ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the questions of class and gender in contemporary Korea that Parasite depicts, to explore the ways in which the film’s social criticism, combined with its universal cinematic genre storytelling and local details, creates a narrative whose affective impact lingers, leading to more disturbing questions after the film ends. The film’s diegetic world is a man’s world, and the women in the film are caretakers and affective laborers, whose limited power is only derivative of that of the men in their lives. Parasite seems to conclude that Korea’s neoliberal social reality reflected in it is such that the haves and the have-nots are fundamentally different, and that the latter cannot cross the chasm between their two worlds. At the same time, female characters’ experience does not always fold neatly into such binary notions of class difference the film presents.
