Op-Ed: Why Parasite? Why Now?

By Steffi Shook, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Communication and Media at Manhattanville College

On Sunday, the South Korean film Parasite (2019) made history by being the first non-English film to win Best Picture at The Oscars. Quality “foreign” language film has existed since the first Academy Awards in the 1920s. So why this film, and why now? The answers have a lot to do with South Korea, and a lot to do with us.

South Korean popular culture began sweeping the globe following the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. The South Korean government’s refocus on cultural production following the crisis, aided by a democratic revolution and opening up to foreign products, caused South Korean media to spread quickly across Southeast Asia in the late 1990s. Beginning with K-dramas, one-hour television shows, in countries like Singapore and Taiwan and continuing with the spread of K-pop, Korean film, and celebrity culture in Europe and the Middle East, once the Korean Wave began, there was no stopping its momentum.

The South Korean film industry was also part of this cultural explosion.

Screen quotas and eased censorship allowed the industry to grow domestically – leading to a national cinema mirroring the quality of Hollywood but remaining uniquely Korean, influenced by the country’s ancient and tumultuous history. Themes of division, brotherhood, and trauma characterize many of the late 90s/early 2000s films that worked to define the industry. Korean film broke onto the international stage largely thanks to the art film circuit, most notably when Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy (2004) won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival.

So, South Korea has been churning out quality, internationally successful cinema for decades. What is it about Parasite (2019) that made The Academy take notice? A lot of it has to do with director Bong Joon-ho. As a filmmaker, Bong has always sophistically straddled the line between popular film and arthouse cinema. His monster thriller The Host (2006) is an example of a movie that both filled theater seats and made critics take note. He has also crafted films with English-speakers in mind as with his English-language film Snowpiercer (2013).

But why this film and why 2020? Surely other non-English films were also worthy of the ultimate Oscar title in previous years. To answer that question, we must look at the present state of the U.S.

In 2020 America, we face a divided nation. Nazis openly march the streets, domestic terrorism is a threat, and politicians regularly engage in hateful rhetoric. Many of our major crises are domestic, and foreign-language film allows us to look outward, not for escapism, but clarity.

Class discrimination is most definitely not a uniquely South Korean problem, and plenty of previous Best Picture winners have focused on issues outside the United States, but always in our own vernacular. As American audiences, we rarely have to worry about the complex and messy art of translation —the nuances of communication that cannot be faithfully transferred from one sign system to another. When native speakers watch an English-language film, they can take these nuances for granted.

Non-English film “others” us in a way unfamiliar to many Americans. It offers a new perspective where we are listeners and not speakers. Maybe that’s what we need in 2020 America, an opportunity to listen. For the majority of our country’s history, “foreignness” has largely been framed as a threat to our way of doing things. Maybe it’s comforting to acknowledge that there are other, valid ways of being in the world—other complex societies, with histories, social dynamics, and shared global problems. The Oscars awarding a non-English film, reminds us, gently, that there is more out there. As our eyes adjust to read small print on the bottom of a screen, we gain perspective about our place in the global neighborhood.