Parasite and Knives Out were two of my favorite films of 2019. On the surface, they don’t have a lot in common. One is a darkly comic Korean thriller about a family of con artists, while the other is an old-fashioned American locked-room murder mystery. Both have twists that make them much more than just that basic description, but the plot, tone, and style of the movies are quite different. What links them? Both movies are fundamentally about capitalism. And together, the two movies reveal something important about class solidarity.
What is class solidarity? On a basic level, it is about the way people who share an economic or social class stick together. They share political and economic goals with one another, and generally speaking have more empathy for people who lead similar lives. Teen Vogue put it well: George W. Bush and the Obamas may be political opponents, but they’re still friends. They ‘share values’. Why? Because they’re staggeringly wealthy elites. The Obama family didn’t lose essential services under the Bush. They weren’t invaded. Bush did truly monstrous things, at home and abroad… but not to them.
We live in a time of profound inequality. How did this come to be? Because it wasn’t an accident, I promise you that. The powerful have strong class solidarity — and the working class does not.
What are you, a family of charlatans?
In Parasite, the Kim family are perpetually down on their luck group of con artists. Kim Ki-woo gets hired on as a tutor for the high school-age daughter of a wealthy local family. He uses that opportunity to help elevate his whole family, first getting his sister a job in the house, and then scheming to get the family’s other servants fired and replaced by his mother and father. At first, the scheme goes surprisingly well, but when the family
Well, spoiler alert: Turns out the housekeeper’s husband has been living beneath the house for years. He had once owned a cake shop that had gone under, leaving him deep in debt. Both families, each dominated by debt barely held off by their wealthy employers, turn on the other. Moon-gwang and her husband threaten to report the Kims; the Kims fight back. Ultimately, both families are destroyed seeking the protection of their employer.
There is a delightful tragedy to Parasite. Both families have so many opportunities to team up, for lack of a better phrase. The Parks, the family that employed them both, had more than enough money to support all of them, and that’s not even counting more… radical solutions. Instead, the two families turn on one another, each seeking to protect what little they had from the other, neither realizing that there’s more than enough for them both.
I’m so sorry I told them about your mom.
In Knives Out, beloved mystery writer Harlan Thrombey dies overnight in an apparent suicide. The police are ready to go with the accepted story — until gentleman detective Benoit Blanc shows up, hired by a mystery person to dig a little deeper. Everyone in the family is a suspect. What the audience knows that most of the characters don’t is that the one person who seems beyond suspicion, Harlan’s nurse Marta, accidentally overdosed Harlan on morphine, and he killed himself to prevent her for getting blamed.
Spoilers… again… but when it comes out that Harlan left the entirety of his estate to Marta instead of his family, seemingly all of the family turns on her. No surprise, there; nothing about the first half of the movie suggests that any of them are particularly good or honest people. Except, of course, for Meg, Harlan’s granddaughter, a liberal college student who sticks up for Marta early in the movie and seems to have a genuinely positive relationship with her. Their relationship was strong enough that Marta told Meg her biggest secret.
So you can imagine how heartbreaking it is for Meg to not just turn on Marta, but to betray that secret. Meg doesn’t seem happy to do so, and she doesn’t have much in common with the rest of her family. What she does have is class solidarity with them. If Marta inherits, Meg’s stock tumbles. Meg might believe in feminism and antiracism, but she practices class solidarity. Because in the end, she believes first and foremost that the Thrombeys deserve their wealth and Marta deserves to be the help. I have no doubt that Meg genuinely likes Marta. She just, you know, genuinely likes her where she is right now.
We are the Thrombeys, goddamnit! This is still our house!
In the intro, I talked a little bit about how good the rich are at having class solidarity. Unfortunately, they are also very good at undermining class solidarity for working people. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes the process by which wealthy elites, fearful of a union between working class Black and White folks, used the legal system to oppress them both — but, and this is key, to oppress them unequally, so Whites would feel superior without any actual material benefit.
Even today, many White folks are reluctant to give any ground. Every year, the representation of people of color and trans folks within the working class swells. And every year, the divide between the wealthy and the rest of us grows deeper. When do we come together? Because it is impossible for me to watch Parasite now and not wonder what could have been. If the Kims hadn’t been so hostile to helping Moon-gwang and her husband, could the tragedy and terror that followed have been forestalled?
Watching Parasite and Knives Out in 2020 highlights one thing to me: We cannot be so afraid of what we might lose in the struggle that we do not try to make a better world for one another.