Built on rock: the geology at the heart of Oscars sensation Parasite

As in Uncut Gems and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a symbolic stone adds weight to Bong Joon-ho’s searing satire of Korean society

When Bong Joon-ho made movie history by winning a clutch of Oscars for Parasite, he held the statuettes together afterwards, making them kiss. There is something charming about Bong taking these longed-for, career-defining objects and bashing their golden heads together. We love our treasures – since antiquity people have carved and hoarded statuettes, stones, rocks, trinkets. This is a genealogy that runs from Stonehenge to today’s most Cartier-obsessed rapper. Parasite is unashamedly about wealth, class, longing, scamming: what we want and what we’ll do to get it. Incidentally, Elon Musk loved the film. I wonder who he rooted for in its frenetic final scenes – the closest thing I’ve seen to class warfare on screen.

At the heart of Bong’s taut tragi-comedy is a rock, a “viewing stone” a “symbolic gift” that drives his heroes, the Kim family, to inventive and deadly extremes in pursuit of more: more money, more opportunities, a better life. Geology – rocks, gems, stones – as a heavy-handed metaphor for wealth or class difference is common on screen. Uncut Gems opens with a scene featuring bleeding, injured mineworkers; in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, money-mad Lorelei risks her reputation by getting embroiled with diamond-mine owner “Piggy” Beekman.

Parasite is more subtle than that. Its shocks are violent, sometimes funny; its chaos comes in exquisite, controlled bursts. The Kim family languish, unemployed, in their basement flat, folding pizza boxes for money. One fateful night son Ki-woo’s elegant friend, Min-hyuk, descends into the basement and presents the family with a suseok, or viewing stone: a natural rock collected in Japan, China and Korea. Min-hyuk says the stone is believed to bring material wealth to families, even if he dismisses the idea as “stupid”. Soon Ki-woo has taken over Min-hyuk’s role as English tutor to the daughter of the hyper-affluent Park family – with the help of a faked college degree. The family toast their success, and diligently create fresh personas and fresh scams to infiltrate the Park family home by stealth.

A knock-off – whether it’s a bag, a necklace, an accent or, in this instance, a slew of faked qualifications and personae – can often do the job of the real thing. The viewing stone emboldens the family to scam their way to a better life, but it is also a reminder of the limitations of this self-made value. When the Kim family’s home floods – a biblical torrent that sends sewage streaming from the toilet and destroys their miserable belongings – the rock endures.

Homeless and sodden, the family lie on the floor of a gym, and Ki-woo embraces the stone. “Why are you hugging that thing?” his father asks. “It wants to be with me,” his son replies. “It’s true. It keeps following me. I knew it was a sign when Min-hyuk gave it to me. A symbolic gift …” He cradles it tightly. He lugs it to an anxiety-inducing party, where he will be forced to act the part of the urbane tutor; things end badly. At moments of hellish drama and chaos, the rock re-emerges, like a body that won’t sink.

Parasite is set in the present day, an economically turbulent era in which value and product feel cleaved from one another. In London, residential planning permission on a piece of land can see its value rocket from £21,000 to £1.95m a hectare. The bitcoin boom saw billionaires created overnight, insanely rich off the back of an intangible currency. Amid this economic chaos, faith in the promise of stones and jewels makes abrupt sense. It doesn’t matter if their value is real, imagined or just longed-for: the allure is undeniable.

Bong is sometimes deliberately, deliciously obvious. When Ki-woo is presented with the rock, he coos: “It’s so metaphorical.” In the final scenes, we see the origins of the viewing stone, as a pair of hands pluck the rock from a pristine stream. We hear Ki-woo’s message to his estranged, imprisoned father: he is making “a long-term plan … I’m going to make a lot of money.” The viewer watches, knowing this rock was used to split Ki-woo’s head open.

The film’s enormous sadness lies in the determination of some people never to give up the dream of crossing the gap between rich and poor, the haves and have-nots. In doing so, they put their shoulder to the sisyphean task of pushing the rock up the hill, and it crushes them, as it does Parasite’s Kim family.

Eve Willis

The GuardianTramp

Related Content

Article image
Parasite makes Oscars history as first foreign language winner of best picture
Bong Joon-ho’s South Korean satire wins the top prize after sweeping up best director, international film and original screenplay

Catherine Shoard

10, Feb, 2020 @10:41 AM

Article image
Parasite wins best original screenplay Oscar
South Korean satire directed by Bong Joon-ho becomes first Asian film to win the original script Academy Award

Andrew Pulver

10, Feb, 2020 @1:39 AM

Article image
Why Parasite should win the best picture Oscar
Bong Joon-ho’s tragicomic thriller is the dark horse of this year’s Oscars race. An exquisite piece of storytelling, this is classical film-making at its best

Simran Hans

03, Feb, 2020 @6:00 AM

Article image
Parasite wins best international feature film Oscar
Palme d’Or-winning satire directed by Bong Joon-ho wins the Academy award for the best film not in the English language

Andrew Pulver

10, Feb, 2020 @3:25 AM

Article image
Trust your nose: what rich people can learn from Parasite
Bong Joon-ho’s savage Oscar-winning satire offers plenty of helpful insights into how the wealthy can avoid being preyed on by the less fortunate

Stuart Heritage

18, Feb, 2020 @12:04 PM

Article image
Bong Joon-ho wins the best director Oscar for Parasite
Bong becomes second film-maker to win directing prize for a foreign language film at the Academy awards

Andrew Pulver

10, Feb, 2020 @3:52 AM

Article image
Parasite's box office figures surge after Oscar triumph
The Korean thriller took more than $501,000 at US cinemas the day after the Academy Awards, and smashed the UK record for the opening weekend foreign language films

Andrew Pulver

12, Feb, 2020 @12:52 PM

Article image
Oscars 2020: who will win | Peter Bradshaw
The Guardian’s chief film critic makes his picks for the big night – can Bong Joon-ho pull it off with Parasite?

Peter Bradshaw

07, Feb, 2020 @12:06 PM

Article image
Trump's Oscars rant? He just wants Hollywood to see he's a star
The US president’s tirade against Parasite’s best picture Oscar, preferring Sunset Boulevard and Gone With the Wind, masks his own frustration at being cold-shouldered by Tinseltown

Steve Rose

21, Feb, 2020 @1:20 PM

Article image
'Like Halle Berry versus gum disease': nine things we learned at the 2020 Oscars
Brad Pitt got political, the Cats cast got their claws out and Eminem’s appearance left everyone confused

Alex Needham

10, Feb, 2020 @7:37 AM