familiar with Dr Louks and her particular area of expertise on scent as a class marker in literature, and indeed, more widely, in everything else too. Parasite itself is a movie about a rich family and a poor family. Class relations are a difficult thing to untangle, and this resulted in some viewers having trouble figuring out who exactly the titular 'parasite' is. We... have some theories. ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. As you well know I've been working with a few gazan families to raise money for their daily living costs in the genocide. As a ceasefire has been announced, we hope soon plenty of Aid can get in and help alleviate the dire famine they're being subjected to. But until then, they still have to afford to eat, so we ask for you to keep helping them out, just a little longer. https://www.gofundme.com/f/a8jzz-help-me-and-my-family-get-out-of-the-gaza-strip https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-and-my-family-to-find-a-safe-place https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-us-maher-and-my-family-to-leave-gaza-to-belgium https://www.gofundme.com/f/htdcj-evacuating-my-family-from-gaza https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- This is an unlocked bonus episode, find the rest here, on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

Jessica, my only daughter, Illinois, Chicago. My senior is Kim Jin-mo, and my senior is Lee Seo-chong. Hello and welcome to a bonus episode of Kill James Bond. I am November Kelly, joined as always by my friends Abigail, Thorne, and Devon. Hey! Hi. And we have a very special guest, because I got asked, can you do a Korean film for this one?

And I thought, well, I've literally just seen Parasite again two weeks ago? That's a movie with a lot of smells in it, right? It's a very old-factory movie. Who can I ask for this? RILEY Like Spy Kids 4! ALICE Exactly! RILEY Exactly, like Spy Kids 4, yes! ALICE You've got a big list of old-factory movies. It's Parasite, Spy Kids 4, there's probably others. And so, decided to set our sights high, and so we're very grateful joining us is Cambridge

Academic olfactory ethicist and slug, I guess? Dr. Ali Luke. Welcome. Hi. Thanks for having me. You're absolutely welcome. I'm feeling particularly slug-like today. You're very, um, yeah, thank you for making the time.

And the slug thing, there's a context to it, but you don't get to hear it listeners. Um, yeah. Welcome to the only podcast that smells good listener. That's true. That's right. I think we invented. Crucially listener, if you can't smell the fact that we smell good, there's something fucking wrong with you. No.

Yeah. I put on like, oud before this. I don't know why, none of you are getting the benefits of that, but I am. I'm feeling fantastic. Lilac path every day, baby. I also put on some perfume for this, alright, because, like, so if you're not familiar with Dr. Luke's whole deal, right, there was this thing on Twitter where you finished your PhD thesis, right? Correct. yeah.

Which was olfactory ethics in contemporary modern English literature, as I remember right? Yes, absolutely. A bunch of the most normal people on the internet decided to be very very normal about what this meant about sort of academia and about the humanities. They lost their ever living minds. Yeah. Yeah. I think my favourite ones were still the people that were like insisting there's some sort of tautology when you said modern and contemporary.

Which is like, so so good. That's the same, that's the same. Beautiful. Thanks for weighing in everyone. I mean, also, one of the things that made me kind of put this together in my mind was Parasite as a movie, I read on Twitter from one of those kind of self-same people, what I think might be one of the most ignorant pieces of film criticism I've ever read, which was this kind of like, right-wing

view of this movie. And we'll get into it, but I just kind of, I had that in my head. So Parasite, it's a movie by Bong Joon-ho, you might remember from Snowpiercer. NM. You might remember this movie for being very popular when it came out. Too popular, in fact. It became like, the most popular movie of the entire year, it got palm d'or, it was like, best picture at the Golden Globes. Was it like, famously popular with people who didn't get it? Yes. It was hugely popular with people who did not understand what it was trying to do.

This is like a special curse for an artist, I feel like, or for a director, especially, is people love your movie. And for not necessarily the right reasons. I think a lot of criticism of this movie, even the praise of it, it doesn't hate capitalism enough, right? It's a very left-wing movie, Bong Joon-ho is a very left-wing director, and this is a movie that kind of is about class struggle, it's about class conflict, and I think it evokes a lot of stuff like, I'm gonna talk about the movie High and Low, the Akira Kurosawa movie, because I think they's also, it evokes a lot of stuff, like, I'm gonna talk about the movie High

and Low, the Akira Kurosawa movie, because I think they're kind of talking about similar things. But so, we begin in modern day Seoul, South Korea. The literal first shot is socks hanging up to dry by a basement window. ALICE I scratched off the little panel on my Scratch and Sniff Bong Joon Ho card, and the first one is socks. ALICE First scene, like, very evocative, like, scent in this kind of like semi-basement poor apartment. RILEY Yeah, they live in this sort of apartment

that's called a semi-basement, where it's like all underground, basically. It's the very bottom floor of a flat, only. ALICE And we meet the Kim family, who are trying to leech off their upstairs neighbor's WiFi, and they, y'know, she has changed the default password, and so they're having to, like, climb around into every nook and cranny of this semi-basement flat looking for a coffee shop's wifi to steal. There's a detail I really like, which is that the wife, Mrs. Kim, there's a silver medal for some kind of track and field event on the wall from 1992, which is like displayed with such pride, which I just, it's such a nice way of telling us about.

It's for Shotput. She was like a Shotput athlete, which I think is quite cool if we're talking about femininity. We tend not to think about Shotput as a particularly feminine sport, but she's just too cool for that. Yeah, that's fun. We see her do a hammer throw later on as well, even. The fact that it's a silver medal as well, that's a kind of... And that it's from 1992, like it's from that long ago. It's great, right? Like, I saw the other day another Bong Joon-Ho movie, The Host, which is kind of a companion piece to this, and a bronze medal in archery plays kind of a similar point in that, so

it's a real preoccupation here of like, almost but not quite making it, of doing something that's impressive but not enough to kind of catapult you into the next thing up. Yeah. We also see that their house is infested with stink bugs. Yes. Yeah. We see the dads. Are they really called that, or do they actually stink?

Oh yeah. It's a real thing, it's a little shield bug. They smell like coriander, apparently. And they're an invasive species in Korea, coming to the US and Europe. So yeah, I've got that. Well I guess I should look forward to that. My house is infested with bugs, it just smells like a bay leaf, I'm not sure what it does. It's kind of like, oh, okay.

Oh, you want me to fight you? Okay. I did a bit of research into this when I first started working on the movie. I looked up, you know, what stink bug meant in the original language, and it means fart bug. I also discovered at the same time that anus literally translates to fart eye. Which, wow. That's fun.

Yeah, I mean, probably get off on that actually. This is a Korean movie, which means, and you may notice this from how we all sound, but none of us are Korean. Even when I was gonna go over there, I was only gonna try to teach them English, so like, all of our pronunciation, it might be bad. Yeah, I apologize in advance. We're sorry, we're trying. We love all of what you've got going on. We're just all

British. ALICE It's interesting as well because the Korean language in this movie is apparently it's very very expressive because Korean has like formal and informal registers, it's like in the grammar, and there's stuff that we're missing just from subtitles. So we see the dad Kim Ki-taek who like- RILEY Yeah, it took me forever to find a dub. I listened to like a really bad dub of this, just completely flat, yeah. All the women were really breathy, like, animate, it was very very strange. The father Kim Ki-Tek, like, flicks this stink bug away.

And we see that they're all kind of, not just poor, but also losers, right? This is another, like, kind of, bong preoccupation, right? Um, is, y'know, his wife has to kind of kick him awake, and be like, help your kids with the WiFi, and he gives them the, like, kind of least helpful advice of just like, oh, stick your phone in the corner. ALICE I do like how the whole family are kind of a unit on this, cause they're sort of like family of wheeler dealers that are running these little scams that like stealing the wi-fi and so on. They all have a job folding pizza boxes for a pizza delivery company and they're all they're all supporting

each other in this, which I really like. Like the parents are always so proud whenever the kids come up with some new dodge. Like they managed to charm a part-time gig out of the lady who runs the pizza company. Like the parents are really proud of those. I don't know, I like it, it's a sweet thing. RILEY It's really good. Like, yeah, the poor family is much nicer to each other than the rich family is, like, just as a unit, they're a much better team. ALICE Much closer, much more intimate.

But, so, as they're folding these pizza boxes, we see that they're doing fumigation out in the street outside, and the dad is like, okay, we'll leave the window open, free fumigation, we'll kill the stink bugs. And as they're all folding the boxes, they're just getting tear gassed by this insecticide. ALICE We do get a really nice bit of character establishing action though, which is that even when the clouds are like wafting through their little house and the other family members are choking, Kim Kutec is still just furiously folding pizza boxes as hard as he can.

He's so determined. Yeah. The next shot is the woman from the pizzeria, sort of saying, I'm not gonna pay you full price for these, because one in four of the pizza boxes is like, completely folded wrong, and when she says that, Kim Kutec slips into focus, and you're just like, okay. So he's locked in doing it completely wrong. He's working hard, but he's fucking it up. God, I respect that, yeah.

I have something that I want to kind of establish as a bit of a canon here, which is something that I'm interested in, which is the cinema of the big fucking idiot. And like, Barry Lyndon is the kind of preeminent big fucking idiot, but like, Lydia Tarr, big fucking idiot, the entire family in The Host, the other Bong Joon Ho movie, also big fucking idiots, and so too in this, it's a real preoccupation of, like, incompetence. StellORMTROOPER Stellan Skarsgård in Crafted Yolton? ALICE Yes, yeah, absolutely. STORMTROOPER Looking out for a Kill James Bond big fucking idiot season starting soon.

ALICE Yeah. Every season. Um, so, they live in this alley, it's like, at below basement level, and we see one of their other sort of like, bains of their existence is drunks coming down the alley and pissing on their windows, which is so viscerally horrible. And one of the sons' friends comes to visit, his better off friend Min, and sort of like, impresses them by yelling at this drunk guy who's about to piss on their windows and sort of intimidating him. It's also great when this guy Min comes to see

him, they're all sort of like, visibly ashamed at him seeing where they live. They're kind of hastily trying to tidy up and be like, oh no no no no, you're not imposing, but also like, mm, it's, you know. ALICE Yeah, the way they are when he walks into their home, suddenly they're all kind of exceedingly polite, polite out of nervousness. We've seen them just around each other being quite relaxed, and then as soon as Min walks in they're like, at attention and tidying up, and it's, yeah, it's quite powerful. RILEY Trying to keep them in the corridor as well.

