“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 films 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 social class 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 a capitalistic meat industry, while Bong’s latest, Mickey 17, deals with the expendable working class via an endless supply of clones.
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 stated that he came up with the idea for the latter film while working on the former. Although different genres (Snowpiercer being a dystopian sci-fi and Parasite a domestic thriller), both movies confront the growing division and outcome in 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 provides that frightening vision realized in a frozen wasteland of our making—as if capitalism reached peak evolutionary form. 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 circling the globe 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 renders grimy, filthy, and teeming with passengers in their squalor. Many of them show signs of nutritional neglect; the rags they don show signs of the wear and tear expected from 17 years of wear. Thus, the resources afforded to the Front comes at the cost of depriving the Tail. This is by design. The Front enjoys saunas and sushi, while the Tail eats protein blocks made of bugs. Class segregation somehow thrives in the frozen apocalypse. Curtis (Chris Evans) and his tail-end cohort then 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 quiet war fought with manners and back-stabbing. The Kim family lives 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, while 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 underground and down-on-their-luck Kims struggle to put jobs between them, also by design. Because higher education and the free market did not provide a lush 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. Parasite may not be an outright dystopia, but it is on the verge of one. 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 Park’s daughter. Soon after, he 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 doesn’t live like them.
When Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton) addresses the Tail in Snowpiercer, it sparks a revolution better than Captain America himself could: “Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. We must, all of us on this train of life, remain in our allotted station. We must, each of us, occupy our preordained particular position.”
But neither she nor the train’s conductor Wilford (Ed Harris) truly plead for the Tail’s loyal sacrifice. The armed guards at their disposal enforce their rule. Those at the back find themselves there because the Front makes it so — the many at the mercy of the few.
The Tail enlist the help of one Namgoong (Song Sang-ho), a security specialist who hotwires each gate, allowing them forward access. Along with the armed resistance, they encounter other faithful servants as they gradually move up the train’s hierarchy. The interior, too, has shifted from filthy walls to the exposed concrete and piping seen in the hotel staff section.
From time to time, the Front pulls those from the Tail who have particular skills of interest. Early on in the movie, the armed guards request a violinist, and later, two children. The violinist later appears out of his rags and virtually unrecognizable in a suit and tie. Passengers granted forward mobility through the train, not to partake in the riches, but to dutifully serve.
The Kims mistake this as one in the same. Having conned their way into highly paid domestic jobs, they fool themselves into thinking they’re rich too. They conspire to have the Park’s chauffeur fired in order to bring their father Ki-taek into the con, also played by Song Sang-ho. The final ploy to bring in their mother Chung-sook (Jang Hye-jin) leads to the firing of the Park’s longtime housekeeper, Moon-gwang (Lee Jung-eun). Despite their improved income, their ranking in the social strata hasn’t changed. In reality, all they’ve done is line up to be willing servants for the Parks. Back in 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 that she’s been hiding her husband in the basement from greedy loan sharks. They, the Ohs, become the third family leeching off the wealthy mountaintop.
Moon-gwang proceeds to beg Chung-sook for mercy by citing their shared economic status: “Sis, we are fellow needy.” The sibling relation isn’t entirely out of line. Moon-gwang further reveals that her husband took out loans to cash in on a Taiwanese cake shop craze that eventually went bust in South Korea. The Kim patriarch ran a similar shop that went the same way.
Instead of recognizing their fellow man, Chung-sook is offended by their attempt to relate at all. Immediately afterward, the Park matriarch will use “sis” in their conversation and she’s subservient to the approval. Rather than acknowledging her basement peers, Chung-sook 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, though, we later learn that the Tail didn’t always unify in their struggle. Curtis reveals to Namgoong that after climbing aboard the train, they were pitted against each other in a bloody free-for-all: “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.”
Instead of eating the rich, the Kims and the Ohs eat each other. Where the Kims’ infiltration of the household was played for comedic effect, this fight among the poor and powerless cuts like a survival horror movie, more so than the cannibal revelation in Snowpiercer.
Curtis, for all of his sins, is powered by redemption and hope. Once the Kims kick the Ohs down the ladder, they’ve crossed the point of no return. Bong exaggerates the downward slope the Kims must traverse to get back to their subterranean home—a vertical trajectory that he withholds for this moment. Nature, too, seems to mourn or retaliate against the Kims by sending a flood that decimates their basement home, reminding them of their place and where their allegiances should be.
The Kims are not rich. By the end of Parasite, their employer’s approval prevails as the goal over the money or status. Man to man with the Park patriarch, Ki-taek tries to relate to his “brother.” But his master, who may as well be god determining his schedule seven days a week, bids him to serve. All the back-patting and use of kinship terms never intended to welcome the Kims into the Parks’ world, but to bring the Kims to heel. The Parks even got the Kims to take out their dirty laundry without asking. The Park matriarch might’ve fired Moon-gwang, but the Kims dispose of her and her husband.
Curtis learns the truth when he finally reaches the front of the train: Wilford planned the Tail’s revolution all along. “The Front and the Tail are supposed to work together,” the conductor explains to Curtis, as more accomplice than nemesis.
The Front saw Curtis as the essential gear in a plot to greatly reduce the train’s population, thus establishing greater control over the remaining resources, and thereby resetting the hierarchy. Now that he’s the Front, as a proven leader, he will take over Wilford’s place as conductor.
Such is how capitalism self-sustains, like a snake eating its own tail — or a train going round and round. The rich and the poor become locked in a constant struggle with each other based on mutual dependence. The poor want to be rich, but the rich need the labour of the poor, and thus need the poor to stay poor by unequal distribution of wealth, a dehumanizing social strata where one’s gain means the other’s loss. That this class divide would survive at the end of the world doesn’t feel like hyperbole, but an inevitability so long as humans are around.
Song Sang-ho’s character in Parasite thinks he can game this zero-sum. Having been put to heel for so long, Ki-taek sees no other way out except through the economic ladder because the climb encompasses his life. In Snowpiercer, Sang-ho’s Nam knows no fix exists, and that the only engine of change requires the destruction of those structures that reduce human life to numbers on a balance sheet.
If any hope endures, it’s found at the end of Snowpiercer. Curtis rejects the capitalist mantle and the remaining occupants of the Tail choose to blow up the world. More so than Parasite, Snowpiercer accepts that the capitalist structures we institute upon ourselves became the blight killing the earth. That man-made apocalypse is our natural endpoint. We made our bed and so we must lie in it.
Snowpiercer reveals only two children as the only survivors of the train, Adam and Eve on a snowglobe that may thaw out to reveal a new Eden. Too young and too few to know who or what the ruling class is, maybe their generation can build a world free from the structures and monuments 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.
