From Parasite to Us, modern cinema is exposing the scam of the American Dream

Class is not cool, says writer and activist bell hooks. While race and gender are now fashionable to talk about, class is the paste-eating boy in the class whom everyone awkwardly ignores. And nowhere is its second-rate status in popular culture more observable than in modern cinema.

Film is addicted to fantasy, and the American Dream is one of its favourites. The only thing standing between you and Bill Gates levels of success? Desire and hard work. If you’re not rich, that’s on you. Of course, this notion of easy social mobility is as elusive as its name suggests – yet script after script has regurgitated this make-believe vision, often to spectacular box-office effect.

And then came Parasite. The thriller by Bong Joon-ho just made history as the first South Korean film to receive an Oscar nod for Best Picture. But perhaps even more seminal is the film’s radical approach to class. In a cinematic era otherwise defined by rags-to-riches tales and individualistic narratives, Parasite offers the unflinching reality of class difference. Its director recognises that perpetuating the alternative fantasy is dangerous.

The blockbusters of the past 30 years are full of individualistic stories of fairytale-like social mobility. Regrettably, a familiar storyline emerges: with just a little elbow grease, an underdog floats effortlessly to the upper echelons of society. Take Working Girl (1988). Savvy and ambitious receptionist Tess, played by Melanie Griffith, outsmarts her conniving boss Katharine with good ideas and a good heart. The message is clear: merit triumphs and class is temporary.

As well as being fluid, class is shown to be performative – it is not only dictated by birthright and bank account but also everyday behaviours. Tess swaps her Staten Island perm for an elegant French twist and dons a power suit to successfully pass for her uppity boss. Similarly, in Pretty Woman (1990), when Vivian returns to exact revenge on the snooty shop assistants who refused her service, she’s only able to do so because she’s swapped her “hooker garb” for Chanel and Louis Vuitton. Both she and Tess class-pass by wearing designer clothes.

These films do not ignore class difference or American capitalism. In fact, through their glamorous depictions of corporate culture, they extol them. What they criticise, however, are those who have not found a way to overcome their circumstances. In their eyes, upward mobility is like swimming against a current – perfectly easy if you train hard enough and wear the right, preferably designer, swimsuit.

Hollywood plays a huge role in nurturing and sustaining this mass-produced myth of an open society, where social strata are permeable and class difference is meaningless. But Hollywood executives aren’t exactly force-feeding us this trope; as an audience, we are willing participants in the delusion. Pretty Woman became one of the highest-grossing movies ever and Working Girl scored six Oscar nods. Pairing haves and have-nots is a tried and tested structure that has persisted throughout cinema’s history, forever popping up in both low and high-brow films: Titanic, Dirty Dancing, Maid in Manhattan, Chalet Girl, The Notebook, Notting Hill, Step Up, Sabrina… the list goes on. And on.

It is argued that cinema can exist as a place of spectatorial pleasure, where fantasies can be momentarily lived out for a small fee. And in the case of these Cinderella stories, the audience is invited to partake in the class-passing too. They are allowed to identify as much with Jack as with Rose; with Noah as with Allie; with Baby as with Johnny. And it’s not just romantic comedies in which these narratives play out. The success of films like The Talented Mr Ripley (1999) and Catch Me If You Can (2002) demonstrate a similar spectatorial engagement, without the accompanying love story.

These kinds of films are the legacy of an industry governed by corporate interests. In his book Cinema and the Wealth of Nations, Lee Grieveson details how the film industry was co-opted to peddle political messages and financial agendas. During the interwar period, a variety of films were produced by the UK and US governments, huge corporations including Ford and General Motors, and lobbying groups like the US Chamber of Commerce. Media played an undeniable role in the dawning era of capitalism, so much so that an investment bank report written about cinema in the 1920s said that the silver screen could produce a “golden harvest”. The same year, the US Department of Commerce announced that “trade follows the motion pictures”.

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The corporate ownership of cinema has shaped its aesthetic and its narratives in profound and lasting ways. The American Dream is a foundational myth of cinema that ignores the reality of structural inequality – and the gulf between fantasy and reality is only growing wider.

