The Rake’s Social Progress: Being a Gentlemanly Dialogue Between “Parasite” and “Barry Lyndon”

Introduction

When I watched Barry Lyndon a few weeks ago, it helped crystallize for me an objection that had been building in my mind ever since Parasite became the object of fascination for the film community late last year. That objection isn’t towards Parasite as a film, but to the way the conversation about the film has proceeded and where it has focused. Parasite has been endlessly and breathlessly described as a movie that needed to be understood as an anti-capitalist project. My feeling was always that the brilliance of the film lay in something deeper – that its structural critique was, to be sure, incisive and revealing, but incidental to a more essential story.

In this context, it was striking to watch Barry Lyndon and see how similar are the strategies that Barry employs in his own efforts to climb the socioeconomic ladder – even though the socioeconomic ladder that Barry seeks to climb exists in a system that bears more resemblance to the feudal economic system of the Middle Ages than to contemporary late capitalism. Barry, like the collective Kim family, is an impoverished and unscrupulous figure who uses whatever means at his disposal to advance his social position – and for whom the ultimate cost of his climb proves to far outweigh the reward that he seeks.

I don’t want to argue that either Stanley Kubrick, with Barry Lyndon, or Bong Joon-ho, with Parasite, weren’t intending to advance sophisticated political critiques. The critique is self-evident in the content of Parasite, and while it’s refracted through an 18th-century lens in Barry Lyndon, that film, too, is interested in political questions that are unconfined to any specific era in history. Rather, the intent of this essay is to examine the similarities between the worlds of the two films and the behavior of their protagonists. Such examination reveals that to read these stories as structural critiques is to overlook a far more important shared examination of the uglier side of human nature. In their truest selves, these are stories about the human inclination to advance oneself at the expense of others – and of the inevitable (inevitable in these stories, at least) consequences of doing so.

“Parasite” :  the Anti-Capitalist Reading

Here is the plot of Parasite, abbreviated in very few lines. The Kim family lives in a subterranean apartment where they struggle to make ends meet. The son, Ki-woo, lucks into a job tutoring the teenage daughter of the wealthy Park family. In order to secure the job, Ki-woo has his sister, Ki-jung, forge him a diploma from a prestigious university; this seemingly innocent bit of deception (Ki-woo has taken the university entrance exam four times and says he intends to go in the future) is just the first small deceit in what will become a chain of ever-extending, unsustainable lies. By the end of his first lesson, Ki-woo has persuaded Mrs Park that her son needs art therapy and has recommended a highly qualified therapist. Unbeknownst to Mrs Park, this “highly qualified therapist” is Ki-woo’s thoroughly unqualified sister, Ki-jung, posing as Ki-woo’s university acquaintance. In time, Ki-woo and Ki-jung secure places in the Park household for their father and mother as well, all pretending to be unrelated. This sets the stage for the revelation of a dark secret lying beneath the house, and with it, the destruction of both the Park and the Kim families.

The critical consensus around Parasite is that it’s a film about class struggle, but in the reviews I’ve read of the film, this idea is more talked around than directly engaged. I have yet to read a direct excavation of just what the class reading of the film is. The more sophisticated critics (I’m thinking specifically of Manhola Dargis of the New York Times) talk about various manifestations of class within the film without making a direct, overarching argument about what those manifestations add up to. Less sophisticated critics (read “dumber critics” here if you want) make broad assertions without explaining how they arrived at them.

Now, let me be quite clear: this film is most assuredly interested in questions of class; indeed, it is about class in the same way that Moby-Dick is about the sea. However, to the degree that it is an anti-capitalist film, it is such mainly in its situational orientation. In other words, it is anti-capitalist insofar as it is set within a world wherein the two central sets of characters are most clearly defined by their wealth or lack thereof. The film’s social critique plays out in the film’s examination of how money becomes the dominant matrix through which human interaction is understood. When Ki-woo develops a romance with his 15-year-old tutee, he is excited not so much by the expectation of their future happiness but by the idea of marrying her and entering the social milieu of the Parks. Mr Park, meanwhile, is incapable of revealing human emotions of affection in front of his driver, Ki-woo’s father Ki-taek; when he has Ki-taek dress up to perform a role in his son’s birthday party, Mr Park cannot express appreciation or gratitude but instead has only the language of an overtime bonus with which to encourage his employee. Parasite depicts a capitalism that has infected the ethos with which we live our lives and that has transformed the basis of our relationships with others from interaction to transaction.

