Parasite – Bong Joon Ho et al

I just watched “Parasite”. I wasn’t planning to, but I was going past a university auditorium, it was playing, and they said, I can go in, even if half an hour had already elapsed.

Was it one of the best Asian films I had ever seen? No, I still like Edward Yang’s masterpieces better. But it was pretty good.

Sometimes it’s just great to watch films in a cinema full of natives, because they know the cultural jokes to laugh at. I watched a Hitchcock film in cinema full of Americans, who understood a few cultural nuances better than I did. I watched “Coco” in a room full of Hispanics, and now watched “Parasite” in a UCSD theatre full of Asian Americans.

It’s good that Bong Joon Ho thanked all his fellow nominees in his Oscar speech, because it’s important that he’s had to contextualise this moment in the limelight. It’s easy to forget, but American cinema of the 1960s and 70s were in no small way shaped by groups who were at some point marginalised groups in America. Italian Americans were the underclass, and JFK winning the presidency was significant – he was a Catholic. And Woody Allen, before his fall from grace, was an auteur who could do no wrong, banging out (pun intended) masterpiece after masterpiece.

And more recently, there are the “three amigos” Mexican directors, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, and Alejandro González Iñárritu, who are three of the most critically acclaimed directors working in Hollywood today.

It’s a great movie. I don’t know about masterpiece but I’d have no problem putting it in a compedium like “1001 movies you should watch before you die”.

There are parallels with the Eloi / Morlock dichotomy in HG Wells’ “Time Machine”, and there’s this pretty spiffy satire of the North Korean newscaster. The taking over of the mansion was the segue to the second half of the film, where the basement was revealed for the first time. You could study this film over and over again for the cinematography, the various “Parks above, Kims below” architecture. I’m no longer a film buff and I can’t say much about where it belongs in the pantheon, much less where it stands alongside its contemporaries, but it’s a perfectly decent picture.

The great flood was extremely cathartic. The deluge carries with it connotations of divine wrath. It’s a sign that not all is well with the world, morally. In some way, the Kims were being punished for arrogating the mansion to themselves. When they sought refuge in the gymnasium, along with all the other underground people, it felt like they were the jetsam being washed out. The son could be out in the thunderstorm with his pretend wigwam, but he was just slumming it, and with the walkie talkie his parents would be out in a flash to rescue him. The Kims were away from their flooded basement and hiding out like rats in the Park mansion.

About the boy scout thing, I don’t know what it had to do with the movie. Does it represent some kind of DIY entreprenialism? Does it represent some tainted honour?

At the same time, it feels that the system of economic inequality itself is a “spectre”, like the spectre that Marx said was haunting Europe. IT’s haunting the world today.

In a way, I think that the language of cinema was invented by Hollywood and the French New Wave. The precision and the camera angles reminds me of Hitchcock. The visual architecture as cinema language reminds me of Antonioni. But since the groundwork has already been laid down, the main thing to do is to subvert the traditional genres of the movie. So you’d have a grifter show spliced with black comedy, and spliced with slasher flick, spliced with morality tale. I think he’s entitled to do this, since you have to do something different to stand out.

I think that it’s a great thing that the Koreans have some coming out party. They’ve already had the success of Gangnam Style. Having “Parasite” win the best picture Oscar was some kind of a triumph, and this was combined with the success of last year’s “Crazy Rich Asians”. It feels like some kind of coming out party for the Asian Americans.

Northern Exposure

I got this very strong sense of nostalgia when thinking about “Northern Exposure”. It was something that was broadcast late at night when I was in high school. No, I didn’t always get to watch it, but when I did, it seemed like some kind of fantasy world, situated in some pristine paradise in the middle nowhere.

Knowing what I know about America, you usually can’t have it both ways. The places which are the most tolerant and welcoming of diversity tend to be the cities. The wonderful places with all the postcard views tend to be the places where you have all the bigoted people, the Trumpy places. The only places which are both liberal and small towns in idyllic surroundings tend to be the college town and I was lucky to go to a place like that.

Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure and Grunge were all 90s cultural landmarks that revolved around the Pacific Northwest. It now seems to me that “alternative” music largely arose from flyover country. REM from Georgia, Husker Du from Minnesota, Smashing Pumpkins from Chicago, Nirvana from near Seattle, during its pre-tech boom days. Something exotic and flyover-ish. And that’s why when I was accepted to a college that wasn’t in a big city, and in the middle of nowhere, I was pretty blasé about it. I thought I could live with that. (True, but I really underestimated how badly the depression would affect me, and I underestimated how insular the townfolk were going to be.)

One thing I realised about some of the shows that were popular in the 90s – Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks and Friends. They were pretty “talky” shows. They usually were centered around philosophical arguments. That was one of the big things about Generation X culture. It was coined by Douglas Coupland, (Who also coined a phrase about my hometown, “Disneyland with a Death Penalty”.) They saw life with ironic detachment, were obsessed with deconstructing this or that.

Whereas by the time the next decade came around, things lurched in the opposite direction, you had reality TV, where not only was that detachment gone, but you took one more step, where the pretense that this was some kind of a fictional setting went along with it. Instead of you having a bunch of fictional people passively sitting down and people watching other fictional people, you put real people in a quasi-realistic situation, and you filmed them in action.

