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There’s this section in Parasite where the Kim family is sitting around having a feast in the Park family’s home. It’s a quaint scene- this family we’ve seen struggling in destitute poverty, living in a semi-basement folding pizza boxes for scraps is able to have a big dinner for once. Not in a room filled with exterminator smoke, but in a real living room, with a view of a lawn instead of a back-alley and its assorted drunks.

The family’s discussion ranges in topics from the son’s relationship to the Park family daughter to Kim Ki-jung’s apparent instinctual comfort in the family tub. Then the discussion veers towards the Park family matriarch, Yeon-kyo. “She’s so naive, and nice. She’s rich, but still nice” Kim Ki-taek says. “Not ‘rich, but still nice,’” his wife Choong-sook responds, “nice because she’s rich.”

Parasite is, at its heart, a movie about the class antagonisms, big and small, that tear apart the lower class. Director Bong Joon-ho is not new to making movies with class conflict as the centerpiece- Snowpiercer (2013) plays with the most grandiose Marxist idea- that of revolution against the ruling class. Yet despite young Marxists and other revolutionary’s love of The Communist Manifesto for its hellfire reaped by unjust rulers, Marx only thought that would come about because of working class resentment. This resentment, an unsexy aspect of global capitalism to the bourgeois pencil-pushers moonlighting as revolutionaries, is the heart of Parasite, and to those of us who grew up poor, it is at times painfully accurate.

The scene I described above vividly reminds me of this spectre of resentment. It haunts many of us, and the idea that we’d be different with money is a convenient comfort, but the truth for many is this resentment is lifelong. Even as the Kim family get nice jobs and the bonus income, their upbringings have scarred them. That seed of resentment only grows. The Park family can do nothing but remind them of it, constantly- they weren’t born there, they don’t belong. Even as Kim drives for this wealthy family, in a painful scene, he’s forced to listen to the heads of the family discuss his subway-stained stench, that of raddishes, or boiling a dirty rag.

Still, the conflict between the Park and Kim clans isn’t the only class conflict explored. There is also the matter of Moon-kwang, the former housekeeper who, it’s revealed, had been hiding her husband (Geum-saw) in a secret bunker built underneath the home. The husband was in deep debt, and at risk of being murdered by the debt collectors he borrowed from for his doomed restaurant, he hid in the basement-bunker where Moon-kwang could bring him food. Down in the basement, her husband Geum-saw developed a deep admiration for Mr. Park, the man he sees as keeping him alive, and has developed several rituals in accordance with this admiration.

This discovery kicks off the movie’s most tense scenes in which the Kim family and Moon-kwang’s family are fighting over whether to have the Kim family expelled from the home for their treachery of getting Moon-kwang fired. This is, at its heart, the crabs-in-the-bucket problem. Both family’s believe their success is rooted in the other’s destruction, both family’s in this high-emotion time recognize one-another as the enemy. This is anti-thetical to building a class movement, but it’s the reflexive response. Once the Kim family has something, the potential of losing that becomes the most important thing in their lives.

The situation resolves itself in the movie with Moon-kwang being essentially murdered by Choong-sook who kicks her down the stairs and concusses her. Without medical attention, she slowly dies in the basement before the families can reconcile. Once the Kim family is able to escape the home after the Parks untimely return, they find their actual home completely flooded. Nearly everything they have is gone- their home destroyed, they’re forced into a gymnasium for the night. The next morning, the Park family calls them up, none-the-wiser to the going-ons of the previous night nor the complete destruction of the Kim family’s home, and ‘requests’ that they come in for work as soon as possible. “I’ve already told Kim to hurry over,” Yeon-kyo tells her husband, “I’ll pay him overtime.”

We live in a world where your time can be bought, regardless of your personal circumstances, and you’ll have to accept should you want a paycheck or stay employed. Christmas? Get to work! Daughter sick? Get to work! Entire home destroyed? Get to work! In no universe is servitude to a check any kind of freedom- and agency an illusion when up against effective debt peonage to credit companies. This is another antagonism- they’re all forced to work the morning after the complete destruction of their home. Kim Ki-taek visibly shows his resentment as Yeon-kyo recoils from the smell of him, his son Kim Ki-woo is in a haze with Park’s daughter, unsure of himself and his place at the home.

For Kim Ki-taek, these small antagonisms boil over in the movie’s tragic conclusion. After Geum-saw escapes, he immediately stabs Kim’s daughter Ki-jung and attacks Choong-sook. Ki-taek rushes to his daughter’s side as she bleeds out, while his wife battles with Geum-saw for her life. The Park’s son has fainted, and the Park patriarch demands Kim Ki-taek either drive his family to the hospital or throw him the keys. In a state of shock, he attempts to throw the keys but they land next to Geum-saw. Watching his wife fight for her life and holding his dying daughter while the party-goers all flee, leaving them to fight the invader on their own, fills him with a mixture of horror, sadness, and hate. The final straw though is seeing Park bend down to grab the key, holding his nose to mask the poor-person scent in exactly the same way Yeon-kyo did in the car earlier. A final antagonism.

Parasite hit me with a particular kind of feeling. Rarely does a movie depict, effectively, the exact feeling I have as an audience member, reflected in the characters. Watching Kim Ki-taek hiding under that table, listening to the Park family demean his scent, I felt that resentment deep within. It’s demeaning, it’s painful to feel like the people around you don’t respect you because of where you come from. It’s painful to look at a room full of people and not see even a hint of yourself. This experience was completely foreign to me before I entered middle-class settings- before I was the first in my family to get a college education. Resentment was born in my heart the day I looked at a bunch of faces and none of them had any of the warmth of home. We might know cognitively that the people around us don’t notice our city-bus smell, but that’s no certainty in that. This movie depicts a deep pain within many class conscious individuals, and for that, it has quickly become one of my all-time favorite films.

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