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?
I think you might be dumb
That’s literally the punchline. There’s a man stuck underneath a mansion alongside a dead couple that was also poor, and one of them was trying to “do it right” by getting a job to take care of her husband. Do you not see the cycle here? Do you expect the kid to actually pull his bootstraps and free his dad given that the last person who tried this ended up as a rotting corpse?
And what’s the problem here? Being “honest entrepreneurs” doesn’t exempt you from contributing to the world’s misery and being poor will often make you desperate to do anything to survive, and not all of it is intelligent (e.g. spending your mortgage on crypto or trying to break a pizza box folding record). Being poor doesn’t make you a saint. People scam and kill and do all sorts of shit because the alternative is dying.
But not everyone is mistreated 24/7. How many people here have amazing managers? And how many of those people with great managers still find ways to “steal company time” or shoplift/steal during work? Having a good boss doesn’t mean anything. You can be the most amazing and caring CEO to me, and I will still find a way to make sure I extract money from you. These people lived inside a bungalow with an apocalyptic toilet. A nice boss means Jack shit. But if you can make your life a little better by taking advantage of the nice boss, then why not? Especially if he’s not going to materially be affected.
What you’re looking for is a liberal portrayal of class warfare where the big ceo man is a dapper fella with a twirly mustache and a British accent who tells an orphan child to get back to the mines. It’s easy to understand and easy to oppose. This reality exists in many places. But so does the reality portrayed in Parasite, but this one makes liberals uncomfortable because many of them fit the same bill as the wealthy family and consider it offensive that anyone would try to take advantage of them despite the surface level kindness.