This article was originally published in Turkish in Manifold on 7 November 2019. It can be accessed here.
Parasite is the new film by Bong Joon-Ho, the South Korean writer and director known for his films Snowpiercer (2013), Okja (2017) and The Host (2006). The film has won the coveted Palme D’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It has also become one of the most discussed films at international festivals and is considered to be one of the best films of the year. Before continuing, a bona fide warning: It is tricky to talk about this film’s spatial elements without referencing its themes and plot points. I will try my best to talk about the spaces of this film and how spatial relations are realised without giving much of its plot and themes away. If you don’t know a lot about this film and haven’t seen it yet, I strongly urge you to go in blind and watch it before reading the rest of this article.
The upstairs-downstairs duality is a tool to spatially and analogically emphasise social status in architecture. In Parasite, this duality is presented by using two housing examples; a contemporary style single house and a dwelling in a poorer neighbourhood of the city. It is also observed on a smaller scale as in the spaces within these houses and on the urban scale. At the start of his process, Bong Joon-ho asked the question “What story could I tell with just two houses?”[1], which then shaped the script. In the film, the audience is introduced to two families that cross paths, each with four members, one of them upper class and the other working class. Bong analyses class polarisation in the current system through their interactions with each other and with spaces. As he elaborates: “… the dynamic between these … teams and the dynamic of space, they were very much intertwined and I think that combination really created an interesting element to this film.”[2]
I would firstly like to talk about the set design. After seeing the film, my initial reaction was to search for the architect of the main house that was used as a location. To my surprise, that house and most of the film’s spaces were designed as sets according to filming and script requirements. The creators of the film refer to the houses as the ‘rich house’ and the ‘poor house’, I will adopt these terms as well. An interview with the director Bong Joon-ho and the film’s production designer Lee Ha-Jun (who achieved something incredible with his work for Parasite in my opinion) details the process. All spatial decisions were in fact made by the director before filming, as early as the writing stage. The characters’ places in the city and the houses, their movements according to necessary interactions with the spaces and other characters, blocking decisions, and what they symbolise were all predetermined. Thus, visual and spatial applications were clear from the start. Bong Joon-ho’s expectations for the spaces, especially for the rich house, were requests that were necessary for the scenes to work as intended, but an architect would have never agreed to incorporate these requests in their design.[3] So the crew decided to build the spaces themselves instead of painstakingly scouting the perfect location. The designs were created prioritising the director’s “… main concept of class hierarchy and polarization.”[4] The main influence for both families’ houses and their neighbourhoods was the city of Seoul.[5] The production designer preferred graceful, elegant colours and materials in the rich house to generate more of a contrast with the poor house, using antiquated materials in the poor house and its neighbourhood to create the impression of a derelict and worn-out environment.[6]
In the film, the fictional architect who designed the rich house, Namgoong Hyeonja, is a character that the audience never meets, save for a photograph. He designs and builds the structure, and lives in it with his housekeeper, before the events of the film. After he moves out of the house, a newly rich, young family, the Parks, move in and employ the same housekeeper. A driver and an English tutor also accompany this new family. The son of the Kim family, the second, working class family, takes over the tutoring from his friend, then executes a plan to bring the rest of his family into other positions in the rich house. His sister becomes an art therapist for the youngest son of the Park family, his father their driver, and finally, his mother, their new housekeeper, taking over from the original housekeeper, all with ethically questionable methods. Certain secrets surface, establishing the characters’ relationships to the film’s spaces, with bleak results.
The rich house where the Park family resides is almost a caricature of modernist single housing architecture. Designed as a minimalist space, it is inspired by the works of an architect popular amongst the newly rich IT industry people (In the film, Mr. Park also works in the IT industry.)[7] The structure consists of an external gate that leads to a private garden, then into the main living space and open plan kitchen through the entrance on the ground level. Bedrooms and wet areas (bathrooms and a sauna room) are located on the upper level, a basement/pantry that is accessed from the kitchen via a staircase is on the lower level and finally a bunker below the basement. The main living area is also accessible through the garage. One of the first spaces that the audience is shown is the living area and the kitchen of the rich house. These spaces are mostly empty, pure and elegant. This level of the house has a somewhat awkward open plan and circulation. That is due to the decisions for this space that were dictated by scriptural requirements; e.g. the conversations in the kitchen can be heard by someone on the main staircase without being seen, characters in the living area cannot be spotted by someone standing in the entrance, the staircase that leads to the garage can only be perceived at specific angles, etc. The fictional architect Namgoong Hyeonja designed the large glass façade of the living area for the users to enjoy the views of the custom design garden.[8] Intended for a living room without a television, this façade is a screen for the user to observe the outside from the inside in certain instances; the Kim family gazing at the garden like a painting when they are alone in the rich house, the parents surveilling the youngest member of the Park family as he camps in the garden, the glass façade partially preventing the perception of the interiors, leading to the inability to foresee the events in the last moments of the film. These uses of this façade make it a key architectural element.
