Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant Review
In i of the final scenes of the film that won last year's Oscar for Best Picture, a mother risks her life to protect her family unit from an unhinged killer while her husband leaves their dying daughter'due south side to attack a bystander because they…insulted that killer?
This dark, confusing and astonishingly gory catastrophe to an otherwise funny, calorie-free-hearted and adequately straightforward story is, as many critics have noted already, less of an unintellectual, Tarantino-esque overindulgence in violence for violence'south sake, and more of a circuitous nonetheless convincing representation of the psychological complications that tend to accompany revolutionary strive.
Since its release, Bong Joon-ho's Parasite has received universal acclamation for its painstakingly detailed craft, monumental role in the history of international cinema, and profound message at a time when amusement culture is more than progressive than it e'er was before. Merely while much of this praise has been well-deserved, it has also discouraged viewers from studying the film's more questionable aspects, similar how—from a feminist standpoint—it might actually be kind of archaic in its understanding of gender.
Feminist critics have argued that, for most of history, women were regarded every bit subjective creatures whose quote-on-quote weak mental faculties, combined with stiff biological instincts, prevented them from looking at reality in an objective fashion. "Women," writes Lorraine Code in her study, The Sex of the Knower, "have been judged incapable, for many reasons, of achieving cognition worthy of the proper name" (185). A quick survey of European idea confirms her suspicions.
Aristotle, for starters, compared women to slaves, and from that premise argued that only a costless subject could possess 18-carat intellect. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, separated from the Greek philosopher by over twenty centuries, deemed the 'fair sexual practice' subservient to their own sensuality, while Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche each excluded them from 'higher' modes of beingness birthday. The Prussian polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt possibly put it crudest of all when he characterized the underlying nature of women past "a lack or a failing of analytic capacity which draws a strict line of demarcation between ego and the world" (349).
The ideas of these male thinkers, one time commonplace but now considered controversial and problematic, are remarkably prevalent in Parasite, whose screenplay consistently associates women with the material or concrete, and men with the abstract or ideal.
The motion picture'southward opening scene conspicuously sets up this dichotomy with Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik), the oldest son of the Kim residence, pointing his phone up at the ceiling in search of an invisible Wi-Fi bespeak while his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) loafs about. Elsewhere in the semi-basement, their mother, Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin), e'er lamenting the family'southward state of apple-polishing poverty, kicks her sleeping husband—Ki-tek (Kang-ho Song)—who wakes from his dreams with an "aware smiling" (Bell 2).
The males and females are placed in opposition to one some other even so once again when Ki-woo receives a viewing stone—an East Asian collector'due south item whose monetary value decreases the more its natural shape is contradistinct—from his friend Min-hyuk (Park Seo-joon). Where male parent and son admire the object for its 'symbolic' quality, Ki-jung does not care much for it. Chung-sook does, but only insofar equally she complains about the fact that their gift isn't edible.
Although these little differences may seem trivial at this bespeak, they acquire tremendous significance when Parasite starts to get political. Looking at the film through a Marxist lens, it is plain to see that, as the story progresses, Ki-tek becomes increasingly socialistic while his married woman and daughter remain strictly preoccupied with the wellbeing of themselves and their family.
This development does not enter the foreground until the end of the commencement act, when the Kims, jubilant their successful infiltration of the Park household, are interrupted past a random drunkard that is nearly to piss on their porch. These sorts of disturbances are the guild of the solar day, and in the past they've usually allow them slide, only not this fourth dimension; Ki-woo, eager to defend his new-institute honor as the tutor of an upper-class pupil, grabs the viewing stone and heads out into the street.
Whereas Ki-jung, giggling with excitement, takes out her telephone to movie the ensuing fight, an alarmed Ki-tek stops his son to commutation the rock for an umbrella. Although played generally for comic relief, this plot point is rather serious in nature. Given that Chung-sook says her son looks as though "he is trying to impale someone" (Bell sixty), information technology's reasonable to assume that Ki-tek has managed to forestall fate itself while the women in his life were perfectly ready to but let it happen.
