The Basement Smell of Parasite (2019)

You can have a lot of money and still be poor

Bong Joon Ho is straightforward in his symbolism.

Were it not for the sex and gore, the question “Explain the title of Parasite (2019)” would make a pretty good eighth-grade English exam. You think the poor Kim family are the parasites, as they lie and cheat their way into employment with the rich Park family, but maybe the rich Park family are the real parasites!

Easy. Done. Obvious. Just post the meme image of Kim Ki-taek driving the rich mother Choi Yeon-gyo:

I want to talk about the smell.

The younger son Park Da-song brings it up first, noticing that the father Kim Ki-taek, mother Chung-sook, and elder sister Ki-jung smell the same. But the rich father Park Dong-ik describes the smell in detail:

Maybe the smell of an old radish pickle? Or that smell when you’re washing a dirty rag?…It’s hard to explain. I smell it when I ride the subway sometimes.

Ki-jung knows the source: it’s from the basement apartment that the Kim family lives in. They can’t excise it without moving out.

The Act Two plot twist is that the Park family house has its own basement, this one a secret from its owners. It was installed as a bunker in case of a North Korean nuclear attack, but it has since been occupied by the former housekeeper Gook Moon-gwang and her husband Oh Geun-sae. Younger son Kim Ki-woo first walks into the hidden basement with his nose covered, suggesting that this basement also smells. For all the murderous antagonism between the Kim family and the old housekeeper, they’re all basement people. They all have the smell.

Remember that for the first half of the movie, Moon-gwang is framed as a well-groomed mainstay of the house. In fact, she has more history with the house than the Park family do, because she was the housekeeper for the architect who owned the house first. And the Kim family, despite living in cramped, dirty conditions, also manage to look well-groomed in the presence of their employers. The children Ki-jung and Ki-woo nail the blazer-over-tee look that became the look of 2010s tech VCs, and the father Ki-taek introduces himself to the patriarch Dong-ik in a well-fitted suit. Even after the Kim’s flat gets flooded, leaving the family in a disaster shelter, they manage to make it to work in presentable fashion.

But outside the view of the rich, the Kim family, as well as Moon-gwang and Geun-sae, all dress in worn, stretched-out, poor-people clothes. They’re all basement people. For all their experience with Benzes and art psychology and braised ribs, they can’t get the smell out of their clothes.

The Evergreen Value of Class (1983) by Paul Fussell

Of course, it’s not literally a smell. But as Paul Fussell could tell you, real class distinctions are just as intractable. Middle class neurotics (like me) can emulate the aesthetics of the upper classes: peep the logos on Instagram and take your pick between vintage, knockoff, and Klarna. But we cannot nail the upper-class vibe, as I am learning in my new job. In my case, the most glaring difference is that I don’t know what rules I can break.

To be upper-class is to buy hundred-dollar wines on company cards, to show up late without apology, to sign off emails with “k thanks bye.” It is to know the rules of power and status so well that you can flout them at will. It is to be a barbarian, indifferent to reality, because to you, that reality is mutable. Whether boom or bust, the Street will still reimburse your bar tab—because if this fund won’t, another fund will.

I could buy a fine suit. I could buy another watch. I have already bought the fragrance. But I cannot dispense of others’ opinions of me, because unlike the true upper class, I could still destroy myself by angering the wrong person once. And for that reason, I still smell middle-class.

The Fog of Class War

The Kim family marvel at how expediently they dupe the Parks into hiring the lot of them, and they wisely take the mother Yeon-gyo as their mark. Yeon-gyo is depicted as too naïve to live, and too pretty to let die. She cannot cook, cannot clean, takes every Kim ruse at face value, dotes on her son while completely oblivious to her daughter’s needs, and—going back to that meme—does not consider that the rainstorm that washed away her son’s camping trip was more than a “blessing in disguise” for…other people.

