East Asian cinema has a strange reputation in the West. Directors like Park Chan-wook, Takashi Miike, and Takeshi Kitano are known for their more extreme works. Old Boy, Ichi the Killer, Violent Cop. These films are brilliant, if brutal. The morals are murky, the main characters are masochistic, the violence is graphic. More than that, they aren’t particularly political.
Bong Joon-ho stands out in comparison. He has become one of the region’s most celebrated filmmakers, finding success in Hollywood with movies with a message.
Parasite put him on the map, but it wasn’t the first time he pointed the finger at the powers that be. Bong always makes entertaining movies with a progressive, even subversive angle. Let me explain why this matters and how he achieves his aims while still operating in the mainstream.
Outdoing Toothless Hollywood
The biggest movies to come out of the US are often conservative in their worldview. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, superheroes are a tool of the state. We cheer as supreme beings are co-opted as a new military branch. What is The Avengers if not Team America: World Police with a bigger budget?
Hollywood has been defanged partly because its main aim is to make money. To do that today, you need films that will sell internationally. Overtly political movies don’t tick this box, so we get stories that shore up the status quo.
Bong Joon-ho is in a better position to ruffle some feathers. His movies aren’t all a call to arms, but they often ask difficult questions about our society. Like Steven Spielberg being subversive through horror-inspired family flicks, Bong bites back with popcorn movies that are still political.
Barking Dogs Never Bite (2000)
Bong’s first film sets the template for his approach to political movie-making. It’s a character-driven story with serious, often shocking moments, but uses comedy to soften the blows it delivers.
The male lead Ko Yun-ju is an out-of-work academic who feels entitled to more in life. Tormented by a barking dog in his apartment building, he disposes of it. Or tries to. Having targeted the wrong pooch, he’s forced to kill a second neighborhood pet.
Although he’s seen committing the second killing, there’s no comeuppance. It’s a homeless man living in the basement (throwing forward to Parasite’s plot) who’s framed for all the animal cruelty. Meanwhile, Yun-ju borrows money from his wife to bribe his way into a professorship. He’s a middle-class, male, white-collar worker, and he fails upwards while being nothing but selfish.
On the other hand, the female characters are selfless and suffer unfairly despite this. That money from his wife? It’s part of a severance package she received after she got fired for being pregnant. Even for normal people with average lives, society is structured to benefit some more than others.
Memories of Murder (2003)
We’re used to seeing police detectives playing cat-and-mouse games with serial killers on the silver screen. Even if the cops misstep, they inevitably end up cracking the case. And while their personal lives might be in disarray, their professional skills save the day.
Not so here. In Bong’s second film, the detectives investigating a series of murders are chalk and cheese. One relies on gut instinct, the other on scientific evidence. But ultimately, neither can get their man. Intuition is proved wrong, and forensic clues are inconclusive.
It’s cathartic to see two types of arrogant authority figures humbled. And this isn’t pure fiction. Bong based Memories of Murder on a South Korean serial killer who was still unknown when the movie was released. The perpetrator was only identified in 2019, while Parasite was making waves at Cannes. This is in spite of police dedicating 2 million working days of people power to the case at its height.
Bong is not just shining a light on the flaws of authority for the sake of it. He’s inviting us to question the way law enforcement is presented to the public. The detectives are humans, so they’re fallible. And not just in a “he likes a drink and is divorced” type of way. When they make errors, all of us suffer.
The Host (2006)
Monster movies are still a Hollywood staple. However, they’re also entirely apolitical. Last year’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a prime example of this. The human characters are basically incidental, giving us an excuse to see the giant lizards and oversized apes in action. It’s cinema at its most disposable.
The Host takes the opposite approach. People are at the center of the action, even if there’s a mutated creature on the loose. And it’s working-class people who bear the consequences of government lies and conspiracies.
