Parasite: Hidden Grammar and Historical Ideology in Plain View

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Parasite, the Korean movie which eventually got Bong Joon-ho (its director) an Oscar and which grossed over $70 million last summer, is essentially an appropriation or recycling of Hollywood’s perennial history of playing dice with the moral order.

But Donald Trump did not have the insight to see that Parasite is a covert attack on the moral order, apparently because he is too busy listening to the Israeli machination of the United States and creating chaos in places like Syria, where Israel has been supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups like the Syrian rebels[1] in order to destabilize the Syrian government.[2]

The International Business Times reported in 2014 that Israel had “regular contact with Syrian rebels, including ISIS.”[3] This is from the Jerusalem Post: “Report: Israel treating al-Qaida fighters wounded in Syria.”[4] We read: “Israel has opened its borders with Syria in order to provide medical treatment to Nusra Front and al-Qaida fighters wounded in the ongoing civil war…”[5]

But these issues have never bothered politicians like Trump. Behaving like a raging bull, Trump declared: “And the winner is … a movie from South Korea! What the hell was that all about? We got enough problems with South Korea with trade. On top of it, they give them the best movie of the year?” How stupid can it get?

In any event, we are going to ignore Trump here because he is not able to string two coherent thoughts together.

Parasite is similar to Todd Phillips’ Joker in that both movies raise economic issues and class warfare—two central topics that always resonate with audiences virtually everywhere. As the magazine GQ has put it, Parasite “evokes the acute desperation of late capitalism, all wrapped in a layer of dark comedy.”[6] The LA Times declared that the movie is “rooted in class conflict.”[7]

The LA Times continued to say elsewhere that movies like Parasite have thrived because of the financial crisis which came into full bloom in 2008, when it was discovered that companies like Goldman Sachs preyed upon “muppets” (that’s what they call their customers) by “ripping eyeballs out” of them.[8] The usurers and predators were responsible for the 2008 financial crisis, which caused the average American to lose their economic wherewithal, including their homes.

The interesting thing is that Obama bailed those grifters out. As Ben Norton of Salon rightly put it back in 2016, “Obama’s hypocrisy: He said blame Wall Street, not food stamps — but he bailed out bankers and cut help for the hungry.”[9] In a similar vein, Paul Krugman of the New York Times wrote then, “The failure of the Obama administration to prosecute the bankers was a tragic moral error with practical consequences.”[10]

And how much money was that? It has been calculated to be around 14 to 16 trillion dollars![11] Journalist Nomi Prins has documented that the bailout “was never about the little guy.” It was exclusively done for the oligarchs, the usurers, the gangsters on Wall Street, and the banksters—the very people who don’t give a damn about whether you live or die.[12]

Prins—who used to work as a managing director for big companies like Goldman-Sachs, Bear Stearns, the Lehman Brothers, and the Chase Manhattan Bank—writes courageously and unflinchingly: “If the thought of the government spending trillions of dollars on Wall Street’s screw-ups pisses you off, you’re not crazy.”[13] But the central question should be this: what could the government or society do with 14 trillion dollars? Get this:

10 years of vaccines for kids in 117 countries
$110 billion

10 years of $10,000 bonuses for all US public school teachers
$318 billion

Sending all 2009 US high school grads to private college
$347 billion

Doubling US spending on HIV/AIDSand cancer research for 20 years
$493 billion

10 years of CO2 offsets for all Americans
$559 billion

Meeting UN anti-poverty goals by 2015
$757 billion

20 years of universal preschool in US
$860 billion

Buying a house for every homeless American
$878 billion

Buying the world an iPhone 3GS
$2 trillion

10 years of private health insurance for uninsured Americans
$2.2 trillion

Paying off 1/3 of US home mortgages

$3.5 trillion[14]

And all those expenses do not even add up to 16 trillion dollars! The average American had every right to be angry at the government and the capitalist system, which our dear friend E. Michael Jones has aptly and historically defined as “state-sponsored usury.”[15]

It was no surprise, then, that Hollywood’s depiction of capitalism as a dying system or a rotten economic corpse continues to attract wide audiences. Movies like Hustlers would have almost certainly been a failure at the box office had the swindlers at Wall Street not crashed the economy in 2008. In Hustlers, Ramona Vega (Jennifer Lopez), a veteran stripper, told Destiny (Constance Wu), a rookie in the business:

“We’ve got to think like these Wall Street guys. You see what they did to this country? Hard working people lost everything. And not one of these douchebags went to jail. Not one. Is that fair? This game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.”