The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad were all series which revolved around one main character, instead of TV series like Northern Exposure, the Simpsons, Seinfeld or Friends where it was ensemble acting, and there was equal weight put on multiple stars. The great TV series of the 21st century were also post-9/11 shows. Half of Sopranos was post-9/11, and anyway it was a mafia show. There probably were shows that revolved around criminals in the 90s, but somehow back then, America seemed to be a friendlier, more relaxed place. It seemed to be living rooms and couches. “Mad About You”, “Seinfeld”, “Friends”. There were pure escapist fantasies. To be sure, there was an edge about “Seinfeld”, “Friends” and “The Simpsons”, because there were signs aplenty that people were escapists, either oblivious to the dangerous world out there, or disregarding it. Tragedy was couched as satire, and its blow was softened. It wouldn’t be the case for “Breaking Bad” or “Sopranos” or “The Wire”. They were physically and morally gruesome shows. “Sopranos” was that special double-headed beast, both family drama and crime. Maybe that’s why the “Friends” reruns turned out to be so popular, because they depicted a country that was celebrating its short peacetime between the end of the Cold War and 9/11. A country that was becoming militarized and highly incarcerated.

What I found comforting about Northern Exposure was that it was in a place where time stood still, and possibly that’s why the series could stretch for 100 episodes.

What did I identify with Dr Fleishman? He was a big city guy who got transplanted into small town Alaska and having to deal without the modern conveniences. He was stuck there for years, the way that I was stuck in my college town for years. Granted, that college had a 20% admission rate when I attended it (10% now), and people are dying to attend that school, but it doesn’t mean that it was easy.

He had to brave very harsh winters, like I did, and he was a cultural misfit, like I was. The reality of being in a place like that was that invariably you were bored out of your mind, and somehow you still had to be busy all the time. That was something that gave rise to the American work ethic: nothing existed, save for what you made with your own hands.

That said, it was a very welcoming place. It was a place to turn your back on social stratification and privilege. That was not the case for the college I went to. The shadows of the big metropolitans on the East Coast – Boston, New York, Philadelphia and DC – loomed heavily over the place. But unlike a college what was physically in one of those places, it didn’t swalllow it up whole.

You were always in some interior of some big room, pondering over what was going to happen next, thinking hard about the meaning of life. It was basically Walden, every single day.

In many ways, though, Joel Fleishman was not a fish out of water. He was an American, and he could fit in better with everybody. What you saw a bit of in America was the narcissism of small differences. At that time, White America was something that was tall and wide and deep. It was already a multi-cultural entity unto itself, and it could disregard the rest of the world, in the same way that we Chinese sometimes had this phrase “all under Heaven” to refer specifically to China.

When I watched “Northern Exposure” as a teenager, I saw in it some kind of an escape. It was some kind of fantastic other. I was tired of the landscape I inhabited, big city Singapore, you either listened to adult contemporary, hair metal, or syrupy mandopop. A place like Cicely Alaska was different, they had people walking around in flannel shirts. It was rainy, like Singapore (I didn’t hate the rain.) It was alternately cloudy and sunny. The landscape was magnificent, although it was totally far away from the sea. It was depressing, but the right sort of depressing. I could not keep up with the Californian sunniness. Maybe I didn’t care that much that people spent all their time in taverns. Taverns are the one place where Asians don’t hang out in the US, notwithstanding that in Japan and South Korea it’s the place that you go straight after work. Maybe I didn’t totally care for country and western.

Now, I see the “alternative” movement in a different light. Yes, it was about more variety in music, and yes, a lot of it was very liberal. But some of it was a yearning for a space that existed in Americana, that was safe from the intrusion of other cultures.

I think about Morrissey, and he yearned for a lack of macho posturing, he declared a fondness for ye Olde England, he liked the old movie stars in the days before all this cultural miscegenation took place. Then he turns out to be so racist and hateful towards minorities in England. In a way, it was a betrayal of what the Smiths stood for for so many people – a culture of inclusiveness, of a safe haven, where you were not judged for who you were. But there was always an undercurrent of resentment and hate and angst about his music. It used to be directed at the people who bullied him, but it could very well be directed at vulnerable minorities. And that was the aspect of what Morrissey had become that was not that shocking.

What Cicely represents is some wonderful dream where whites and Indians lived side by side. It was some kind of diversity, but a more limited kind of diversity, something that you could deal with. And the landscape was broad enough that you saw some kind of multiculturalism, but not so broad that the possibilities were so bewildering that you were behooved to treat everybody who was not like you, to treat all the others like they were some kind of stranger that you could never understand. (ie what happens in a place like California, which is so cosmopolitan that everybody is obliged to put on a face, the blandest version of themselves that they could possibly muster up. )

And as with “Northern Exposure”, it was problematic to portray minorities. You had one type of Indian, Ed, who was a film buff and a great fan of western movies. And you had another type of Indian who retained their way of life, and the resentment over the settlers grabbing everything that used to be theirs is somewhat glossed over. Instead, Indians living their way of life served the purpose of enriching the inner life of the “American”. It’s not perfect, but I suppose that’s what happens when you portray them having harmonious relations. And I suppose we should be thankful for small things where they’re curious enough about what lies beyond white America. There are a lot of potemkin depictions of Indians that would not pass muster in today’s woke America, but I suppose you could say that Northern Exposure was pretty liberal and enlightened for their time. At the very least, there was some kind of curiosity and positivity about the world at large.