Crossing the Line: Habitus and Misrecognition in Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite

K.T. Jamieson analyzes the dynamics of class in Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory. Contains spoilers. 

At the 92nd Annual Academy Awards, South Korea received its first-ever best director award for Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite. Partisan observers in the Tarantino (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Todd Philips (Joker), and Sam Mendes (1917) camps squabbled online over which was snubbed more, although Mendes absolutely deserved it the least.¹ Besides this was the usual gnashing of teeth from boomer uncles on social media (including the boomer-in-chief) over the fact that it’s a foreign film with subtitles since reading is the last thing they want to do at the Imax. And Bong’s brief acceptance speech wasn’t even in English, but in some strange moon language which gave them horrible flashbacks to the time their hip nephew made them order bibimbap from a food truck.

Yet in that minute-and-a-half, Bong thanked no fewer than four American directors and referenced a fifth (Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre); in particular, he referenced Scorcese and his admonition that ‘the personal is the most creative’. Was this ironic self-effacement? Or is it a tacit admission that, like the genetically-modified pigs in Okja, everything in cinema starts and ends in America?

The truth is that this award was a long time coming. Since The Host, all of Bong’s major releases have featured English-language roles, most prominently in 2013’s Snowpiercer, which raked in a respectable combined profit (box office and VOD) of more than 10 million dollars in the US.² 2017’s Okja was also mostly in English and distributed directly by Netflix, a fact that was roundly booed during its Cannes premiere. As Steven Yeun’s character, a bumbling animal-rights activist, quips in Okja: translation is sacred.

Parasite, however, dispenses with literal translation, as it is entirely in Korean. Yet there is still something in the nature of translation when it comes to communicating the struggles and tribulations of Korean class society to American audiences who have barely begun to realize they live in a (class) society at all. How, as Bong quotes from Scorcese, can the personal be creative, if the personal is stamped by particular conditions, penned within local and national boundaries? A minor factor that explains Bong’s American success is his style, which is best summarized as unobtrusive. His shots are medium-length, his compositions and framing are merely adequate, his dialogue is witty but not challenging; there is nothing at a formal level that approaches the inaccessibility of art film, which American moviegoers have come to associate with foreign imports. But this is overshadowed as an explanation by the blunt reality that the laws of motion which dominate our working lives, that is, our actual lives, are already universal in the form of value. As Bong puts it pithily:

“I tried to express a sentiment specific to Korean culture, [but] all the responses from different audiences were pretty much the same. Essentially, we all live in the same country, called Capitalism.”

Yet this statement can also be read ironically, as a confession of frustration. Given that class occupies its foreground, nobody deserves points for recognizing that Parasite is in some way about capitalism. Yet this doesn’t stop legions of hacks, mostly American, hailing this insight with all the naive enthusiasm of a child with a cereal box decoder ring.

The most obnoxious of them are, of course, the right-wing, who treat the film’s anti-capitalism with more vulgarity than the most online anti-revisionist. One sullenly complains that it depicts “seething hatred among the poor for the evil, haughty and surely stupid rich”, a contradiction since “South Korea is a champion importer” whose rising tide has lifted all boats. Equally clueless and absurd is their insistence that the ending is supposed to be a cathartic wrap-up in a morality play, in which individual acts of good and evil are tallied and totaled on both sides: “I didn’t find the killing by the poor father of the rich one in Parasite at all justified; the rich folks there seemed mostly morally blameless, while the poor ones commit many wrongs”, says one idiot cited by National Review.

The left is often only slightly better. A recent Jacobin review does laudably provide context specific to the Korean struggle but lamely concludes, as all Jacobin articles do, that it’s about income inequality and neoliberalism. From the decolonization perspective is a better, but still narrowly didactic, interpretation through the lens of military occupation and repressed indigeneity. The liberal rag The Nation, meanwhile, complains that the film is not didactic enough, taking us “not to the ledge of class war but to a shrug over inequality”, laughably asserting that Bong is not bothered by poverty but merely wants “our social arrangements to feel a bit kinder”.

Faced with this discourse, it is tempting to focus instead on Bong’s craft, stripped down to its scaffolding, where the political can be ignored. There is much to admire here: his Rube Goldberg-esque plot construction, which ratchets the tension as it grows more sprawling, complex, and prone to failure (rivaling here another contemporary release, Uncut Gems); his ability to balance wit with violence, like a humbler and less annoying Tarantino; the compelling rhymes and parallels inserted into every layer, which reward multiple viewings. After all, like all good art, there are many threads to pull on.