The poor house where the Kim family lives is called a semi-basement apartment. It is a common house typology which can be seen in the back alleys and poorer neighbourhoods of Seoul. An “architectural purgatory”[9], this flat is tiny, tight, a place where objects are stored haphazardly rather than hidden or thrown away. It consists of a living space/kitchen, a bathroom and two other rooms towards the back. According to the director, this house is neither above nor below ground: this state of physical limbo also symbolises the Kim family’s economic situation. While the family wants to believe they are upstairs, they live in fear of sinking even deeper down.[10]
Similar to Seoul, the unnamed city in the film is on hilly terrain with steep streets. This quality lends itself to the upstairs-downstairs relationship naturally. As is the case in Seoul, gated single houses with large gardens located on hills in the high neighbourhoods clearly depict their users’ status. On the bottom of the hills, in the outskirts, exist the working class dwellings and neighbourhoods. The starkest example of class separation in the urban scale is depicted in the flood scene. As a result of both the natural disaster and inadequate infrastructure at the lower, poorer areas of the city, the dirty load of the upstairs surge and flood the downstairs, and people who live there have to deal with it. A window left open carries floodwater inside the poor house as the sewage system overflows. So, the Kims continue living in a space that can sink at any moment. Spending time at the rich house instead of a place like this is an additional incentive to maintain the tricks they play to keep their jobs at the rich house.
On the day of the flood, the Kim family rushes down the city from the rich house to the poor house through a group of staircases which essentially connect both houses. As they move down through the city, precipitation intensifies, the electric poles and cables become more entangled, and the visual language changes, creating a narrative of upstairs-downstairs in the urban scale. The staircase, an explicit symbol of class hierarchy, is used prominently in this scene. Bong refers to this film as his stairway movie (he similarly calls Snowpiercerhis hallway movie).[11] The production designer says: “I’ve never created so many staircases while working on a film.”[12] The hierarchies created by staircases can be observed in the house designs as well. A steep road leads to a locked gate elevated on a few steps, which opens to a private staircase, a climb to the rich house passing the garden. Inside the house, a staircase connects the garage with the living space, another links the ground level to the upper levels, another one leads to the basement, this one narrow and always poorly lit/dark, and finally the concrete staircase attaches the bunker to the basement (this is the staircase that leads to rock bottom in my opinion). All these staircases illustrate the upstairs-downstairs dynamics within the rich house.
Another concept that concerns class discrimination is privacy, or lack of it, in spaces. “But if the rich house feels like an isolated castle, the poor house couldn’t have any privacy, because this gap between rich and poor really draws from [access to] privacy. All the pedestrians and cars passing by had to be able to see inside the poor family’s semi-basement home.”[13] The disparity of private space is obvious: In the living space of the poor house, the family always sits touching knees, they are usually in each other’s personal space, whereas in the rich house every member has their own space and more, they are usually not aware of other members’ locations and even clueless about who actually lives in the house(!).
The class differences between these two houses are further emphasised by the natural light the spaces are exposed to. The only source for natural light in the poor house is a window that faces the street at feet level. In the rich house, daylight is abundant, filling the space from vast glass façades. Bong says: “The poorer you are, the less sunlight you have access to, and that’s just how it is in real life as well: You have a limited access to windows.”[14] To properly take advantage of natural daylight and create the intended effect in the film, the sets were designed and constructed outside.