The ideological friction betwixt the male and female person members of the Kim clan further intensifies during the second human activity, in which they kickoff to turn on each other. Enjoying the luxuries of the Namgoong mansion while its real inhabitants are out on a camping trip, Ki-tek initiates a word on why the Parks are the mode they are. Ki-jung, bellyaching by her begetter's increasing obsession with their employers, urges him to reassess his values: "Just worry about your own goddamn family!" she yells (Bell 68).
Her words quickly learn new meaning when Mun-kwang (Lee Jeong-un), the Parks' onetime housekeeper, arrives at the scene. Upon revealing the existence of an underground bunker, as well as her indebted married man—Kun-sae (Park Myung-hoon)—who has been hiding there, she begs Chung-sook to continue her secrets safe, but the latter refuses to cooperate in spite (or peradventure because) of their mutual, fraternizing poverty. "I'm non your fucking sister, bitch," (Bong 78) the Kim matriarch angrily retorts, pledging loyalty non to their economic class, but her own mankind and blood—a pledge she will honor before the credits roll.
Up until recently, the inner motivations of revolutionaries were unremarkably studied with methodologies borrowed from Freudian psychoanalysis, a discipline which treats the disproportionally minor number of female person revolutionaries that mod history has produced pretty much similar it does most other phenomena: as an outgrowth of the Oedipus complex. "Deprived of a penis," Marie Mullaney says in her aggressive critique on the subject, Gender and the Socialist Revolutionary Role,
.…the female has no incentive to abandon the oedipal position. Passive and submissive, the 'normal' adult female is said to have less of a superego than a normal human, to be less capable of sublimation, and to be less concerned nigh social issues and problems. Her overriding concerns remain on an melancholia level; that is, her dominant preoccupations remain the wish to be loved and the fear of loss of dear (108).
The longing for a satisfying personal life was thought to preclude revolutionaries from creating a meaningful public ane, not only considering raising a family required tremendous time and effort, merely as well considering they distracted people from life's 'true' purpose: the implementation of socialism. Information technology was for these reasons that Vladimir Lenin, in an essay not unrelated to this discussion, reserved his trust for those who were able to "devote the whole of their lives" to the revolution, "not only their spare evenings."
And yet, while traditional understandings of revolutionary personality paint women in a negative light, they don't necessarily put men in a positive one, either. Then far, this essay has taken Ki-tek for a rebel on the rise, someone who learns to 'readapt' his dearest for his family unit onto humanity equally a whole. Such a conclusion is evidently supported past the film's gruesome ending, which sees Ki-tek stand up down while his married woman wrestles with Kun-sae—and even wince when the latter gets impaled with a skewer—but it'due south not the only one which may be drawn from it.
On the contrary, an equally viable interpretation of the themes of Parasite would hold that Ki-tek murders his employer not in an donating try to avenge the suffering of the working form, but because of his selfish desire to escape the humiliation that comes from having to live at the bottom of a social hierarchy.
Shame plays equally of import a role in Parasite as does form-consciousness and, interestingly, it as well appears to exist sensed only past men. In a previously mentioned scene, Ki-woo turns vehement because he is embarrassed, while his female parent and sis—though young man victims of the boozer's public urination—do not feel offended in the slightest. Of course, this situation could have been avoided completely had Ki-tek non felt the need to requite speech glorifying the family'south accomplishments. He had, in fact, tried to give a similar pep rally before, when his son applied for his tutoring job with the Parks, but failed because, every bit the script put it, he tried to audio "like a Tv patriarch," but lacked "gravitas" (Bong 6).
The description above gives the impression of Ki-tek existence on a quest to chief the role of paterfamilias, and in a way he is. When we first encounter him, he is a target of constant abuse, especially at the hands of his wife. Initially, the bullying doesn't seem to face up him. Withal, as soon as he meets the confident and controlling Park patriarch Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyung), that changes. Drinking through his boss' individual liquor collection, Ki-tek imagines himself the possessor of the place. When Chung-sook reminds him he is non, joking that Nathan would chase him abroad like a "cockroach" (Bong seventy), he slams his fist on the table and grabs her past the collar while the kids look on in disbelief. Although Ki-tek after swears he was just acting, his alibi seems disingenuous.