The father Dong-ik, meanwhile, does not question his wife’s hiring decisions, further enabling the con. Much of the Act Two hiding sequence hinges on the Parks not looking under beds and couches, of being too inattentive to notice the signs of bedlam in their living room. The father, too, doesn’t think about other people. Even when seeing his driver try to staunch a fatal knife wound in his son’s art teacher, his first thought is, “Mr. Kim! What are you doing?” Why aren’t you driving my son to the emergency room?

Only the son Da-song seems to pay attention. He calls out the basement smell first. He picks up on the Morse Code, intuiting that maybe the light sensor on the stairwell is not a light sensor. And he is the first in the family to see Oh Geun-see. A drawing of the man has been framed in the house the whole time.

But the film never explains where the Park family’s wealth comes from. The script suggests the father works all the time, but the film only gives one view into his office, with the brandmark “ANOTHER BRICK”¹ and an inscrutable slide deck. The apparent wealth of the Park family is beyond the Kims’ understanding.

Parasite depicts a battle in the class war, but both sides clearly misunderstand the enemy. So it is in real life. The poor frame the machinations of the rich in the CSI-spinoff lore of QAnon, the middle class repost macroeconomic data on Twitter, and the truly rich ask what everyone’s problem is. There’s so much money to make. Why can’t you see it?

The Kim family don’t see it. They only see what they can hustle out of the people with real money. And at the end of the film, no one learns anything.

“I Will Make Money. A Lot of Money.”

This all starts because of a suseok 수석—a viewing stone, told to bring luck and money to the family. During the Act 2 flood that destroys the Kim family’s apartment, Ki-woo fishes that rock out of the sewer water. He clutches to it in the disaster shelter as his father tells him that, despite all the plans he has devised, the best plan remains no plan.

If you plan, something will always go wrong. That’s life…That’s why you should never plan. If you don’t have a plan, you can’t fail. You can’t do anything wrong. Doesn’t matter if you kill someone or commit fucking treason. Nothing fucking matters.

Ki-taek’s speech is cope. After the bloody birthday party that kills his daughter and nearly kills his son, he returns to his plan. Remembering that the basement is now unoccupied and still hidden, he moves in himself. Replicating the madness of the now-dead Geun-see, he writes a letter in Morse Code, (correctly) expecting his son to come looking and recognize the message. Ki-woo replies with his own plan:

I will make money. A lot of money. University degrees, a career, marriage…those are all great, but first, I’ll make money. When I have the money, I’ll buy that house. On the day we move in, Mom and I will be in the garden. Because the sunshine is so nice. All you’ll need to do is to walk up the stairs.

The film doesn’t end with the renunion. It ends in the same semi-basement apartment, now with snow outside the half window. Ki-woo stares, glassy-eyed, through the camera. There are, in theory, paths to immense wealth for a crafty-but-broke hustler like Kim Ki-woo.

kyla scanlon

talks about them frequently.

But that’s cope too, because Ki-woo and the real young men like him misunderstand what “a lot of money” looks like. You don’t buy the Park’s house with a fat bank account. You don’t even buy it with a fat income. You buy it with equity. An LLC owns that house and depreciates it for the tax deduction. That S-Class is a perk covered by Dong-ik’s company. Do you think Patrick Bateman went to Dorsia with his own money? No! Business meals are tax-deductible.

You what the smell is in Parasite? It’s whether your measure of personal wealth keys off your cash flow statement, your income statement, or your balance sheet. If you think a paycheck is the most enticing compensation for a job, then you don’t have real wealth.

The miracle of the middle class is the capacity to amortize immense costs over long periods of time: 30-year mortgages, insurance policies, preventative care, boots that can last ten years. And as we are learning in the post-ZIRP hangover of the 2020s, that miracle can turn into its own prison.

But the truly wealthy have never thought that way about their own money.

A mortgage still implies that “you” are paying for it.

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This writing reflects my views alone, and does not reflect the views of SemiAnalysis. This is not investment advice. For analysis on semiconductors, AI, energy systems, industrial inputs, or utilities, visit https://semianalysis.com

1. “Like that album! Anyway, remember to SMASH that like button!”