Place Identity and the formation of communal identity

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As humans, the space we occupy forms an integral part of our understanding of the self, and consequently affects that space as well, since they do not exist in isolation but in tandem with each other, the space reflects in its very nature, the components of self. This is accurately explained by the term ‘Place Identity’ coined by Harold M. Proshansky, who defined it as ‘those dimensions of self that define the individual's personal identity in relation to the physical environment by means of a complex pattern of conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, goals, preferences, skills, and behavioral tendencies relevant to a specific environment.’ Taking this we examine Parasite (2019) by Bong Joon-Ho which narrates the story of two families, the Park family - living an affluent and privileged life, and the Kim family who struggle to survive through petty jobs while living in a bunker located in a dingy neighbourhood. It reveals class inequality and disparity between the two classes. Set in hyper-capitalist South Korea, Parasite talks of two families who are attempting to navigate the socioeconomic structure that is both imposed upon them and created by them. We look at how the idea of the home as generated by Bong Joon-ho in the movie becomes a site for violence with public consumption of a privatized space. We do so via an investigation of the architectural design incorporated in both the family homes with an emphasis on the structures of the basement, staircases and windows. The cinematic house is more than just a statement in architecture – its spatial/filmic significance means that it has a role to play in understanding the deeply convoluted relationships between the external architecture and the intrinsic and intertextual connotations of the contents of the house. As Anthony Vidler notes, this intersection of filmic and architectural aesthetics led to the formulation of a new term in the 1920s, “cineplastics,” whereby “space –hitherto considered and treated as something dead and static, a mere inert screen or frame, often of no more significance than the painted balustrade background at the village photographer’s – has been smitten into life, into movement and conscious expression” (Scheffauer in Vidler 2000: 103).

As Martin Heidegger says: “place is the deep and complex aspect of human's experience from the world" (Afroogh, 1998). Expanding on this, the idea of place identity has come to have deep-seated connotations in the study of architecture, focusing on the psychology of a place and its impact on the human subject. Architecture, like the human subject, evolves and transforms through multiple cultural, social, and political encounters and serves as a visual marker of a complex heritage of a nation, its culture and its people. Similarly, the evolution of Korean architecture connects intrinsically with the political, social and cultural transitions the nation has experienced. 

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Capitalism, industrialisation and urban development of Korea

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With the Japanese colonization, the Korean War, the period of a militarist regime, Korean Hallyu and rapid industrialisation, Korea experienced massive transformations of entire landscapes. Korean architects took on the task of reconstruction following the Korean War, and until the 1970s the trend in Korean architecture was to adopt International style. The prominent architects during this period were Jung-op Kim who worked under Le Corbuisier. This concept of space in architecture is primarily understood as man-made and something that is distinctly shaped differently from the natural space outside the building. Usually composed of a floor, ceiling, and walls, interior space found in Western architecture is defined as “cubic space.” This space is viewed as a protective artificially enclosed and human-centered area formed against the empty space of the natural universe. However, Korean architecture, often referred to Hanok, seeks to find “a feeling of vitality” within this to generate more of a “space of life,”* where people lead everyday lives, rather than as a “mathematical, cubic space.” This is also in lieu of Le Corbusier's thoughts relating to a second machine age that would restore the more harmonious relationship between nature and mankind, the human and the cosmic, something that was destroyed by the coming of the first machine age     (1830-1930). Corbusier identified changes in architecture that would guide this process, one of the primary being glass as the means of restoring the law of the sun (just as the main windowpane in Parasite).
Apart from the adoption of an international style, the Korean war led to creation of the underground bunkers or semi basements called Banjihas. Primarily created to safeguard against the war, it soon became the living space of many students, economically and socially downtrodden citizens of the country, even often used as shelters for North Korean defectors. Described in vivid detail in Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite, the semi-basements and the basements reflect the perpetual violence that continues to exist, if not rise, in contemporary times. With the modernisation and urbanization of Korea these places of violence intersect with the modern to form a complex relationship of self- identity. Boyd and Linehan describe how bunkers, designed for sheer survival, yet making a very efficient use of resources, represent “simultaneously both the apotheosis and antithesis of modernity” The bunker’s dual role as both a womb-like protective space and a site of death has been noted by scholars such as Beck (2011) and Duffield (2011). Defined as indicating “environ-mental terror” (Duffield 2011), the presence of bunkers is essentially ambivalent, as it reminds onlookers of both an impending annihilation, and it necessitating a possible safe place where one could survive it. (Jieheerah Yun,3). The difficult heritage of these basements connects directly with the rapid modernisation of Korea that peaked during a militarist regime** . With Kim Swoo Geun becoming a rising star in the new military regime, he was put with the responsibility of industrializing Seoul. With industrial and the eventual opening up of the Korean Economy to foreign investors, a modern minimalist structure was favoured for the construction of houses, and the Hanok was regarded as ‘old and impractical’ due to the need to imitate the West and become a ‘modern’ nation. Through modernisation, a capitalist economy emerged which moulded the architectural spaces in an increasingly hierarchical manner. One such minimalist architectural element, The main horizontal window in Parasite not only becomes a frontier between two spaces but also sets an anxiety-ridden and dynamic course. As the Park family house was constructed by a fictional architect Namgoong Hyeonja, whose art is essentially seen as minimalistic, it is stated, “The architect also chose privacy. The interior space of the home and the exterior sociological world is clearly distinguished as if it is cut with a sharp blade. This establishes a sense of detachment from the underprivileged society and a clear way of remaining ignorant of the poor’s struggles as embodied in the flooding scene where the Park's tent sustains without any flooding, which is Bong's metaphorical hint of the socioeconomic divide that Seoul sees. It is ironic to think a tent wouldn't have any damage, but a home would. Bong Joon-ho provided this example to show that different parts of Seoul are built for a modern touch to the city, and some others are left behind" (Julia,11).

