Parasite
Han Jin Won and Bong Joon Ho, 2019
#2,
2019 Skandies; AMPAS Best Picture
This one is about a family (brother, sister, mom, dad) living in a grody basement apartment. Times are tough and the only way they can afford even this place is by taking a gig folding pizza boxes. One day a friend tips off the brother to an opportunity: the friend is moving overseas, and can put in a good word for the brother to take over his gig tutoring a rich teenage girl in English. Some forged university papers, a good performance in the interview, and he could be making a lot more than he would as a pizza box folder. He gets the job, and soon discovers that a second job opportunity could be engineered for his sister, as the rich girl’s rambunctious little brother could surely use an art tutor. Of course, it wouldn’t do for the rich mom to think she was hiring based on nepotism rather than résumé, so the fact that her two newly hired tutors are siblings will have to be a secret. And as for Mom and Dad back in the basement… the rich family does employ a chauffeur and a full-time housekeeper, so if those positions were to somehow become available…
This movie won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Best Picture at the Oscars and thus has been the object of no small amount of commentary: about how the looming conflict between the rich family and the poor family is derailed by a fiercer, dirtier conflict between two poor families fighting over the rich family’s scraps; about how the film presents a world in which job offers come exclusively through networking, never through merit in an open process; about how Parasite trades the x‑axis hierarchy of the director’s earlier Snowpiercer for a y‑axis hierarchy, with the poor literally beneath the rich (in the latter’s basements, or hiding under their beds, or at the bottoms of the hills on which their houses are perched). So what does that leave for me to write about? Well, there’s this:
In Parasite (2019), Ki-woo’s job as a home tutor was picked as director Bong Joon Ho thought that[,] unfortunately, it was the only way that families from two extreme ends of the class spectrum in modern-day South Korea could cross paths convincingly
I went looking for a direct quote from Bong on the matter, and found this:
When South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho was in his early 20s, he took a job as a tutor for the son of a wildly wealthy family in Seoul.
The family lived in a palatial home in one of the city’s most exclusive enclaves, and Bong, who grew up in considerably less lavish circumstances, was to be the boy’s math tutor. He’d been introduced to the family, somewhat incognito, by his girlfriend at the time—now his wife of more than 20 years—who was already tutoring the boy in English. “They wanted another tutor for math, so she put me forward as a trustworthy friend, even though I was actually really bad at math,” Bong explains. “That’s how it works with those jobs. It’s not as if they put out lots of ads looking for domestic help—you’re introduced.”
[…]
“I thought a lot of fascinating cinematic elements could come out of it because in reality the rich and poor so rarely really mix together. They’re always separated. But when you’re working as a tutor or a housekeeper, you’re in the most private spaces, and both sides are brought together in such intimacy.”
This is something I can speak to, because I have worked as a tutor, off and on—mostly (and currently) on—for thirty years. And much of that tutoring had me driving to homes that, like the one mentioned above, could fairly be described as palatial. How palatial? Let me put it this way. When I was in college, an occasional topic of conversation was the ludicrous mansion that then-superstar M. C. Hammer was having built for him. The land alone cost him $12 million (in 1990s dollars); the construction of the building cost an additional $30 million, due to such amenities as a seventeen-car garage, three waterfalls, and—well, I’ll let the Chicago Tribune take it from here:
the acres of black marble, the mirrored bathrooms, the massive gold and black marble Jacuzzi in the bedroom, the black wall-to-wall carpeting and the marble dining room table made from the same striated marble as the floor
Anyway, cut to twenty-five years later… and I tutored at that house. I don’t mean “that’s the sort of house I tended to tutor at”. I mean that I tutored at that house. M. C. Hammer didn’t live there anymore. (The family of the CEO of the electronics division of India’s largest conglomerate did, and does.) And this was more the rule than the exception. Sprawling country estates at the end of miles of winding private road, slender four-story townhouses in the heart of one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets… I’ve spent many, many hours in houses where the mortgage was fifty times my rent. Parasite makes a big deal of the fact that the rich family has a gigantic picture window looking out onto a spacious yard; I tutored at houses where the gigantic picture windows looked out at the Golden Gate Bridge. And, yeah, I don’t know how many other jobs would have given someone in my economic quintile such an extended, close-up look at home life in the world of wealth.
But I’ve been using the past tense because things are different now. One reason I tried my hand at teaching high school is that test prep tutoring seemed to be drying up. It was around this time in 2017 that I decided to take the leap, and here is what my first week of April looked like that year:
SAT APR 1
• SAT class in Richmond (3h)
• 1h driving
SUN APR 2
• ACT tutoring in Pleasanton (3h)
• AP tutoring in Milpitas (2h)
• SAT tutoring in San Francisco (2h)
• 6h driving
MON APR 3
• GRE class in Berkeley (3h)
• GRE tutoring in Berkeley (2h)
• 1h driving
TUE APR 4
• ACT class in San Francisco (2h)
• 2h on transit
WED APR 5
• GRE tutoring in Menlo Park (1½h)
• 2h driving
THU APR 6
• ACT class in San Francisco (2h)
• 2h on transit
FRI APR 7
• day off
That was nearly forty hours out of my life, but only ten and a half tutoring hours, plus ten classroom hours (compensated at a significantly lower rate). But today that schedule looks to me like it was beamed in from a different universe. Because when 2020 rolled around and a pestilence descended upon the land, both high school classes and test prep tutoring sessions moved online, and while the high school classes eventually returned to meeting in person, the tutoring sessions didn’t. My hours on the road are a thing of the past, as my commute now consists of the trip from my bed to my desk. Without needing to account for drive time, I can stack appointments back to back to back to back, and I have the appointments to stack, because my pool of potential students is no longer restricted to Northern California; I have students in seven time zones. I could go on and on about the ways this job is better than it was just five years ago: the subjects I get to teach (mostly AP now), the bidding process for tutorials, the way that all our materials are at my fingertips (no more lugging twenty books around in the car and then discovering that the one I want is still at the house)… but Bong’s musings on his own tutoring days, and the film he made drawing upon them, did make me pause to reflect that, yeah, that’s one more ingress from the world of the 99% into the world of the 1% that’s been walled off. I’m no longer visiting students’ homes and getting a sense of life in their households.
I am probably in the lower percentiles when it comes to “reading people”, picking up on their body language and microexpressions and whatnot, but even for me, something is lost when my students are reduced to a few pixels in little rectangles on my computer screen. In my last few weeks at the high school, the administration desperately tried to placate angry parents with a very limited reopening, allowing weekly, brief in-person sessions that mixed and matched students from different classes. This idea was a flop. I’d go in for an hour on Monday afternoons, and maybe two or three students would show up. That was not enough of a quorum for them to do much of anything besides chat with each other. Yet, I gotta say, even though we were all wearing masks and sitting six feet apart from each other, those students who did show up instantly felt infinitely more real and knowable than those who did not. No matter how clear their cameras and microphones were, no matter how much they participated in class discussions or asked questions during the one-on-one Zoom and Google Meet sessions the school arranged, those students who were just little faces inside a rectangle always felt on a certain level like abstractions. And I think that exacerbates many of the problems Bong is addressing in this movie, because a lot of the ills that face the world stem in part from the feeling that other people, especially people from outside one’s own group (socioeconomic class here, but substitute any axis that seems relevant to any given issue), are in some sense not truly real.
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