Irony and a keen sense of the absurdity of contemporary consumer society allow Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, director of the global hit film Parasite, to deal with surreal plot lines while emphasizing the tangible elements of everyday life – including food – as arenas where battles for the control of the bodies and minds of citizens are waged.

Much has been written about Parasite, Bong Joon-ho’s last black comedy with a hint of horror, which has made him the first Korean director to win the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Parasite has also been selected as the South Korean entry for Best International Film at the 92^nd Academy Awards, banking on its appeal as a biting critique of the growing social and economic inequalities that have come to the forefront as an urgent political issue in many countries around the world.

Without providing any spoilers, Parasite is the story of a downtrodden family, the Kims, that manages to insinuate itself in the life of an upper class family, the Parks, by leveraging their need for all kinds of services, from private lessons for their kids to driving around town and taking care of food and housekeeping. Except that they are not the only ones trying to take advantage of the rich Parks blissful obliviousness…

The rich and the poor appear to live in parallel worlds, both spatially and culturally, that only collide when the Kims try to get their slice of the pie by conning the well-off Parks. Social status seem to be reflected on the altitude of their homes. The Kims live in a crowded semi-basement full of things at the bottom of a hill, a place where drunk people go to urinate and sewers explode when it rains too much. The Parks enjoy instead  a beautifully decorated, minimalistic mansion designed by a famous architect. Luxury is access to private green spaces, light, and air. It is a home whose privacy is protected by thick trees. Poverty is lack of exposure to sun, having one’s windows open to any passersby’s curiosity.

However, food becomes the tool the filmmaker uses to make the inequalities more visible and immediately understandable for the viewers. In their semi-basement, the Kims can only afford the cheapest mass-produced, packaged goods. When their son’s friend come to visit, they cannot offer him much, so that the two young men have to go out and share a cheap bottle of liquor on a wobbly little table near a corner store. To make some extra money, the Kims fold pizza boxes for a store which does not even want to pay them in full because of their shoddy job preparing the boxes. They are not only consumers of junk food, but they are also forced to participate in its production to survive. As they start to make money providing services to the Parks, the Kim’s eating habits change: they can finally order pizza, and later they chat while cooking meat on a table-top grill, using scissors to cut thin, sizzling slices as you would see at the restaurant.

The Kims grilling meat

When they manage to spend a night at the Parks, taking advantage of their employers’ camping trip, they eat – and above all drink – all they can find and are usually not allowed to have access to. They do it with greed and abandon, covering the otherwise immaculate space with food debris and leftovers, almost as a deliberate offense to cleanliness of the environment that they are tasked to keep tidy as part of their duties as employees. The other poor family that appears in the film, which happens to live even deeper in the urban landscape, with almost no access to sun and open spaces, is even worse off. They can access food only sparingly, stealing it from the rich. In one of the most intense food-related scenes of the film, a hungry man eats a banana, slowly and systematically, with an intense focus, almost swallowing it whole, as if in fear it could disappear.

The Kims partying in their employers’ home

The Parks, instead, enjoy the best food, apparently without limit, and for that they take it for granted. They have a housekeeper that takes care of keeping the fridge and the pantry well stocked and cooks most of the meals, as the Park house lady cannot really cook but, instead, enjoy going on grocery shopping sprees and have parties catered. When they come back from their camping trip, all the Parks have to do is call in advance to ask their housekeeper to prepare their child’s favorite food, a recipe she does not know and makes up, partly using the mass-produced products she is familiar with. The Parks have an extensive collection of fermented fruit juices in their basement, all neatly organized and aesthetically pleasant. A whole wall in their gorgeous kitchen is taken by a well-lit collection of dishes, plates, and other table serving accoutrements that are clearly never used but meant to display the family refinement and good taste.

Because they live in an extreme clean environment (as somebody else takes care of it) they are very sensitive to smells. In fact, human odors constitutes one of the social differentiating traits in the film, separating the have from the have-nots, and eventually brings about the demise of the Parks. Poverty smells, but the poor are not ready to be reminded that. Precisely because food, together with smell, is a visible manifestation of social inequality, it also becomes a tool through which those tensions and anxieties come to full fruition. A birthday cake originates all sorts of nightmares for a small child, peach fuzz is able to cause devastating asthma attacks. But above all, the knives and skewers that are meant to prepare and cook food are turned into murderous weapons. I won’t say more as the film is still in theaters…

Bong Joon-ho’s The Host

Few filmmakers have used food so consistently as Bong Joon-ho to address class inequalities, often in an sarcastic and oblique way. In his 2006 The Host, the movie that put him on the map, a humble family makes money by selling snacks and packaged foods to the crowds enjoying the Han river in Seoul. When hiding from the police, they steal and consume instant noodles and other items straight out of wrappings, while dreaming to feed their absent child good, homemade food like pickles and dumplings. In the 2013 Snowpiercer, which takes place on a train where the last human survivors of the consequences of climate change travel around the globe, the rich are shown consuming sushi and other delicious foods in their gorgeous front cars while the poor in the back cars have to get by with much humbler fare. The gelatinous and mysterious protein blocks they are forced to eat are nothing else but ground cockroaches. In the 2017 Okja, Bong directed his critique to the meat industry, especially in terms of their treatment of animals. Irony and a keen sense of the absurdity of contemporary consumer society allow Bong Joon-ho to deal with fantastic or surreal plot lines while emphasizing the tangible elements of everyday life -including food – as arenas where biopolitical battles are waged.

I may have to teach a film class about these movies, who knows…