Use of space is also an interesting element in Parasite. When the Park family goes camping, leaving their new housekeeper (a member of the Kim family) alone in the rich house, the Kims seize the opportunity and settle there. When the Parks are in the house, everything is in its right place, space is orderly, clean, pure and leaves a mental image of pristine lines. As the Kims utilise the space, they leave their belongings everywhere, move the furniture and the objects around carelessly, do not hesitate to leave their marks in the rooms. The difference between user behaviour is immense. The Parks reside in a space that a famous architect meticulously designed and simply exist in it, treat it with the utmost care, minimise personal touches to not contaminate this priceless work of art with puny human interferences and hide away any personal belongings in storage spaces. The Kims however, use the house without pause (as it is, or should be, for the user), marking, staining, touching, moving, in a way allowing themselves to personalise this space.
Finally, I want to talk about the bunker, albeit vaguely. It is a space where the plot of the film unravels, twists and turns. The fictional architect included the bunker in the design, considering a possible North Korean nuclear attack and occupation, a valid concern at the time of construction. The bunker has a hierarchical relationship with the entirety of the rich house. When the architect was the resident, he never needed to nor wanted to use the bunker, to go downstairs. Unless absolutely necessary, going down there might even symbolise a decline in status. It is an idle space, forgotten by the owners of the house, but still, the original housekeeper found ways to utilise(!) this space for other needs. She did that, but how appropriate is the bunker for a user? An underground space where daylight is non-existent, where there is no texture, minimal furniture, a place completely made of concrete and plumbing/utilities, in essence, a space very similar to a prison cell. To what extent is this space designed for emergencies or extraordinary circumstances suitable for daily use? What sort of impact can it have on a regular user? Also, the rich house’s lowest space is the bunker, all the staircases lead here, it is the literal downstairs of the house. The family that the housekeeper serves changes, the housekeepers themselves change, but the situation will not change, the ones downstairs are chained to the ones upstairs, the system dictates it so, the hierarchy cannot be broken down. So the bunker continues to be used. The bunker being concrete makes it both protective and deadly, which may be another point that this downstairs space wants to draw attention to. With a design that is challenging to enter, hidden from vision, including stairs that make it easy to take a tumble, the bunker might be useful to survive a nuclear war, but oh the things that can happen as you go downstairs in a panic to hide, or to act instinctively believing that you are defending yourself (and your status) to stay above it… The bunker is an even lower space than the semi-basement apartment in the poor neighbourhood.
With all these qualities, Parasite uses space and spatial elements tactfully and masterfully to convey its intentions. Besides its use of space, the film concerns itself with social hierarchies and modern people’s existential problems that are inherent to the system. Rather than mere criticism, Parasite functions as a mirror for these phenomena, becomes exponentially more striking in doing so and is one of the best films of the year.
[1] Sims, D. (2019, 15 October). “How Bong Joon-ho Invented the Weird World of Parasite.” The Atlantic.
[2] O’Falt, C. (2019, 29 October). “Building the ‘Parasite’ House: How Bong Joon Ho and His Team Made the Year’s Best Set”. IndieWire.
[3] Mottram, J. (2019, 1 August). “Bong Joon-ho: Parasite Filmmaker.” FilmInk.
[4] “Settings in ‘Parasite’ highlight sharp contrast between rich, poor”. (2019, 5 June). MSN Entertainment.
[5] Chu, L. (2019, 11 October). “Interview: Dissecting the Hidden Motifs of ‘Parasite’ with Director Bong Joon-Ho”. From the Intercom.
[6] “Settings in ‘Parasite’ highlight sharp contrast between rich, poor”. (2019, 5 June). MSN Entertainment.
[7] Taubin, A. (2019, September-October) “A House Divided”. Film Comment.
[8] O’Falt, C. (2019, 29 October). “Building the ‘Parasite’ House: How Bong Joon Ho and His Team Made the Year’s Best Set”. IndieWire.
[9] Jung, E. A. (2019, 14 October). “Let’s Talk About the Ending of Parasite”. Vulture.
[10] Sims, D. (2019, 15 October). “How Bong Joon-ho Invented the weird World of Parasite”. The Atlantic.
[11] Jung, E. A. (2019, 14 October). “Let’s Talk About the Ending of Parasite”. Vulture.
[12] O’Falt, C. (2019, 29 October). “Building the ‘Parasite’ House: How Bong Joon Ho and His Team Made the Year’s Best Set”. IndieWire.
[13] Sims, D. (2019, 15 October). “How Bong Joon-ho Invented the weird World of Parasite”. The Atlantic.
[14] O’Falt, C. (2019, 29 October). “Building the ‘Parasite’ House: How Bong Joon Ho and His Team Made the Year’s Best Set”. IndieWire.