Like, yeah. But he has brought them a present, in the form of a sushok, a scholar's rock. He says, like, my grandfather used to collect these when he was at a military academy, which is in itself an interesting detail, right, that means that his grandfather was a military officer when South Korea was a military dictatorship. He used to collect these, and this one is supposed to bring wealth to a family, it's this kind of very, sort of like, hewn, like rough hewn like natural rock, and like a sort of special wooden stand for it. Yeah.

I love this, because it's like, this useless rock will bring you wealth. Yes! It's such a- It's just a rock. It's a big, really heavy, worthless piece of rock. It's like, this will bring you money. And they're like, could you have brought us some fucking money? Well that's what the mum says too.

She says, food would have been better. And I think this was something I was gonna try and build up to, was, the sun, Kiwi, he looks at this rock and he says, wow, this is so metaphorical, which I really love, it's like, it insists upon itself, it means nothing. But it isn't, though, I like the view of this rock as purely materialistic, of you have come to these people's houses and handed them a rock that says, like, stop being poor. ALICE Yeah. NICOLA But Kiwu becomes so attached to it, it's like a talisman to him, and he really

like holds onto it quite literally throughout the film, like cuddles it. It's quite a, yeah, a significant materialization of this desire for wealth. Yeah, I mean, yeah, crystallized almost. It's interesting you brought up that Min's father was a military officer, because that's not something that I had caught before, but that does really imply that even this first symbol of wealth that you get in this movie, all of that wealth is already ilgon. It's not really like, I don't wanna claim that anyone can really earn, y'know, a million dollars or anything, but like, if you're getting rich under a military dictatorship, that's already, y'know, ill-gotten.

Good point. Which is also like, to collect rocks, like special rocks, that you think are gonna bring you wealth and prosperity as a kind of upper-class hobby. This is like very old money coded in and of itself. SID Yeah, do you think the military dictatorship might have had more to do with your wealth accumulation than the magic rock, dude? ALICE Listen, listen, I'm not gonna attack him on the rock thing, obviously. I'm non-binary, I'm autistic, I've got rocks in my house, alright? Nice rocks. But they're not bringing me wealth, you know?

ALICE No, that's the podcast. That's the podcast, yeah. So they go out for drinks, Min and Kiwu, and then Min's like, I'm going to go away soon to university abroad, and I'm an English tutor to this little girl from a really wealthy family. Do you want to step in and be her tutor whilst I'm away? Yeah. family, do you want to step in and be her tutor whilst I'm away? And he also kind of confesses that the reason he wants Kiwi to do this is because he wants to date this girl when she's old enough?

And like, doesn't trust any of his mates to be her tutor, because they might make a move? ALICE It's this weird, interesting mix of, like, earnestly wanting to do him a favor, in quite a patrician sort of way, pity, contempt for, he talks about disgusting frat boys, but also he doesn't see Kiwa as a threat to this ambition at all. And we even, we see that the reason why he thinks- And Hugh, considering a high schooler. They held hands once. The reason why he thinks he can do this gig is because he, like, took and failed the university entrance exam, the KSAT, four times. And so, on that basis, his English is really really good, but it hasn't gotten him anywhere,

right? Because he hasn't sort of succeeded in a formalized way. And he also says- He also says that the mother of this family is simple. Is the word he uses. She's a bit thick. And so they could just lie and say he's a student, and they get some fake credential courtesy of his sister, Ki-Yung, who is really good at art and Photoshop, and that creates

a fake university. This is really wonderful. She's so cool! There's a bit where she's forging his university admission letter, where she's in an internet cafe smoking and getting told to put it out and ignoring the employee, and it's just like... This is really cool. She's a horrible little gremlin, I absolutely adore her. Something else that's really fun as well is when the dad sees that they have forged these

documents, he's not disappointed at all, he's proud. He's like, oh man, if there was a document forgery class at Oxford she'd be top of the class. Which is so nice. He supports women's wrongs. He does. So Kiwu goes off to meet the Park family at this incredible house that they live in. There's something I want to draw out, which is that when he first goes to the house, it's behind a secure gate, which is very, very loud in the mix.

We get a big like eeeh alarm and the clanging of the gate. And also as he walks up the steps into that terrace garden, the sunlight is really really bright. So just being in this world is like, is like a sensory assault on him. I don't know how it smells, the movie doesn't quite tell us. Fresh cut grass, I suppose? ALICE Almost certainly. JUSTIN Probably smells wonderful, honestly. ALICE Yeah. I really love that it's a very sensory film in that regard, which I quite like. ALICE He's also like, he's out of his depth as well,

he like, sees the maid who lets him in and he mistakes her for Mrs. Park. And in fact, Mrs. Park has to be woken up. This is a really like, revealing detail that I like, because she's spending her day, she's just like, passed out on like a kind of patio table, and the maid has to go outside and like, clap next to her head to wake her up. And when she does, there's a line, the window pane, separating them as well, it's not subtle in that way, just to be like, there's this division, there's this line between them. Yeah. But so- There's a wonderful moment when she meets Kiwu, the mom, Mrs. Park,

and she talks about how she really liked Minh-Huoc, the previous tutor, and said, you know, your qualifications don't matter, that doesn't interest me. His recommendation means more than anything else. And she also suggests that her daughter's grades don't particularly matter either. It's just about whether Ki-woo is kind of like a culture fit for their family, is the most important factor. It's a little corporate, doesn't it? It doesn't matter whether the daughter retains anything, it's just about like, do you fit in with us? And like, ticking the boxes, right? Doing the things that they feel

they need to do to produce cultured children. Yeah, and the whole time throughout this little interview, she's got this tiny shitty dog. No disrespect to the dog, but she has one of the rich people dogs. You know the kind that I mean, it's like a toy breed. Just on her lap the whole time. She's got like three of these things running around as well. With like, you know, very special dietary requirements and everything. So she hires him on the basis of like, I don't care about this document that you spent ages

forging, you know, I care about like, culture fit, and so, can I sit in on the lesson? And she asks him this in English, just as a kind of a flex, right, and this is a thing about Mrs. Parker, she throws in a lot of English, like a comical amount into her speech, and it's kind of like a recurring thing. We've seen that as we come into the house, the housekeeper pulls out a couple of toy arrows that are stuck into a wall, and she's like, oh yeah, these are the suns, you know, it's the whole house, it's like a pigsty immaculate, apart from these two things. It's beautiful.

The house is so nice, it's so good. The family portraits. We learned that it was designed... The house was designed by an architect who used to live in it. The Parks did not design it, they bought it from the architect when he left. But it's spectacular. We see the father, Mr. Park, as well, in a kind of framed cover from, I don't know, Wired or whatever. And interestingly, he has a Korean name in the script, I don't think we ever

hear it. And the cover has his English name, Nathan Park. Yeah, it's Dong Ik, we never... Yeah, it's always Nathan or Mr. Park. The house as well is wonderful. It's just such a beautiful, beautiful space. Like clearly, Bong Joon-ho has spent a long time thinking about the way that this house works. There's a great YouTube video by a guy called Thomas Flight, who I'm doing my best to not just completely say everything that he said about these things, but the way that the windows in this new house are massive, are like huge and wide and open, they let in all this light is contrasted all the time with the tiny little windows in the semi-basement. Really good. Watch that guys' videos.

Which always have this like really murky green grey film over everything. and there's mold on the walls, and it's congested, and just like Akira Kurosawa in High and Low, Bong is using these really low, wide angle shots, interposed with these really close shots to emphasize that disparity between the spaces. ALICE Absolutely. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. And we know it's smell crazy. To tie it into High and Low is actually, it's good timing, right? Because the conceit of High and Low is Toshio Mifune is this kind of executive who has built,

or occupies this house on a hill, overlooking the rest of the city, which is this kind of, like, grievous, psychic insult to everyone who has to look up at it, because he has, like, air conditioning, he has this big white house on the hill and everyone else is sweltering down in the valley, and there's a lot that, y'know, that Kurosawa does with camera angles there, as you say. And it's the same again, especially, like, any traversal between the Kim semi-basement and the park's house, you know, Seoul, very mountainous city, very vertical, lots of staircases, lots of hills, you see Kiwoo going uphill to this place, and we're just really driving that home all the time.

NARES The sweltering heat as well is worth bringing up, because that's the same in Parasite, like this is a Korean summer which is hot and humid, and you can see it, and the way everyone's dressed in these very silky flowing gowns and the way that Ki-taek is always, at a minimum damp. Ki-taek always has a sheen of sweat on him. It's very wet moving. I ask if the movie is creepy or wet. Yeah, I've got a point to make about that later.

We get a lovely bit of character establishment with Kiwi, as he teaches this lesson to the young, to the park daughter. And he tells her that like, you've got the knowledge, but passing an exam is about mindset. It's about spirit. You've got to attack the exam. You've got to like fight your way through and like, don't let anything stop you. Which is just a really nice snack tocdoche for his outlook on life generally and kind of true. You just got to vibe it. You just got to walk into the exam like you own the joint.

That didn't work. This is kind of the myth of capitalism, right? That everybody, so long as they try hard enough, is going to be able to make it. Which obviously is not true. Yes, I should say, I went into several exams with that mindset, I don't know that I did. It's interesting because it's hypocritical, right? We've seen that he's failed this exam four times because he doesn't test well. And so what he's saying to her is something that he's unable to achieve himself, which is, you know, you're very smart, you know the thing, but you don't have the kind of vigor to test well, to do well in this

kind of formalized environment. The other thing that I wanted to pull out is, the way in which he gets the job and sort of like, shocks both mother and daughter is he touches her, he takes her pulse to indicate that she's like too stressed about this and she's, y'know, not thinking vigorously enough. And it's this kind of like lightning bolt through the room, because they're so distant from each other, the Parks are, that it's kind of almost unthinkable. And it comes very easily to him, living in very close quarters, having this very intimate relationship with his family, and it's just

like, it's a lever being pulled that I really like. ALICE It's an interesting, I hadn't really thought about it before, but it's such an interesting moment, because throughout the movie we get this idea that class distinctions are defined by not crossing the line, essentially. And we see the poor family constantly crossing the lines drawn by the rich family. But there are also moments like this one that we were just discussing, and a moment later when they're on the sofa, where they're essentially cosplaying as poor people, and they're really enjoying it, and they're kind of seeking out these experiences that are kind of thrilling and

maybe even disgusting, so that they can, I dunno, live more interestingly. ALICE Yeah, you're totally right. ALICE The house is so empty and so antiseptic and so clean, that there's no kind of, like, connection to it, it's a kind of separation machine in that way. So yeah, absolutely. So she pays him for the lesson, we see that she thinks better of how much she's going to pay him, originally she takes some off, and then lies to his face that she has paid

him more than she was paying Min, which is a nice little detail. She gives him a new name too. She does, she renames him. She does, yeah. She dubs him Kevin. Yeah. And then they basically never call him by his name at any point from then on.