Embarrassment regularly takes the form of emasculation, an association which, while nowadays throughout the movie, is not made explicit until the introduction of Kun-sae. This character is by far the nigh disturbing of the entire cast, and non just considering he lives underground and kills people. Hiding inside the mansion's basement to escape from loan sharks, he is completely dependent on his wife for food and intendance, and has developed an imaginary chief-slave human relationship with Dong-ik. Virtually telling (and nonsensical) of all, Mun-kwang feeds her twoscore-v-year-old lover with a "baby bottle" (Bong 75).
As if the notion that a malnourished adult man has to be hand-fed by his wife isn't enfeebling as is, the discomforting phallic imagery indicates that his 'manliness' is consciously chosen into question by the filmmaker. In a way, seeing role of himself reflected in this helpless parasite may well take driven Ki-tek to take up the axe. Since the picture never comments on his motives direct, that's pure speculation; however, because Ki-tek ends upward assuming Kun-sae's place in the basement, a symbolic connection between the characters does appear to be within the script.
According to psychoanalysts, the typical revolutionary was driven as much by his attraction toward a item ideal as he was by his distaste for specific figures of say-so. Picking up where Freud left off, their studies suppose that many an influential historical personage transposed the hatred they harbored against their own 'private' parents, and transfixed such sentiments onto a 'public' or universal parent: the state.
While government organizations play only a small-scale part in Parasite, the film goes to considerable lengths to compare Ki-tek's familial frustrations to the disagreements he has with his employer. Every bit a result, their relationship gradually morphs into the socioeconomic equivalent of father and child, with ane performance equally both a financier and a teacher of the other. In his efforts to escape that relationship, notwithstanding, Ki-tek—if simply past accident—irreversibly robs himself of what trivial liberty he had to begin with.
This stroke of poetic justice (or injustice) not merely sheds light on the fate of the revolutionaries themselves, but of revolutionary enterprise in general. Some filmgoers have interpreted the bunker beneath the Park house as a metaphor for Democratic people's republic of korea which, seeing how Mun-kwang impersonates Kim Jong-un for the amusement of her footing-dwelling lover, is no unsubstantiated reading. Far from it: just every bit Ki-tek's rebellion got him locked inside the Park's basement, so too did North Korea'south socialist revolution isolate them from the rest of the world.
In 2007, Aspasia—otherwise known as The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Women'due south and Gender History—hosted an all-female person forum on the topic of whether in that location was a contradiction between communism and feminism. As these two mass movements, both of which matured during the twentieth century, sought freedom from an oppression that they associated with capitalism, 1 would wait the consensus to accept been a resounding "No." Yet that was not the example.
Kicking off the forum was an essay tellingly titled "Communism was a State Patriarchy, not State Feminism". Its author, Romanaian political theorist Mihaela Miroiu, proposes that feminism and communism were not only incompatible in practice, merely in theory. Defining the former as a crusade for autonomy, she argues that emancipation in a social club in which citizens are forced to organize their lives along socialist lines—and where other 'isms,' especially those which champion the freedom of the private over that of the group, were regarded equally tangential at all-time, conservative at worst—was categorically incommunicable.
Rather than liberating the proletariat like it promised, the Soviet Union, at to the lowest degree in Miroiu's words, "negatively 'feminised' both women and men. The purpose for their life became the self-cede for the communist goal, better expressed in the obedience towards the 'Head of the Social club,' the Communist Party" (199).
With a few minor alterations, this paragraph could easily double every bit a synopsis for Bong'south story, which posits emasculation as the sole outcome of revolutionary struggle: following the carnage of the climax, Ki-tek is relegated to the basement like a rebellious teenager grounded by his parents, while his son—after being carried to safety on the dorsum of his underage girlfriend—suffers a brain injury that not but robs him of his independence, but coincidentally causes him to burst out in random fits of laughter, not unlike the previously imprisoned Kun-sae.
