By Jacob Skubish

There’s a moment of calm in the middle of Parasite, the latest film from director Bong Joon Ho (Snowpiercer, Okja), where our protagonists’ plan seems to have paid off. The Kims, an economically destitute family in South Korea, have successfully conned their way into a slew of jobs for the wealthy Park family: the Kim children (Woo-sik Choi and So-dam Park) have secured tutoring jobs for the Park children, the Kim father (Kang-ho Song) becomes the Park father’s chauffeur, and the Kim mother (Hye-jin Jang) is hired to serve as the Park family’s housekeeper. With the Park family away on a camping trip, the Kims feast in their lavish living room, soaking up the spoils of their swindle.

The conversation inevitably turns to the Park family, and Ki-taek (Song) remarks on its matriarch’s kindness. “She’s rich, but still nice,” he muses. Ching-sook (Jang) fires back: “[She’s] nice because she’s rich. Hell, if I had all this money, I’d be nice too!”

In the extravagant Park home, a far cry from the run-down abode the Kims are used to, the point is well taken: the rich can be personally pleasant and still act as a destructive force. It’s a sentiment prominent at the movies this year. From Us to Hustlers, this year’s films have taken delight in exacting revenge on those above us.

Parasite doesn’t dismiss Ki-taek’s viewpoint, however, and ultimately considers its consequences: what happens when the rich are nice, and we love them for it? And what happens when that love goes beyond the individual and seeps into the ethos of a society? In this regard, Parasite shares an inquisitive outlook with another recently released film it would seem to share little in common with: Jojo Rabbit, a satire about a young boy in Germany during World War II and his imaginary friend, Adolf Hitler.

Jojo Rabbit makes a farce of Hitler (played by Taika Waititi, who also wrote and directed the film), portraying him as a sassy sounding board for young Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) and his frustrations. Jojo is well on his way to becoming a member of the Nazi army until an accident with a hand grenade puts him out of commission. Forced out of service, Jojo finds himself with ample time to toil around his house, where he makes a shocking discovery: there is a Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding behind his walls. The two form an unlikely friendship, a cursed phrase that automatically vaults Jojo Rabbit into the awards season conversation.

The reception to Jojo Rabbit has been mostly positive, but the film has earned its fair share of detractors, mostly on the grounds that it’s a sugarcoated, naive take on the horrors committed by the Nazis. But this approach is intentional, and precisely why the movie works: this version of Hitler is a figment of Jojo’s imagination, only whimsical and empathetic because that’s how a boy indoctrinated with Nazism would see him. It is an individual relationship that suggests an explanation for an entire country’s indoctrination; if all of Germany saw Hitler with the love this young boy did, they would follow him blindly, too.

The film is, however, a Hollywood production through and through. Jojo learns to not hate the Jewish people as his friendship grows with Elsa (McKenzie), and the positive vision of Hitler begins to fade from his mind.

Such a surface-level description groups Jojo Rabbit dangerously close to Green Book, last year’s Best Picture-winning “unlikely friendship” film fiasco. Let me be clear: Jojo Rabbit triumphs far beyond the meager sentimentality of Green Book. Aside from its factual inaccuracies and mistaking of an economic relationship with a genuine friendship, Green Book finds little interest in doing much but congratulating its white savior for renouncing his racism and, *gulp*, teaching his black friend how to live.

Jojo is changed by his relationship with Elsa, but the film is more concerned with the indoctrination and oppression on a larger scale: it fully derides the context in which Jojo could have developed his hatred in the first place, and fully humanizes Elsa. It is also crucial that Jojo is a child. He was never a direct party to the horrors committed by the Nazis, and the film charts a path for him to see what a mistake it would have been if he was.

Waititi is a talented filmmaker with a gift for emotional honesty, and Jojo Rabbit is full of lovely, sometimes painful moments of human intimacy. I take issue with the criticism that the film is naive. Waititi certainly imbues Jojo Rabbit with a positive vibe; his characters are living through the end of WWII, yet they want to dance in the face of disaster. But the film offers no singular corrective for authoritarianism, nor does it try to. What it does do is present a touching case of what can happen when we relinquish the adulation for the oppressors we loved. As Jojo looks at himself in the mirror near the film’s conclusion, he gives himself a directive: “Today, just do what you can.”

