Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Parasite
2019 · Bong Joon Ho · Parasite on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch whether a character is walking up or down. (staging)
Bong puts stairs between everything. The Kim apartment sits at half-height to the street with a window full of ankles and gutter. The Park house waits at the top of a long climb.
Payoff: Height is this film's map of who has what, and every trip between the two families costs a climb.
Look at how the light changes between the two homes. (light)
Hong Kyung-pyo warms the Kim basement with tungsten and lets gray Seoul daylight in through the gutter window. The Park house is diffused and high-key, all glass, with sun that looks laundered.
Payoff: You can tell whose world you are in with the sound off, just from the color of the air.
Look at what the Park family's furniture is for. (setting)
Lee Ha-jun designed the house around glass, empty floor and expensive objects that exist to be seen rather than used. The manners inside it are as controlled as the rooms.
Payoff: Wealth here has been smoothed into architecture, so the house does much of the family's talking for them. In the reading: derived-milieu. The reading calls this the derived milieu: the furnished, mannered surface a society builds and keeps polished.
Notice how the Parks react to how people smell. (performance)
Nobody makes an accusation. Lee Sun-kyun's father shifts his nose, a child says something offhand, a car window goes down. It keeps happening and it is never said out loud.
Payoff: Rank registers as a sensory fact here, something the rich notice about the air instead of about a person.
Listen for the strings sliding from playful into dread. (sound)
Jung Jae-il writes with orchestral warmth and then bends it. Inside a single cue the music travels from curiosity to alarm with no seam you can point at. Later the rain is mixed as sheer mass.
Payoff: The score changes genre before the story does. Trust it the moment it starts to turn.
Once you have seen it
Watch the high shot of the family descending flooded stairs. (camera)
Bong hangs the camera above the Kims as they run downhill through the storm. From that height they read like water finding its level. Everything in Seoul that night drains toward where they live.
Payoff: The angle stands you with the indifferent world above, watching people slide to the bottom of a grade. In the reading: entropy / degradation. The reading calls this a line of slope: the irreversible downhill the film's world is tilted to produce.
Look at the door behind the kitchen pantry. (staging)
One hidden staircase drops below the basement of a house that already sits above the whole neighborhood. Bong keeps the geography exact, so the third level is measurable rather than figurative.
Payoff: The house has a floor beneath its floor, and the comedy of the first hour was standing on it. In the reading: originary-world. The reading calls the sub-basement an originary world: the raw hungry layer the polished house is built on top of.
Track the three lines of action at the garden party. (cutting)
Yang Jin-mo keeps Ki-taek, his son and the figure from below in separate lanes, cutting between them at a pace that tightens until the lanes have nowhere left to go but into each other.
Payoff: The cutting holds the collision off just long enough for you to see it coming and not stop it.
Watch Song Kang-ho's face when nobody is addressing him. (performance)
Song plays Ki-taek as neither angry nor resigned. Driving, waiting, standing at the edge of a room, he takes in each small humiliation and lets none of it reach his mouth.
Payoff: What finally comes out of him is a discharge, not a decision, and the film stored it in that face.
Carry this in: Watch the stairs. Bong built a house with a slope under it, and everyone in the film is standing on that grade.