Although the gender politics of Parasite turn out to be somewhat conventional, they remain highly complex. The women of the motion-picture show, one on hand, are selfish in the sense that they intendance simply nearly themselves and their loved ones, but selfless to the extent that they are ready to lay down their lives for the sake of their family. The men, on the other, may be shallow due to the fact that they human action—first and foremost—in defence of their own egos, yet they can be idea of as profound insofar as this endeavor puts them in melody with a larger, albeit invisible realm of thought.
A sympathetic managing director with a centrist outlook, Bong makes films that don't necessarily fit into the lucent boxes prepare up by his competitors. When Joker was still in evolution, for example, its writer-director took pride in telling journalists that his take on the comic book grapheme had been inspired not by blockbusters such as The Dark Knight or Justice League, but cult classics like equally Taxi Driver. Simply while the latest origin story of this supervillain does actually infringe many things from Martin Scorsese'due south acclaimed psychological thriller, ambivalence is non 1 of them.
During that flick'southward final confrontation, a failed comedian shoots the charismatic and successful host of a popular late night talk show. As if the premise alone does not render the killer's motivations obvious, the script is kind enough to spell them out in case the audition wasn't paying attention: "What do you lot get," Arthur asks, his finger wrapped around the trigger, "when you cantankerous a mentally-ill loner with a system that abandons him and treats him like trash?" His question has but one answer—a bullet—and the story of Joker is weaker for it.
Thus, past exposing the thesis for all to see, Phillips made his superhero spoof vulnerable to such extensive criticism it'south unlikely to ever be recognized every bit the sort of insightful social drama he originally gear up out to brand. The same, however, cannot be said for Parasite, whose true meaning—in spite of the film's apparent gender bias—is sure to exist debated for years to come.
Bibliography
Code, Lorraine. "Is The Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Pregnant?" Metaphilosophy, vol. 12, no. ¾, 1981, pp. 267-276.
Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Humanist without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, translated by Marianne Cowan, Detroit, Wayne Country University Press, 1963.
Jaggar, Alison. "Beloved and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistomology." Inquiry, vol. 32, no. 2, 2008, pp. 151-176.
Kim, E. Tammy. "Upstairs, Downstairs: On Bell Joon-ho's Parasite." The Nation, 10 October. 2019, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/_Parasite_-bong-joon-ho-review. Accessed 9 May 2020.
Lenin, Vladimir. "The Urgent Tasks of Our Motility." Iskra, vol. one, no. 1, 1900, from Lenin, Nerveless Works, Progress Publishers, 1964, Moscow, vol. iv, pp. 366-371.
Miroiu, Mihaela. "Communism Was a Country Patriarchy, Not Country Feminism." Aspasia, vol. i, no. 1, 2007, pp. 197-201.
Mullaney, Marie. "Gender and the Socialist Revolutionary Role, 1871-1921: A General Theory of the Female Revolutionary Personality." Historical Reflections, vol. 11, no. two, 1984, pp. 99-151.
Parasite. Directed past Bell Joon-ho, performances past Choi Woo-shik, Kang-Ho Song, Park So-dam, and Jang Hye-jin, CJ Amusement, 2019.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. "Of Women." Translated by Thomas Bailey Saunders, 1851. Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Of_Women.
Scott, A.O. "It'due south Bell Joon Ho's Dystopia. We Just Live in Information technology." New York Times, thirty Oct. 2019, https://world wide web.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/movies/bell-joon-ho-_Parasite_.html. Accessed 4 May 2020.
Slezkin, Yuri. House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017.
Wolfenstein, E. Victor. Revolutionary Personality: Lenin, Trotsky, Gandhi. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1967.
Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch-built-in, New York-based journalist whose writing on art and civilization has appeared in PopMatters, High Times, History Today and The New York Observer among others. He studied history at New York University, and currently works as an editorial assistant for Motion picture Comment mag. A scholar of Russian literature, he has helped phase exhibits for the State Hermitage Museum and is profoundly interested in the relationship betwixt political ideology and popular entertainment.
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