2020 / Volume 1 / Issue 1

E p o c h é

Features

BACHELARD AND BONG

JOON-HO?S PARASITE
By Mihnea Avram
DIE HIPPIE, DIE
By Mihai Antonov
 BACHELARD?S ROOF-CELLAR
POLARITY IN BONG JOON-HO?S
PARASITE
By Avr am M ihnea
(Disclaimer: a bit spoilery.)
In La Poétique de l'Espace, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard combines the method of
phenomenology in architecture and the psychoanalysis of psychiatrist Carl Jung to analyze the
personal and emotional responses to buildings, in life or poetic works, urging architects to base
their work on the experiences it will engender rather than on abstract rationales that may or
may not affect viewers and users of architecture.
Considering the House as a ?body of images
that gives humanity proofs or illusions of
stability?, Bachelard proposes two main
connecting themes; the verticality of the
House being, appealing to the consciousness
of verticality of the human being, the
concentration of the House being, appealing
to the centrality of the human being. Using
examples, he made these themes
recognizable in a psychological nature. Thus
the polarity of the cellar and the roof gives
birth to verticality; the rationality of the roof
opposes the irrationality of the cellar. As the
innate raison d'être of the roof is to give
mankind shelter (?We understand the slope
of the roof.? ?... the slope of the roof is the
surrest indication of the climate.? says
Bachelard), giving thoughts a clarity of
comprehension and a participation to the
solid geometry of the carpenter, the cellar is
first and foremost ?the dark entity of the
house, the one that partakes of subterranean
forces?.
Parasite can be split in three distinct parts,
using the levels of the House in which the
Ki-taek family operates as a unit. Starting out
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in their shabby semi-basement apartment,
where they?re trying to make ends meet, can
be takes as a Purgatory of sorts, a
hebephrenic frenzy of folding pizza boxes
for money and leeching Wi-Fi from
neighbors; the family lives between the
promise of homelessness as a representation
of societal exclusion and society itself as an
entity. If we imprint psychological values to
the roof and the cellar, conscious and
subconscious, the semi-basement takes the
form of sleep, waiting, the quiescent mind, a
kind of inert life. A sort of Divine Reverie
from which free will was born.
The second part is the infiltration of the
family into the home of the Parks. Ki-Woo,
the Son, becomes the new English tutor of
the Park daughter; by a system of
recommendations, the whole Ki-taek family
migrates in the life of the wealthy Park
family. The Daughter, Ki-jung, is hired as a
art therapist for the Park son; Kim, the
Father, becomes a driver and Chung-sook,
the Mother, a housekeeper. We notice in this
second part the emphasis on the top floor of
the modern house, which takes the place of
the roof in Bachelard?s theory. Both the Park
children receive tutoring in their rooms and
the parents express their relationship; a
narrative representation of the conscious
mind. So, as Jung would put it ?the sole
purpose of human existence is to kindle a
light in the darkness of mere being?, then we
could consider this a chance for the Ki-taek
family to ascend their inert life towards the
light of consciousness, abstracting their
malign reasons, by ways of language
(English tutoring) and art (art therapy). Since
they already have these abilities to teach
others, we can consider that all people have
the means to reach consciousness.
The plot twist, masterfully done by Joon-ho
Bong, is the invasion by the
subconsciousness on the waking life and
rationality, the intrusion of the chaos of the
cellar on the order of the top floor/roof. The
four main characters react different to this,
and suffer different outcomes based on their
actions in the face of the unknown. As per
Jung?s theories, the ?prudent man? instead of
facing the cellar (the unconscious mind)
seeks alibis for his courage in the attic. In the
attic, fears are easily rationalized, whereas in
the cellar even for a more courageous man
than the one Jung mentions, rationalization is
less and less rapid and clear. In the attic we
can face fears in the light of day, whereas in
the cellar darkness prevails day and night,
and even if we carry a lighted candle,
shadows engulf us from every side. Thus
?the cellar becomes buried madness,
walled-in tragedy?, as Bachelard poignantly
puts it. Certainly, this polarity. this clash of
the human mind is amplified by the black
comedy facade that Parasite is presented in.
 DIE HIPPIE, DIE
By M ihai Antonov
Despite the popular and influential depiction in Coen brothers' Hail,
Caesar!, Hollywood has usually nurtured a center-right attitude, from
its beginnings and up to the present. This is hardly surprising,
