I haven't been able to stop reflecting on this ish since I watched it Saturday Night. I was glued to it from start to finish and I've been running over range of feelings I had going through the movie. I feel like it does this amazing job of giving us a surface level understanding of characters that reflect our society's norms...and then we get a deeper look at the characters and they all have incredible depth. It starts off feeling like the characters and plot will move along some fairly predictable tropes but then the more we get to know the depths of these characters, the more the stakes rise. Every decision feels like it has some sort of justification even if it is somewhat depraved.
Sticking to the whole "our shallow view of people changes with context," it's just impressive how the wealthy family can be so helpless and oblivious, yet hold all overwhelming power over the situation...but they're even sort of oblivious to that power dynamic. To them, they're doing right by these people simply by paying them (ie: the conversation at the end about the surprise ambush between Mr. Park and Mr. Kim). So Mr. Kim never has to explain what he means when he says that Mr. Kim is always close to taking it "too far." To me, that seems to be about taking things past the wall of employer/employee and more toward sincere friendship. His comments about the subway smell rolls right with it.
But that ish is also something embedded into the wealthy Park family. Da Song (the son) is actually the first one to really bring it up and he can smell it even on the Kim family's children, who are faking like they're part of the wealthier class of people. It's a reminder that they're imposters who won't ever truly be accepted, they can dress up and forge the papers and mimic the language...but they still have the odor of the less fortunate.
There's also an interesting twist on the power dynamic in how helpless the Park family really is. They can't cook or clean for themselves, the father can't drive, the daughter has a tutor for show (they kept Mifun around regardless of her grades) and the son is receiving art lessons and therapy simultaneously from a girl whose qualifications are photoshop and google. They were even being taken advantage of by the former housekeeper in a way that could easily be argued is more extreme than what the Kim's did.
That gets best exposed in the final scene too. Mr. Park desperately needs to get his son to the hospital but he's got to rely on his driver to get the kid there. Even when he finally does go for the car keys, he has to recoil at the smell of a "less than" before he can take action. Dude wastes more time yelling at Mr. Kim to help than he does actively helping his kid...and we all saw how his inability to hide his disdain for explicit poverty ends up.
At the end of the day, it's a lot about disguises to me. The Kim family has to hide their circumstances in order to get an opportunity to even be servants. Meanwhile the Park family has a facade of being put together but they rely on everyone else to construct that facade and they're covering up past trauma and also look down on the people that make their lives look so perfect. And all of it is just as shallow as how we view the characters initially. I guffawed at the box folding with the smoke blowing in their faces and then felt awful looking at the flooded basement. I chuckled at Mrs. Park's panic over some shapes on a piece of paper and then gasped at the truth behind the trauma that she saw in that doodle.
It's heavy on the "we don't worry about what we can't see" idea. Not just from the characters disguises but from the poor man, hidden in the basement of this perfect home (and repaying the family as best he can by acting like a damned sensor light...that's what's left of meaning in that man's life, brutal). It's a wealthy family sleeping peacefully with someone dying in their basement. A child sleeping in a tent in the rain while entire homes are flooded.
But the idea that we see only what we want to see isn't strictly on the wealthy Park family. Ki-Woo is dreaming of marrying the daughter even though he knows she gave the exact same impression to his predecessor in the tutor role. The entire family goes about their business in the bloody aftermath of the basement incident without any of them having a real plan. Mr. Kim is the "This is Fine" dog fam!
And that's the last bit of this long post that I wanna touch on. There's a bit of a mirror effect by the end. Everyone has blinders on, both families lose people and everyone is left with blood on their hands (at least metaphorically). Everyone comes across as goofy and foolish in a way, depraved and ignorant in another, but sympathetic in their own light.
At the end what's left of the entire incident is that house. A symbol of success that the German family moved into without knowing the depth of its story, oblivious to the man in their basement and entirely reliant on their housekeepers to keep up the picture perfect aesthetic (something Mr. Kim alludes to in his complaints about the dangers of sneaking around to get himself food). Now for my next post, 500 words on the significance of that rock gift; the disconnect it shows between the have's and have-nots; and the way it only has real world utility as a weapon...I liked this movie way too much.
