“As in the beginning, I belong to the front, and you belong to the Tail…,” an authoritarian figure states as if reading from the Bible. “Know your place. Keep your place.” The passengers at the back of the train in Snowpiercer revolt against this notion, much like the lowly Kim family in Parasite.
Both Snowpiercer and Parasite literalize the eternal battle between rich vs. poor, haves vs. have-nots, and weaponize the hope that the powerless will rise up against the powerful. But on the global stage of capitalism, neither set of protagonists rage against the machine so much as demonstrate the well-oiled system that makes the rich richer and keeps poor people down.
Bong Joon Ho’s films each deal with class division in some way. In The Host, a family-owned food stand can barely stand up to the real monster: the occupying American regime. In Memories of Murder and Mother, sons with learning disabilities from impoverished families become obvious scapegoats to satisfy the masses. In Okja, a farm girl reckons with the mega meat industry, while Bong’s latest, Mickey 17, deals with the expendable working class.
The class struggle is most overt in Snowpiercer and Parasite where it serves as the central tension and conflict. In an interview with The Talks, Bong says that he came up with the idea for the latter film while working on the former. Although the two are in different genres — Snowpiercer being a dystopian sci-fi and Parasite a domestic thriller — both movies confront the zero-sum game of capitalism.
“We are all aware of this gap between rich and poor, but what is fundamentally even more frightening is the fear that this won’t be resolved in the future,” Bong says in the same interview.
Snowpiercer realizes that frightening vision in a frozen wasteland of our making. World leaders launched a chemical into the atmosphere to combat the man-made disaster of global warming, but it overcorrected, extinguishing life on Earth and ushering in a new Ice Age. The last vestiges of humanity have taken shelter aboard the Snowpiercer, a perpetually moving train that’s also a self-sustaining ecosystem. Though it’s no Noah’s Ark; it’s a caste system on wheels. Those at the front end of the train enjoy a luxurious lifestyle that those at the tail end do not.
Spacious and pristine, the Front offers the services and amenities you’d find at a high-end hotel. By contrast, the Tail is grimy, filthy, and teeming with passengers in their squalor. Many of them suffer from nutritional neglect, and the clothes they wear are the same rags they had on when they boarded 17 years ago. Thus, the resources afforded to the Front comes at the cost of depriving the Tail. This is by design. The Front enjoys steaks and saunas, while the Tail eats protein blocks made of bugs. Curtis (Chris Evans) and his tail-end cohort stage an uprising to unseat the powers that be at the front. They believe that by taking the engine, they can change the way of the world.
The class warfare in Parasite proves to be less an outright revolt than a heist job, or a quieter war waged with manners and pleasantries. The film opens with the Kim family living in a cramped semi-basement that may as well be the tail section of Seoul. Neither parents nor children stand fully upright in their sewer-level home, and their viewfront window is no wider than a storm drain. Their lot in life literally equates to a public restroom for drunks at night. Further dwarfed by the surrounding buildings, the Kims enjoy nary a hint of sky.
The downtrodden Kims struggle to put jobs between them, also by design. Because higher education and the job market did not provide a land of opportunity for all, rather a free-for-all where everybody is overqualified and unemployed. In the movie, characters talk about a real-life instance of 500 college graduates lining up to apply for a single open position. What was supposed to be the great equalizer instead became another economic hardship locking people in place. While Parasite may not be an outright dystopia, it is on the verge of one. It paints a world where equal opportunity has gone extinct and the climb up the economic ladder yields a steep dropoff.
With the help of a family friend, they find a wealthy cash cow in the Park family. Their son Kevin (Choi Woo-shik) poses as an English tutor for the Parks’ daughter, who then deceives the mother, Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), into hiring his sister Jessica (Park So-dam) as an “art therapist.” One by one, the Kims grift their way into the Park estate.
The Parks live on the upper crust of Seoul — an entirely different planet really where there’s nothing but sky, and clouds and angels could easily serve as lawn decor. The inside of their palace goes beyond a home for four; it’s a minimalist art piece furnished with spaciousness. Bong emphasizes space as a key luxury of the rich in both Parasite and Snowpiercer. Beyond just square footage, the rich boast a proximity from those beneath them making those like the Parks blissfully out of touch from the real world, and breathtakingly ignorant of anyone who isn’t them.
When Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton) addresses the Tail in Snowpiercer about their preordained position on the train, it draws a clear battle line between the classes: “A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot.”
“When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed.”
Neither Mason nor the train’s conductor, Wilford (Ed Harris), plead for the Tail’s loyal sacrifice; the armed guards at their disposal enforce their rule. Those at the Tail are made to be the foot because the Front makes it so — the many at the mercy of the few.
The Tail enlist the help of one Namgoong (Song Kang-ho), a security specialist who hotwires each gate, allowing them to move up the hierarchy albeit with obstacles of armed resistance. Along the way, they encounter other faithful servants of the train. From time to time, the Front pulls those from the Tail who have skills of interest. Early on in the movie, the armed guards request a violinist, and later, two children. When the violinist later appears out of his rags, he’s virtually unrecognizable in a suit and tie. The Front grants passengers forward mobility through the train, not to partake in the riches, but to dutifully serve. This social progress, however, is an illusion. They are all lateral and stationary on a train, doing the same laps around the world.
The Kims mistake the illusion for the real thing. Having conned their way into highly paid domestic jobs, they fool themselves into thinking they’re rich too. They conspire to have the Parks’ chauffeur fired in order to bring their father, Mr. Kim, into the con, also played by Song Kang-ho. The final ploy to bring in their mother, Mrs. Kim (Jang Hye-jin), leads to the firing of the Parks’ longtime housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun). Despite their improved income, their status in society hasn’t changed. Back at their subterranean home, they continue to deal with the same drunks pissing outside their window.
The class warfare that unfolds in Parasite is not poor vs. rich, but poor vs. poor. While the Parks are away, Moon-gwang returns to the estate and reveals to Mrs. Kim that she’s been sheltering her husband in the Parks’ secret basement from greedy loan sharks. They, the Ohs, become the third family leeching off the wealthy mountaintop.
Moon-gwang proceeds to beg Mrs. Kim for mercy by citing their shared economic status: “Sis, as fellow members of the needy…” The sibling relation isn’t entirely out of line. Moon-gwang’s husband took out loans to cash in on a Taiwanese cake shop craze that eventually went bust in South Korea. Mr. Kim invested in a similar shop that went the same way.
Instead of recognizing their fellow man, Mrs. Kim is offended by their attempt to relate at all. Immediately afterward, Mrs. Park uses “sis” in their conversation and she’s subservient to the approval. Rather than acknowledging her basement peers, Mrs. Kim adopts the class consciousness of the rich: in order to be rich, someone else has to be poor.
The Kims turn on their impoverished brothers and sisters, whereas the Tail succeed in their uprising because they have solidarity. Towards the end of the movie, however, we learn that the Tail wasn’t always unified in their struggle. Curtis reveals to Namgoong that after climbing aboard the train, they were pitted against each other: “Wilford’s soldiers came and they took everything. A thousand people in an iron box. No food, no water. After a month, we ate the weak.”
Similarly, instead of eating the rich, the Kims and the Ohs in Parasite eat each other. The Kims’ initial infiltration of the household was played for comedic satire — a fight among the poor and powerless as horrific as the cannibal revelation in Snowpiercer. Moreover, as the Kims and Ohs clamour for each other’s throats, it looks like the massacre that took place in the Tail section.
Curtis, for all of his sins, finds the path to redemption. Once the Kims kick the Ohs down the ladder, they’ve crossed the line for good. Bong punctuates their moral downfall by showing us the literal climb it takes to get to the Parks’ estate from the Kims’ underground hole — a steep downward trod withheld for this moment. Nature, too, seems to mourn or retaliate against the Kims by sending a flood that decimates their basement home, a biblical reminder of their place. Nature is its own equalizer. The Kims deal with their apartment flooding, meanwhile the same storm serves as a camping vacation for the Parks’ son in their backyard.