The plot starts with the careless disposal of old bottles of formaldehyde, which contaminates a river. Again, Bong took this from a real-life incident. Except here, a bloodthirsty beast is born from official incompetence. It snatches the youngest member of a multigenerational family, and the survivors are quarantined. The government claims there’s a virus involved, but it’s a cover-up. The family takes matters into their own hands. The authorities cover their tracks by releasing more toxins into the waterways.
Between the horror and the humor, we’re shown that the little guy is always at the mercy of The Man. And if you want a problem solved, you must work with family and community. Go to the government, and they might lobotomize you. Once again, Bong uses comedy to make the movie’s message palatable. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. It’s a good lesson for anyone who wants to write a script themselves.
Snowpiercer (2013)
The message in Bong’s early movies can be subtle. But Hollywood doesn’t do subtle. So you’ll forgive Snowpiercer for wearing its social satire on its sleeve.
Here, mismanaged environmental tinkering has thrown the entire planet into an ice age. The survivors are confined to a train that circles the planet continuously. In the front carriages, the rich passengers enjoy a comfortable life. In the rear, the poor are treated like cattle.
The poor revolt. Their revolution pushes through the train, and literal class warfare follows. Worse still, it’s revealed that the elites deliberately encouraged the rebellion. They wanted to thin the herd. The rebels eventually succeed, and the train is derailed at great cost. In the end, we’re shown that the leadership’s lies and conspiracies were to blame for the entire debacle.
Another aspect of Bong’s work that comes through in Snowpeircer is cynicism mingled with hope. There might be a brighter future ahead, but it requires dismantling the old way of doing things. Violence is an inevitable part of this process, in his eyes.
Okja (2017)
Here, we find Bong at his most sincere and silly. He takes aim at the meat industry with a movie about a little girl and her super pig.
Bred to be eco-friendly and delicious but not a pet, Okja is adorable and intelligent. Snatched from its owner and fought over by a corporation and animal activists, Okja’s ordeal exposes hypocrisy on both sides. The adults all have an agenda, and only young Mija is really in touch with her four-legged companion. It’s designed to make meat eaters (myself included) reconsider their choices.
Like Snowpiercer, Okja is less ambiguous about its political ideas than Bong’s first few films. This is good since its message is simple and easy for audiences to follow. Crucially, it’s not a preachy piece of cinema. Whether or not it convinces you to make a change, you’ll have fun watching it.
Parasite (2019)
Bong’s crowning achievement in an already sparkling career, Parasite provides twists, chills, and violence that’s justified rather than gratuitous.
In it, a working-class family wangles its way into a rich household, only to find there’s already a cuckoo in the nest. The poorest characters spend their lives scrabbling for scraps that fall from the table of their masters. They end up fighting among one another just to have the opportunity to remain as servants. The straw that breaks the camel’s back is a throwaway comment about how underprivileged people smell.
The film sets out to show us the painful consequences of our wealth and class-focused social hierarchy. Everyone gets hurt, but it’s still a sliding scale. And at every level of society, flawed humans behave selfishly. It ends as it began, with a poor man trapped beneath the floorboards of a wealthy household. The only way his son can think to free him is to become wealthy himself. It’s the South Korean equivalent of Quentin Tarantino’s trapped women.
Compared with Bong’s other films, this one evokes more cynicism than hope. Some feel that Parasite doesn’t do enough to critique South Korea’s social structures. That might be true, but it doesn’t diminish the film’s impact on most audiences.
A Political Future
Thanks to Parasite‘s acclaim, Bong Joon-ho has been given the reigns of a full-bore Hollywood movie. We’re weeks away from the release of Mickey 17, a sci-fi satire with a $100+ million budget. It stars Robert Pattinson as a man who’s endlessly cloned and killed while working on a far-off planet. How governments treat the working class as disposable is the main theme again.
This is good news for all sorts of reasons. Mostly because Bong is an auteur with an impeccable record, it’s safe to assume Mickey 17 will be a blast. But perhaps it will also give Hollywood the confidence to be more political from now on rather than leaving it to other regions. If Bong’s latest release is a commercial hit, this is likely.