This is interesting, right, because she's, I think she honestly believes that she's doing him a favor. This is like a kind of upwardly mobile thing, we see that, y'know, her husband mostly uses a western name, and it's a kind of like, class marker, but it's also- she chooses it for him, she doesn't ask him. Yeah. No, she doesn't ask at all, like she just is like, you're Kevin, let's go with Kevin. She just doesn't even think about it.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. On his way out, we meet the youngest Park Sun, Da Song, who has a lot of energy, he's running around and being... Yeah, we meet him because he ambushes his mum with these, like, with a bow and arrow. Bow and arrow, like sucker bow and arrow. Again, she mentions that they ordered from the US, right, these Native American themed bow and arrow thing.

This is also a high and low thing, the two kids in high and low are playing cowboys, essentially, one of them's dressed up as a sheriff. And there's a similar thing here about obsession with desire for the West, but also there's a real, you know that ballad quote about how the suburbs dream of violence, right? Like, Dasong is injecting this ambush of violence into this really staid, really boring house. It's a fantasy, right? In the same way as fantasizing about being poor, fantasizing about being Native American, because you imagine Native Americans are very like, wild and free and violent, it's like, it's, you know, we'll see what

comes of that. There's a sort of comic irony there. Yeah. Can you give a compliment of this kid's shitty art, which is on the walls? And his mum's like, yeah, like, we've had a lot of, you know, art teachers. He's got some of his energy. He's so much of wild Charlie Kong handle it. And I fucking, without missing a beat, he was just like, well, you know, I've heard of this really, really good art teacher. She's really in demand though. It'd be so hard to get her like, maybe I could give you a referral though. Like next shot. It's his fucking sister coming to the house, protecting the art teacher.

The first half of this film is so fucking funny. I forgot how funny it is. And then at the midpoint, it becomes extremely not funny anymore. But the first half is fucking hilarious. It's so, yeah, it's so good. Cause like, you know, these two are so used to running cons together basically.

Like we see it happen with the pizza, like the pizza company CEO earlier, where they just surround her and bully her into giving one of them a job. Very much they are comfortable getting each other in on their scams, which I really like. ALICE Yeah, and it's funny and stylish, this is the bit where you get the nursery rhyme in the beginning, as she's doing a little mnemonic for her cover outside where she stops him and she goes, you know, Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago. And none of this is ever tested, right? You still get all the tension of having to forge the

diploma, of having to kind of memorize all of this stuff, and then the people that you're doing it for just don't care. They're that oblivious. Yeah! Because it's not about the qualification, it's just about whether you're our kind of person, you know, that's the vibe. Yeah, she's right. And as she later says, she gets in there, and having googled art therapy, she just kind of ad libs it. She looks at this very childlike drawing and she's like, oh, it's like BASKIA. And it's like...

Her, like, her persona that she plays as the art teacher is so fucking good. Where she's like, please leave us now, we must like seriously contemplate the art of this like four year old child. And like she tells the mum that he may have like trauma, he may have schizophrenia, we're gonna like, gonna be more of have schizophrenia, we're gonna be more of an art therapist than an art teacher and that is much more expensive of course than the most, like, oh of course, yeah, it's so good! The most flagrant piece of nonsense, which I really liked, is when she looks at this

little figure in the lower right of both the drawings she sees and she goes, oh, the lower right of the painting is called the Schizophrenia Zone. This bodes so poorly. He's gonna need lots of therapy. The really funny thing as well is- Like, three a week, easily. We don't see how this happens, but through, y'know, the mother is very kind of nervous, she's very anxious about it, she gets the maid to try and kind of go and snoop on the

lesson. And Da Song is like, this sort of terror, he's very badly behaved, and Ki Jung instantly gets him to cooperate. And there's a couple of ways to read this, right? One is the kind of more reactionary one, which is none of these people will stand up to him and they're constantly indulging him, and she doesn't, and she's, you know, being more strict with him works. I think the other lens you can look at this is, like, much like Kevin, she's just good at her job.

It might be, she might have bullshitted her way into it, but like, she's actually good with him, and again, it's that kind of intimacy in a family that has no experience of intimacy with each other. RILEY That's something I really like, is that constantly they are implying that the poorer family have really clear skills and talents that they just aren't able to use. ALICE Absolutely. RILEY And it's really really good, this specifically.

TANDI I feel like Ki- Young is maybe my favorite character. I think she's so fierce and so badass. And the way that her kind of persona, Jessica, is completely the opposite of how she really is, really tickles me. But also, she is the person in the Kim family that fits in best in this kind of upper middle class setting. She really is able to kind of relax into it in a way that the other members of the family really can't and they kind of feel constantly alienated and on the outside. Whereas she has the kind of brains and the gift of the gab to be able to completely blend in. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, she gets, she definitely seems the most at home in it. There's a scene

later on where she's defending it the hardest, like the sort of lifestyle that they're giving themselves. We also see that the Park daughter is a little bit jealous of Kevin, Kevin in quotes and Jessica in quotes. And she's like, well, is she, she really just a distant friend of yours? Is she your girlfriend? And then Key was like, no, she's not my girlfriend. And then they end up kissing. ALICE Yeah, I don't know what's going on here, I'm not 100% sure on the ages here.

I don't like it, regardless. ALICE I looked this up, if he's taken the KSAT four times he has to be at least 24, and she's high school age, so, yeah, 17. ALICE Yeah, that's probably bad. Like, 14 and 17? The other thing I found, looking this up, is that, like, seeing this in the movies, in South Korea, there were, like, gasps when this happened, right, when they kissed. Okay.

So, like, no, it's not, like, normal, it's... and he is also, to be fair, like, they're under false pretenses, and he is sort of grooming her, right? Like, it's... This is bad. Yeah, it's real bad. It's like triple level fucked as well, because he's also her tutor, so even if it's not for the age gap, that would still be not good.

But anyway. But it's the same themes, there's like, intimacy in this kind of emotional wasteland, and of course this kind of teenage girl clings to this as the first thing she sees. It makes sense. RILEY Yeah, she's just struggling for connection of any kind. ALICE Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. exactly. NICOLA But there's also a real sense of rivalry here, right? RILEY Totally. NICOLA Between Kiwu and Min, because he's kind of taking over in this job that originally was his, with this person who he'd kind of somehow

managed to claim as his own. He's talented Mr. Ripleying him, you know? Although everyone in the movie is talented in talenting Mr. Ripleying somebody. Yeah, that's true. It's a whole family of talented Mr. Ripleying. But there's a moment I really like when the dad, Mr. Park Nathan, comes home and everyone and everything in the house gravitates to him. So his wife gets up and walks towards him, the maid walks towards him, even the dogs

like trot towards him and like, and also his son, like everything just like bends towards this man, like rolls towards him. It's such a quick, really beautiful little sequence. Adding drama as he's walking up the staircase, the lights are turning on as he gets to each of them, which will come back later, but it's just another thing where it's just like, this man is in control of the house, like this is the final boss of being allowed to be in his house. ALICE Yeah, and we meet him and he's very, he's very patrician, he's nice, he's sort of affable, relaxed. SON Oh, sit, he's hot.

GARTH It's crazy, I don't know if he's putting this voice on or what, he sounds like Dio, I don't know what's happening, it's's hot. It's crazy, I don't know if he put this voice on or what, he sounds like Dio. I don't know what's happening. It's crazy, man. It's unbelievable. Very sexy voice. It's so deep a voice, like, it's in... It's so chill as well.

Just like, really cool. This is Lee Seung-Kyun, who, RIP sadly, but he did great in this movie. What?! Aww. Aww, that's a shame. Yeah. Real victim of like, Korean sort of toxic celebrity culture is the whole thing there. But like, he has their chauffeur drive Jessica, who has also been renamed, home.

And so, she's in the back of this Mercedes, alright, and he offers to drive her home, and obviously she can't have him figure out where she lives, but he's also pushing it a bit, he's also kind of a creep. It's this thing about crossing lines again, right? Where he's like, oh no, you sure? I don't mind at all. And she kind of has to, you know, a very common thing, has to invent a fictive boyfriend to be like, I'm meeting my boyfriend later, to kind of

knock him back. But she realizes in that moment that that's kind of exploitable, right? And so, this, like, Machiavellian thing, she takes off her underwear, she takes off her underwear and she kind of hides them under the front seat for Nathan Park to find later. first year. Yeah. And he's like, actually surprisingly reserved, I think. I watched it so many times, this particular scene. And it's like the smallest shock of repulsion. He's so, he's actually surprisingly tolerant of it. It's the wife that is not at all. He would say in the conversation, he even says like, I didn't, I didn't beg him for that kind of guy. Like, yeah, he's like having sex in my car, that's crazy. But it is bad though.

ALICE Yeah, there's a little bit of like, almost admiration. And we see that they have this conversation about it between them that's kind of a mutual series of fantasies, where... RILEY Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like fetishistic almost, the way they're talking about it. ALICE There's no way of them talking about this that doesn't require imagining their chauffeur fucking someone in their car. And so when Park brings this up, he's like, well, you know, I don't take offense to that,

necessarily, but why on my seat? Why cross that line? And he even has this very vivid sort of like, imagining, he mentions the driver's sperm dripping on my seat, and I'm like, you came up with that! This is a thing that is purely fictitious! You are making up cum to get mad at! Um. Yeah. You're imagining cum and getting madder.