Yet this is not a story of class exploitation. If the Parks represent something about the state of the upper classes, they do so through their obliviousness, not through their malice. It is the lower-class Kims, in fact, who feel like the truest representatives of the capitalist mindset. They are avatars of acquisitiveness unbound from moral limitation. Their desire for enrichment necessitates the cold-blooded displacement of the Parks’ prior domestic workers in addition to their morally problematic behavior towards the Parks themselves – behavior which is insidious in how easy it is to dismiss as basically innocent deceit (the Parks have so much, after all) while it harms the only two truly innocent characters in the film, the Parks’ daughter and son.

To read Parasite as an anti-capitalist film necessitates viewing the Kims as acting out a drama of social conflict in which they have no choice in the matter; their economic straits necessitate their misdeeds. Approaching the film from that perspective, it becomes easy to understand why so many reviewers focus on Ki-jung’s assertion, at the halfway point of the story, right before it is about to take a hard turn into the surreal, that the Parks “are nice because they’re rich,” with the subtextual excuse that the Kims cannot afford to be nice. But then, one must wonder, what else can Ki-jung, a woman actively cheating a prepubescent boy out of an education for her own enrichment, say to justify herself?

Reading Parasite as anti-capitalist, in other words, requires viewing the Kims as automatons whose actions are out of their own control. They are so in thrall to their economic situation that they have lost any agency they might ever have had. While I don’t want to reduce Parasite to the simplistic flatness of a morality play – again, the economic critique is most assuredly there – I think this reading goes too far. In fact, the film’s more fundamental critique isn’t about capitalism at all. Parasite is descriptive of capitalism in its specifics, but the story the film tells could be adapted to critique the specifics of any system of power (and, of course, all human systems are, in one way or another, systems of power).

How do I know this to be true, and not just a general uneasiness towards overbroad and indefinite claims about how we should understand a movie? I know it because I have seen Barry Lyndon.

“Barry Lyndon” :  The Rake’s Social Progress

Today, Barry Lyndon is more remembered for its technical achievements than for its narrative or thematic strength. Most notably, there are a number of scenes that were shot entirely with candlelight, the sort of detail that sends film nerds into ecstasies of onanistic bliss while everyone else rolls their eyes at the pretension of it all. But, indeed, from a technical perspective, the film is a marvel, exhibiting a painterly care in its compositions that results in tableaus worthy of a Thomas Struth photograph or even – not to get too excited – of the Renaissance masters that Kubrick was supposedly attempting to emulate.

Kubrick’s source material was The Luck of Barry Lyndon, an early novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. The film follows a young Irish adventurer named Redmond Barry, played by Ryan O’Neal. Barry begins as a romantic idealist in love with his cousin Nora. When Nora accepts the attentions of a British army captain putting together a regiment for service in the Napoleonic Wars, Barry challenges him to a duel. Tricked afterwards into believing that he has killed the offending Captain Quin, he flees Ireland. With this experience having dispelled his romantic notions of the world, Barry sets out to advance himself by whatever means possible. He joins, and then deserts, the British army; is discovered and forcibly volunteered for the Prussian army; joins forces with an aristocratic grifter and with him gambles his way through high society on the Continent; and ultimately determines to woo and win a rich wife in order to secure his place in the world. The result of this effort is a union with a wealthy widow, the Countess of Lyndon. The second half of the film – and this film is very long indeed – traces the subsequent decline of Barry from the seemingly secure social position he has achieved for himself, culminating in the death of his son and Barry’s own exile to a life of obscurity and poverty.

In my view, the casting of O’Neal prevents the film from attaining real greatness. A more generous critic would doubtless describe his performance as cold and inaccessible by design. My experience of watching the film, by contrast, was that O’Neal brings neither dynamism nor empathy to the title role, leaving Barry’s dishonorable behavior unmitigated by the audience’s affection.

The result is a structural and thematic murkiness. However negatively we are led to view Barry’s behavior, the film nonetheless has little patience either for the elites whose ranks he seeks to join. Captain Quin, who displaces Barry in Nora’s affections, is a wealthy coward; the Prussian officers that Barry serves under are brutal taskmasters; and Lord Bullingdon, Lady Lyndon’s son by her first marriage, both Barry’s stepson and his nemesis, epitomizes effete aristocratic decadence. The film’s contempt for these characters is magnified by its detached omniscient narration, the mordancy of which is unsparing of either the aristocrats or of Barry himself. Between the film’s disdain for the aristocrat and Barry’s own unlikability, its tone points more towards generalized misanthropy than towards pointed social critique.