The LA Times again agrees that movies like Parasite raise issues that are in concert with the economic malaise of our time. As they put it, “as the gap between the rich and poor has grown ever wider — hitting a record in the U.S. in 2018, according to data released last month by the Census Bureau — it should come as no surprise to see filmmakers taking it on.”[16] Rian Johnson, writer and director of Knives Out, a movie which again is based on economic themes, said:

“Films always respond to the world that they are born out of. It’s unavoidable right now that we are in a world dealing with increased income disparity, and you can feel it. At the same time, the tub of boiling water of the public discourse has been cranked up to 11. It’s no longer something that we all are in the privileged state of being able to dip in and out of. It’s very much the ocean that we’re all swimming in.”[17]

Joon-ho himself admitted: “When I was in college I worked as a tutor, and it was a pretty fun and strange experience. I really felt like I was spying on this rich family.”[18] Joon-ho has said elsewhere:

“The topic of the gap between rich and poor lends itself to being so universal. Every country has its own structures and conflicts regarding class, but when you really delve deep into the cave of capitalism and explore the infinite darkness of it, you find a similar sort of mechanism flows throughout.”[19]

Bong Joon-ho has been making movies about class warfare—or capitalism, as GQ again puts it—for quite some time. Class warfare was the hidden grammar behind his 2013 Snowpiercer, as well as his 2017 Okja.[20] But Bong Joon-ho is just a new director on the block. Hollywood and the movie business attempted to raise these issues in the 1920s with very little success. One can reasonably argue that the history of class warfare in movies goes all the way back to Fritz Lang’s 1927 hypnotic film, Metropolis, which was produced in Germany during the Weimar period. In fact, hypnotism was widely used in movies throughout that era.

For example, Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) “centered on a showman and hypnotist who forces a somnambulist under his hill, compelling the docile medium to commit several murders.”[21] One scholar writes that “instead of appealing to rational faculties,” hypnosis in movies “was based on surreptitiously implanting an idea in a susceptible mind, without raising contrary or inhibiting thoughts.”[22]

Around 1900, hypnosis began to be attached “with the newly emerging medium of cinema.”[23] Fritz Lang obviously used this hypnotic effect in his previous movie, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922). In fact, movie directors and producers during that time began to observe that “the new medium” had a tremendously “irresistible, hypnotic influence on its spellbound audiences.”[24] This “irresistible, hypnotic influence” would later play a major role in politics and mass media during the latter part of the twentieth century.[25] This form of mind-control was introduced to the Germans by people like Sigmund Freud, Albert Moll, and August Forel.[26] Moll, Magnus Hirschfel and others founded the sex program in Germany[27] that later proved to be morally devastating by the time Hitler rose to power.

But the theory of hypnosis itself was developed in the late nineteenth century by a Jewish physician named Hippolyte Bernheim, who, according to one scholar, believed that “everybody was subject to hypnosis…As Bernheim and numerous other physicians affirmed, they hypnotized subject functioned as a sort of medium who could even be compelled to commit crimes against his or her own will.”[28]

METROPOLIS

Central to Lang’s overly long and silent film is that the ruthless elite always end up suppressing the poor, namely, the laborers. In fact, Metropolis advances the idea that the ruling elite or the titans of this world seem to view the worker or average person as herd, and the worker himself is trapped in an economic river, which forces him to him to swim for at least ten hours.

The ruling class in Metropolis lives in luxurious places, while the average laborer toils with a hellish existence—a matrix from which there seems to be no exit. Lang, a lapsed Catholic,[29] couldn’t expunge the idea that economic issues have a moral dimension—more specifically a Catholic dimension—from his mind. In his February issue of Culture Wars, E. Michael Jones writes:

“Even after he abandoned the Catholic faith, Scorcese never stopped espousing the values he abandoned. This made him incapable of directing horror movies, a fact he made clear in a conversation with the Jewish Canadian horror-meister David Cronenberg, because, unlike Cronenberg, Scorcese never lost his sense of moral causality.