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However, it becomes clear that the privileged family is blessed with the natural element of sunlight. Le Corbusier's insistence on the supremacy of light and the exterior landscape meant that the natural elements of the sky and earth were to be treated mythologically as the elements of a vast outdoor room, an extension of the single room. The windows are never covered with curtains, neither is access to them hampered by objects. On the contrary, everything in these houses seems to be disposed of in a way that continuously throws the subject towards the periphery of the house, wherein the horizontal window of the house gains a TV-shaped frame. The look is directed to the exterior in such a deliberate manner as to suggest the room almost as a frame to view the elaborately manicured lawn outside.

Bong Joon-ho says that each character and the teams of the three family units that they take over, that they can infiltrate, and secret spaces that they don’t know, create an interesting dynamic between the units and the dynamic spaces they occupy in the house. The story of Parasite demands much in terms of blocking, for if someone is in a certain position, the other character has to spy on them; if someone’s coming in, another person has to hide behind a corner. These positions established spatial relationships within the character as well as sought to give the architectural design a hide-and-seek effect.

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Memory, Violence and Spatial Reality

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"Through the factor of cinema, time is incorporated to become a dimension of space." Faure claimed time becomes a veritable instrument of space by means of film, "unrolling under our eyes its successive volumes ceaselessly returned to us in dimensions that allow us to grasp their extent in surface and depth." The "hitherto unknown plastic pleasures" thereby discovered would, finally, create a new kind of architectural space, akin to that imaginary space "within the walls of the brain." This space allows the construction of memory to play out. In the ending note of Parasite, as the father of the Kim family supposedly walks up the stairs again to climb out to a better life, the moment is suspended in an imagined space whereupon our senses and understanding of spatial reality are thrown into disarray.

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In 1920, German art critic Herman G. Scheffauer hailed the end of the "crude phantasmagoria" of earlier films and the birth of a new space, one that holds movement and conscious expression. Thus, the film began to extend out what Scheffauer called "the sixth sense of man, his feeling for space or room - his Raumgefiihl," in such a way as to transform reality itself. No longer as an inert background, architecture now participated in the very emotions generated in a scene; the surroundings no longer surrounded but entered the experience as presence” (Vidler 1993: 47).

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The spaces at work in Parasite are mostly semi-basements, sewers and symbolically loaded staircases that allow for the vertical exchange of meaning to take place between Bong Joon-Ho’s vertically superimposed characters. Logan Baker points out similarities between Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and BongJoon-ho’s 기생충 (Gisaengchung, Parasite) use of stairs (Baker 2021), and how the filmic space basically becomes a host inhabited by vertically arranged sets of parasites (present as the characters), representatives of different social classes who, on the other hand, display more similarities than differences. The clear distinction between the location of the Park family house and the Kim family house reflects the fast-paced capitalist-centred production of living spaces in Seoul, outwardly seen as a “soft city”, one that values “the appreciation of invisible things, such as cultural and emotional wellbeing” hide its poverty-stricken class much like basement remains hidden but in plain sight. In such an economy, capitalism created a desire for upward mobility and the creation of a social identity through the means of architectural modernity which disregards tradition but at the same time keeps it in its underbelly. The Kim family slowly occupies positions in the Park house, and the dream of the Ki-Woo finally buying that house and freeing his father serves as a reminder of the modernized facade of a ‘global’ city. 