Critical direction aside, the narrative arc of the film is easy to identify: grasping ambition destroys itself. Through grit, grift, and charm, Barry raises himself from poverty to an exalted social status. The thing he desires above all, however, is to be accepted into the ranks of the aristocrats on his own terms rather than as the consort of his wife. While the film seems to suggest that this is theoretically possible, it demands an unerring adherence to a particular social code that is so spectacularly beyond Barry’s capabilities that it is difficult to see his failure as anything but inevitable. And what are the sacrifices he makes at the altar of his ambition? His social and economic well-being, the life of his own son, and the health, wealth, and sanity of his wife.

Narrative and Thematic Connections

This broad-stroke examination betrays a superficial resemblance in the narratives of the two films: graspers who aim beyond their station pay a terrible price. In itself, such a general similarity in a one-sentence plot outline isn’t a basis on which to make deeper claims about how two films relate to each other. The reason that I was so struck, watching Barry Lyndon, by the idea that it was in conversation with Parasite despite the gulf of time and space that separates them, is that I couldn’t help but see more specific thematic resonances between them. The four that I will focus on here – are pretense, displacement, absence of class solidarity, and blood sacrifice.

I use the word “pretense” here in the sense of “pretending to be someone that one is not.” In order to effect their swindle of the Parks, each of the Kims assumes a fake identity: Ki-woo pretends to be a university student at a respected university, Ki-jung an art therapist who has spent time in America, Ki-taek a professional driver, Chung-sook a housekeeper with the imprimatur of a high-end domestic agency. (There may or may not be a commentary here on the purpose of credentialing, as by the time things begin to go south the Kims all seem to be performing their respective functions in the Park household at least to the satisfaction of their employers despite their lack of appropriate credentials. However, things go south quickly enough that it may be that their unfitness for these roles hasn’t had time to reveal itself. Indeed, though she salvages the situation, Chung-sook’s ignorance of how to prepare a particular dish at a crucial moment threatens to blow the entire operation.)

Redmond Barry’s pretense is even more naked. He deserts the British army by stealing the clothes of an officer, the armor which he believes will protect him from being questioned as he travels away from the front. Unlike the Kims, he has no ability to deceive anyone not immediately taken in by the veneer of this new outfit, and so he is arrested at the first by the Prussian Captain Potzdorf. Later on, he turns the tables on Potzdorf by agreeing to spy on an Irish gambler in aristocratic dress whom the Prussians suspect of being a secret agent of the Austrians. Ultimately, Barry joins forces with this gambler, a man called the Chevalier de Balibari, and escapes the Prussians once again by disguising himself – this time by impersonating the Chevalier when the Prussians arrange to have the Chevalier deported. Ultimately, Barry is able to win the heart of Lady Lyndon by adopting the dress and manners of an aristocrat and pretending to be, if not of her rank, then at least of her class.

Hand in hand with Barry’s tendency to dress up as other people is the attendant effort to displace them. Clothes make the man, as the saying goes, and while there’s commentary in the fact that all Barry needs to do to escape his cruel soldier’s existence is to put on an officer’s uniform, it also remains the case that he has literally replaced the man who should be wearing that uniform. Indeed, Barry’s story after his desertion can be rendered as a series of such displacements. Traveling through the countryside in an effort to reach neutral Belgium, he supplants a Prussian soldier in his wife’s bed; as the film’s narrator wryly comments, “A lady who sets her heart on a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.” When, later on, he encounters the Countess of Lyndon, his overriding goal becomes to marry her and thus to displace her elderly husband. This goal accomplished (Barry gets the literal last laugh) his son with Lady Lyndon displaces, for a time, her son from her first marriage, and as the film approaches its conclusion, Barry’s mother displaces Lady Lyndon in running Lady Lyndon’s own household. The event that forces events to a head is Barry’s mother’s effort to remove Lady Lyndon’s chaplain and confidante from his post. The chaplain’s intention of defending his privileged position is what causes the dominos to begin to fall.