But despite all the reviews, the ceaseless analysis, and the decoder-critics, there are still some threads to pull on as regards class and capitalism. And while Bong himself freely admits that Parasite reflects ‘almost a pessimistic reality’, his protagonists do retain a stubborn sense of agency. They are not doomed insects trapped in amber, caught within static structures beyond their control. We can see that at multiple junctures, things could have gone differently; but we also see that they, the Kim family, are keenly perceptive of the social world around them. While they do not have anything resembling class consciousness, they can navigate the cultural emanations of class like a web, manipulating them to ensnare and feed off the more fortunate, and this too is an act of resistance (though not a revolution). They instinctively sense how expression, consumption and aesthetic preference exhibit a classification that can be mimicked. This suggests a practical, if semi-conscious, awareness on their part that the distinction of taste and cultural judgment sprouts, in the last instance, from the division of labor. In other words, they grasp what Pierre Bourdieu, French social theorist, calls the ‘reality of the representation’ and the ‘objectivity of the subjective’. For Bourdieu, ‘class is defined as much by its being-perceived and by its being, by its consumption … as much as by its position in the relations of production’³ without denying the obvious link between the two.  

If the Kims are practical Bourdieuians, then turning to the man himself and his theories may allow us to squeeze further insights from an already over-analyzed film. Bourdieu is best-known for his landmark 1979 investigation of French social attitudes, translated into English as Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Here he attempts, through a combination of data-driven inference and theoretical reflection, to trace the manner in which aesthetic preferences both shape and are shaped by class position, in a kind of feedback loop. Mobility within a class structure, Bourdieu believes, is not a simple matter of relation to the means of production; it is also a relation to consumption, and what one consumes becomes part of the cost of reproducing one’s class, as well as a signal of that class to others.

Important to this work are the concepts of habitus, misrecognition, and field. Habitus is the obligate reproduction of the day-to-day in which the “work of acquisition is work on oneself”.⁴ Bourdieu, influenced by Heidegger, sees habitus as a ‘mode of being’ localized to a certain class. However, this mode of being is not authentic but is rather a form of misrecognition, a reification of purely mental attitudes. It systematically produces a class lifestyle, the ingrained and habitual practices of those inhabiting a given role within class society, but also a principle of definition-by-difference. Each habitus generates its own identity through its relation to other practices, and Bourdieu is especially interested in aesthetic preferences and cultural consumption as the arena in which the habitus negotiates its position relative to others. Bourdieu terms this competitive setting a ‘field’, as in ‘the field of cultural reproduction’, and within each field there are agents (and their habitus) engaged in a struggle for dominance of position.   

Within the field of cultural reproduction, signaled preferences become channels through which cultural capital is delivered as real capital. In his words, practices of a habitus become “sign-systems that are socially qualified … the dialectic of conditions and habitus is the basis of an alchemy which transforms the distribution of capital … into a … distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized.”⁵ With a bit of ‘translation’ into the Korean context, and an update for the 21st century, the insights and conclusions of this study remain applicable. Of course, because Parasite is a work of fiction, and especially because of Bong’s magical realism there is a hyper-reality in its expression, but for this same reason, it is more obvious.

Although it is often assumed that the Kims and the Parks are straightforwardly representative of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, the picture is more complicated.

The Kim family forms part of the proletariat, of course, but more specifically they are that fraction of the proletariat which struggles to find a buyer of their labor power – the reserve army of labor (or, if this condition persists, surplus population). This is not the first time Bong has focused on this subclass, which is becoming increasingly relevant as core economies automate productive labor, or simply shift it from north to south, to subcontractors and subsidiaries in the great shell game of the world market, as John Smith details in his excellent work Imperialism in the 21st Century. The protagonists of 2013’s Snowpiercer are redundant and immiserated stowaways in the rear car of an autonomous train, a clear metaphor for automation anxieties. However, just as full automation is impossible under capitalism, this train secretly relies on the manual labor of the kidnapped children of these lumpen passengers.

The Kims – mom, dad, son, and daughter – are all unemployed, having to ‘borrow’ everything from wifi hotspots to fumigation. Ki-taek, the father, had a string of valet jobs for several failed small restaurants, a reminder that the small ownership class is being squeezed out by monopolization, sweeping their employees into a common misery. The son, Ki-Woo, aspires to become a college graduate, having taken – and presumably failed – college entrance exams four times. The South Korean university system, as in America, acts like a pachinko machine in which class position is shuffled around until, for the lucky ones, a promise of acceptance into higher ranks is granted in the form of certification. In fact, for most it is also a promise of future exploitation, to be paid for in the form of present domination by creditors who now lean on students to repay their loans as quickly as possible.