In his fervent boyish nationalism, Jojo had literalized the notion that Hitler should be his best friend. Waititi’s film tells the story of what happens when he realizes that he must give up that love in order to do the right thing. It’s not naive, but it is hopeful, and the distinction is in the scale of change that Jojo Rabbit sees as possible: all we can hope for is to do better than before.

Ki-taek, on the other hand, has no hope that things will turn out better in the future than they have in the past. He promises the rest of his family that he has a plan in his back pocket in case their con goes awry. When things do fall apart, his son asks him what that plan was. “You know what kind of plan never fails?” Ki-taek responds. “No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned...it doesn’t matter what will happen next.”

The economic origins of this inclination are evident: the Kim family has no financial security, and thus feel as if planning for the future will do no good to change their present. It’s a belief visually captured in my favorite shot of the movie, when the shit is literally overflowing and all Ki-jung (So-dam Park) can think to do is light a cigarette. Meanwhile, the Park family can whip together an ostentatious party at their home in a matter of minutes. Ching-sook is right: they are nice because things come easy to them.

But from the very beginning of Parasite there is an ominous feeling that there is something sinister lurking beneath the surface of the Park family, and when that becomes literally true it flips the film on its head. An unexpected member of the underclass complicates the Kim family’s plot, and what ensues after the film’s big turn is the most tense stretch of filmmaking I’ve seen in years.

What is fascinating about this shift in Parasite, aside from Bong’s expert storytelling, is that the Park family does not become a mutual enemy; rather, those on the bottom wage war with each other for their scraps. Held captive by the Park family’s wealth, one character still deifies the Parks (Sun-kyun Lee), self-harming as he mutters, “I’m sorry, Mr. Park.”

This is what separates Parasite from the other cinematic income inequality parables of recent memory: it resents the rich, but it can’t help but love them, too. As a Bong Joon Ho movie, things do inevitably get bonkers; there is a fight back, and the Kims and the Parks are not able to bury the hatchet. But moments before chaos ensues, looking over the splendor of the Park home, Ki-woo asks the Park daughter, Da-hye (Ji-so Jung): “Do I fit in here?” The Park family treats the Kims as nothing more than economic commodities, yet Ki-woo still strives to be a part of their world.

Ki-woo continues this desire in the film’s final sequence as he tries to make a better future for himself, ignoring his father’s advice. “Today I made a plan,” he says. “First I’ll earn money. When I have money, I’ll buy the [Park’s] house.”

What makes this closing sequence so crushing is not that Ki-woo is trying to better his life, but that he can only think to do so on the terms of the conditions that oppressed his family in the first place. It’s a different sort of love than the one Jojo has for Hitler, but perhaps more powerful: the type of love that forces Ki-woo to frame everything in terms of capitalist glory, no matter the past results.

“Okja, Snowpiercer, Parasite, they’re all stories about capitalism,’ Bong said in a recent interview with Vulture. “Before it’s a massive, sociological term, capitalism is just our lives.”

It’s this expansive perspective, this ability to see capitalism as more than a “system” with the ambiguity that term carries, that continues to make Bong’s films resonate. In Parasite the oppressive nature of capitalism is not just an economic arrangement, but a psychologically organizing force that influences our entire condition. It’s what causes us to turn on each other before we turn on the Park family: Ki-woo so quickly imagines himself as being able to achieve what they have.

“You’re not a Nazi, Jojo,” Elsa says midway through Jojo Rabbit. “You’re a ten-year-old kid who likes dressing up in a funny uniform and wants to be part of a club.” The criticism is spot-on, and Jojo eventually realizes it’s true. Jojo loves Nazism because he thinks Nazism loves him, and when he realizes there could be no love in an ideology that hates Elsa, he abandons it. Ki-woo, meanwhile, is not so quick to see the light. The oppressive state wins out in Parasite, even if its characters don’t fully realize they remain trapped under its spell.

But while the two films diverge in their characters’ ability to shed the love for the forces that oppress them, they share the idea that this love should be scrutinized at all. Perhaps Jojo Rabbit is hokey and naive, and we cannot so easily escape indoctrination. Perhaps Parasite is too nihilistic, and we can think on our own terms. But together they make a crucial argument, that the oppressive love we need to shed won’t always be so obvious as an imagined Hitler. It’s a parasitic affection that lives within, and before we can expel it, we have to know it’s there.

'Parasite,' 'Jojo Rabbit,' and the oppressors we love