ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the logic of capital that moves across cultures via analysis of the spatial structures employed in Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite. The film’s world-wide reception stems from the film’s cross-platform content, which speaks to capitalist societies in general rather than to the local context of contemporary Korean society. In the midst of its compelling narrative about a symbiotic relationship between a wealthy capitalist family and a destitute family lies the charming, Western-style house. The spatial structure within the house stands out because it leads the audience back to modern Korean films from the 1960s, which feature the then contemporary emergence of middle-class paranoia through the spatial infiltration. By tracing modern Korean films and transnational landscapes for K-film in the twenty-first century in Parasite, this chapter argues that the shift in the transcultural logic of capital from Western modernism to contemporary Korea infiltrates all levels of everyday life in global neoliberalism.