considering the vast concentration of wealth and glam around the big
studios, but there may also be deeper, more obscure connections
between filmmaking and conservative ideology.
On one hand, most great directors have the tendency to fully control,
auctorially, like Renaissance princes, all the stages of the process that
leads from the choice of a script to the film as a finished product. On
the other, there is an overwhelming proclivity for classic, old tropes;
often, these cliches have no relevance or connection to the real world
of the moment of the film's emergence: the Bible, the Ancient Rome,
the Victorian era, the Wild West, the Nazis, the Mafia of the 1920s, the
Mafia of the 1950s, the Mafia of the 2000s (which probably no longer
exists as such), etc. From an artistic point of view, Hollywood exists in
its own parallel world, which has more to do with its own tradition
(already a century old) than to the real world. One cannot shake the
feeling that it uses reality only as a pretext for its own, self-generated
and self-generative mythology. This however doesn't bother me.
David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, the most innovative American
directors of the 1980s and 1990s, respectively, are obsessed with
classical iconography, situations, characters, confrontations, and they
often make direct references to classical films. So does Paul Thomas
Anderson, whose There Will Be Blood is usually considered the best
post-2000 cinematic creation.
Someone (was it Engels?) said of Balzac that although he set out to
bury the bourgeoisie and glorify the church and the aristocrats, he was
too good of a writer, so his great novels contain the exact opposite
message. Contemporary Hollywood has a similar problem, but, unlike
Balzac, the cause is (to a certain extent) a lack of brilliance. No matter
what its creatures declare in various interviews, ceremonies and press
conferences, the films, with a will of their own, are asserting the
opposite: the American film industry is now shipwrecked in the rigid
mythologies of Lucas, Marvel and DC Comics. This is of course sad,
but hardly surprising since Hollywood has been spiraling towards this
kind of singularity since the very beginning; the 1970s and 1990s were
only a partial exception.
Notes: fir st star , second star .
Quentin Tarantino's Obscenely Regressive Vision of the Sixties in
"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" is the title (which summarises the
content quite well) of Richard Brody's review in the New Yorker. It is
said that this narrative, which became quite widespread, created bad
optics for the film, and cost Tarantino the 2020 Oscar. This is only half
true. After all, Tarantino is an offspring of the New Hollywood, which
started around 1971 with Friedkin, Scorsese and De Palma, rather than
the old one. The only authentically conservative feature in his films
(including Once Upon a Time ...) is the contempt for what we might
call, oversimplifying, "hippies". This contempt is the mantra of the
entire generation X, expressed, cinematically and otherwise, in the
most varied, subtle or direct ways. It seems to have caught onto the
next generations - in recent years it was acquired by generation Z in
the more general form of "OK Boomer". What is more representative
for boomers if not Woodstock, pop mystique and, yes, the hippie
culture? Other famous Gen-Xers, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, offered
perhaps the clearest ironic condemnation of the hippie mentality in the
anthological South Park episode of 2005, which gives the name of this
text.
Putting, for a moment, surrealism and transcendental meditation aside,
David Lynch made in 1999 his most human, most honest film, The
Straight Story (again, the title is a good summary of the content). But
Lynch?s most direct attack on the enthusiastic naiveté of (mostly male)
adolescents, and on the beat and hippie movements of the 1950s and
1970s is his last film, Twin Peaks: The Return. (The 2017 series is, in
fact, a film of more than 10 hours, considered as such by the Cahiers
du cinéma; they named it the Best Film of the Last Decade), Inspired
in part by Kafka's The Hunter Gracchus* , Lynch creates here the
extraordinary, symbolic character, Wally Brando* * , whose name is an
obvious reference to both Marlon Brando and his 1953 film The Wild
One. The Wild One was a possible founding moment (in pop culture)
of the neo-romantic archetype of the rebel with a disobedient soul, in
search of his true self, Goethe?s Werther in a leather jacket, riding his
motorcycle on the open roads of America. In Lynch?s interpretation,
besides the disturbing (conservative) panoply of spirits of Good and
Evil, psychopaths, mobsters and honest people, Brando's little clone,
framed by the two vaguely retarded parents, produces a crushing comic
effect.
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