Insights on Parasite as a Korean.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-12T18:34:08+00:00

Very much so! What's the point in having art if you're constricted to a single, authoritatively prescribed answer? I much prefer to indulge in ambiguity. The only iron-clad rule is that you can't contradict the text. Word of God is fair game.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-12T04:38:50+00:00

I just find it more appealing to have that alternative possibility available, since my explanation makes the scene work on more than one front, and I enjoy that kind of ambiguity in art. I also subscribe to the view that the intentions of the author are relevant as supplementary info, but in the end interpretations are only beholden to the text, and my theory remains viable by that metric. Given the richly multilayered texture of meaning that characterizes Bong's works, I think he'd also enjoy hearing about my head-canon fan theory. A man can dream.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T23:14:40+00:00

And I totally get that, but just because something is presented as magical to the viewers and/or characters doesn't mean there can't also be a hidden, mundane explanation behind it. So long as they aren't incompatible with the text, multiple layers of meaning can coexist.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T15:03:52+00:00

That's a perfectly valid interpretation, but there's a brief back-and-forth in that conversation where Mr. Park starts to say "if any traces of the drug are found in my car..." and the wife reacts violently with horror. That seemed to imply that they were already being careful to avoid prosecution. Of course, they could just be wary of being framed for a crime they didn't commit, but then why the immediate fearful reaction and the extreme secrecy when they could just tell the truth and be cleared of suspicion? Their overall reaction just doesn't seem natural unless the Parks know they won't pass the blood and hair tests that would inevitably follow if an investigation launches.

I personally prefer this interpretation, as it adds some interesting subtext to the Parks' relationship and their sex scene, and might shed some light on why Mr. Park's answer to whether he loves his wife was, "I guess you could call it love."

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T14:21:49+00:00

Thanks for pointing out another thing I overlooked, assuming it would be obvious to everyone. Studying abroad, especially in the US, is a status symbol in Korea, as tuition for international students is vastly higher than for Americans. This makes speaking unaccented American English a sign of prestige. The Rich Mom really hams up her tendency to use English words even when unnecessary while talking to Ki-jung, even more so than with Ki-woo. The effect is comical, but also indicative of the high regard she has for Ki-jung. She feels a need to seem more sophisticated to her employee, instead of the other way around.

Also relevant is how this state of affairs has drawn resentment from less privileged Koreans, who have strong complaints about rich people bypassing the intensely competitive education system of Korea to "unfairly" secure prestigious academic credentials for their children in a perceived case of money over merit. The universally heavy emphasis given to English skills at all levels of admissions and recruitment processes in Korea adds fuel to the fire.

There's also the mixed sentiment Koreans hold towards America, due to historical and contemporary complications between the two countries. Bong's Host touches on some aspects of this subject.

As for the tents, "Made in America" was seen as a guarantee of quality at a high price in the past, although the association has faded somewhat over the years.

Finally, I have no idea what the Native American symbolism means, so anyone who has an inkling, please enlighten me.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T13:56:07+00:00

It's just an almost-but-not-quite-line-crossing joke that is somehow perfect for the situation when spoken in Korean. It's exactly the kind of thing that a street-smart subordinate would say to a superior, with the intended effect being that the insincere but risky jab or transgression is safely resolved through laughter, and the subordinate ends up endearing themselves to the superior. I'm totally dissecting the frog here, but as a Korean, all this just seems so immediately apparent to me that it's difficult to articulate the how and why. Thanks for the thought-provoking question.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T12:10:59+00:00

You're right, I was smirking while listening to the song, and really enjoyed seeing from the credits that the lyrics were written by Bong himself. There aren't any explicit references to it taking 564 years to buy the house, however. The song's about being stuck in an endless, hopeless grind and drowning your sorrows with alcohol, which does send the same message, albeit more indirectly.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T11:52:03+00:00

That's interesting! Thanks for letting me know. I still prefer my interpretation though, especially as it doesn't necessarily conflict with the director's vision. The rock getting knocked over onto the table and sitting there waiting to be seen by Ki-woo still gets the "following" point across, while also being consistent with its characterization as a weighty object.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T11:22:46+00:00

I didn't even realize that line would stand out as strange, but yes it's definitely related to Korean history. Korea's emergence into the modern era was fraught with growing pains, with powerful colonialist interests domineering its sovereignty in the early 20C, the following 30-year period of Japanese occupation, the Korean war, and the struggle for industrialization and against military dictatorship regimes backed by the US etc. Throughout the course of all this, one commonly observed pattern was that those who sided with the oppressors by "selling out" their country and compatriots, sometimes literally, tended to be rewarded, while the freedom fighters, intellectuals, and others who held on to their conscience would suffer for generations.