I mean, it's so classic too, because he's correctly noting problems with the story, but because he's fetishizing being poor so bad, like he immediately just starts imagining lurid fantasies about it, rather than being like, it is kinda weird that the pants would be in the back seat instead of the front one, and there's no hair or anything like that. And he says as well, he's like, who forgets their panties? She must have been in that like whispers in his wife's ear like, oh drugs. Exactly. They just imagine how depraved the sex would have to be rather than like actually thinking about it for a second. No specific drugs, just like, drugs. There's a really funny bit after that when he says, oh, it's just supposition, a rational guess about something that's just

completely irrational. You just made that up. Yeah. Fantastic. So the next day they don't fire him for that. They say, well, just make up an excuse and quietly fire him. There's no need to mention any of this unpleasantness. ALICE Because they're also worried about these drugs that they have imagined, and this being kind of like getting them in trouble. And so the next day, they talk to, or rather Mrs. Park talks to Jessica about it, and she plays naive, perfectly. She's so good. She's like, oh yeah, no, he was really nice, he

was so cool, in fact he actually like, insisted on driving me home, just to really set this guy up as a creep. And so we get the chain of recommendations extends one link further of, well, if you need a driver, youknow, my cousin's uncle's father had a really good driver, Mr. Kim. RILEY Yeah. Oh, but they've moved to Chicago, so maybe he'll be out of work right now and be able to do it. And again, it's using America as this cache, to be like, oh. Like, tangentially he's related to America, therefore. And it's obviously the dad. I do like that when Kintec and Mr. Park go for a test drive, he's really good. He's like, we can see that Mr. Park is holding his coffee and seeing whether it spills as

they corner, and he corners so smoothly that he's actually genuinely a really good driver. I want to go back a little bit, right, because the scene immediately before this is the one time we see Mr. Park at work. At work. Right? Because he's in some kind of tech, it's like VR or some shit like that, and we see him- what he's doing in this sort of glass office is idly playing with a little tech peripheral thing, asking a question about it, and then immediately

ditching work to go and test his new chauffeur, and it's like, this man's work is not that important or that involved. If he can just take the middle of the day off and be like, I'm gonna go see how well this guy corners a Mercedes. RILEY Yeah. It's fun that all of this money that's being fought over here is basically a joke, to begin with, like, this guy's job is made up, he goes to the meetings factory every day and then gets paid an exorbitant budget off of it.

RILEY And listen, whenever we have to test drive with our show, because we don't do it in the middle of a podcast. RILEY That's right, that's right. ALICE I'll be right back. So, uh, the next step in the plan, and we see that this is a plan that's coming together, is the housekeeper, the maid, who... Yeah, we gotta get rid of her. We gotta get her outta here.

Yeah, it's like, they've got everyone in, and now the obvious spot is, they've gotta get the mum in somehow, and there's a housekeeper right there. So it's like, how do we get her fired? It's all kind of crossing the lines. is this is where I'm just like, okay, that's fucked up, actually. You should be you could be happy with three. I don't want to be mean to the mum, but like, you don't have to be there too. I don't mind talented Mr.

Ripley in the housekeeper too. That's kind of fun. But the way they do it is like kind of evil because they learn that she's deathly allergic to peaches. Oh, no, like this is the point in which it becomes like up until this point, like they've just replaced the guy who's moved away and invented a new role. Like the driver is the first guy that they like get fired on purpose to replace him. And then the housekeeper is where they hugely cross the line here. Yeah, yeah.

Like in terms of class solidarity here, this is fucked up. They learn that she's extremely allergic to peaches, so they shave a peach and then sprinkle peach fuzz on her, and hide her medicine, so that she's like hacking her gut... This is cruel, right? Yeah, it's really mean. It's cruel and it's greedy, right? And we have this whole, it's a montage set to classical music, where Kitek kind of works on Mrs. Park, and kind of like, it stretches plausibility, he's like, oh, I was in the hospital and I took a selfie,

and this woman next to me, who's in the selfie, was talking about how she's got tuberculosis. But like, of course it gets to her, and of course this kind of like, uh, terror of disease and ill health gets to her. They even manufacture some bloody tissues using hot sauce, and like, make it seem as if the housekeeper is coughing up blood. My favourite detail is that we see we get a cut back to the semi basement, and they're rehearsing the scene, and they're able to correctly predict Mrs. Park's lines effectively. To be like, but isn't tuberculosis rare now? RILEY This is another one of those moments where we

see the family have real genuine skills. The acting here, like the son has written all of these lines and he's coaching his dad through saying them, cause initially the dad's too emotional about it and he's like, you gotta bring it down a little bit. Things like that. It's just nice, they're really putting time and effort into thinking of how to screw this family over as hard as possible. SONIA And the Parks do the same thing again, which is that they don't tell the housekeeper this is happening, they just manufacture some excuse to fire.

ALICE Yeah, and we get the first real shot of consequence, which is her walking down the hill in the rain looking absolutely bereft, and this kind of hits home a bit in this moment. ALICE And the Parks lament this, and Mr. Park is like, ah man, she was really good, she never crossed the line, that's a shame, and specifically he says, now the house is going to smell. ALICE Mmhm. NICOLA And he says, my clothes are going to smell, as if he couldn't put a load of laundry in himself. ALICE He can't figure it out, yeah.

ALICE He's like, my wife, she doesn't, you know, she can't cook, she can't clean, and you just think, at this moment, right, and I think this is one of the things about criticism of this movie not really getting it, and this is a really, really basic thing that still manages to shock some people, right? Is, like, the parks can't cook, can't clean, barely, like, one of them works, and that barely, he can't drive. These are the parasites, right? Like, there's some, like, parasiting off of other people's labor, it's a dual meaning there. And I think people still manage to miss that.

RILEY Because the shot, they're really like, when Mrs. Park is boiling one of his shirts on the stove! ALICE God, that's gotta smell awful. No fucking yeah it's like if you swapped over these families like just wholesale the the park family would starve to death in like 45 minutes somehow like you know how you managed this yeah and so key tech says well I I know a housekeeper I get you one, through this membership only service they're really exclusive, they're really, you just call this number and they'll

set you up, and of course it's the fucking mum. ALICE Yeah, of course. Absolutely, yeah. ALICE It's interesting as well, the business card is bilingual, so again we have this kind of, like, aspirational use of English, and he also flatters himself, because, you'know, the conceit here, as Kutek, Hans, and Lakata's like, oh, they scouted me, but I had already, like, agreed to, y'know, this interview with you, and he bolsters it himself, because from the back

seat he goes, oh, so you turned down this famous company to work for me, and it's just this opportunity to kind of, of like buff your own ego that legitimizes the thing. So the smell, smell returns once again to the movie, because now that all four of them are in the house, you can scratch off the next panel on your, on your little parasite scratch and sniff card. And that is, that is poor people because the sun notices that they all smell the same. And they're like, shit, we need to start using different soaps maybe. And then it's, it's Ki-Yung who says, no, it's not, it's not our soap or our laundry. It's our house. It's where we live. It makes us smell. It's semi basement smell is how they identify it. Yeah. They would have to leave the

house. Yeah. They'd have to leave the house to get rid of the smell. And that is one thing that they actually cannot do. With all of their lying and trickery, they're not actually able to leave that house. ALICE Yeah. Housing and soul, very very bad. Also, this kind of like, poverty having sort of like circumstances that betray you is interesting, it's something that's in high and low as well, it's like, the back half of that movie is a police procedure about finding this kidnapper who's been looking up at the house the whole time, and it's all details like, oh you have to live near a tram line so there's noise, or you have to use a phone box and you complain that

it's hot so the sun has to be shining on you. And it's like, these things are identifying, these things mark you, right? But with smell, it's more kind of, it's more attached to you in that sense. Especially about clothes as well. And this is a thing that will, like, this sensation of finding out that other people think that you have a bad smell that you hadn't noticed, is like one of the really recurring horrors. LORRAINE We get so habituated and desensitized to

smells that were around all the time, that it becomes actually impossible to check your own smell or the smell of your kin. And that kind of gives everyone else a kind of power over you. And it's a power that is wielded when different classes are in close proximity. So usually that wouldn't happen, but in this film the whole point is that the two classes are in close proximity. And that is how they become undermined and their kind of ruse almost becomes obvious. ALICE The Max Weber thing about how class is defined in these kind of moments of proximity.

SONIA The nose knows and then the nose is turned up. So the Parks are gonna go on a little... oh no, sorry, first of all, Kiwu gets a little moment of character development, because the drunk guy comes by to piss on their windows again, and then Kiwu goes out there and yells at him. So he's like, yeah, he's found his fire, yes! I would also say, not even just that, he takes the stone out to go yell at the guy with. Like, he's holding the stone when he does it. His comfort stone.

He's gonna, like, brandish this, this, my comfort rock. But evidently weighs like ten kilos at least. He's like, he's struggling with this thing all the time. ALICE Yeah, he's gonna show him off with the rock, right, which has worked for them so far. The other thing about this as well is that they're having dinner, and we see that with their, like, ill-gotten gains, they've got a hibachi grill, and they're all drinking Sapporo beer, they're drinking imported beer.

Except for the mum, who is still drinking, like, Phylite malt beer, the cheapest beer you can get, features in the host as well. And it's like, she's the one who's still keeping it real. But so, instead they shoo away the guy by throwing water on him, and we, y'know, Jessica films it out of the window, and she's like, it's a deluge. So the Parks are gonna go camping. Niamh Yeah. Luke Yes.

Niamh Well, they're going on a camping trip and they're gonna leave the house in the mom Chung Sook's care. So she's like, all right, off you go, like waves them away, and then immediately lets the rest of her family in to enjoy this beautiful house. And, here he's having a beautiful bath in the bathroom. And like, the son is reading the the park daughter's diary as well. Yeah. And they all they have this big meal downstairs in the living room. Trashy meal. There's like food scattered all over. Yeah, like get a big old takeout. Yeah, they drink that. They drink the park's fucking booze. They all get wasted drinking their expensive liquor.