“Scorcese, according to Cronenberg, was an ex-Catholic who ‘does deal with good and evil in very proto-Catholic terms, and I’m sure that what he meant was that when he saw my films.’ Scorcese, on the other hand, told Cronenberg that he didn’t understand his own films. Scorcese, according to Cronenberg, ‘saw the struggle’ between good and evil ‘being played out. I don’t see it quite that way because I really don’t see the lines drawn in those terms.’

“Scorcese spends his time rebelling against a moral order he cannot ignore. Cronenberg, on the other hand, does horror because he has lost his grasp on moral causality. ‘I have difficulty thinking in terms of good and evil,’ Cronenberg continued, ‘I’m sure if I had been raised a Catholic I would have no trouble because those issues are raised at a very early age.’”[30]

We see similar things in Lang’s Metropolis. Lang, whose Jewish mother converted to Catholicism long before Lang was born, admitted: “As the truth, you may laugh, but don’t forget I was born a Catholic—perhaps I’m not a good Catholic according to the Church—but Catholic education (and probably any education which has to do with ethics) never leaves you.”[31] In other words, the moral law continued to hunt Lang, despite the fact that movies like Metropolis are suffused with pagan or occult technics like hypnotism.

But despite its deficiency, Metropolis is an important movie that seems to resonate with some of the problems in our modern age. Freder, the son of the city’s ruthless master who goes by the name of Joh Fredersen, realizes the inner workings of the titans of society when he went to see the underground-dwelling workers whose existence can be compared to a piece of property. Freder, with the help of a woman by the name of Maria, began to sympathize with the underground-dwelling workers when he first saw their children. He then went underground to do some investigation on what one can call the deep psychology of the subterranean workers’ city.

To make a long story short, Freder goes back to the skyscraper building to meet his father and confront him with this puzzling question: “Where are the people, father, whose hands built your city?”

The father responds: “They belong in the depths.” This horrifies the son. He again tells his father: “What if one day those in the depths rise up against you?” During their conversation, the father again asks Freder, “What were you doing in the machine halls, Freder?” To which he responds: “I wanted to look into the faces of the people whose little children are my brothers, my sisters…”

What Metropolis tells us is that capitalism always ends up suppressing the average worker, a central point which has been historically documented by E. Michael Jones in his 1400-page tome Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury.[32] Rotwang, who is a mad scientist and occultist in Metropolis, attempted to bring the entire city down by preying upon both the lustful appetite of Fredersen and the ignorant workers’ city.

That plan turned out to be a disaster because both the workers and Fredersen realized that they were being manipulated by Rotwang, who eventually got into a duel with Freder and then died. Lang, being again a lapsed Catholic, leaves the audience with the idea that the rich and the workers do not have to be engaged in a cosmic war that would end up destroying just about everyone in society.

Metropolis is an implicit attack on capitalism, which always ends up destroying family formation and ultimately economic progress. Some will quickly jump to the conclusion that this writer is proposing Marxism or socialism as an alternative. Not so. Keep in mind that there was a period in history where Marxism or socialism or capitalism did not have any economic power over nations, particularly in places like England. So what did people do? How did England actually become a prosperous nation? This is a story for another time.[33]

THE CULTURAL MILIEU

As we have already pointed out, Metropolis was surprisingly made in Germany during the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), where films during that time were in the hands of the very people whose goals and purposes were to denigrate the German culture and subvert its people.[34]

In fact, those same people were also involved in messianic politics and revolutionary ideologies. This eventually gave rise to Nazi Germany, which eventually shut down the sex industry that was dragging the Germans into a psychological abyss. Several Jewish scholars and historians agree on this point. Martin Bernal, for example, concedes that from 1920 to 1939, “Anti-Semitism intensified throughout Europe and North America following the perceived and actual centrality of Jews in the Russian Revolution.”[35] Jewish scholar Gordon has said similar things.[36]

Even Lucy S. Dawidowicz, of all people, would somewhat agree. Hitler, according to Dawidowicz, “had discovered that Jews dominated the liberal press in Vienna and the city’s cultural artistic life, that they were behind the Social Democratic movement—Marxism. Triumphantly he had at last found an answer to the original question he had posed about the Jew: ‘The Jew was no German.’”[37]

To quote Hitler, “In my eyes, the charge against Judaism became a grave one the moment I discovered the Jewish activities in the press, in art, in literature and the theatre.”[38]