As in America, cast-off proletarians survive by resorting to gig jobs. They scrape together a few bucks by folding pizza boxes, and when a supervisor comes to collect, Ki-Woo manipulates her into providing him with another employee’s job, setting the stage for the intra-class conflict later in the film. However, he never takes it – Ki-Woo’s graduate friend, Min, comes to offer another gig job, tutoring the high school daughter of a wealthy family – the Parks – whom he plans to marry once she enters college. This is the first domino in the Kims’ doomed chameleon strategy to infiltrate and take over the domestic functions of the Park family.

The Park family is wealthy, but not bourgeois in the full sense. They represent, rather, a new managerial class aligned with so-called information capital, a form of intellectual rent collected on patents and technology skills. The captains of these firms like to think of themselves as entrepreneurs ‘disrupting’ various industries, in so doing creating the conditions of unemployment and omnipresent gig work which the Kim family lives under. The patriarch of the Park family, Dong-ik, is a well-off executive at one of these firms. In a brief scene we glimpse an award he received for ‘Best Use of Emerging/New Technology’ (granted by one Kevin Wiltshire whose Anglo name is no coincidence – in fact, ‘Kevin’ is the name Ki-Woo assumes as the Park’s tutor). Next to it is an article clipping which reveals that Dong-ik, credited as ‘Nathan’, is the inventor of a ‘hybrid module map’ which is a kind of virtual reality navigation system for the city of New York. Mrs. Park, Yeon-gyo, is a useless appendage of the household, described as ‘simple’ and unable to clean, cook, or even look after the children. Her son Da-song is a kind of pampered indigo child whom Yeon-gyo is convinced harbors brilliant talents, while daughter Da-hye is mostly ignored and left alone.

Additionally, there is the Parks’ erstwhile housekeeper, Moon-gwang, and her husband Geun-sae. When Moon-gwang returns while the Park family is on a camping trip, we find she has been secretly providing for her husband Geun-sae, who has secluded himself in an underground emergency bunker in order to avoid loan sharks. It turns out that these debts were incurred after his cake shop went bankrupt, the same cake shop which employed Ki-taek as a valet. We can say that their sadistic rage toward the Kims reflects feelings of stolen legitimacy. Moon-gwang truly was a professional housekeeper, having served two prestigious families, and never ‘crossed the line’ in Dong-ik’s words. Though literally an ‘underground man’, Geun-sae never ceases to identify with the Park family, and especially Dong-ik. This adoration, like the messages he blinks in morse code with electrical switches, is always one-way. His split personality, self-defeating and suppliant, yet capable of explosive cruelty, is classically fascist – the mindset of the defeated and deranked middle class.

Returning to Bourdieu, we find that one way in which cultural capital is transformed into material profits is through what he calls the ‘institutionalizing’ of cultural capital. This happens when cultural capital becomes embodied in the form of qualifications, such as a university degree; these qualifications entitle the bearer to exchange it for monetary value, but their exact value fluctuates with changing conditions. If there is a glut of certifications, particularly for fields which are out-of-sync with structural allocations of labor, such as an overwhelming increase of humanities graduates, they become devalued. Not only this, but before they can be exchanged, the bearer must ‘prove’ and legitimate their value. This phenomenon is recognized in the competition for prestige among universities. In South Korea, the state’s close relationship with the bourgeoisie of countries in the Western core, particularly America, means that degrees from universities in these countries embody a higher relative cultural capital. Relatedly, proficiency in the English language, and familiarity with the customs and culture of English-speaking Western nations, is a way of ‘proving’ the value of this institutionalized cultural capital.

Despite their friendship, Ki-woo’s relation to his graduate friend Min is not one of peerage, but of misrecognized subordination and supplication. It is Min, not Ki-woo, who feels authorized to shoo a drunk pissing next to the Kims’ apartment (symbolically situated below street level). Ki-woo pleads helplessly with the drunk, but Min directly addresses him as an ‘asshole’ and a ‘punk’, shoving him out of the way and prompting Ki-woo’s father to remark that college students ‘have a real vigor to them’. It is Min who provides Ki-woo with his tutoring gig, and it is significant that the subject is English.