If you've got expensive water in the fucking park house, it's all the Voss. When you open the fridge up and it's all Voss water, like, glass bottles, like, shut up guys. And they have this conversation that I think is the real crux of the movie, right, which is, they speak about the parks, and they like them. Oh yeah, this is it. It's Kitek, it's Kitek is the guy that and they like them. Oh yeah, this is it. Right? It's Kitek, it's Kitek is the guy that likes them the most. He's the true believer, he still somehow believes in his heart that rich people are rich because

they're, like, better, in some way. He's like, oh they're so nice, or something like that, and immediately the mum is like, yeah, if I had this fucking money I'd be nice too, man, what are you talking about? Yeah. I had this fucking money I'd be nice too, man. What are you talking about? ALICE Yeah, she said money is an iron. It smooths out all of these wrinkles, right? And this is the thing about the movie that I wanted to really talk about is, this Brightwing criticism I saw of it was like, oh well the Kims are straightforwardly, they are bad people.. ALICE Objectively. They objectively smell bad and are sort of evil, and are taking over the house of this well-meaning family. And it's like, well, yes, sort of, but this is the point, right, is that they can't afford to be nice, and the Parks can, and to be honest

they're not nice either, but they can afford to be polite, at least for a while. Yeah. Exactly, yeah. It's not really nice, it's not kindness, it's like being well-mannered, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Because it's certainly not nice, because we see so many little instances of them, like, the one that comes to mind is when they're talking about the drivers in propriety, and they're making it up in their mind. These are not nice people. They just don't interact with people very often at all. They have a house servant to deal with that for them. ALICE I read an interview with Bong Joon-ho, where they ask him about Mrs. Park, and he says, well she's not stupid, she probably did very well in school, but she's trusting, and the reason why she's trusting is because nothing

bad has ever happened to her. Right? You need those experiences to make you doubt people. And the Kims have all had, if anything, too many of those experiences, right? And so of course they're sort of like, venal, and of course they're self-centered, and it's... Ki-Tek feels bad for the chauffeur they got fired, he kind of like wonders about that, and Ki-Jung, the daughter, is like, well fuck

that guy, what about us? And as she says this, there's this crash of thunder and the sky is open and it starts raining torrentially. It's just like, well there's your, like, your, um, your pathetic fallacy, right? I think that's what it's called. ALICE Where it's like, in that moment, where she's sort of like, been occupying the house, and where, y'know, her brother says she looks like she belongs there, and where she really takes on that greed, and where she's like,

well yeah, but like, what about me? What about us first? That's when, that's when it starts raining. RILEY Exactly. ALICE Also, she's eating dog treats, because the dog treats are like, imported like crabsticks, and they're just straightforwardly nice. Which is, yeah. A contribution to big fucking idiot cinema, I think. RILEY Yeah. SONIA And at that moment, the doorbell goes and they're all like, oh shit. What's, what's happening?

We're at the midpoint of the movie. Everything's about to change. Oh shit, I was really enjoying the first half of the movie. It was really funny. Let's just do that and keep doing it. But no, no, because the old housekeeper is here and she's soaking wet and she's like, oh, I, you're the lady who replaced me, right?

I left something in the basement. Could you let me in to get it? And they're like, okay, fine. So the rest of the family hide as Chung-Suk lets her in. She goes down to the basement and then she doesn't come up. It doesn't come for ages. Yeah, it's really fucking tense. And then they're like, just fucking go in, go in then. Like the basement is this like really intimidating, like way down as well. Like it's in the kitchen.

It's this like staircase that leads down, it's in the kitchen. It's this, like, staircase that leads down and it's always, like, in shadow. Like, it's always a little bit threatening in every shot that it's in. It's a huge wine cellar too. And when Chunxue descends, she finds the housekeeper opening a secret door, which opens into this really long staircase, which I think we go down in one shot. This, like this hidden sub-basement, well bunker actually they call it, and we follow her and the old housekeeper down into this bunker, and we're just like, what the fuck, our whole notion of the geography of

this house has been completely upended as we enter this sub-basement, and we find the old housekeeper's husband, who's been living here for four years since the parks moved in. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Parasites. RILEY They're like, this is a bunker, because, just in case of like, North Korean invasion or something like that. ALICE The line isn't even that, the line is a lot of old houses have bunkers like this in case North Korea invades or creditors break in.

Which, like, introduces this little bit of precarity there. RILEY And the parks don't know this basement is here. No. This is a secret we established. Because the architects built it in and then they just moved into the house. Yeah, and he never mentioned it. Parasite, parasite is about there being a creepy guy in your house. A thing which I would hate to happen.

Yeah, that's the parasite from Parasite. Oh, there he is! There he is! Oh, I figured it out, it's him! Parasite from Parasite? That's Next. Film solved, big tickin' box. Oh thank god, yeah, big tickin' box. That's the guy who smells bad! And he smells bad because he's evil and he's evil because he smells bad.

He's evil because he's poor. Yes, okay. Got it. Here we go. Cool. He doesn't have any money which makes him evil. Yes, and smell. There's no shower in the bunker though, so like he doesn't...

No very much. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person.

He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. He's not even a good person. him evil. Yes, and smell. There's no shower in the bunker though. So like, he doesn't- No there's not. Actually, because the rest of the family follow the mum down there secretly, and we see Kiwu like, cover his mouth and nose when he gets in there, because presumably the stem- Because you wish he smells. Yeah, it smells well. This scene is so fucking- this scene is like a fucking play.

And that we're just in it for so long. Yeah, this scene is like the whole movie to me. With so many reversals of fortune. So Chung-Suk is initially like, get the fuck out of here or I'm gonna call the police and report you for smelling real bad. And the former housekeeper begs on her knees and is like, we have debts to loan sharks, my husband's been hiding it for four years, they won't kill us if we go out. I've been feeding him every month, like once a week when I used to work here, please just

like I'm not going to try and get my job back, just please leave some food out for my husband so he could keep safe. The other three family members, the Kims, they fall down the stairs and are all emerged. Big fucking idiots. And Ki-Woo calls his dad, dad? And the former housekeeper immediately realizes what the fuck is going on and like films them. Starts filming it, catches the son calling, like catches Kiwu calling, he take dad, and it's just like, I got you, got you motherfuckers. I will send this to the housekeeper unless you all like do anything for me. Things like that. Like the, the, the, the, the power dynamic reverses so

quickly. And I gotta say, good for her. You know what? They were gonna kick her and her husband out. ALICE There's like, attempted and then rebuffed solidarity on both sides, right? Like when the old housekeeper is kind of like, at their mercy, she says, we're just fellow workers, you know, we're the needy, she calls her sis, and then this immediately inverts, and as soon as she has power she's like, don't call me Sis.

I think I'm always saying. ALICE Yeah. Well you can't anymore. NICOLA She calls Chung Sook a filthy bitch, because like, immediately she's suddenly in this position to be saying, ah, you're dirty. Actually, it's not us, you're the ones that are dirty. ALICE It's you that smells bad! LIAM Wait, we've just noticed, you're the ones that do it. It's you that smells bad! Wait, if we've just noticed, it's what you smell!

Fuck you! And so we cut to upstairs, the old housekeeper and her husband are on the couch, she's giving him a massage, while the kims are kind of lined up on their knees with their hands in the air, which is apparently a common Korean classroom way of punishing a child kind of thing. That's crazy. What the fuck? That's fucked up. Yeah, I know, but it's like sitting in the corner kind of thing.

Anyway, so, and she's like, oh, they're threatening them with sending the video, and the old housekeeper does a perfect North Korean newsreader. It is pitch perfect. It helps as well Yeah, this is a good bit. Pitch perfect. It helps as well that the actress actually resembles one of them. You might have seen her on YouTube- I thought you were gonna say she was one of them! Yeah, usually. Li Cheng, yeah, she looks like her.

But yeah, so- I don't watch a lot of North Korean news, so... Oh, well, you know, you're losing out on real Juche thought, you know? But so, in this moment- It's a good bit. real Juche thought, y'know? In this moment, as they're kind of experiencing this hubris, of course the kids all, as one, make a grab for the phone, and then there's this horrible fight between them, the dogs are running around as they find... NICCOHONTIE They hit it with the peaches!

ALICE Yeah. Yeah, someone runs over and gives it the fucking door. NICCOHONTIE And gets the peach and shoves it in her face, they hit her with the peaches! Yeah. Yeah, someone runs over and- Keele! Gives her the bridge! And like, gets the peach and shoves it in her face, they hit her with the peach! The black site spike it, the daughter gets over and immediately starts rubbing peaches on her. I'm scratching off peach on my little card. Okay, sorry, audience, the joke there is that the movie Spike Kids 4 came with a fucking

card that was scratch and sniff in the cinema, alright, that's the bit we're doing. Just in case... ALICE But yeah, so... RILEY Just in case you haven't seen Spike It's Four and you wanted to hear your favorite internet smells talk about parasite. What the fuck are they talking about? KATE I feel like they'll be interested anyway.

There are loads of movies that have scratch and sniff elements. ALICE I realize what a poor job we did of introducing our podcast's whole deal at the start, and also tune out. NICHOLAS No, I figured they would get it like a crab being boiled or whatever it is, y'know? ALICE We did an episode about Spike It's Four with Tom and Demi, so you can go and listen to that. NICHOLAS You should listen to that episode, yeah, it's

actually the best one we've ever done. ALICE They take the housekeeper's family and they tie them up in the bunker, right, and at this moment Mrs. Park calls, and she's like, oh yeah, it got completely flooded at the campsite, so we're just coming home. Can you make... Well, yes, indeed, like, she starts out, like, the first thing she says on the call is, can you make Ramdon? Like, she asks for the food before she says, oh, we're coming home, by the way.

So this is Japaguri, which is like, it's like, one half instant spaghetti noodles, one half instant udon noodles, mixed together. It's like kids' food, right? Yeah, cause it's for the kid, it's for the song. But because she's so rich, she's like, oh, can you just throw some Hanwoo beef in there as well, some sirloin? Some really expensive beef into this. SONIA Cos by the way, we're gonna be home in eight minutes.

ALICE Yes. SONIA Yeah. Like, if you boil it now, it should be ready when we get in there. And the mum is just asking clarifying questions about that, like, ah, so how far away are you? ALICE And so they have to very hurriedly... SONIA So they just, like, oh, so how far away are you? And so they have to, they have to very hurriedly. So they just like panic. Yeah. They tie up the former housekeeper and her husband in the basement. They have to make the noodles really fast, sweep all the trash under the sofa. They hide themselves under the furniture.

And just as the former housekeeper is like about to run up and yell at the Park family, Chung Sook pushes her down the stairs, she falls down and then hits her head on the concrete wall with this sickening crack. ALICE Oh, the foliar on that head injury. Oh, it's awful. But yeah, so they're hiding under the table and under the bed, like bugs, right? There's a line earlier where the wife is like, you know, he thinks he can

live here, but if Nathan Park came home he would run like a cockroach, right? ALICE There's also a moment where, as Kimtek and the housekeeper's husband are in the basement, we realize that the lights that turn on as Mr. Park is walking up the stairs, are being turned on by this guy hitting the switches, with his forehead, because his hands are tied up, and he absolutely reveres Mr. Park, like he has pictures of him on the wall. ALICE Invisible labor. SONIA He's like, sometimes I even send him messages by like, splitting the light switches in morse code, and like, Mr. Park has no idea this man exists.