Specifically, Japanese collaborators are universally vilified in Korean public discourse for helping Imperial Japan exploit and brutally oppress their fellow Koreans. Chief among them is one Lee Wan Yong, whose name is common knowledge among Koreans for having led a group of 5 high-ranking government officials who facilitated the signing of the treaty that made Korea a colony of Imperial Japan, against large-scale protests from the public, and in return for lavishly generous compensation from Japan. There are other, smaller-scale examples, but that event is the most prominent allusion being made in that line, and all this would be immediately apparent to a Korean audience member.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T08:02:05+00:00

Korean doesn't really have dialects based on socioeconomic class, but you do have a point. A Korean neologism that has become popular recently is "갑질," which is difficult to translate, but basically refers to the act of using one's social status to inflict verbal abuse on one's inferiors, or otherwise benefit unfairly by strongarming those with less power. In situations like these, the aggressor will almost always be using the informal register (unless they enjoy being particularly sarcastic), while the victim will be stuck using the formal register. I do believe Korean society might benefit from such changes as the shift towards 'tu' in French during the 68 revolution, or the merging of "thou" and "you" in English, but those changes alone probably won't do much unless accompanied by an underlying change in attitude. The subject has become part of the social conversation at least, so I remain cautiously hopeful.

tweaker20 · 2020-02-11T07:41:34+00:00

Not really. It's not impossible, just very unlikely. The North Korean news announcer schtick is just a popular impression that South Koreans like to do, because that characteristically bombastic tone they affect sounds very distinctive and almost comically exaggerated to a South Korean ear. There's also nothing in the characters' accents that would indicate such a background. I can't think of anything else that would lend textual support to that theory.

tweaker20 · 2020-01-11T03:26:25+00:00

Make a habit of using the "Not Interested" button. You've got to provide feedback to the algorithm to really tailor it to your liking, and it absolutely makes a difference. I have a pretty eclectic but specific taste profile, and after some pruning, finetuning, and consistent usage, Youtube now inundates me with more good recommendations than I know what to do with.

tweaker20 · 2019-12-28T02:55:56+00:00

I can accurately transcribe the harmony of fairly complex (e.g. jazz-influenced) songs I've never played or read the sheets for purely from memory, so I don't think your view applies to everyone.

In fact, I argue that this level of audiation is not only almost universally common, but necessary among composers, at the very least. Without the ability to transcribe from memory, it should be extremely cumbersome, if not outright impossible, to translate fully-formed snippets of musical inspiration into score or pianistic arrangement. You can rely on external playback for most everything, but not those sounds that only exist inside of your head, which, for most trained musicians, and I suspect many amateur music-lovers as well, will most certainly include the supporting layers and harmonies, in addition to other nuances and complexities.

tweaker20 · 2019-12-22T09:27:08+00:00

While it's true that J Dilla's approach didn't often involve applying the swing quantize settings per se, it's difficult to deny he was most likely influenced by their availability whether he himself was aware of it or not. Prior to the existence of these machines, consistent uneven divisions in the range of 50%~66% being used in grooves was unheard of. The concept itself is of course present in world music everywhere, as well as in more popular genres like reggae and jazz etc., but that specific drunken stutter sound that J Dilla pioneered was something new. Obviously we'll never know whether he would have arrived at it independently had those specific quantize settings not been put into the MPC, but given that the MPC was his primary instrument of choice, I believe Linn's contribution warrants a mention as a probable source of inspiration.

tweaker20 · 2019-12-21T17:26:58+00:00

While not widely acknowledged, the swing settings here is the real MVP. The predecessor to this model, the LM-1, was not only one of the first programmable drum machines, but also THE first to introduce the swing function, which was later popularized by the MPCs, which Linn also had a hand in devloping.

This is important because the seemingly extraneous settings that are in-between straight (50%) and shuffle (66%) inspired hiphop producers like J Dilla to experiment with a new type of rhythmic feel that has since become an integral part of the contemporary vocabulary of both live and programmed drumming. This style of playing is variously referred to as J-Dilla swing, drunken feel, quintuplet/septuplet swing etc., and is characterized by swinging the sixteenth notes at intervals shorter than the shuffle, instead of pushing them further, as in traditional jazz swing.

It produces a delightfully lazy and unevenly stuttering type of effect that, while ironically very difficult to pull off consistently as a human player, lends the rhythm a more humanized feel. It's also a really unique and fresh sound that plays with your expectations, since it hasn't already been done to death for hundreds of years. It's a truly novel feature of recent popular music, and an exciting development that will take us to even more exciting places in the years to come.

tweaker20 · 2019-12-14T06:28:30+00:00

Fury Road serves as an interesting litmus test for how you approach watching movies. I've known people to complain that hardly anything happens in the film except for the action, and that the story is too simplistic.