It is also Min who gifts the Kim family with the aptly-named scholar’s rock, which symbolizes the dependency of the Kim family – their survival, like that of all proletarians without class consciousness, is their oppression. When Ki-woo prepares for his interview ‘earned’ by lowering the value of another pizza employee in the eyes of a supervisor, his mom is shown polishing this same scholar’s rock. He describes the stone as ‘clinging’ to him, following him, and once Ki-woo’s position with the Park family is secure, It is wielded as a weapon against Geun-sae, who then turns it against him in a reversal of fortune. After the birthday disaster, when he is no longer able to pose as a graduate, we see the stone for the final time when he returns it to a riverbed.

In order to ‘prove’ their worth to the Park family, Ki-jung not only forges a university degree, but she and Ki-woo forge the social identity, the habitus, of Western-educated Korean PMC. They are now graduates of Western universities – Southern Illinois, Oxford – and assume Anglo names – Kevin, Jessica. ‘Kevin’ tutors English, while ‘Jessica’ poses as an art therapist, camouflaging herself with the pretentious airs of a liberal arts student.

The Kims are not the only bearers of this credentialized cultural capital. As mentioned, the Park father proudly displays his company’s awards on his walls. His company, Another Brick Inc, alludes to the dad-rock staple ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ by Pink Floyd, a protest (albeit cheesy) against rigidly hierarchical British schooling. It may also evoke interchangeability; says Bourdieu: “By conferring institutional recognition on the cultural capital possessed by any given agent, [this] … qualification also makes it possible to compare qualification holders and even to exchange them (by substituting one for another in succession).”⁶

Returning to the scholar’s rock, we can also interpret this object as symbolizing what Bourdieu calls objectified cultural capital. Because whole persons, with their habitus, are not transmissible as such, their cultural capital attaches to items of consumption – especially cultural goods such as paintings, writings, movies, architecture, and the like. Thus embodied capital becomes objectified capital. This is especially important among buffer classes, such as managers and professionals, and those occupying key positions in social reproduction, such as teachers, therapists, and bureaucrats. The owners of the means of production do not themselves require this cultural capital, having total possession of the real article, but the various classes employed in this production must again ‘prove’ their access to some form of capital in order to be sorted and slotted into the dominant roles within it. This forms what Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production, an arena of class struggle in which “agents wield strengths and obtain profits proportionate to their mastery of this objectified capital, and therefore to the extent of their embodied capital”.⁷

The Kims and the Parks have a starkly contrasting relation to these symbolic objects of cultural capital. Again, we can take the example of the scholar’s rock, which has a dual function. On the one hand, it is a superstitious charm, functioning ideologically within traditional Korean culture to mystify the real conditions of class mobility by appealing to belief in forces of good and bad fortune. This function within folk belief is likely the most familiar to the Kim family, and they generally treat it as such. Yet it is also an art object, a focus for aesthetic contemplation, and as such, it is an object of cultural capital. Sensing this in preparation for his increased status – his adjusted habitus – Ki-woo alludes to this function when he declares it to be ‘so metaphorical!’ He repeats this phrase in the presence of mother Park, Yeon-gyo, when she proudly exhibits her son’s abstract painting.

This demonstrates a growing awareness within Ki-woo of the distinctions which legitimate objects of cultural capital as such. In his study of French attitudes toward culture, Bourdieu observes “the tendency of the most deprived respondents to disguise their ignorance or indifference and to pay homage to the cultural legitimacy which the interviewer possesses, in their eyes”. ⁸The working-class aesthetic is, he says, a dominated aesthetic, but nevertheless one which is “obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics”. If in France the dominant aesthetics is one of Kantian detachment, Bourdieu found that French workers granted a ‘purely verbal recognition’ of objects intended in this way as ‘pure’ art, acknowledging their legitimacy. When presented with photographs, his working-class participants explained them in terms of their intended audience and social use, rather than in the elevated and disinterested language of the upper classes. In other words, they had a practical knack for knowing what cultural objects appealed to whom and why, even when they are the excluded audience.