ALICE He's made up a creepy little song about him as well. It's like, oh thanks. Yeah, we get the reveal that the basement guy has gone insane and that's like, specific way that turns you into a metaphor. So he's like, totally subsumed his role as basement guy. Like, he worships Mr. Park for housing and feeding him. He says he feels like he's always been down there, which is a very important line. Like, yeah, just, he becomes the metaphor for the movie. He's internalized the class relationship, and ideology, and he smells bad. But he doesn't even realize he smells bad, because he's internalized it. Mm-hmm.

You ever go into someone's bunker basement and be like, damn, people could get used to any smell. We also learned something, Da Zang was traumatized by this guy when he was a kid. Yeah! He had a Mulholland Drive moment! On his birthday, he saw the parasite from Parasite creepily coming up the stairs, and he had this seizure, which, in their kind of, sort of very anxious way, the Parks have taken to mean that like, oh, if he has a seizure again, he's got to get to hospital within

like 15 minutes or he'll die. Which is not at all true, by the way, but like, it's a thing that they believe. Yes. It's very important. But Dasong, Dasong, like, doesn't, like, he doesn't want to stay in the house on his birthday because of this, and so partially because of this he wants to camp out on the lawn in like a teepee. Which, again, it was in his room, they bought it from the US, more kind of Native American

fetishism. And the parents are like, on the couch watching him, they've got walkie talkies, and then they discuss the way that all of their staff seem to smell. Although specifically, specifically it's Kitek. It's Kitek, yeah. They say that he smells like a boiled rag. Yeah, but also like a radish, and like, the subway. So there's this kind of sense in which it's like all encompassing, like, nameless. It's really difficult to put a pin on precisely

what that smell is. Which I think is actually kind of important. ALICE They can't have class consciousness. Also the heartbreaking bit where he's under the couch and you realize he smells it on himself that he has that moment of realization. Also people who ride the subway has a cultural valence there because as best I can tell, like everyone in Korea rides the subway. It's like this is a real, not even 1%, like 0.1% type thing. And the subway says, you know, you smell that on the subway, and Mrs. Park says, I wouldn't know.

She doesn't travel, she doesn't leave the house, pretty much. Like, she doesn't do anything. Yeah. Like, we see at least two points her just getting, like, woken up, like, in the middle of the day, to just, like, get on with her things. the middle of the day to just like get on with her things. But it's interesting that because Mrs. Park cannot smell, and has not before smelled, the odor that Mr. Park keeps talking about, it kind of puts into question whether that smell really exists, or the extent to it, like the intensity of the smell, or whether he just has this kind of super-sense.

He can sniff out the working class individual, rather than it being an actual smell. ALICE Yeah, maybe it's just this is the smell of everyday life that they're so completely cut off from, that they just don't ever smell it. And they're just like... LORRAINE Or maybe even that it's not a literal smell, it's just that he has a judgement and is processing that almost as a kind of psychosomatic scent. Psycho-olfactory?

It has to get worse, right? We have to turn the screw a little bit more. And so, the parks, like, their son is just out in the tent sleeping, and they have sex. But the way in which they do it is specifically like this poverty fantasy again, that's so... Yeah, this awful rich person sex that they have. Offensive and ridiculous. It's kind of like, it's sweet in the sense that they like each other, right? It's something that we'd even heard Park laugh off when Kim was like, oh, you love your wife,

right? And he's like, yeah, I guess. Yeah, Katek has this, he often is talking about love, like he really believes in love. And you get the sense that the rich family kind of don't. But anyway, yeah. There's a moment where Mr. Park is like, do you still have those cheap panties we found in the car? Oh, it's horrible. That'd really get me going. And she's like, oh, if I did that, you'd have those cheap panties we found in the car that would really get me going?" And she's like, oh if I did that you'd have to get me some drugs.

No specific drugs, just drugs. She's just moaning, buy me drugs. Yeah. It's hilarious, fucking horrible. Again, it's just like fetishism of the working class, of what they think poor people would be like, which is more free and more animalistic and more sexual like that. ALICE Yeah. Like Native Americans, as they imagine.

But so, they escape by crawling across the floor when the parks full of sleep, like bugs, go back down infinity flights of stairs in the pissing rain. RILEY The whole walk home is incredible. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some theremin guys following them like, woooooooow. And the kims are like, can you stop that? NARES And the semi-basement is flooded, the whole neighborhood is flooded.

ALICE Mmhm. With sewage water, specifically. NARES With the deluge that started when Kejung was like, well why not us? ALICE We're the onlyuge that started when Ke Jung was like, why not us? LIAM We're the only people that matter, yeah. ALICE And so Ki-Tek rescues his wife's medal, and Ki-Woo rescues the scholar's rock, which floats up towards him, and we see that they're in the church hall and the emergency center,

or whatever, and he's just hugging this rock on his bed. ALICE We get this moment where Ki-Yung is sitting on the toilet, and she's put the lid down and is sitting on it, and she's feeling like every transgender person in the world right now, as she's just like, smoking a cigarette as this thing is just erupting shit. KATE They are completely unaffected. ALICE She's just like, fuck it, just smoking the cigarette, who gives a shit. Like, that's crazy.

It goes completely against this like middle class idea that physical repulsion is something like inherent and that you can't get over. Because they could not give a shit. They're just like, we need to get in, get our stuff and leave. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, yeah, no, you get specifically like this is all sewer water, this water smells horrific. Like the scent is again, like double down here.

It's almost like it's like the original like scent that the scent is poverty just in general. It's not like it's less a real scent and more just like these people are poor, right? But in this in this move in the scene specifically, they're like, we are doubling down on the scent, the scent is both real and metaphorical now, they all literally smell like shit. ALICE Yeah. And so we get this very very bleak scene, in this kind of evacuation centre, where he's still hanging onto this rock, and the father asks him, why do you still have this thing, he says it keeps clinging to me, it keeps following me. And the dad who's always been saying- He's lost the base at this point as well, like it's just the rock.

Just the rock. The dad who's kept trying to reassure his kids by being like, don't worry, I have a plan, has this moment of total bleakness, and it's like face onto the camera, where he says, the only plan that never fails is having no plan. And this culminates in him saying, whatever you do, whether you kill someone, or betray your country, none of it fucking matters. Right? And this is the kind of, like, there's, like, he's kind of broken in that way, there's like, no kind of total nihilism. And of course, we have to then immediately go to the parks, who are like, oh man, we needed that rain!

ALICE Yeah. RILEY That rain was beautiful, it was lovely, we're gonna have a garden party. And they're calling all of them while they're all in for like, displaced peoples, like, like emergency camp in the fucking gym, being given clothes, they're just all being told like, oh can you come in today, we're gonna put a garden party on, have a really nice time. ALICE We really dial up the labour as well, like

we see Ki-Tek has to carry all of these groceries while Mrs. Park's on the phone, we see the mums having to arrange the tables. There's a detail that I really want to pull out here, which is, she's trying to decide how to arrange the tables, and she says, oh put them in like a cranes wing formation, like Admiral Yi at the Battle of Hansan Island. And this is such a specific... Yeah, I've got to answer you, I wrote November moment, but carry on. No, it's a specific moment, not because of... Okay, I don't know the Korean context of whether this is particularly famous, and it's referencing

the Spanish Armada would be for an English person, but it betrays these hidden depths. Again, it's this thing of, oh, she's a smart person, she probably did well at school. It's like, imagine what she could have done instead of this which is nothing. You know? Instead of arranging the way you want the tables to be set out. It's just this, this kind of... It reflects, there's something in there that is being wasted, that's being squandered, right?

ALICE Definitely, yeah. ALICE And I think it's a really beautiful detail. Oh, also this is where we get the shot that was a meme of her with her feet up on the back of the seat, while Kim Kutek is driving and he's just, like, seething. Yeah. Yeah. Kim Kutek is, like, falling down as we speak, you know? He's in the grocery store five seconds to midnight.

It's almost happening. But he's just packing these bags, so he's like, fine, fine, I can get through today. And Mrs. Park smells him from the back seat and like opens the window, because he smells bad. But does he really, or does she just have this idea put in her head by Mr. Park? No, I think he actually does smell like shit in this moment, yeah. Well I think at this point he does, because he's like covered in sewage. And he hasn't had a chance to shower. does smell like shit in this moment, yeah. Well I think at this point he does, because he's like covered in sewage.

Yeah, true. And he hasn't had a chance to shower. He's very wet at this point. This is like making the metaphor naked, right, like he literally does smell like shit in this moment, but it's supposed to be because he's poor, not because... it's because he's not had an opportunity to clean himself, he's wet. He's been damp since the start of this movie, he's been like, at a baseline, and he's not been able to get dry. ALICE He's very red, he looks like a sunburned

dad. He's like your dad on holiday. ALICE He actually is sunburned, yeah. So, they all assemble for this party, Kevin is with Dahye, the daughter, and he's starting to worry, like, can I ever fit in here, because he's had this kind of daydream of, like, well what if I just got married to her, and we hired actors to play my mum and dad, and we just lived in that house, and, y'know, what if I... he has this fantasy of social mobility, I guess you would call it now. And so, Kim Kutek, he gets back, and the dad is like, right, put on this racist headdress. Because he's got like, Native American, like, Plains Indian war bonnet, right? RILEY Yeah. It's not cowboys versus Indians or anything, it's inter-tribal, like, it's

all Indians. They say Indians. ALICE Yeah, and he's like, I'm gonna wear one of these, you gotta wear one of these, and the plan is when, like... When Jessica brings his birthday cake out, we're gonna jump out and we're gonna be the bad Indians who attack the cake, and Dar Song's gonna be the good Indian who fights us off and saves the cake. And you see these shots of Kim Keechak wearing the war bonnet just like, face completely like seething. But he tries.

