Parasite Revisited: The roots of deception
It’s been over a year since the South Korean film Parasite (2019) made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to garner international attention and acclaim, including the Oscar for best movie of the year. For all of the hype, there has been relatively little effort to seriously engage with the content of the story. While fictional, Parasite provides a lens into understanding critical aspects of our society today, including the prevalence of deception and lies.
Before getting into the film, I want to state that I don’t believe that people are less honest today than in the past. However, what does seem to make this moment unique is the degree to which people are aware that they are constantly being lied to. This difference likely boils down to the fact that we have greater access to information today; just think about the age of centralized mass media and how tough it was for the average person to fact-check an article.
But, why do we live in a world of deception and how do we transition to one based on truth and transparency? As deception is the theme of Parasite, I’d argue that there is much that we can learn by examining how dishonesty plays out in the film.
The movie begins with a scene of the Kims, a poor family in South Korea, running through their cramped and hot basement apartment, desperately trying to get a Wi-Fi signal so that they can get a notice about a job opportunity to fold pizza boxes. Next, we are introduced to the world of the Parks, a rich family who live in an impeccably kept mansion and whose lives run seamlessly, thanks to all of their help — tutors, a driver, and a live-in housekeeper who takes on the roles of the cleaning lady, caregiver, and cook.
Throughout the movie, the Kim family embeds themselves into the lives of the Parks by taking on the roles of their help. To do this, the Kims trick the Parks into firing all of their employees. At first, it seems as though the Kims are the liars; depending on one’s positionality, I’d expect that for many the film reinforced the sentiment that “good help is hard to find” with “good” acting as a euphemism for trustworthy. But at a closer look, we see that the Kims have no choice but to lie; and in fact, it’s perversely the behavior of the Parks that forces the Kim family into positions of deceit.
Throughout the film, the Parks don’t show any intention of wanting to know their help. When Mr. Park gags at the smell of his drivers, we see that he is viscerally repulsed by people in poverty. The “professionalism” that he demands is based on a desire that his servants keep their distance and perform their roles as laborers.
To earn a wage, the Kim family, and other members of South Korea’s working-class must conform to the expectations set by people in the capitalist class, like the Parks. Yet, as the movie reveals, these expectations are at odds with their lived reality.
This dynamic is most evident in the scene where the Parks decide to spontaneously throw a lavish birthday party for their adolescent son Da Song the day after a torrential rainstorm. While they wake up to a peaceful and sunny morning, the Kims wake up in a shelter for displaced people after their basement apartment was flooded by the storm. Adding insult to injury, the Parks insist that the Kims come to their home to “enjoy” the birthday party. Yet, when Mr. Kim stops performing and expresses an honest feeling, he’s quickly reminded by Mr. Park of his place as his employee. “Consider this part of your job,” Mr. Park quips, visibly annoyed at Mr. Kim for crossing the line.
This scene and many others show that the Parks are not just innocently ignorant, but it’s precisely their actions and warped expectations that force the Kims into a position where they must lie to maintain their job. Surely, anyone who has had to bite their tongue while politely nodding to their boss understands the necessity of deception. In the case of the working poor, they must pretend like they are not in poverty while fulfilling roles that one would only take if they were.
This point is further reinforced with the story of Moon-gwang, the former housekeeper. While the Park family expected her to be the perfect employee — on call 24/7, being in tune with all of their needs, and doing it all with a smile on her face — we see that these impossible expectations of someone in poverty who barely has enough resources to take care of themselves and their own family also forced her to lie, as she hid her husband in the Park’s basement for years while trying to avoid the violent loan sharks that were after him.
The dynamic between the Parks and their help suggests that at the root of deception is capitalism, a competition-based system that deprives the masses of the basic resources that they need to survive while forcing them into a labor-market that’s controlled by people who own the resources. Under such a system, the poor must lie to get the resources that they need, while the rich must also lie to placate the poor and prevent them from rebelling. We can see this play out when Mr. Park fires his help. Rather than tell them the truth about why he is firing them, he makes up an excuse to help make the transition less antagonistic.
The necessity of deception for survival has a long history under capitalism. Scholar Joel Spring writes of the enslaved African as a trickster, since they often needed to find ways to fool their master, “Typical of the slave as a trickster was the story of Henry Johnson who lured a turkey into his cabin and killed it. He immediately ran crying to his mistress that one of her turkeys unexpectedly died.”
When we think about deception today, it’s clear that not much has changed. Even in academia, which should be a haven for truth, lying is rampant. The hyper-competitive nature of being the first person to publish on a topic has created a situation in which academics exaggerate their findings and lie to each other to send potential competitors down a rabbit hole.
In a capitalist society, everyone has an incentive to lie. Those at the top lie to maintain their competitive advantage and those at the bottom lie as a means for survival. Under this system, it would seem foolish to not use the “art of deception” to one’s advantage.
But if we are living in a world of lies, one has to wonder when this Ponzi scheme will finally crash. And in many ways, today’s intense fragmentation between groups of people who don’t trust each other and who can’t come to an agreement on anything, suggests that it already is.
What would a world look like in which both the Kim family and the Park family have no need for deception? At its core, it would be a society that provides for people’s basic needs and it would incentivize cooperation. If this is the world we want, we would need to transition away from a capitalist system. It’s not just that getting people to tell the truth is hard to do under capitalism, but it’s impossible since its core logics — deprivation and competition — are the very things that incentivize deceit.
No matter who becomes the next president, it won’t change the fact that we are living in a house of cards and there are only so many untruths that a world can be built upon before it comes crumbling down.
In 1950 the decolonial intellectual, poet, and politician Aimé Césaire observed that “A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.” Seventy years later and it’s clear that he was right. The question we are faced with now is how we come together to build something new.