This bifurcation, an understanding from ‘below’ of what is for those ‘above’, is what enables the Kim family to ‘fake it ‘til they make it’ and assimilate into the Park household. There is nothing but insincere opportunism in Ki-woo’s appreciation of the scholar’s rock, or of the abstract painting. The same can be said of Ki-jung’s reaction when Yeon-gyo describes her son as ‘Basquiat-esque’. When the Kims design a business card for ‘The Care Premium’, a make-believe VIP service, to encourage the Parks to hire Chung-sook as a replacement maid, they know exactly how it should look: austere and minimalist. Yet their bluff is not quite complete. Moon-gwang, the former maid who was passed down like an heirloom from former owner and home designer Namgoong, notices they have no appreciation for the home’s sleek modernist interior, insulting them as ‘neanderthals’. (It is no surprise that Namgoong himself left for Paris).

For their part, the Park family, although undoubtedly wealthy, are not quite in full possession of the dominant aesthetic, due to the cultural effects of imperialism, though their reverence for it is fully sincere. They pepper their conversations with poorly-pronounced English phrases, in much the same way that mangled French passes through the lips of hapless Americans in the presence of those they are eager to impress. Almost all of their bearings on what passes for culture are derived second-hand from Western sources, down to the toys Da-woo plays with; stereotypical Native American accouterments, stamped with a seal of quality – made in the US (not China!). Bourdieu: “The petit-bourgeois … bows, just in case, to everything which looks as if it might be culture and uncritically venerates the traditions of the past. This pure but empty goodwill which, for lack of the guidelines of principles needed to apply it, does not know which way to turn, exposes the petit-bourgeois to cultural allodoxia, that is, all the mistaken identifications and false recognitions which betray the gap between acknowledgment and knowledge.” ⁹ We might add that, in South Korea, the petit-bourgeois bow also to everything Western.

Dong-ik, the Park breadwinner, is indeed a petit-bourgeois in this sense. He is an executive, but not an owner, and his family occupies a strata that is closer to the upper-middle than the very top. His relation to his domestic servants is one of anxiety, fearing that through over-intimacy and impropriety they may blur the boundaries which define them, or in his words ‘crossing the line’. To maintain this distinction, he doubles down on misrecognized differences – that is, those emerging from a kind of cultural false consciousness.

One of these is hygiene and in particular the sense of smell. This assertion of difference is by no means conscious and intentional, any more than turning one’s nose up at a bad scent. Bourdieu writes that “even when it is [not] inspired by the conscious concern to stand aloof from working-class laxity, every petit-bourgeois profession of rigor, every eulogy of the clean, sober and neat, contains a tacit reference to uncleanness, in words or things, to intemperance and improvidence”.¹⁰ Uncleanness has a special valence in South Korea, which has inherited a disdainful association between manual labor and filthiness from its Confucian neighbor. One scholar, in a study of South Korea’s urban middle class, that this association has been termed ‘3-D disease’, the ‘avoidance of manual labor … [because it is] dangerous, dirty and difficult’.¹¹

This explains why Dong-ik’s wife performs almost no household chores, delegating even the simple task of grocery shopping to the Kim family. But it is the association with dirtiness that Bong brings to the foreground. To the Parks, the Kims all have a similar odor, compared to an old radish, a boiled rag, or more revealingly, the ‘special smell’ of those who ride the subway. Of course the Kim apartment is genuinely disgusting, and the Kims recognize it as the ‘semi-basement smell’. But it is not the smell itself which bothers the Parks; it is rather that this smell is a reminder of the Kims’ class origins, one which moreover does not obey boundaries. It ‘crosses the line’, wafting from Ki-taek to Dong-ik in the back seat. When Ki-jung leaves her panties in the back seat, leading Dong-ik to assume that his former chauffeur was having a drug-fueled sexcapade, that too was ‘crossing the line’. He is no puritan, as we can see when he later recreates this scene with his wife. “A young guy’s sex life is his own business”, he says; but why his car, in the back seat, where he sits? As an aside, it is notable that Dong-ik does not assume like most would, that panties left in the back seat of his car – with suspicion of drug involvement no less – might indicate sexual assault. Instead, he is disturbed by the possibility of drug evidence being found in his property, and his driver’s impropriety.

This male chauvinism is also a feature of the relations within the Park household and in particular the disparate treatment of Da-hye and Da-song. All the Park family’s hopes and aspirations are concentrated in Da-song, the wunderkind whose creative genius is midwifed into being by Ki-jung. It is Da-song who gets first dibs on a plate of ram-don, and when he refuses it is offered in order of importance, first to the dad and then to the mom, who finishes it off to Da-hye’s indignation. Da-song’s traumas, not hers, are worth shelling out for Ki-jung’s ‘therapy’, although Da-hye’s loneliness is evident in the alacrity with which she romantically bonds to her tutors. She is left inside the home while Da-song’s elaborate birthday celebration unfolds on the back lawn. Simply put, the family resources – both symbolic and actual capital – are spent on the son, at the expense of the daughter. This limiting, says Bourdieu, is done to ‘conform to the dominant representation of legitimate fertility […] procreation subordinated to the imperatives of social reproduction.’ ¹² In South Korea, as in many Asian societies, there is a systematic preference for the male heir, and one suspects that the Parks would opt for selective abortion if their income did not afford them relative tolerance.

