As far as I could tell in the movie the rich people were depicted as decent parents if not a bit naive, while the poor family were backstabbing assholes who betrayed their fellow workers (the housekeeper and her husband) because of sheer malice. Not once does the film hint at the underlying economical system as the reason why the rich are rich and the poor are poor.
If you are a socialist, you will (correctly) identify capitalism as the reason for the misery of the poor people in the film, and the rich as part of the bourgeoisie who exploit them. But that isn’t any different than analysing an IRL crime through that lens, the film didn’t help you reach that conclusion, it just presented a scenario.
A chud could easily see the rich family as the honest entrepreneurs and the poor family as poor because of the negative behaviors they exhibited, and there is nothing in the film that would dispute that interpretation.
With the poor family getting punished for their deception, and the son resolving to make money to save his father at the end (presumably through more “honest” means), it even displays the “pull yourself by the bootstraps” belief.
The best case interpretation of the film I can make is that “the rich people should be more conscious of the poor’s struggles, and the poors should stay in their place or risk losing everything” which is pretty reactionary and not the class conscious film many people described it as. I guess you could see the ending as punishment for the class betrayal but I think that’s a stretch.
Am I overzealous in policing the politics of the media I consume to the point of misinterpreting things or finding an even vaguely leftist film that hard?
Just want to note that the director’s grandfather defected to the DPRK and worked there as a writer for decades heheh. My lib spouse is from South Korea and refers to Bong as a “red” and says that all the best Korean directors are communists. We actually just watched Parasite a few days ago and our kids were seriously disturbed by the depiction of poverty in the film. The working class dad in the film also physically resembles my FIL, except that he has had a withered leg his entire life due to getting polio as a child when his family was literally starving and way too poor to afford the vaccine (which had been developed several years earlier). He’s a petty lib landlord/business owner now though, always makes excuses for Park Chung-hee, hates the DPRK, abused the fuck out of his family. My spouse has so many fucked up stories about her childhood. At one point her dad actually dug a hole under their apartment (like in Parasite but much smaller) so they could rent out a room. At one point he also owned a bunch of slot machines and was apparently making $10,000/month before the government outlawed gambling everywhere in Korea except for like one casino an hour’s drive from Seoul.
I don’t think the film is lib. It’s mostly a movie about capitalist alienation and how everyone loses under capitalism no matter what we do. The moment of recognition and solidarity at the end between the working class dad and the underground dweller is pretty obvious to communists too. There’s an issue with left works of art not endorsing communism explicitly enough, but this is partly because corporate censors just won’t allow them to do this.
Another really great Korean movie about class is Attack The Gas Station, by the way. You can find the whole thing on YouTube.