Parasite Best Picture Victory: A Fitting Crescendo to a Decade-Long Trend

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When Jane Fonda’s perfectly executed pregnant pause concluded with an announcement of Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite as the Best Picture winner at the 92nd Academy Awards, it cemented new ground that had been broken. Becoming the first-ever foreign-language feature to take home this highest industry honour and the first Palme d’Or winner since Marty, Bong Joon-Ho went down in history as the first filmmaker to win four Oscars for the same film — overtaking Walt Disney’s 1954 record, but in Disney’s case it was four different movies. It was an odds-defying feat that surprised the world, delighted the online community of film aficionados and has hopefully opened mainstream anglophone audiences to the exotic wonders of world cinema.

However, in the midst of the hubbub surrounding this unprecedented occurrence, little has been said about the fact that Parasite sweeping the Oscars can also be interpreted as a culmination to a trend in cinema that has been slowly percolating to the surface of the discourse in the medium over the course of the last decade or so. It has validated a class struggle dystopia as one of the most impactful and currently relevant subsets of themes explored in film.

The idea of commenting on the frictions between haves and have-nots is not exactly novel; in fact, it is older than cinema itself, easily traced back to its early codification in philosophy as one of the principal tenets of communism delineated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These simple ideas of depicting the world as a zero-sum game between the oppressors and the oppressed where the notion of someone becoming richer is always accompanied by someone getting poorer have reverberated profoundly with peoples around the world. 

These concepts have naturally permeated into the budding medium of cinema — in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Through the years, the themes of oppression, the destitution of the working classes and/or their usually futile attempts at revolting against their overlords have taken different guises, found in Italian neorealism (e.g. Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and Umberto D.), the British kitchen-sink cinema, or Jean-Luc Godard’s rampant descent into Maoist propaganda in the late 1960s. 

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However, all those ideas have always been most successfully packaged into a satirical format or disguised as seemingly escapist genre entertainment. The last century of cinema history is evenly peppered with such examples: Modern Times, 1984, Soylent Green, A Clockwork Orange, Dawn Of The Dead, They Live, Fight Club, The Matrix and many others. Interestingly, though, the onset of the twenty-first century has precipitated some changes and, in recent years, movies handling these themes have been released more frequently and grown in prominence. 

Presumably, this trend can be rationalized as an incarnation of art imitating life principle, according to which cinema is predominantly a reflection of the world’s emotional state at any given time. Consequently, in the age of political division, militant tribalism and terrifyingly bellicose language having been normalized in politics and press it is only natural to expect filmmakers — consciously or not — to comment on these matters through their artistic output. 

From the vantage point of the early months of 2020, one could even identify such genre films as District 9 and Never Let Me Go as something more than an allegorical commentary on South Africa’s apartheid past and the societal implications of cloning, but as early heralds of an impending shift within western societies that would see the gap between the privileged and the oppressed widen and deepen simultaneously. One swallow does not a summer make but using the benefits of hindsight, one could easily see those movies — especially with Neill Blomkamp’s sophomore effort Elysium — as more than just harmless escapism or quasi-cerebral musings but as mild foreshocks preceding a violent earthquake. 

Soon thereafter, many more films dabbling with those concepts would enter the picture, some of which would make their way into the mainstream of popular culture and conceive successful franchises, like The Hunger Games and The Purge series that took the notions of class warfare and popular revolt to their literal extremes. This is also when Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer offered its two cents as a highly allegorical and heavily stylized treaty that handled the idea of class segregation and an underlying environmentalist agenda with a visually-distinctive metaphorical language; though, now it is more likely to be seen as a training ground for his Oscar-winning satirical opus. 

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Nevertheless, the trend was gathering momentum like a snowball slowly turning into an unstoppable avalanche or a violent tectonic shift that generated a deadly tsunami slowly making its way through the ocean aiming for the human-inhabited coastlines. Moreover, in the latter years of this past decade, it has entered its grand finale, which was likely aided by the tumultuous developments in world politics that saw Donald Trump elected president, United Kingdom leaving the E.U., Jair Bolsonaro taking over in Brazil and various populist movements making significant gains in mature democracies.

Along these lines, between 2018 and 2019 films such as Sorry To Bother You, Us, Hustlers, Burning, Knives Out, Ready Or Not, Joker and of course Parasite have seen the light of day and all of them happen to attempt to accomplish the same thing — they are all fundamentally rooted in dystopian fantasy (even though Hustlers is based on a true story) and romanticise the idea of the have-nots rising violently and vengefully against the haves in a bout of righteous fury, all disguised to varying levels as straight-up genre movies, elevated satire or even comic book movies. Together, they form a sequence of tidal waves of class warfare and Parasite is its very culmination that has punched through the societal fortifications with its brilliant combination of accessibility and thematic poignancy. 

Bong’s movie and its historic sweep at the Oscars is therefore much more than just a data point on a graph contributing to a mathematically-definable trend. It is a distillate of everything movies about class inequality could and should be, delivered with panache and visual acumen that was bound to enamour audiences the world over. This universal appeal is also highly unusual given the fact Parasite does not offer a traditional life-affirming take-home message but a complex set of observations meant to get the viewers to think about the world they live in and perhaps indirectly incite change. 

A tsunami of awareness has washed over the collective consciousness of the interconnected world. Perhaps it may precipitate a thematic reversal where life will imitate art for once and the societal divisions will be addressed, as though in response to the deafening roar generated by concerned filmmakers who have become vessels for those anxieties. The unfortunate alternative is that the tsunami will pass without leaving much of a mark and all those great movies with their elaborate guises including human-horse hybrids, whodunnit templates, slashers, unstoppable trains and mansions sequestered from the outside world will all be seen by future film historians as genre curiosities instead.