The 2019 Movie Parasite is a Revelation

I expect Hollywood movies to be leftist propaganda. When they show a conflict between rich and poor, the rich are the greedy jerks, and the poor are the heros.

The 2019 movie Parasite is an exception.

Alex Tabarrok reviews it:

I am late to this but Parasite, now available on streaming services, is the most willfully misinterpreted movie that I have ever seen. The conventional interpretation is so obviously wrong that I cannot but think that it is anything but a collective gaslighting. The conventional interpretation is that the film is about inequality and on the surface that makes sense. After all, there is a rich family and a poor family, and an upstairs and a downstairs, and everyone knows that inequality is the problem of our age so despite the subtitles this Korean film must be a version of what we expect to see.

The movie is strange for several reasons. It is not in English. No Jews were involved, except those giving it Oscars. And it won more praise and big awards than any other movie in recent years.

It is about a family of good, honest, successful people who prey to parasites.

The parasites are not rats or cockroaches, but they as might as well be. They are lower-class humans who pretend to be decent folks, but they are disgusting crooks who are unfit for polite company.

If there is any message to this movie, it is that poor people deserve to be poor, and must be seperated from productive citizens.

I am still wondering why this movie was so popular. Did they really like the message that much?

A new Netflix movie, JJ+E, is also all about class divide. It is a Romeo and Juliet, with a low-class dark-skinned boy and a nice rich Swedish girl. It keeps portraying the rich as bigoted for looking down at the boy, even tho he started the movie as a hero.

It turns out that the Swedish father is exactly right when he tells his daughter to stay away from the boy. The girl seduces him, as a way of rebeling against her father. The viewer is left with the impression that the school should not have let them attend classes together, and the girl should have to obey her father. The movie ends with the boy and girl kissing in the back seat of a police car, after they both get arrested.