He makes a final attempt to relate to Mr. Parker as an equal, and he just like gets shut down immediately, he's like, oh well yeah, but you know, you're doing this because you love your wife, really. And like, Mr. Parker just looks at him for like five seconds, it's like, you're on the clock right now, man. It's like, you are not here as an equal motherfucker, first of all, like, remember your place. Yeah. Like, he fails to show the requisite enthusiasm to, like, degrade himself by engaging in this

colonial fantasy. And he's like, remember you're getting paid extra. Yeah, exactly. You are here as a prop for me to have a moment with my son. Like, this is nothing to do with you being here at all. You're not my friend, I don't like you." Meanwhile, the son, Ki-woo, is upstairs kissing the park daughter, and she pulls away and goes, you're thinking of someone else too, and it's like the reverse shot, and he is also at like five seconds to midnight. Everyone is just like, right there! ALICE Yeah, well he's right there to preserve the thing. RILEY Yeah, he's like, he's desperate to keep a hold of this fantasy of being a rich person.

SONIA And like many people, he's like, well, maybe if I could fantasize about having a rich house, that's a good reason to kill someone. So he goes down to the sub-basement with the rock. RILEY He goes down there to kill. SONIA He goes down there to kill Mr. and Mrs. Basement Parasite from Parasite. And then he gets reverse parasited because Mr. Basement turns the tables on him and then like, he then hits him with the rock.

Yeah, well this is the thing, right? And this is the two readings of it, right? You can make a reading of the movie where the rock is like extremely metaphorical, right? But I like the one that you set out, Abi, where it isn't, right? And what you have is this kind of like, false consciousness rock that you imbue with all of your feelings, that then becomes, like, it stops being metaphorical and starts being extremely material when a guy uses it to beat you unconscious. ALICE Yeah! ZACH It stops being metaphorical the second it gets used to hit you in the head.

Yes! That's my understanding of most things. You've been hitting the head with your own fantasies of wealth! Again, some really sick, like, head injury foley. It's like, this is br- it's brutal violence, right? And like, again, I think it's important that it is, because you contrast it with the kind of like, plastic Tomahawk, Carl May kind of like, like fantasy of violence, the real thing is, it's horrible. Yeah.

And Mr. Basement, the parasite from Parasite, he's covered in blood, he walks upstairs, grabs a knife from the kitchen, just walks out into the garden party? Yeah, this is a man who is going out, alright? He's walked up the stairs with the intention of going out. He sees some knives on the way past, and he's like, that'll help me go out. Grab some of them and just walks into the garden. Interesting detail that none of the rich people notice him. At any point.

Not at all. They're all still watching, like, the party, they're not looking. And so, Giyoung is bringing what we are told is, and I think one of the funniest lines of the movie, Da Song's trauma recovery cake. To celebrate that he's all better now. And he's not gonna work. No spoilers. He's good from seeing a scary guy one time. I want someone to bring me a trauma recovery cake, that sounds great!

And then, you know, that self-same scary guy comes up with a knife and stabs Ki-Jung. Again, really funny thing that she hits him in the face with a cake on the way down, unintentionally. ZACH The scene is so wrenching, but also really funny, because he gets covered in cake, and then as Ki-Yoon collapses having been stabbed in the shoulder does so it's like standing there staring at this guy from his literal nightmares and just like passes out being effortlessly retraumatized. The trauma recovery cake does not work. Recovery cake has been covered in the blood of your art therapy.

If you wanted if you wanted to pull out a theme that we kind of haven't in Parasite, one that would be really interesting to do would be cake, not least because both Kim Ki-Tek and Mr. Parasite from Parasite both have failed businesses as, like, Taiwanese castella restaurant owners, as is a fad in Korea in 2016. It's killed by bird flu. Anyway. Okay, um, yeah. Well, we'll talk about this next time when we get Dr. Cake on. I am certain there are cake academics and if you are one-

I know there are, I'm sure there are. If you're an academic and you're caked up, write it. Give us a slice of your brain! No. But the whole time, the Rich family only care about the fact that their son has had his, like, he's fallen over and they've decided he needs to get to the hospital within 15 minutes or it's lights out. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. So they don't give a shit. Mr. Park literally steps over. Like, yeah, like, there's a stabbed woman in the middle of their garden, and like, Kitake is over there, like, this is his daughter, y'know, he's like, dropped down to her knees and he's looking at her, and like, it's just crazy, like Mr. Park is just like, hey, throw me my keys, I'm trying to get out of here. ALICE He doesn't tell him to throw him the keys first, he tells him to drive him!

It doesn't even occur to him to drive himself! He's like, he's the chauffeur, that's what he's hired to do, drive my son to the hospital. The mum comes in and kind of kills the basement guy in self-defense, and he lands on top of the car keys. RILEY They're like fighting with each other while they get... yeah, that even compounds the point, it's like there's a stabbed woman and his housekeeper is currently fighting with the guy that stabbed her, and his only thought is like, can my servant please drive me out of this situation, I don't like

it. ALICE And so we get, in all caps, ultimate smell moment, right, because... RILEY Certainly. ALICE Because Mr. Park pulls, sort of like, has to turn over the basement guy who is, sort of vaguely just about still alive, recognizes him, shouts like, respect in English as well. And as he does, as he's reaching for the keys, he's like, repulsed by the smell.

ALICE He like, holds his nose, because like, Mr. Baseman, he smells really bad. He's also upwind of Ki-Tek. Downwind, no, downwind of Ki-Tek. Because you see, there's this kind of close-up shot of his head, where you see the kind of wind ruffling through his hair in the direction of Mr. Park. So it's kind of like a combined, it's a combined thing. Yeah, well that's really good detail, I hadn't spotted that. But they're kind of inseparable, there's some like, they kind of shell together in that moment. And this is- Yeah, absolutely. Because it's class. This is where the like, the war bonnet takes

on another valence, right, because Kim Kutek, he takes the knife and he stabs Mr. Park. And there's a bit here that I wanted to really draw out, I guess, which I can tie back to high and low, but I can kind of tie back to anything class-based, right? Which is, I've kind of often thought that, y'know, the movie lens for this is Native Americans, which is a good lens for it, but I think you can apply it to like, Luigi Mangione, or like, Hamas, or anything, right? That like, a decent shorthand for any kind of class is whether or not you immediately get the concept of violence, you know, horrifying violence, even in kind of, in defense of dignity, and against someone who maybe isn't even aware that they're hurting you, against someone

who is constantly harming your dignity in a way that they don't even recognize, right? And I think that that kind of violence, that kind of violence in defense of dignity, is something that High and Low kind of deals with and then kind of ultimately backs down off because it's scared to be more than ambivalent, whereas this movie I think, y'know, really really takes the sense that this is, y'know, it's the obvious inevitable outcome of this, right? It's violent ends. RILEY It's the fact that Ki-Tek is the guy who does it as well, is like the important part here, because he's the one who throughout

the whole movie has been the most true believer in the Parks is just sort of better. And this is the point at which he realizes, oh no, there is nothing that I, as a person like me, could ever do to get these people's respect. We are only ever gonna be servants, or, y'know, we're only ever gonna be working class to these people. And that's when he gives in, he's just like, y'know, fuck you! He's gonna go Luigi mode. It's also, it's not revolutionary violence, right, it's individualism, it's kind of like,

and it's something that is portrayed as being futile as well. But it's kind of this instinctive reaction, right, it's a kind of, and like I say, I think it's an instinctive reaction on behalf of his own dignity, right? And the movie kind of, you know, just kind of withholds judgement on that, I think. Yeah. Yeah, and that's kind of one of the interesting things about the political impetus of this film. Because it seems like Bong Joon-ho kind of wants to say that both are in the right or that

neither really did anything wrong in the end, that we're supposed to understand kind of both sides of the story. Which you know, potentially is problematic, I think. Because it doesn't kind of, well, we're supposed to assume that if Mr. Park had somehow managed to show more tolerance towards these people's smell and not react in the way that he did, then the violence wouldn't have occurred. And I think that it doesn't really break down the kind of class distinctions that are entrenched here and that produce these reactions. It just kind of relies on this idea of managed politeness.

And so we're still kind of elevating this idea of like, upper middle class, like, benevolent tolerance. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting idea. I mean, I think it's... I don't think it both sides, personally, but I think it does kind of, like you said, I think it kind of I don't think it both sides it, personally, but I think it does kind of, like you said, I think it reinforces those things.

It's, yeah, I think it's also as much as anything else about atomization, right? You see these gestures towards some kind of class solidarity, and then they're always kind of interfered with, they're always sort of like, smacked down by this idea that everybody seems to have, that they can all be the Parks if they wanted to. The same as The Rock, right? Where it's like, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh,

eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, it's like, yeah, this is kind of like, this is a society that's not only sort of stratified by wealth, but it's one where everybody has this kind of false consciousness and everybody thinks, well, why not me one day? And that's the thing that kind of dooms Kintaro.

LWX What if I could be, what if I could wear the boot, actually? That'd be good. ALICE What if I could be the one who smelled good? ZACH It's funny, yeah, because even the mentions of working class solidarity here are very much like punchlines, basically. They're put into underscore that, realistically, the old housekeeper and the new one have a shared interest in not rocking the boat here. Real realistically, they are like the same person in the same position, but anytime that one of them is like, oh, we're kind of like the same.

It's only because they're the one who is down in that moment and because they want to get back to being on top of the other. Like, there's no actual class solidarity shown at any point in this movie. I think as well, the movie does a good job of showing that, like, the owner class doesn't really need to have class consciousness or class solidarity, they just naturally act in such a way that it benefits them.

Yeah, that's true. So Ki-woo wakes up in hospital, and- He's become the Joker! Yeah, he has this kind of paradoxical laughter from his injury, and ultimately they, y'know, they get away with a suspended sentence, Ki Jung is dead, there's a beautiful little quite cruel joke where they're looking at her ashes in the urn and then the cleaner comes in on the noisiest machine possible, and completely disrupts that moment for them. The cops are following them around trying to find Ki-Tek, there's a great line where like, one of the cops falls down a flight of stairs trying to follow him

because they're exhausted trying to follow someone who actually works for a living. SONIA Yeah, because Ki-Tek just vanished, nobody knows where he went. ALICE Yeah, and the sort of act of violence is futile in that the house is eventually sold to, like, this Swiss family, and, y'know, who are just as clueless in their own way, it's just like, oh, these people are completely transposable into this house. And so he has to, y'know, after the detectives have given up, Kiwu goes up on the hill and looks at the lights, which are, of course, tapping out morse code from Ki-Tek, who is in the

bunker in the basement. ALICE Mmhm. He's become Mr. Parasite from the movie Parasite. ALICE He has. LIAM Oh, he lives in the bunker. ALICE I know it smells crazy in there. ALICE It probably smells. It does, it do. RILEY Yes, I'm under reasonable apprehension that

it smells crazy down there. I think they've expressed that. ALICE Til the room stinks. reasonable apprehension of it smell crazy down there. I think they've expressed that. It's a final smell irony, right? Because if by killing Mr. Park, Keeteck was hoping to free himself from being perceived and judged as being stinky, then the film's resolution just definitively trapped him in this stinky environment. Yeah, it's worse than prison in some ways. But he has this kind of, he takes on this parasitical role in the end. WILL You get this instance, this sort of indication that maybe things are even continuing, where he's talking about trying to get out to get food at night, but he's like, the housekeeper is there 24-7?