Mr. and Mrs. Park may not notice the Kim family resemblance, but they’re not naïve. The Parks draw battle lines, too, between upstairs and downstairs. Mr. Park complains to his wife about Mr. Kim’s smell, a damp odour that “people who ride the subway” have. No matter how many times Mrs. Park calls Mrs. Kim “sis,” or how pleasantly Mr. Park speaks to Mr. Kim man to man, the Parks will never regard the Kims as equals.
“They are rich but still nice,” Mr. Kim says of his employer, to which Mrs. Kim corrects: “They are nice because they are rich.”
The Parks’ niceties and back-patting in the end are just passive conditioning to bring the Kims to heel, and further, to exploit the fruits of their labour. Kevin and the Parks’ daughter begin dating, and he cares for her better than her parents, Jessica has become a second sister to their son, Mrs. Kim works as a 24/7 maid, and Mr. Kim’s chauffeuring includes being a personal bag lady. The Parks even got the Kims to take out their dirty laundry without asking. Mrs. Park may have fired Moon-gwang, but the Kims dispose of her and her husband.
The eventual truth eats at Mr. Kim as the Parks bid them to serve on the weekend unannounced by dangling a carrot of double the pay. The Kims didn’t fight to become rich. They fought for the privilege to be the help, trading places with the Ohs.
Curtis also learns the bitter truth when he finally reaches the front of the train: Wilford planned the Tail’s revolution from the start. He saw Curtis’ bloody rebellion as a gear in a larger machine meant to reduce the train’s population like a round of mass layoffs, establishing greater control over the food and water supply, and thereby resetting the hierarchy.
“The Front and the Tail are supposed to work together,” the conductor says, like fellow accomplices rather than nemeses.
Wealth is no longer absolute in the final stages of capitalism; it’s also relative. In the aquarium car, the Tail eats sushi for the first time. Minister Mason points out that they only serve sushi twice a year. When Tanya (Octavia Spencer) asks why there’s not enough, Mason explains: “Enough is not the criterion. Balance. The number of individual units must be very closely, precisely, controlled in order to maintain the proper sustainable balance.”
If everyone on the train had their share, then no one gains relatively. This unequal distribution then isn’t a glitch in the system. It’s the whole point.
Curtis inadvertently served to keep that balance. His journey is not a rags to riches story that changes the paradigm, but a maintaining of the status quo. Neither he nor the two children pulled earlier in the movie are exempt from servicing an oppressive system that demands their blood, sweat, and tears. The kids are revealed to be human replacement parts for the train’s engine, a ghastly punchline of child labour.
Both films show how the cycle self-sustains like a snake eating its own tail, or a train going round and round with no borders or boundaries. The rich and the poor become locked in an eternal struggle with each other. The poor want to be rich, but the rich need the labour of the poor, and for the poor to stay poor — an unfair social strata where one’s gain demands the other’s loss. Snowpiercer may be set in a fictional scenario, but imagining a world free from the shackles of capitalism is too far-fetched for Bong. That class inequality would survive at the end of all things doesn’t feel like hyperbole, but an inevitability so long as humans are around to climb on top of each other.
Song Kang-ho’s character in Parasite thinks he can game this zero-sum. Put to heel for so long, Mr. Kim sees no way out except through the economic ladder, because he’s been climbing his entire life. In Snowpiercer, Kang-ho’s Namgoong knows no fix exists — the system is as working as intended — instead, the real revolution is to destroy it wholesale.
If there’s any hope for the future, it’s found in Snowpiercer when Curtis and Namgoong decide to blow up the world. Where Parasite falls back down to reality, Snowpiercer’s sci-fi dystopia becomes a sci-fi fantasy in its final minutes. Two souls emerge as the only survivors of the train crash, an Adam and Eve embarking on a snowglobe that may thaw out to reveal a new Eden. Too young and too few to know about the Front and the Tail, maybe their generation can build a world free from the structures that keep us down.
Or, with a glimpse of a polar bear in the final frame, maybe nature will finally put us in our place six feet under.
