American Versus Korean Poverty
American Versus Korean Poverty
I talked to Rob Henderson about Parasite, the 2019 South Korean film that won the Oscar for best picture of the year. You can listen to the audio here or watch the video below. There’s a spoiler regarding The Sopranos at about 22:30-23:30 in the podcast (22:00-23:00 in the video), so skip over that if you haven’t seen it. Of course, there are spoilers about Parasite too, like in all our movie and TV reviews.
Someone asked me to do an AI transcription of these things. It turned out terribly, but if you’re interested, here it is. Cost about $17, and we got what we paid for. Don’t rely on it to quote us.
There were two main themes we kept going back to. First, there was the issue of the politics of the movie. Rob and I agree that it’s definitely not a left wing film, although perhaps we think in ways so divorced from how liberals do that others can take a different perspective.
More interesting was how the film portrayed poverty in South Korea versus the US. We tried to imagine a scenario where you made a movie about poor people in America, one that involved a married couple and their two children, who lived in a neighborhood with no violent crime and where nobody is fat or on drugs. Korean leftists I’m sure have the same ideology as American leftists, where poor people are the victims, and rich people are the oppressors. Yet so many things that supposedly make poverty difficult and inescapable in America – guns, broken homes, addiction, “police brutality” – don’t really exist in East Asia. It’s not even on the radar of a left wing director making a film about poor people. As we discuss, a cool thing about watching a foreign movie is that you gain insights into things the creator of a film might not even be aware of. Somehow, the underlying cross-national ideology manages to be the same despite massive differences in local conditions.
On a different note, I was quoted in the NYT on feminization and the current political moment. I actually had a more detailed analysis that they didn’t publish, but I’ll save it for that future essay everyone seems to want.
Enjoy.
I am a woman. I grew up in NYC in the 90's and have been around stockbrokers a bit. I even had job as a secretary on Wall Street for a day when I was in High School. I smoked pot, laced with something, with my boss and was sexually harassed by him. That was fun. A Black friend of mine who worked on Wall Street for a bit told me that guys who work on Wall Street are very sexist and very racist. He said that my boss and his co-worker (who gave us the pot) intended to drug me and rape me. So to answer your question Richard, no stockbrokers are nothing like academics (I know academics really well). They are edgy and "spirited" as Rob would say. I saw a hole in the wall in my boss' office and he told me that his co-worker had a bad day lol. Yeah they are aggressive AF.
Rob just had an outstanding thread on twitter and I'm glad I saw it before posting my mid-wit hot take. Ultimately, I liked Parasite because it came off as authentic and original. Quite a contrast to the soulless paint-by-numbers superhero movies.
I too missed the paradigm of downwardly mobile middle class vs upwardly mobile middle class. Rob's correct that the permanently/legacy rich aren't concerned with showing it off like the Parks are. The millionaires drive the Escalades, but the billionaires drive the Suburbans. I think the theme in America is more of a downwardly mobile upper class which looks something like the following. Child of managerial class parents grows up in an extremely structured environment, never has a job in high school and barely squeaks into a poor man's Ivy League (Skidmore, Bates, Williams, etc.). Since they barely got in, they have to pay the full boat $75K tuition. Mom and/or Dad just got the big promo to associate VP since they came up with the coolest sounding buzzword, but the tuition nearly wipes them out. The kid's poli-sci degree means they have to go to an even more expansive grad school or law school. They pile up more debt and will struggle for decades to pay it off while thinking they can score it big in journalism, law or politics. They will never be able to afford the $1.4 million it costs for a fixer-upper in some Blue-topian area of a city. Finally, it has NEVER crossed their mind that they could have "made it" with a 4-year state school degree in Engineering (gasp!). As Richard has beaten to death, people of this mentality are completely turned off by productive, even highly skilled productive work.