That they do not raise this male heir with tyrannical strictness is also, Bourdieu asserts, a characteristic of the ‘new petit-bourgeoisie’. The Parks are modern enough – that is, liberated enough – to adopt a therapeutic ethic toward Da-song, which ‘credits the child with a good nature which must be accepted as such, with its legitimate pleasure needs’. ¹³ This ethic moreover is a product that supplies the need for a class of specialists, and hence an opportunity for an ersatz ‘art therapist’ like Ki-jung.

Bong’s choice of title has driven the literal-minded to ask who the ‘parasite’ is. It is a silly question, but most are satisfied to name the Kims, the easy and obvious answer. If we assume subjectivist and idealist notions of free will, then this carries with it a kind of moral accusation; if we deny any contingency at all, then the relation between the Kims and the Parks is a permanently inscribed feature of social structures, and we have no right to complain. Bong, given his at least passing familiarity with Marxism, probably does not intend either horn of this false dilemma.

For Bourdieu, the field of cultural production is ‘organized around oppositions which reproduce the structure of the dominant class’, with the polarities dominant/dominated defining the other, unconsciously, through the judgment of taste.¹⁴The outcome of this struggle is a social map for which the division of labor is the territory. To navigate such a map, to organize its signs and symbols, is to also reinforce and invoke the very principle of its navigability. Such is the habitus, which is ‘not only a structuring structure … but a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes’.¹⁵

Thus we can see that the film’s pair of opposites, host/parasite, when placed into this context, are homologous to dominant/dominated. So long as the dominated does not break with misrecognition, and thereby becomes revolutionary, it can only survive and reproduce by defining itself through difference according to the schema already elaborated by the dominant, in this way upholding it. The Parks must find strangers to provide labor for their household economy because avoiding such labor is part of the cost of reproducing their class; thus the host is compelled to provide sites of attachment for their parasites. Neither Yeon-gyo nor Dong-ik provide the meals, the cleaning, the art therapy. Their judgment of taste is transparent to the Kims’ habitus, because it is legitimated by it; hence the host makes itself available to the parasite. So long as it does not ‘cross the line’, it goes unnoticed.

In fact, because both ‘host’ and ‘parasite’, as ‘dominant’ and ‘dominated’, exist in a relationship of interdependency, their struggle tends toward reconciliation. Hence Ti-gaek ends the film not in victory but in repentance and seclusion, while Ki-woo dreams of ransoming his father by becoming a bourgeois. Parasite is neither pessimistic, nor optimistic, but in its own way realistic. As E.P. Thompson writes in The Making of the English Working Class, “Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition”.¹⁶ Complaints that Bong does not demonstrate the possibility of class consciousness are equally as unfounded as those that claim he asserts it too much. It is a clever satire, an absurd fable, but it does not give us answers, nor does it tell us there are none to be found. It only reminds us that we are all players on the field. How to abolish the field altogether is another matter entirely.

 

 

 

 

1. Titling your film 1917 and not setting it during the October Revolution should be considered a form of gaslighting, like naming a Charlie Chaplin biopic after the date of Operation Barbarossa.
2. On the economic performance of Snowpiercer: https://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2014/09/08/what-the-economics-of-snowpiercer-say-about-the-future-of-film/#2ac1b8346bb1
3. Bourdieu, Distinction (Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 1984), pg 483
4. Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital (1986)
5. Bourdieu, Distinction (Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 1984), pg 172
6. Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital (1986)
7. Ibid.
8. Bourdieu, Distinction (Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 19840, pg 318
9. Ibid., pg 321
10. Ibid., pg 274
11. Denise Potrzeba Lett, In Pursuit of Status: The Making of South Korea’s “new” Urban Middle Class (Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 2002),  pg 43
12. Bourdieu, Distinction (Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 1984), pg 338
13. Ibid., pg 368
14. Ibid., pg 469
15. Ibid., pg 170
16. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1966), pg 11