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?
Most people are going to miss that if you don’t offer multiple examples of it during your work. If you just have the one poor family try to become rich by betraying their fellow poors and tricking some rich family and failing, someone could argue that they should have just become rich in a more honest way.
But if you also have another set of working class characters that succeeded by cooperating then you reinforce the notion that working class people will succeed united and fail when against one another. Maybe even mention that point explicitly. That’s just my opinion, but subtext is just cowardice when it comes to a work’s main theme
I’d say inserting a success story doesn’t really mix with the doomer tone of the movie which is just trying to depict how hard the odds are stacked against them because social mobility does not exist in South Korea. In the real world, no matter how cunning and smart the Kim family are they will never become equals with the idiots that are the Park family because society is not meritocratic in the slightest. The only real solution is replacing that society entirely but that’s a little too revolutionary to get made.
Yeah you are right. Maybe even a small victory like a successful strike or sth is too taboo there. I am just bored of nihilistic doomer media which serve more to demoralize than to inspire, but it can’t be helped
I’d recommend stuff like The Platform or Andor, definitely has the more hopeful vibes you’re looking for.
Thanks, will check them out
Most people miss the point of many artwork. But that doesn’t mean I want or need an essay from the author explaining every reason for their decisions
Yes. That’s Snowpiercer, Bong Joon-ho’s previous movie. Characters can easily keep their heads down and slave away on the train and maybe one day become part of the upper train carts. But many choose to violently resist even when presented with the opportunity to drop everything and join the upper trains. One critique I’ve seen from the movie is that the workers needed somebody from the upper class to assist their revolution. This may have been true during Marx and Lenin’s time when you needed to be well off to read and analyze a lot, but now everybody has phones and computers and libraries.