He later described how the Jewish elite in the theatre was corrupting the morals of the culture. He also complained that some of the materials produced in the theatre were of a pornographic nature.[39] Theater in Germany began to produce films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed and written by Jewish producers Robert Wiene and Hans Janowitz. This particular film was teleological in nature: it was supposed to hypnotize audiences in an expressionist and psychoanalytic form.[40]

Other films of the same genre included Carl Mayer’s The Last Laugh (1924), Madchen in Uniform (1931), and Kuhle Wampe (1932).[41] Madchen in Uniform was an explicitly pro-lesbian film, something that was completely contrary to the Prussian education system at the time, and many of the cast in the movie were Jewish. Film scholar Richard W. McCormick of the University of Minnesota declares that this film “threatened the status quo” of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.[42] McCormick continues,

“Madchen in Uniform is a film that is implicated within a number of progressive and emancipator discourses of the late Weimar Republic: the movement for homosexual rights and the flourishing of urban, queer subculture. ‘New Objectivity’ and other avant-garde tendencies in the arts and popular culture; and the intersection of modernity, the movies, and the democratic egalitarianism.”[43]

Philo-Semitic historian Paul Johnson himself tells us that films like Blue Angel were so corrupt that they “could not be shown in Paris. Stage and night club shows in Berlin were the least inhibited of any major capital. Plays, novels, and even paintings touched on such themes as homosexuality, sadomasochism, transvestism, and incest; and it was in Germany that Freud’s writings were almost fully absorbed by the intelligentsia and penetrated the widest range of artistic expression.”[44]

Many of these films were labeled “decadent” as soon as Hitler rose to power, and many of the producers fled Germany. Madchen in Uniform became a symbol for feminist movements in the 1970s,[45] one of the weapons used against the existing culture. Moreover, Jewish film directors and producers, like many current Jewish directors in Hollywood, knew that they were indirectly changing the social and cultural mode of Germany. Some scholars do not want to admit this because they believe that sexual liberation is actually true freedom.

But some do admit that once morality began to decline, then “science” and the “secular notions of individual rights, democracy,” etc., began to rise. Laurie Marhoefer’s penetrating study, Sex, and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis, which is published by the University of Toronto Press, provides compelling evidence which indirectly shows that polite people of this world were surreptitiously destroying the German culture through moral corruption and degradation, tough Marhoefer herself would call that sexual freedom and democracy. One of those polite people was none other than Magnus Hirschfeld.

Hirschfeld was introducing sexual liberation, which, according to Marhoefer, everyone should applaud, but the German traditionalists thought he was bringing disaster. This was one reason why Hirschfeld was vehemently browbeaten, not because the traditionalists were by nature anti-Semites. Hirschfeld attempted to use “science” to perpetuate the idea that homosexuality is “purely biological, not pathological,”[46] and that again put him in conflict with the German culture, which viewed the issue as moral and not biological.

Marhoefer writes: “Thus laws like Germany’s Paragraph 175, which banned sex between men, conflicted with science. ‘What is natural cannot be immoral,’ Hirschfeld wrote. ‘When state and society, family and individual persist in their old prejudice against homosexual men and women, a prejudice that is based on ignorance, then injustice is done, one that has only a few parallels in human history.”[47] Hirschfeld “called on his allies in the new government, the Social Democrats, to quickly repeal the sodomy law. They declined to do so.” Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science “championed the principle that science rather than religious morality ought to dictate how state and society responded to sexuality.”[48]

Cinema, then, was widely used as a form of subversion of the German culture, traditions, and more. Even Eric D. Weitz declares that during that period in Germany, “Many artists, writers, directors, and composers jumped at the chance to work in the new media precisely because they signified a break with the past and provided one more way to express rejection of pre-1918 imperial Germany with its kaisers, generals, nobles, and stuffy, rigid and outmoded art academies.”[49]

Johnson writes that during the 1920s in Germany, “The area where Jewish influence was strongest was the theatre, especially in Berlin. Playwrights like Carl Sternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Ernst Toller, Erwin Piscator, Walter Hasenclever, Ferenc Molnar and Carl Zuckmayer, and influential producers like Max Reinhardt, appeared at times to dominate the stage, which tended to be modishly left-wing, pro-republican, experimental and sexually daring.”[50]

