Sixth International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

“What did those nice people ever do wrong?” one of the down-and-out characters of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite” (2019) asks. Well, plenty, actually, but the film takes pains to show how society tends to glorify the rich and vilify the poor. While the terrible consequences of such disparities of wealth are wholly apparent in the film, painful ironies emerge in the way that society and media worship wealth. This leads the economically subjugated to willfully perpetuate the rigid stratification of society and accept their quasi-subhuman position as second- or even third-class citizens. By interrogating the ironies of “Parasite,” we can come to a more nuanced understanding of how media and all of us as individuals are complicit in the perpetual reification of class differences. This paper also briefly examines “Parasite” vis-a-vis another “class warfare” film from 2019, Todd Phillip’s “Joker.”