Parasite · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the shot Bong shoots from above: the Kim family hurrying home through the storm, down and down a staircase that has become a spillway, the camera hung high enough that they read less like people than like water finding its level. Everything in Seoul that night is draining toward the place where they live. The frame tells you, before any line of dialogue does, that the house above and the basement below are not two settings but one slope, and that these bodies are on the wrong end of it.

Deleuze had a name for cinema that works this way, and he borrowed it from the novelists Zola and the naturalists: the impulse-image. It is the cinema of appetite and degradation, of drives that erupt under the social crust, of a world tilted so that everything in it slides downhill toward exhaustion or death. The impulse-image always lives in two milieus at once. There is the derived milieu — the real, furnished, social world, the place with addresses and manners. And underneath it Deleuze finds an originary world: a savage, formless stratum of pure hunger that the polite surface is built on top of and pretends not to know about. The naturalist drama is the story of the second world breaking through the first.

It is hard to imagine a film that literalizes this scheme more exactly than Parasite, and that is the first argument for reading it through Deleuze rather than through the more familiar language of class allegory. The Park house — Lee Ha-jun's bespoke construction, set back on elevated ground, organized around glass and negative space and a light that makes the sun itself seem cleaner — is the derived milieu in its purest form. It is all surface, all protocol, the place where wealth has been smoothed into architecture. And beneath the kitchen pantry, behind a door nobody is meant to open, is the originary world: the sub-basement shelter, the bunker beneath the bunker, where a man has been living in the dark on the household's leavings. Bong does not use the bunker as a metaphor we decode. He uses it as the lower geological layer the whole film has been standing on. When the previous housekeeper descends those hidden stairs and Jung Jae-il's strings slide from curiosity into dread without a visible seam, what opens is not a plot twist but a second world — the one the comedy of infiltration had been suppressing.

The Kims belong to neither layer cleanly, which is what makes them the engine of the naturalist drama. The first act plays as caper, each family member assuming a false identity to colonize the Park household, and the audience is handed a complicit delight in watching the scheme spread. But Deleuze would point out that infiltration is itself an appetite, a drive without a project — they are not trying to change the situation, only to feed inside it. That is why the film can pivot so violently. Once the bunker is open, every action becomes a symptom of the slope rather than a step along a plan. The flood that ruins the Kims and the catered garden party that ruins everyone are the same gradient, the line-of-slope, the irreversible downhill that the impulse-image always ends on. The killing in the garden resolves nothing. A classical action-image would have a hero perceive a situation and act to transform it; here the act is a discharge, a drive surfacing in daylight, and the world simply absorbs it and goes on being indifferent — the same indifference the high camera had over the drowning stairs.

This is also where Parasite earns its place in a long discourse rather than standing alone as a sensation. The vertical house as a machine for class was already an old cinematic idea: Losey and Pinter's The Servant turned the English townhouse staircase into a precision instrument for inverting who rules whom; Lang's Metropolis set the workers under the earth and the masters in the towers; Buñuel and later Altman in Gosford Park mapped rank onto which floor a body was allowed to stand on. Bong inherits all of it and adds the specific Korean fact of the banjiha, the half-sunk semi-basement with its window full of ankles and gutter — a vocabulary he had been building since Barking Dogs Never Bite. What he adds to the form is the bunker: a third tier below the below, which converts the static upstairs/downstairs diagram of his ancestors into Deleuze's two-world naturalism, a derived surface with an originary world breathing under it.

And he fuses it with a tonal control that is his own invention, the three-register architecture he first built with Song Kang-ho on Memories of Murder — comedy collapsing into thriller collapsing into something close to Greek tragedy, held together because the slope was always the real subject. The achievement is that the genre whiplash never feels like trickery. It feels like descent. Watch it again knowing the bunker is there from the first frame, and the comedy curdles in advance; you can feel the floor of the movie as a thing you are standing over. That is the gift the impulse-image hands back to you — not a lesson about inequality you already believed, but new eyes for the downhill grade under an apparently level house.