Hitler, throughout Mein Kampf, seems to have been aware of Jewish revolutionary activities, and even declared that “the part which the Jews played in the social phenomenon of prostitution, and more especially in the white slavery traffic, could be studied here better than any other West-European city, with the possible exception of certain ports of Southern France…A cold shiver ran down my spine when I first ascertained that it was the same cold-blooded, thick-skinned and shameless Jew who showed his consummate skill in conducting that revolting exploitation of the dregs of the big city. Then I became fired with wrath.”[51]

This anger began to escalate after World War I when he saw what was happening in the press and theatre in Germany when art, in general, was being used to denigrate the German culture. What perhaps moved Hitler’s anger to a new height was that the Jews were less than three percent of the population, yet they largely controlled the theatre and were promoting what he would call “filth” and “pornography.”[52]

For Hitler, these acts “must have been definitely intentional.”[53] Moreover, he got first-hand knowledge after World War I that pornography was almost exclusively a Jewish phenomenon.[54]

MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD

Again Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the father of the Gay liberation movement in Germany,[55] used his medical training as a pretext to promote homosexuality and, in 1897, built his own system of “the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first organization anywhere devoted to the protection of homosexual rights.”

Hirschfeld, himself a homosexual, was also “the primary inventor of marriage counseling, Gay Liberation, artificial insemination, surgical gender ‘reassignment,’ and modern sex therapy… His goofy persona and conscientiousness transformed Sexology from an anthropological curiosity into popular German science. The Berlin monthlies, starting in the mid-twenties, referred to Hirschfeld solicitously as ‘the Einstein of Sex.”[56]

Hirschfeld was the Einstein of Sex because he “embraced a doctrine known as ‘sexual relativity.” Hirschfeld specifically used the term “racism” to attack the sexual order. One of the central forces of the sexual order is that if the next generation is to survive, men and women ought to be married and produce children. A homosexual act, by definition, is a hindrance to civilization precisely because it inexorably leads to all sorts of social and medical problems. While homosexuals ought to be free to practice their lifestyle in private—after all, isn’t a sexual act a private matter?—they should not seek to subvert the sexual order by trying to change the laws which are based on the natural order.

Hirschfeld indeed was a sex expert and surely he understood what was at stake. While the natural order makes it clear that there are only two sexes—male and female—Hirschfeld postulated another doctrine, one more congruent with his revolutionary ideology. Hirschfeld “wrote that it was ‘unscientific’ to speak of two sexes. Between ‘full man’ and ‘full woman’ was an infinite string of sexual/gender possibilities.”[57] Hirschfeld spent a large part of his 1200-page book The Homosexuality of Men and Women deconstructing the sexual order.[58]

Hirschfeld was the Alfred Kinsey of his day and actually put his doctrines into practical use.[59] This began to take place in 1919 when Hirschfeld opened the Institute of Sexology in Berlin. Jewish scholar Mel Gordon of the University of California tells us that the institution “quickly became one of the city’s most curious attractions. The Institute’s buildings, including a former mansion, were divided into areas for lectures, consulting offices, study rooms, laboratories, medical clinics, and a museum space devoted to sexual pathology.”[60]

Paul Johnson commented,

“The Foxtrot and short skirts, the addiction of pleasure in ‘the imperial sewers of Berlin,’ the ‘dirty pictures’ of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld or the typical man of the times took on in the minds of the average citizen a repugnance that is difficult to recall in hindsight without some historical effort. In a number of highly celebrated provocations, the stage of the ‘20s dealt with topics like patricide, incest, and other crimes and the deepest inclination of the times tended to self-mockery.”[61]

When Hirschfeld was spreading the gospel of sexual liberation throughout Germany, he was attacked by a number of Nazi students, “prompting the publisher of his autobiography to remark that the ‘Nazis had chosen him from the very beginning as a symbol over everything they hated, and it was Hitler himself, who, after the fascist students attacked Hirschfeld in Munich in 1920 and left him badly injured, declared him in many public speeches as the very epitome of the repulsive Jew and the enemy of the German people.’”[62]

Six years later, Hirschfeld spread the sexual revolution in Russia under Stalin and hailed it as “marital bolshevism.”[63] Historian Otto Friedrich does not believe that Hirschfeld was taken seriously and therefore achieved next to no “notable goal,” but argues that his work was “a classic of pseudo-scientific pornography.”[64]

Many popular historians, even though they discuss the Weimar Republic, seem to stay away from addressing these historical issues,[65] obviously because these issues are pregnant with meaning—even in our time. Which finally brings us back to Parasite.