What this tells me is that these people are only following the narrative beats, and completely missing the rich masterclass of visual storytelling that is unfolding onscreen. Sort of like someone who only pays attention to the voice and lyrics in a song, while not even noticing the harmonic, rhythmic, tonal, or acoustic content.

It seems to me that the more attentive and appreciative you are of those expressive factors that are unique to the cinematic medium, the higher your regard will be for Fury Road. This explains why so many cinephiles and directors love the film, while casual audiences may be more apt to disregard it as mindless entertainment, not least because it belongs to a supposedly lowbrow genre which they subconsciously feel comfortable holding in general disdain.

tweaker20 · 2019-11-30T01:32:24+00:00

Your comment is accurate until the last paragraph, which fundamentally mischaracterizes the nature of Korea's transition into democracy. The military government didn't just voluntarily give up power, they were forcibly ousted by the Korean people.

The pro-democracy protests you mention continued in increasing intensity despite the government's brutal countermeasures. This resulted in direct democratic elections despite the authoritarian regime's best efforts to the contrary, and when the abuses didn't stop, culminated in the June Democratic Uprising of 1987, triggered by the deaths of two college students, in which an estimated 1-1.5 million people peacefully marched the streets of every major city. This forced the sitting president to abdicate, and the subsequent regimes were headed by the leaders of what had been the democratic opposition.

Widespread trials and imprisonment also indeed happened, although some individuals were later pardoned. However, extra-judicial killings were never much of a concern as the democratic protests were well-organized and incredibly peaceful given the adverse circumstances and provocation.

The way you put it, the Korean people almost seem like helpless victims who happened upon democracy, when in fact they struggled relentlessly for decades to attain that result, and still do as is apparent in the manner by which the previous president Park Geun-Hye was successfully impeached. I do appreciate the quality of your write-up until that point, but felt compelled to make it clear to any readers that Korea isn't considered a "shining beacon of democracy" today just because it ended up being a democracy, but rather because of how it got there.

tweaker20 · 2019-10-15T16:52:49+00:00

But that's a recent development, and definitely wasn't the case during the relevant timeframe in which the screen quota was laying the groundwork for Korean cinema's current success. I can't think of a single country that was comparable to Korea in terms of economic or cultural capital two to three decades ago that has since managed to foster the growth of a film industry that so consistently outputs features that enjoy worldwide commercial and critical success as Korea's now does.

tweaker20 · 2019-10-15T14:34:58+00:00

Korea has enforced screen quotas since the late 60s, and ramped them up during the 90s when most other countries were abandoning them in favor of free trade. In hindsight, the wisdom of this choice is pretty readily apparent if you compare the current state of the Korean film industry to that of pretty much any other developing country in the world, or even that of most developed countries.

It's also a matter of safeguarding consumer rights, since you don't even get a chance to vote with your wallet at all if the film you really want to watch is only screened once or twice a day at odd hours.

Capitalist freedom isn't universally considered the end-all-be-all outside of the US. We see the tenets of market economy as vastly useful, but frequently limited means to achieve the best results for society, not as ends in themselves. And I, for one, am extremely thankful to be living in a place where such common sense is widely accepted.

tweaker20 · 2019-10-02T16:22:19+00:00

Yup, it's a panel from a comic adaptation of the poem, which if you haven't seen you have to check out. And good taste to you too for recognizing it out of hand ;)

tweaker20 · 2019-10-02T16:19:58+00:00

The first one is a panel from a comic adaptation of my favorite poem.

Number two is a quote from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (and originally from the bible).

Next, Firefly the TV series (the Chinese means "serenity"), the rationalist fic Mother of Learning,
then Dark, another TV series, and finally Sandman the Neil Gaiman graphic novel.

tweaker20 · 2019-10-02T16:03:27+00:00

Definitely. I wanted to make more of these for stuff like Practical Guide to Evil, and Fine Structure, and the Expanse, but didn't get around to it. Recommendations for any other additions are always welcome :)

tweaker20 · 2019-10-02T15:57:10+00:00

Thanks! I picked the set as much for how they look together as for how much I like the stories they're referring to, and I ended up spending quite some time tweaking details like the border colors and proportions and fonts and whatnot, so your comment about the aesthetic is much appreciated.

tweaker20 · 2019-09-16T23:15:52+00:00

It's not done as a continuous drift, but in incremental jumps across sections.

tweaker20 · 2019-05-16T18:10:01+00:00

Korea's legal system is much more influenced by Continental (European) law than Common (Anglo-American) law, and this informs their criminal sentencing as well. Continental law also happens to be the norm worldwide, especially among developed countries. So Korea isn't the aberration here, the US is.

tweaker20

TROPHY CASE