So you sort of, like, maybe she's just come in there and is parasiting them as well. Like, who knows? We get this last sort of twist of the knife where Kiwu writes a letter back to Ki-Tek, which obviously he can't ever deliver to him. But he writes a letter back saying, I'm going to dedicate myself to making loads of money. And one day I'm going to buy that house and me and mom will be there and you can come up and be with us again. And we see this happen. We see Ki-Tek walk right up the stairs to meet them in the garden. And then it's ripped away from us as we realize this is a fantasy sequence and we are still in the sub-basement where we started, and Ki-Woo's still there being like, I'm gonna make loads of money and make that happen.

ALICE The one kind of positive here, is he puts the rock back in a river where it belongs, where it can just be a rock. It's just a fucking rock. Uh huh. It hasn't worked. Yeah, you kind of give up on these things. There's an extra twist of the knife, right, because this is the credits roll, and we get a song over the credits, the lyrics to which were written by Bong Joon-ho, and about how, if Ki-woo works all of his part-time jobs, he will be

able to afford to buy that house in five hundred and sixty-four years. That's cool. That's really good, actually. I didn't notice that at all. Yeah, he describes that as a cruel calculation, but we did it anyway. Yeah, no, it's a pipe dream, pal. There's no such thing as class mobility anymore. Yeah, it's very funny, this movie became so popular afterwards, and there was a quote

from him or something, it was from Bong Joon-ho, who was like, I wrote this about something that I consider to be a very specifically Korean valence, but it turns out that we basically all know what I mean here. I don't know how I feel about the movie ultimately. I had a good time with it. I really did like it. It is funny. It is incisive and critical about these things. I mean, I really liked it. It made me laugh a lot. It does remind me a lot of a play in the way that we spend a long time in certain scenes, uh, just sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, like the tension, especially around the midpoint, it's like

so beautifully well crafted and stuff. I also, I really appreciate any kind of, uh, movie where it's like mostly set in one very nice house. I'm like, this and Ex Machina, I'm like, that's how you create a really award-winning film, it's like you have one very nice house and you just set the whole film there. ALICE Yes, absolutely. And this is all built on sets as well, so it's like you have one very nice house and you just set the whole film there. ALICE Yes, absolutely. ALICE And this is all built on sets as well, so it's like very like, you know. NICOLAS Oh, really?

ALICE Yeah, yeah. Well they had to build the semi-basement in a, like a flooding, like a water tank so you could flood it, and then they built the park's house as a set. NICOLAS Ahhhh. You're telling me I can't buy the house from Parasite? You're living in it? ALICE Sorry, no. I'm afraid you can't buy the house from Parasite? Sorry, sorry, no. I'm afraid you can't buy the house from Parasite.

It was fictitious. There's a guy in the bunker down there, I don't know why you'd want the house from Parasite. Just being sold the house from Parasite, and it's like, well it's also got a guy with a, you know, guy in the bunker, which is very exciting. Free guy! And you know, Vyvrens. Stairs up to the bedroom, stairs down to the secret bedrooms. Oh yeah. Free guy.

Yeah, so, yeah, what are our kind of closing thoughts on Parasite, then? I give it two noses out of three, and if this movie were a nose, I'd pick it. Awful. Absolutely awful. Citified fresh. Oh fuck. We'll see if Dr. Cake has any ideas. As a piece of entertainment, as a work of art, I think it's a bit of a masterpiece, to be honest, It's brilliant. I'm suspicious of the overall message, which is that, you know, mannered politeness is the way to

resolve all ills. It just seems kind of unfit for purpose if the aim is to assuage fit for purpose, if the aim is to assuage interpersonal contempt. But it's a lot of fun, it really is, and it's like a delight to see Smell represented in the audiovisual medium. ALICE Yeah, that is very clever. That's very very cool the way that happens. ALICE So like, wafts of air, stuff like, y'know, opening the car window, it's like, really the way in which it's kind of suggested is really fun, yeah.

But yeah, that's Parasite. I highly recommend watching, if you're kind of interested in this, if you liked this, High and Low as a companion piece. Also The Host, which is kind of, sort of makes the left stuff a bit more tangible, I guess. Yeah, I need to go back and re-watch that, actually. I watched that when I was quite young and I don't really remember. Check out Bong Joon Ho. Yeah.

Give this a solid shot. Just think this guy's going places, you know? This guy seems cool. Coming to the guy who got the Oscar for this like 10 years late and being like, this guy, you know, he's got some good ideas. Hey, want to watch? Someone to watch. Bong Joon-ho. Making a variety list of Korean artists to watch.

Obscure directors. I mean, I do very, very quickly want to say there is a piece of like, a kind of reflexivity we can do here, right, which is that there was a thing in Korea when this movie came out, which is a bit of a canard, and I don't know how true it is, but I think it's kind of revealing, it's like, if you think this movie is like, fun and funny, you're kind of, you're on, you're upstairs, and if you think it's sad and, like, hurtful, then you're downstairs, right? And I think that's a thing with all film criticism a little bit, you know? And I think it's worth saying that doing it as a podcast and analyzing it like this is kind of like, it's a privileged form of discourse in a lot of ways, you know? And

I think that's one of the things I value about this film is that it's kind of clinging onto that very cultural prestige form of discourse, with its little hooks in there. Like a parasite, that's the parasite from Parasite. Thank you for listening to Kill James Bond. Thank you to Dr. Ali Lukes for joining us. If the people want to find more olfactory content, where can they follow you? ALI LUKES I am, to my great shame, still on X. I'm also on Instagram, and Blue Sky. And, yeah. That's me.

NICOLA Yeah, you're on Blue Sky now? Oh hell yeah. ALI LUKES Well, thank you so much for joining us. This is technically a bonus episode, but we're gonna put it out on the free feed, because it's been great. Um, so, we have a bonus Patreon feed, uh, for five dollars a month, you get an extra bonus episode. We're in the middle of robbery season right now.

This is kind of a robbery film, it's kind of a heist film, so it's tangentially related. Um, and the next mainline episode is gonna be... do we know what the next mainline episode's gonna be? The next episode that comes out is the one that we just recorded, so it'll be Oceans. Oceans 8, the ladies' reboot of the Oceans franchise. Oh, yeah, the all-lady reboot of Oceans. Hell yeah. Yeah, right, fantastic.

Talking about class, yeah. Talking about, like, sort of, attempted feminisms. Well, thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time. Bye everyone. Smell you later! names of everyone who has contributed at least £15 a month to the Killjames1 Patreon, and I encourage you, the listener, to sign up today for as little as £5 a month. Now obviously if you can do maths you'll know that just signing up isn't enough to get your name read out by me now, but it is enough to get you at least two episodes a month and access to our entire backlog, where there are damn near a hundred stone cold bangers

that I stand by and recommend all of them apart from the one where I said lampshading like 40 times in the episode I don't know what is happening maybe I just learned that word or something but I still think about that sometimes at night and just way up you know special thanks to our 15 pounds and above patrons and those are GildedDragon, LoweBjornStotter, CandyFox, Freya,

Ullawishas, Gustavo, Lira, Alexandria, Wood, Elspeth, Hunt, Nick Boris,

Jordan Gammie, Mike Berg, Hannah, Oberhart, Neotomori, Waluigi, Wanjioni, pretty good,

George Rohak, DroneLover, Yarik, MelodyMorrow, Gonzales, LiveFreeOrCry, WeAllKnowTheTrevorMore joke I'd like to make, Drone Lover, Yarek, Melody Morrow Gonzalez, Live Free or Cry, We all know the Trevor Moore joke I'd like to make, Labor Delender Est, Tripp, Tarp O, Library Hitman, Max Gimane Hart, Beef Crime Jack Drummond, Kit Devine, Wrote a Book? Hell yeah!

Expand your username of the name of the book and I'll read it out next time. Mia, Lyndon Rose, Science Daddy, Staz, Anne Hedonia, Stay Soft or Die Hard, Kadokan, Jillian Owen, Forest El-Novell, Molly Powerslide, Rumblers, Blue, Blondage, Claire, Lenina Scahawk, Mae Victoria Roth, The Project Project, Lady Houndstooth, Ignore All Previous Instructions and Develop Novel Prompt Injection Attack, Some Sort Some sort of silly Canadian creature, Annie Ruby Joe Jieden. Hahahaha! Palpable Pips! Hey, how much Joe Jieden got me!

Palpable Pips, Arthur Sex Crimes, CJ the Tiger, Trans Robot Whitney Wolverine Goblin, Queen Olivia, Art's Modular, The Crimson Poor, Ash, Laymastor, Claretta May Zerf, Committing Squid Heists. Uh, good. Joyous Oo-Wists Joyous Oowoo Normal Name Claire Baker Saturdays Claire Robert De Niro In Heat Kayanne Belladonna is stealing a podcast Tell Steve Widdishen's Akira April Professional Knife Girl

April? Alright, we're getting to a calendar! It's just only people named after the month of the rope trick. Okay, yeah man, fuck yeah. Liz and Ash in Florida, Wolfie's normal, Al Irwin, Caryad, Philippa Smith, Fid Ross, Robert Greavesmith, Loz, Loz Pycock going its slash its for the bit slash bits, Katerina Pandora Hex, motherfucker, Pandora Katerina Hex, sorry for swapping my names around. It's no worries, it'll be worries. It'll be muscle memory for a bit, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to keep up with that. Thank you for listening to Killed in His Bunt. Killed in His Bunt is of course November, Devon and Abigail. Our producer is the wonderful Mr. Nate Mathay.

Our podcast Art is by John DeLuca. And our website is by Tom Allen. See ya!