PROBLEMS WITH PARASITE

Parasite—which largely revolves around two families, one wealthy and the other impoverished—is, in essence, a subversive movie that uses the failure of capitalism to draw viewers to a darker ideology, one which is consistent with Hollywood’s war on the moral order. One can largely say that this is one reason why Bong Joon-ho ended up receiving an Oscar. In other words, Bong Joon-ho is doing to Korea what Hollywood did to America when the business industry started producing pornography in order to subvert or destroy the moral fabric of American society. The war on the moral order got its start when producers and directors began to attack the Decency Code in the 1920s and 30s and all the way to the 1960s.

Movies during that era “called into question sexual propriety, social decorum and the institutions of law and order.”[66] By the 1930s, a group of Catholics could no longer tolerate the increasing degeneracy Hollywood was pushing in the movies, so in 1933 they created the Catholic Legion of Decency (later renamed the National Legion of Decency). Their goal was to put pressure on filmmakers to stick with the traditional values that America was built on.

Sklar writes that before the National Legion of Decency, Jews in Hollywood “had always tried to give their public as much sexual titillation as contemporary morals would allow…producers have no qualms about tossing aside the [Decency] code and hanging on to their audiences by offering more sex stories, risqué language and glimpses of nudity than they had ever dared before. One reason why the Legion of Decency campaign proved so quickly effective in mobilizing support was that the general run of movies had never before been so clearly in opposition to traditional middle-class morality.”[67]

The Legion of Decency proved successful—encouraging Hollywood to “direct its enormous powers of persuasion to preserve the basic moral, social and economic tenets of traditional American culture”[68]—until the end of World War II. Then, tempted once more by the profit that could be gained by the risqué, producers began to reformulate their subtle attacks. They turned their attention to “settings that provided the full opportunity to raise the pitch of excitement on the screen, to amaze, frighten and even to sexually arouse…At its most basic level, the sound was a noise, and noise itself could be a source of thrills. Hollywood did not tear down its boudoir sets overnight, but the possibilities of sound attracted filmmakers more and more to noisy settings.”[69]

Jewish revolutionaries like Leo Pfeffer completely opposed the Legion of Decency.[70] When those revolutionaries won the culture wars in the 1960s, they immediately began to produce pornographic movies such as Deep Throat and The Devil and Ms. Jones.[71]

By 2016, basically nothing is forbidden in Hollywood anymore. As Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams himself argued back in 2004, pornography in the entertainment industry was a deliberate attack on the moral order and any culture that embraced that moral order.[72] As Abrams himself put it:

“Jewish involvement in porn…is the result of an atavistic hatred of Christian authority: they are trying to weaken the dominant culture in America by moral subversion…

“Pornography thus becomes a way of defiling Christian culture and, as it penetrates to the very heart of the American mainstream (and is no doubt consumed by those very same WASPs), its subversive character becomes more charged. Porn is no longer of the ‘what the Butler saw’ voyeuristic type; instead, it is driven to new extremes of portrayal that stretch the boundaries of the porn aesthetic. As new sexual positions are portrayed, the desire to shock (as well as entertain) seems clear.

“It is a case of the traditional revolutionary/radical drive of immigrant Jews in America being channeled into sexual rather than leftist politics.”[73]

When the decency code was eventually reversed in the late 1960s, Hollywood crossed the Rubicon, never to return. Sexual mores were successfully challenged by Samuel Roth in the 1957 court case Roth v United States, after which Hollywood began to push past its former boundaries.[74]

In short, Hollywood has been operating under the principle that morality is a relic of the past. Bong Joon-ho obviously knows this. In fact, some of his favorite movies include Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019), etc.[75] The Hollywood milieu—a world in which morality plays no role—has already been created for Bong Joon-ho. He simply stepped in that world when he produced Parasite, which has flashes of pornographic insinuations.