In Parasite, the Kims’ scheme similarly requires displacing the Parks’ existing set of domestic workers. While Ki-woo and Ki-jung engage in comparatively harmless acts of deception to secure their positions (harmless in the sense that there is no one in those positions at the time that they apply for them), the Kims actively plot to get the Parks’ driver and housekeeper fired so that Ki-taek and Chung-sook can replace them. There is also the case Ki-woo’s romance with the Parks’ fifteen-year-old daughter, Da-hye. Ki-woo‘s friend Min-hyuk, the previous tutor, had himself developed a romance with Da-hye, and the reason that he puts Ki-woo forward for the job is that he thinks Ki-woo will respect Min-hyuk’s romantic intentions. As it happens, Ki-woo almost immediately displaces Min-hyuk in Da-hye’s affections.

Displacement is thus a natural corollary to the dispositional attitude that enables it, which is a lack of any sense of economic solidarity. In both Parasite and Barry Lyndon, the only bonds that act on the characters in any meaningful way are those of blood. Where there is no tie of blood, there is no sense of moral duty. As we have already seen, the most directly harmed victims of the Kims are not the Parks at all, but the domestics of similar class whose jobs the Kims essentially steal. The bitterest conflict of Parasite is not that between the Kims and the Parks but that between the Kims and the Parks’ displaced housekeeper and her husband. In Barry Lyndon, Barry feels no obligation to either the British or the Prussian armies which he swears, at different points, to serve. Nor, later on, does he feel any real obligation to his wife, whom he sidelines, ignores, and cheats on; nor to her property, which he squanders in his fruitless effort to gain admittance to the peerage; nor to her first son, whom he beats and functionally expels from her lands. Indeed, to the degree that there is any manifestation of class solidarity in either of these films, it comes only in the behavior of aristocratic faction of Barry Lyndon, who shun Barry after he assaults one of their own, his son-in-law Lord Bullingdon.

In these films, only the obligation of blood holds any power for their protagonists, it is this, therefore, that provides the power of the films’ final narrative and thematic connection: the blood sacrifice, in which the death of a child becomes the ultimate price paid by the sinner in penance for his, and their, sins. In Barry Lyndon, the blood sacrifice comes in the death of Barry’s son, Bryan, who is spoiled by his father and dies when he is thrown from a horse that Barry has bought for him; in Parasite, the blood sacrifice – and it is very bloody indeed! – occurs with the stabbing of Ki-jung at the film’s climactic garden party scene. Though not, perhaps, the nadir of the fortunes of the respective protagonists of the two films, the blood sacrifice is the fullest expression of the inversion of their hopes. The cost is not just the ruination of their ambitions, but the destruction of the family unit that has provided their only real source of meaning and belonging.

Towards A Moral Reading

I have established, I hope, the understanding that Parasite and Barry Lyndon share the same narrative DNA, even though the systems they comment on seem at first blush to be quite different. These two films are telling the same story of excessive ambition, and they arrive at the same conclusion, which is ephemeral success and ultimate disaster.

This is not to say that these films do not comment on the systems that their characters inhabit, but rather that the relevance of their critiques emerges not in the narrative action of these stories, which would retain the same fundamental character transposed into any formulation of human society, but in the specifics of how different systems of power elevate different chimeras for the social climber to chase. It also drives to an uncomfortable truth of the ugliness and moral bargaining that the disparities of power that come along with any human society must inevitably engender. In the world of Barry Lyndon, no aristocrat values the stamp of their own pedigree as much as does Redmond Barry; in the world of Parasite, it is the downtrodden Kims who embody the most immoral extremes of the capitalist ethos.

At the same time, it should be clear that these remain tales of morality, because the sin consists not in the reaching, but in the mistreatment of others that seems to necessarily accompany reaching too high. Barry’s greatest victim, other than his son, is Lady Lyndon, who is driven to attempt suicide after having been marginalized, mocked, cheated on, and forced to endure the death of her younger child. The Kims, meanwhile, might have been content to have Ki-woo take the lucrative tutoring job vacated by Min-hyuk, but in eliminating the other domestics, they unwittingly create the conditions that will lead to their collective downfall. These are stories about the manifestations and ramifications of human acquisitiveness. That acquisitiveness is certainly acted on and informed by context, and that is where the specific settings and critiques advanced by these films become relevant. Acquisitiveness, however, precedes context. Its shape and course may be altered by context, but it is context, not the deep human propensity towards malice, that is contingent.

Surely, then, this is the real “parasite” that Parasite is about, rather than the incidental creature that lives beneath the Parks’ basement. The parasite is not a person or a thing siphoning off our money or our food (“She always ate enough for two,” in Mr Park’s unknowingly prescient line). It is the instinct that we all have to advance ourselves at the expense of others, the instinct that will, like a parasite, slowly destroy us from the inside.