 

Jung Ji-youn says that Bong Joon-ho’s spaces come alive, host a whole range of “parasites”, devour them and spit them out, just to devour them again. He further emphasizes that Bong Joon-ho’s architectural designs, even those that appear calming and comforting, display a high degree of monstrosity, and act as an embodiment of a system that Bong’s characters are desperately trying to inhabit, only to become inhabited in turn.

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Bong Joon-ho’s 기생충 (Gisaengchung, Parasite) takes place in the deeply personal space of a home. Referring to private property and its genesis, Serres states, “Those who see only public space have no sense of smell. As soon as you soil it, however, it is yours. The parasite doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop eating or drinking or yelling or burping or making thousands of noises or filling space with its swarming and din. The parasite expands, to invade and occupy. It overflows, all of a sudden, from these pages. Noises, din, clamour, fury, and non-comprehension. Asymmetry, violence, murder and carnage, arrow and ax (Serres 2007:144). As Bong Joon-ho has already mentioned, everyone is our parasite in the film and it is, arguably, the architectural element that acts as a host, a backdrop of a class struggle that exposes the deeply flawed vertically designed system. Henshaw dwells on the difference between our visual landscape as separate from our bodies, which makes it controllable, and our olfactory landscape, as immediate and less controllable and an integral part of the space that we occupy (Henshaw 2013:13). When Park Dong-ik complains about his chauffeur’s smell it is because he feels entitled to his space and feels his employee as crossing a boundary: Kim Ki-taek’s body odour invades the interior of his car, his posh home, and ultimately his body. The very architectural design of the Park family home enables each family member to enjoy full privacy and isolation (should they wish to isolate themselves from the others, as is the case with the youngest member of the Park family who camps in the front yard) but it also enables its owners to have full visual control over the interior and exterior which ultimately makes them feel safe. However, the body odour of the Kim family members challenges this natural power of their own personal space and leads to an invasion and finally violence, the courtyard which acts as a private sphere of the rich under the urban structures and becomes the space of crime and murder when exposed to the once ignored ‘public’ and disguised ‘traditional’. Despite opting for an architecture of exclusion and separate spheres, the Park’s family home is impregnated with a smell. The trash belonging to damps or sewers explodes in the face of the Park family.

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According to Gabilondo, 기생충 (Gisaengchung, Parasite) is an overworked and convoluted narrative about the impossibility of overcoming, dismantling, or exiting neoliberal capitalism and becomes a cinematic version of Fredric Jameson’s infamous dictum that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (Gabilondo 2020:1). Bong Joon-ho’s characters try to overcome or dismantle whatever is making it impossible for them to climb the stairs which presents itself to be a futile task since the system has internalized them and they have internalized the system in return. It’s precisely what makes it hard to set an individual apart from the system, their host, and the ultimate parasite, it makes it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. The impossibility of advancement within this system is emphasized in the beginning and the ending shot of Parasite. The clear dissent shot of the window in the Kim family house that starts and ends the story clearly shows that what transpires between both points does not hold much weight upon the cyclical nature of the system at all. The ending clearly confirms that no matter how hard the poor try, they will never be able to rise in a world catered at the hands of the rich.

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Despite a rocky history, South Korea currently operates as one of the most concentrated forms of free market capitalism and as a result, contains one of the most stratified class systems. Thus, the nature of home in South Korean cinema has always been heavily influenced by the ideas of class. The divide between the rural and the city, those who struggle to survive on the streets and those who have money has been present in Korean cinema since its inception. So the home has historically been a contested space in which class, culture, race and gender have played out. Theoretical treatises of space have examined such socio-cultural divisions through consideration of, for example, private/public, nature/culture, and inside/outside oppositions***, as well as their impact on the internal architectural organization of the home (Pearson and Richards 1997). The house and the home in Parasite become a site of violation and melodramatic events, reiterating the cycle of perpetual poverty and the vision of a bleak future in a capitalist economy of the rich.

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Notes

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*Traditional Korean architecture was not obsessed with giving a strong visual impression, compared to Western architecture. Korean architecture attached importance to the entire “bodily feeling” rather than just the “eyes". Korean architecture was interested in the overall physical experience, even if it came at the expense of some visual experiences. (Kim sung woo, 63)

 

**The discussion of modern Korean architecture began after 1961, when a coup d’état took place that, two years later, brought General Park Chung-hee to power. This regime, which maintained a dictatorship until the assassination of Park in 1979, embarked on an aggressive policy of industrialization and development.

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***(see Anderson and Gale 1999; de Certeau 1988; Massey 1994; Sibley 1995)

 

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