Hustlers producer Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas said: “The last line of the movie is, ‘The whole country is a strip club — some people are throwing the money and some people are doing the dance.’ It’s hard not to see it through the prism of the craziness of the reality we’re living in.”[76]

What she indirectly ends up saying is that once the moral order is out of the equation, then the very people who reject the moral order inexorably end up living in a crazy prism where some people dance (strippers) and others waste money (titans of this world).

The solution to this crazy world? A return to the moral order. Unfortunately, Parasite does not offer a return at all. And by repudiating the moral order, the movie finds itself in the same crazy prism which has been driving the capitalist system since Milton Friedman began to teach the Chicago Boys how to cheat the economic system at the University of Chicago.[77]

•  [1] Mona Alami, “Syrian rebels pledge loyalty to al-Qaeda, USA Today, April 11, 2013; Akbar Shahid Ahmed and Ryan Grim, “ISIS Strikes Deal With Moderate Syrian Rebels: Reports,” Huffington Post, September 14, 2014; “ISIS strike deal with moderate Syrian rebels to stop fighting each other as military pressure grows and its oil money starts to dry up,” Daily Mail, September 13, 2014; “​ISIS and moderate Syrian rebels strike truce… with Al Qaeda’s help – reports,” Russia Today, September 13, 2014; “In complicating move, al-Qaeda backs Syrian revolt,” USA Today, February 12, 2012.
• [2] See for example Bethan McKernan, “Israel ‘giving secret aid to Syrian rebels’, report says,” Independent, June 19, 2017; “Syrian representative to the UN: Israel has directly supported ISIS,” Jerusalem Post, April 13, 2017; “Israeli Intel Chief: We Don’t Want ISIS Defeated in Syria,” Antiwar.com, June 21, 2016; Elizabeth Tsurkov, “Inside Israel’s Secret Program to Back Syrian Rebels,” Foreign Policy, September 6, 2018.
• [3] Johnlee Varghese, “UN Report: Israel in Regular Contact with Syrian Rebels including ISIS,” International Business Times, December 14, 2014.
• [4] “Report: Israel treating al-Qaida fighters wounded in Syria,” Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2015; see also Marcy Kreiter, “Syrian General Accuses Israel Of Collaborating With ISIS, Al Qaeda-Linked Rebels,” International Business Times, December 7, 2014; William Watkinson, “Israel co-operating with Isis and al-Qaeda in Golan Heights says Syrian chief negotiator,” International Business Times, April 19, 2016; Tovah Lazaroff, “Syrian UNHRC envoy: Israel aiding al-Qaida-linked terrorists,” Jerusalem Post, March 20, 2017.
• [5] “Report: Israel Treating al-Qaida Fighters Wounded in Syria Civil War,” Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2015.
• [6] Gabriella Paiella, “Parasite Director Bong Joon-ho on the Art of Class Warfare,” GQ, October 8, 2019.
• [7] Jen Yamato, “Why everyone is talking about Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite’: A thriller rooted in class conflict,” LA Times, October 11, 2019.
• [8] Greg Smith, “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs,” NY Times, March 14, 2012.
• [9] Ben Norton, “Obama’s hypocrisy: He said blame Wall Street, not food stamps — but he bailed out bankers and cut help for the hungry,” Salon, January 14, 2016.
• [10] Paul Grugman, “The Bankers’ Takeaway,” NY Times, January 5, 2016.
• [11] Mike Collins, “The Big Bank Bailout,” Forbes, July 14, 2015; see also Nomi Prins, It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom Deals (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2009); Mike Collins, “The Big Bank Bailout,” Forbes, July 14, 2015.
• [12] See for example “9 Wall Street Execs Who Cashed In on the Crisis,” Mother Jones, January/February 2010; Andy Kroll, “The Bankers on Obama’s Team,” Mother Jones, January/February 2010.
• [13] Prins, It Takes a Pillage, 1.
• [14] Marian Wang, “12 Better Uses for the Bailout Bucks,” Mother Jones, January/February 2010.
• [15] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014).
• [16] Josh Rottenberg, “From ‘Knives Out’ to ‘Parasite’: Why movies are tackling income inequality and class warfare,” LA Times, October 7, 2019.
• [17] Ibid.
• [18] Paiella, “Parasite Director Bong Joon-ho on the Art of Class Warfare,” GQ, October 8, 2019.
• [19] Rottenberg, “From ‘Knives Out’ to ‘Parasite’: Why movies are tackling income inequality and class warfare,” LA Times, October 7, 2019.
• [20] Yamato, “Why everyone is talking about Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Parasite’: A thriller rooted in class conflict,” LA Times, October 11, 2019.
• [21] Noah Isenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 13.
• [22] Ibid.
• [23] Ibid., 14.
• [24] Ibid.
• [25] See E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).
• [26] Isenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema, 14.
