Is it contagious?
HOW PARASITE’S OSCAR HAUL WILL CHANGE HOLLYWOOD, PLUS SNUBS & MELODIES, FP13-14, AND COSH,
KEN JEONG HAS MADE A REAL NICE LIVING PLAYING KEN JEONG PARTS. — COLBY COSH
On Sunday night the South Korean film Parasite became the first movie with all-non-english dialogue to win the best picture Oscar. It came as a near-universal surprise, and represents an extraordinary bust- out from the pen that is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ best international feature film award. Everybody who respects the traditions of the cinema must be imagining their own list of great “foreign” films that were given no chance to take best picture. Please accept our retrospective apologies, Battle of Algiers and In The Realm of the Senses and The Bicycle Thief!
So here’s my sincere question: is this an unwitting mistake that will not be repeated soon, or it is a very natural development that could have been foreseen? The Academy Awards are always best understood as self- recognition or self- expression by an industry, a trade group. They’re not a critical or an artistic accolade. They honour the ability to make money, or they reward some career of honourable and useful servitude, or they help to signal the shared cultural and political values of Hollywood. Once you realize that, you stop expecting the Oscar voters to stop making ludicrous “errors” that look horrible in retrospect.
When a movie like Spotlight ( 2015) or Green Book ( 2018) wins best picture, it is a plain error to imagine some collective critical intelligence asserting that the winner was, in fact, the best motion picture of the year, or even the best motion picture made by Hollywood. But the Oscars are certainly about Hollywood above all else, which makes it puzzling that Parasite was able to make the breakthrough. There must have been 50 or 100 foreign- to- Hollywood movies over the years that arrived with more impressive purely esthetic credentials. Until Monday morning, one would probably not say that Bong Joon Ho had the cachet or the public profile in the U. S. that Federico Fellini or François Truffaut or Ingmar Bergman had in their primes.
So what, from the trade-award point of view, did Parasite have going for it? An obvious thing is the political question of Asian representation on the big screen. Over the last few years, we have started to see ethnically Asian performers and creators raise their voices a bit and begin to protest — if only implicitly — that the American obsession with the white- black racial dichotomy does not serve them very well.
If you look at the history of American motion pictures, anyway, this seems obviously right. Green Book was celebrated for delivering the old message of In The Heat of the Night or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in a less intelligent and sophisticated way. During that same half- century, east Asian actors in American film made relatively little headway in overcoming typecasting. Anyone of Chinese or Japanese descent who ever applied for the job of being Denzel Washington or Halle Berry didn’t get it yet, but Ken Jeong has made a real nice living playing Ken Jeong parts.
Ethnically Asian moviegoers in the English- speaking world, even ones not preoccupied with seeing “themselves” on the screen, are ultra- aware of this. It’s possible to dislike pervasive racial condescension without giving a damn about “representation” per se.
At the same time, the interpenetration of Japanese and Korean popular arts with our own is one of the most remarkable cultural developments of the past 20 years or so. If you’re the parent of an adolescent in Canada in 2020, your child takes for granted a world in which anime is present alongside Western cartoons ( probably as the superior alternative) and K-pop is a fully validated choice of musical cult (with Korean live-action TV drama not far behind).
Snowpiercer, the 2013 action movie made by Parasite director Bong Joon Ho, was a landmark in this process. Most of the dialogue in that movie is English and most of the main cast consists of familiar white folks — but the movie’s unabashedly contrived premise, plot devices and style are ineffably Korean. If you watched the film knowing nothing about it, you’d know, at a minimum, that Hollywood hadn’t made it. Yet it was a big worldwide hit of exactly the sort that only Hollywood is supposed to know how to make.
This is the sort of thing that an industry, as such, does notice — and Parasite, despite Korean dialogue, has already earned even more money than Snowpiercer. ( It probably doesn’t hurt politically that both movies depict literal, violent class warfare.) Somehow this led to a paradoxical result: Parasite, after sweeping up the equivalents of best foreign film prizes in the less prestigious para- Oscars (the Golden Globes, the British Academy Film Awards), ended up winning the top prize outright at the chauvinistically American main event. This is the opening of a door that Hollywood would surely have hesitated over if it had been aware in advance of the possibility.
From the standpoint of Hollywood, or of the American-dominated Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, gestures in favour of Asian screen visibility would ideally reward Asian- Americans. No one, I think, would consciously plan to fumble the best picture Oscar into the Pacific to wash up on the shore of South Korea. But from now on, every time a clever or energetic foreign film loses out to the kind of pious- liberal room- temperature ephemera that usually wins best picture, tough questions will be raised. And why shouldn’t they be?