An opinion that I often share at social functions, usually without provocation, is that Snowpiercer is one of the best movies of the 21st century. Most people seem not to share that view. Most people are wrong.
If you’re among the benighted millions who’ve never experienced Bong Joon Ho’s masterpiece, I suggest you rectify that shortcoming immediately. (It’s on Netflix — no excuses!) In the meantime, here’s the wild premise. It’s 2031. A desperate stab at geoengineering has backfired catastrophically, entombing the world in ice. The few survivors — Chris Evans and Octavia Spencer among them — are trapped on a train, a “rattling ark” that, y’know, pierces the snow as it circles the earth. The dirt-smudged hoi polloi rot in steerage, locked down by armed guards, while the über-wealthy (led by Tilda Swinton, playing a creepy mashup of Hitler, Gaddafi, Thatcher, and, um, Silvio Berlusconi) frolic in opulence at the train’s head, waltzing through cars filled with orange orchards and saunas and party drugs.
The Snowpiercer haters I encounter, whose legions include my wife, complain that it’s too heavy-handed. Which, fine. (Maybe they prefer the nuance of Mad Max.) The train isn’t a metaphor for how climate change will exacerbate inequality, but a shamelessly literal manifestation of it. I concede the point: Snowpiercer ain’t subtle. Well, neither are the Australian bushfires.
If you’re one of the people who thinks Snowpiercer is too crude a satire of our grim future, you might prefer Bong’s latest work of thinkpiece-inspiring brilliance, which is, of course, Parasite. If Snowpiercer was a movie about global warming with overtones of class warfare, Parasite is a movie about class warfare that ingeniously backgrounds global warming. At its heart are two Korean families, the wealthy Parks and the poor Kims. They’re divided not only by social status, but, crucially, by topography. The Parks live behind locked gates in a massive, spotless house designed by a renowned architect, up a steep street in the Seoul highlands — a city on a hill. The Kims, who resourcefully insinuate themselves into the Parks’ lives over the movie’s course, squat in a cramped subterranean bunker in a low-elevation slum, plagued by crappy WiFi and pissing drunks.
Bong frequently and cleverly emphasizes this altitudinal gradient. The Kims, it seems, are forever hustling up or down the vertiginous stone staircase that leads to and from their downtrodden neighborhood, which is eternally cast in a sickly pall. Said the film’s cinematographer, Hong Kyung-pyo, in an interview: “In terms of topography, if you visit the concentrated semi-basement area in the lowland and the rich area in the highland, the difference in the amount of sunlight is obvious.” The Parks’ bright hilltop home feels clean and salubrious, while the Kims’ corner of the city gives off a grimy, polluted vibe, smothered by Seoul’s unshakeable layer of particulate matter.
The elevational difference between the families isn’t just a symbol of their respective statuses, it also drives a critical plot point. (Mild spoiler upcoming!) Near Parasite’s end, a torrential rainstorm triggers a flash flood that submerges the Kims’ slum and backs up the city’s sewage; as Eileen Jones put it in Jacobin, “the shit literally flows downhill.” The flood inundates their apartment, forcing them to abandon their few possessions and take shelter in a local gymnasium — a crushing humiliation that, in part, triggers the film’s bonkers final act.
This, I think, is a pretty savvy understanding of how social class and urban geography collude to influence climate risk. Disaster after disaster, we’ve seen that lower-income neighborhoods at lower elevations are more susceptible to extreme weather events; Hurricane Katrina and the Philippines’ Typhoon Haiyan are just two top-of-mind examples. One recent study that surveyed more than 200 homes in Myanmar’s Bago City suggested that “poor people who live in fragile houses tend to live in flood-prone areas, where floods have the effect of trapping people in a cycle of poverty” — the precise predicament in which the Kims find themselves.
An equally ominous 2018 study, which examined around 800,000 property sales records from Miami-Dade County, investigated a phenomenon called climate gentrification. The authors found compelling evidence backing the “Elevation Hypothesis” — i.e., in low-lying, climate-vulnerable cities, property values appreciate faster at higher elevations, away from the rising ocean. They also found support for the inverse “Nuisance Hypothesis”: that annoying flooding has suppressed the value of low-elevation homes. Ultimately, the authors conclude, society’s growing preference for the safety of lofty heights “may lead to more widespread relocations that serve to gentrify higher elevation communities.” Parasite never explicitly mentions climate change, nor have I seen anyone posit the movie as cli-fi. But it doesn’t have to mention climate change to effectively deploy it — global warming, in both the film and in life, is an inescapable fact, the backdrop against which we stand, the water in which we swim, simultaneously unobtrusive and omnipresent, like well, the weather. The best kind of cli-fi, for my money, is the kind in which climate change has become such a fixture that it’s almost unremarkable, inconspicuously setting the stage against which plays the drama of daily life.
And that’s precisely how it’s cast in Parasite — the rich, blithe Parks are oblivious to their climate privilege even as it determines their experience of the world. The morning after the deluge, the affluent Park Yeon-kyo chats on the phone with a friend from the backseat of her car. She’s dressed, as ever, to the nines; up front, Kim Ki-taek, her driver, seethes in his own salvaged, ill-fitting clothes. “Did you see the sky today?” Park chirps. “Crystal clear. Zero air pollution. Rain washed it all away.” Photo of 2011 Seoul floods by 최광모.
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Fantastic and perceptive analysis of, yes, an important cli-fi movie that, as Ben points out here, nobody ever mentioned as being a cli-fi movie until this must-read review. I loved it. Thanks for writing this, Ben. Provocative. Brilliant.
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0 thoughts on “Parasite Is Great Cli-Fi”