• [27] Volkmar Sigusch, “The Sexologist Albert Moll – between Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld,” Medical History, 2012; 56(2): 184-200; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3381530/.
• [28] Isenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema, 14.
• [29] Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
• [30] E. Michael Jones, “How Joking About Life Turned Life Into a Joke,” Culture Wars, February 2020.
• [31] Patrick McGilligan, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), kindle edition.
• [32] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict Between Labor and Usury (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2014).
• [33] For an introduction, see for example William Cobbet, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (Independently Published, 1897). E. Michael Jones also discusses these issues in Barren Metal.
• [34] I have exhaustively documented this in Christianity & Rabbinic Judaism, Vol. 2 (Bloomington: WestBow Press, 2013). See also Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
• [35] Martin Bernal, Black Athena, Vol. I (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 387.
• [36] Gordon, The “Jewish Question”, 96-97.
• [37] Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (New York: Bantam, 1986), 7.
• [38] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (New York: Hurst & Blackett, 1942), 42.
• [39] Ibid., 42-43.
• [40] Stefan Andriopoulos, “Suggestion, Hypnosis, and Crime: Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920),” ),” Isenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chapter 1.
• [41] Richard M. McCormick, “Coming Out of the Uniform: Political and Sexual Emancipation in Leontine Sagan’s Madchen in Uniform (1931),” Isenberg, ed., Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 271.
• [42] Ibid.
• [43] Ibid., 272.
• [44] Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: HarperCollins, 1983), 114.
• [45] McCormick, “Coming Out of the Uniform,” Weimar Cinema, 273.
• [46] Laurie Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 4.
• [47] Ibid.
• [48] Ibid.
• [49] Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 250.
• [50] Johnson, A History of the Jews, 479.
• [51] Hitler, Mein Kampf, 43.
• [52] Ibid., 42-43.
• [53] Ibid., 42-43.
• [54] See for example Edward Bristow, Prostitution and Prejudice: The Jewish Fight Against White Slavery (New York: Schocken, 1983).
• [55] See for example Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014).
• [56] Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (San Francisco: Feral House, 2006), 153.
• [57] Ibid., 153-154.
• [58] See Magnus Hirschfeld, The Homosexuality of Men and Women (New York: Prometheus Books, 2000).
• [59] Gordon, Voluptuous Panic, 153-163.
• [60] Ibid., 164.
• [61] Johnson, Modern Times, 115.
• [62] E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the ID: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence Publishing Co., 2000), 141-142.
• [63] Ibid., 142.
• [64] Otto Friedrich, Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 233.
• [65] See Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany, 1918-2008: The Divided Nation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2009); Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989); Peter Gay, The Weimar Republic: The Outsider as Insider (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
• [66] Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America, 175.
• [67] Ibid., 174.
• [68] Ibid., 175.
• [69] Ibid., 176.
• [70] See E. Michael Jones, “Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos,” Culture Wars, May 2003.
• [71] For a cultural history of this, see E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2000).
• [72] Nathan Abrams, “Triple-exthnics: Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004. See also Nathan Abrams, The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012); By the way, Abrams’ article is a reworking of E. Michael Jones’ “Rabbi Dresner’s Dilemma: Torah v. Ethnos,” Culture Wars, May 2003.
• [73] Abrams, “Triple-exthnics: Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American porn industry,” Jewish Quarterly, Winter 2004.
• [74] Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 193.
• [75] https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/bong-joon-ho-favorite-movies-watch/zodiac-2007-3/. For an excellent review of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, see E. Michael Jones, “The Inner Logic of Neo-Paganism in Sweden Why All Porno Films Get Remade as Horror Movies,” Culture Wars, September 3, 2019.
• [76] Rottenberg, “From ‘Knives Out’ to ‘Parasite’: Why movies are tackling income inequality and class warfare,” LA Times, October 7, 2019.
• [77] See for example Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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