The Architecture of Above and Below

Inequality is abstract — a matter of capital, access, structure — and cinema is concrete, a medium of bodies in spaces. So when a film wants to show class, it tends to build it, to give the social hierarchy a literal floor plan. Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game divides its château into the aristocrats upstairs and the servants below, and lets the same farce of love and death play out on both floors to show they are one society pretending to be two. Fritz Lang's Metropolis is the diagram at its starkest — the elite in the gardens above, the workers in the machine-caverns below, the city as a vertical engine of exploitation. The spatial metaphor is so natural that it barely registers as a metaphor: of course the rich are up and the poor are down, of course power is a matter of over and under, and the camera, which must put bodies somewhere, keeps placing them on the staircase of class.

The contemporary masters of the form have made the architecture explicit and literal, turned the metaphor into the plot. Bong Joon-ho built two entire films out of it: Snowpiercer is a class system laid horizontally along a train, the poor fighting their way car by car toward the front; Parasite is a class system laid vertically through a house and a city, the poor family climbing up into the rich one's home and being driven back down, the film obsessed with stairs, levels, basements, the physical up and down of who lives above whom. The genius of Parasite is that the metaphor is not symbolic but structural — the architecture is the argument, the staircases doing the work of a thesis. Ruben Östlund's Triangle of Sadness and Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters and Lee Chang-dong's Burning extend the inquiry — the cruise ship, the makeshift family, the gap between the Gangnam apartment and the rural shack — each finding its own spatial figure for the same intractable fact.

What makes class such a durable and uncomfortable subject is that cinema is itself implicated in the architecture it diagrams. The movies are a luxury and a mass medium at once, made by enormous concentrations of capital and consumed by everyone, and they have always been ambivalent about the inequality they depict — able to make a tearful spectacle of poverty, to romanticize the poor, to let an audience feel for the downstairs while sitting comfortably in the dark. The honest class films know this and refuse the easy sympathy; Parasite implicates everyone, lets no one stand cleanly above the system, and ends not in solidarity but in violence and a son's impossible dream of buying the house someday — the architecture of above and below revealed as a trap from which the only escape is to become the thing above.

That is the genre's hard truth and the reason the vertical diagram keeps returning: inequality is not a problem the plot can solve, because it is the structure the plot is built inside. The class film can dramatize the architecture, expose it, make you feel the cruelty of the staircase — but it cannot dismantle it, and the most honest ones admit as much, ending with the poor back in the basement or the back of the train, the hierarchy intact, the diagram unbroken. Cinema keeps building the house of above and below because that house is the one we actually live in, and the camera, forced to place every body somewhere, cannot help but show us the floor we are standing on, and the floors above and below, and exactly how far it is between them.

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The line: Metropolis → The Rules of the Game → La Haine → Snowpiercer → Roma → Shoplifters → Burning → Parasite

This line crosses:

• The Beautiful Doom — Renoir's The Rules of the Game stages class as an upstairs/downstairs farce; French poetic realism's humanist eye on the divide feeds straight into this lineage.
• When Cinema Went Outside — neorealism's contract to film the unprivileged life without consolation is the moral root of the class film; Roma carries it directly forward.

Read through: writing on Bong Joon-ho and the spatial politics of Parasite · John Hill and others on class and British/world realist cinema.

A note on the argument: these films and their spatial figurations of class are documented record. The framing of the genre as a recurring architecture of above and below — the vertical diagram as the truest metaphor, cinema implicated in the inequality it films — is this essay's reading.