I hope you’ve had a chance to seeParasite, the wonderful film by South Korean director Bong Joon-ho. For me—as for the good people at the Oscars—it was far and away the best film of 2019. Other people, however, are eagerly denouncingParasiteas a failure, a capitulation, a “conservative” film, indeed a movie full of “contempt” for the working class. What is going on?

(剧透吧!)

Here’s what the critics think. First of all, they think thatParasiteis a movie with a message. Maybe this is because they assumeallserious movies have messages, or maybe it’s something specific aboutParasite; either way, they take it for granted that Bong Joon-ho is trying to “say” something, “show” something, "send a message,” “teach a lesson,” “make a statement.”The New Yorkertells usthat Bong “made the movie with the desire, the will, to show something that he has in mind.”The Nationtalks关于“锣的消息。”The LA Review of Booksaskswhether it has “anything original to say.”

但是，如果你是一名记者或学者，你就必须发送信息，展示一些东西，并有原创的东西来表达。如果你是一个小说作家，它们不是你必须要做的事情。它们是你应该从哲学家、历史学家和社会理论家那里得到的东西。你不应该总是要求电影制作人做这些事——即使是严肃的制作人。严肃、有抱负、甚至有社会责任感的小说作者并不总是在传授经验:他们经常提出问题，但他们拒绝回答这些问题。它们迫使我们独立思考。

That’s how Toni Morrison thought of her own writing. “Classical music,” she said, “satisfies and closes. Black music does not do that…. There is no final chord. There may be a long chord, but there is no final chord. And it agitates you. Spirituals agitate you, no matter what they are saying about how it is all going to be. There is something underneath them that is incomplete. There is always something else that you want from the music. I want my books to be like that.” Bong Joon-ho, to his credit,has saidsomething very similar: he wants viewers of his movie to “tal[k] over all the ideas they had while watching it”—not to have their minds changed in a particular direction.

因此，认为奉俊昊的电影是一部旨在告诉人们该怎么想的作品是错误的。Part of what preventsParasitefrom being a simple morality tale is that the rich characters aren’t entirely terrible and the poor characters aren’t entirely saintly. The central poor characters (the Kim family) are vastly preferable to the rich characters (the Park family), but they are flawed human beings. What has today’s legion of critics concluded from this? ThatBong is trying to tell us something, of course, and what he’s trying to tell us is:the poor deserve what they get.

I hope you find that surprising if you’ve watched the movie, but I promise you, it’s exactly what theLA Reviewtells us: “Parasitedelivers uncensored class contempt….Parasiteimplies throughout that the Parks are at the top and the Kims at the bottom of the social ladder for good reason.” (The Parks don’t fold pizza boxes well, so apparently they deserve to live in a slum.)The Nationagrees: “their suffering… is rationalized by their vulgarity and unscrupulousness.” Rationalized!

This idea is already staggeringly false about the Kims: maybe they aren’t enormously motivated to fold pizza boxes, but they are clearly resourceful and sharp. And then again, they are not the only impoverished characters in the film: there’s also the original housekeeper, Moon-gwang, who is surely neither lazy nor unscrupulous.(Most viewers will probably root for the Kims over Moon-gwang. Some will stop to wonder why they did so. And this complexity is a strength of the film, not a weakness.)

如果你想让人们通过你的电影来思考和谈论，那么加入模棱两可的元素是一个好主意。这包括道德的复杂性。If, inParasite, the poor characters are not utterly saintly and the rich characters are not utterly villainous, this is not because the movie is failing to be a good morality tale: it’s because it’s succeeding at being complicated.

So no, the poor characters in the film are not presented as deserving their fate. And no, this is not a “message” about poor people everywhere, telling us that all of them are lazy and unscrupulous and deserve everything that’s coming to them.Parasiteis not an allegory, in which the characters stand for All Poor People. They areparticularfictional people, not archetypes. We are not supposed to base our views of poor people on what the Kims and Moon-gwang do in this film. And even these specific characters are not presented as deserving to live in the gutter.

The critics got it wrong about what the film is trying to do; as we saw, that led some of them to say very strange things about how the Kims are presented. And it also led to a third invented complaint: that the movie is too simple.Parasite,TheNew Yorker《告诉我们》只不过是“准确的信息和精心策划的谈话要点，针对的是持这种明确观点的评论家和观众。”这只是对唱诗班的说教。它既沉闷又压抑，让观众无事可做。真的吗?我猜如果你完全忽略了所有的复杂性，你就无法完成电影想让你做的工作——但这并不是电影的错。

Parasite当然会问我们真正的寄生虫不是富人，不是穷人。是否能有一个公正的社会，允许奢侈。就像阿多诺说的那样，在资本主义内部是否存在道德，在错误的生活中是否存在正确的生活。但它并没有回答这些问题。如果这部电影想教给我们一些东西，那是一种逃避;但由于这部电影试图让我们思考，这正是我们应该做的。

The critics who’ve pannedParasite非常想把它看成一个道德故事。他们希望这部电影成为“我们这边的宣传”，号召人们武装起来反对体制。That’s whatThe Nationmeant when it complained “Here, then, is whereParasitetakes us: not to the ledge of class war but to a shrug over inequality.” But that’s not what Bong is up to, any more than it’s what Toni Morrison is up to, or A.S. Byatt (“I do not have a message to give to the world, I do not wish to seduce or persuade”), or André Aciman (“my novel doesn’t have a message”), or J.M. Coetzee (“A story is not a message with a covering”), or Leïla Slimani (“There is no message. I think that literature is here to ask questions, not to answer questions”), or scores of others. Bong said it right out: “I’m not making a documentary or propaganda here.” Wouldn’t it be nice if people had listened?