Wage disparities have grown “exponentially” since the 1970s, a new report by the World Economic Forum has found. The top one per cent of income earners in America earned 158 per cent more in 2018 than they did in 1979, while the lowest 90 per cent of earners had their wages increase just 24 per cent in the same period. These recent trends have greased the social ladder, making any hopes of climbing it even less likely than 20 years ago.

Wealth tends to linger in families, too. In the US and the UK, it takes an average of five generations for a low-income family to reach the mean income of their society. Social mobility is a long and arduous uphill battle, and one that is not won with a new hairdo and exceptional etiquette. So if you place these fictional stories in a wider reality, they are not so harmless. In their blinkered depictions of class difference as inconsequential, these films fortify a national delusion of an even playing field. It’s an enticing but illusory bubble that pops if you look at it for a second too long.

If the Nineties blockbuster is the blue pill, then Parasite is the red. Bong’s groundbreaking film is an agonising watch, for the same exact reasons that bell hooks says class remains uncool: “It’s the subject that makes us all tense, nervous, uncertain about where we stand.” The film’s depiction of the lower-class Kim family grappling to “make it” does not obfuscate the realities of class difference; it does not fall prey to the mirage.

The film itself abounds in metaphors. The Kim family is disconnected from the outside world without wifi in their half-basement apartment in a Seoul slum, while the wealthy Parks swan around their architect-designed house where expansive vistas and floor-to-ceiling windows pull down literal and symbolic barriers.

The film is set up to replicate the class-passing narrative audiences know and love. The Kims manoeuvre their way to the top, successfully infiltrating the Parks’ home using what they have in their arsenal: prowess, hard work and smarts. Where other films have rolled the credits there, however, Parasite takes it to its dark conclusion.

“They all smell the same!’’ The rich son’s observation is the beginning of the end for the Kims. Despite their faultless performance of class, rivalling even the Nineties heroines, the family is given away by their smell. The idea that there is an essential quality that betrays someone’s social status is not new; a fundamental inferiority among lower classes has long been held as an upper-class justification for class stratification. George Orwell confesses to this in The Road to Wigan Pier, where he writes about the English upper-class belief that lower classes smell in a way that cannot be washed off. After the Kims change their soap, their “smell” persists.

The movie predicts the audience’s reluctance to let go of the dream, preempting its excuses: if they had been better, they would have made it. Bong makes it painfully clear that the Kim family is more capable, more hardworking, more intelligent, more aggressive, more funny, more tough than the Parks. There can be no doubt: if merit does truly prevail over privilege then the Kims would be enjoying a far different future than the one written for them. Misfortune trails the Kims like a shadow, demonstrating the impossibility of succeeding in a capitalist zero-sum game that is rigged against you.

Movies that do not yield to the gleaming, audience-approved message of individualism are not unheard of, but they are few and far between. Jordan Peele’s 2019 horror Us is another to have broken the silence on class.

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Using an HG Wells-ian “Eloi and Morlocks” relationship of oppression, the film depicts an underclass of doppelgängers consigned to life in the literal underground world of dirt and despair. In an eruption of the repressed, the doppelgängers emerge from deserted tunnels, donning red prison jumpsuits and clutching shearing scissors to wreak murderous havoc on their middle-class counterparts. The film rips the mask off an unjust system masquerading as an equitable society. Crucially, the home-invasion structure of both Us and Parasite illustrates the dog-fight world of capitalism: for one to win, another must surely lose.

In a time when the divide between the rich and the poor is growing, the divorce between the reality of class differences and the myth that cinema exalts becomes increasingly dangerous. Today, lower classes face an uphill battle in order to “make it”, and pretending otherwise not only declares a maddening loyalty to a known scam, but impedes any action to address the deepening chasm between rich and poor. We can’t solve it if we can’t see it.

The success of films like Parasite and Us proves that audiences are ready to embrace a different, more truthful narrative. Here’s hoping that class is on its way to being cool.