by Robert Bouffard
I love to engage with media that challenges my beliefs. It makes me think deeply when a film or television show presents themes or characters who are opposed to my worldview. I like to understand where other people are coming from. Understanding and engaging others’ viewpoints are essential to forming your own.
I’ve come to this conclusion largely because I grew up in an atmosphere that discouraged this oppositional engagement. The suggested way of handling this was to shelter your mind and insist that you were right, which is counterproductive.
Nowadays, I get excited when I watch a movie and love it, only to realize it has an oppositional viewpoint to another movie I love. It just serves to materialize the sort of debate and cultivation of thought that I enjoy so much. These instances show me that contrasting ideas can coexist and each thrive, which is the kind of world I strive for.
So join me as I examine two movies that send opposite messages, but which I still love just the same.
Both movies that I have chosen here explore a number of different themes, but I’m boiling them each down to how they deal with one idea in particular: hope.
The two films are Parasite and The Shawshank Redemption. They each deal with a specific kind of hope – Parasite explores wealth inequality in modern day South Korea and whether those at the bottom have any hope of working their way up, while Shawshank explores a more general kind of hopeful view of life and freedom. But while they’re different in this way, at the core, they are both about characters in dire straits trying to create a better situation for themselves.
As I’ve mentioned in previous entries in this series, I tend to favor the movie whose message I more strongly agree with, which in this case is The Shawshank Redemption. So to borrow from the spirit of the phrase, “I have some good news and some bad news,” I’m going to address the “bad” news first with Parasite.
But in this case, “bad” news is sort of an unfair moniker, because I immensely love and appreciate Parasite as a movie. The Academy Award Best Picture winner is my number 21 favorite movie of all time and was my second favorite movie of 2019. The reason I disagree with its message, though, is because it is ultimately pessimistic.
The film follows the Kims, a poor family of four living in a semi-basement and struggling to make ends meet. In fact, Director Bong so badly wants to emphasize that they live in a semi-basement that his opening shot is a tilt down from their window to their living area, the first of many shots to show that this family lives deep in poverty.
When Ki-woo, the elder of the two children, is recommended by his friend Min to be an English tutor for an extremely wealthy family, the Kims find themselves in a better position financially. This is the first time in the movie that we see the Kims have any semblance of optimism. Up to this point, Director Bong shows them living underground, supposedly as low as they could possibly get. They’re stealing WiFi and they don’t even want friends to come over because they are ashamed of the squalor they live in.
But Min’s job recommendation isn’t the only thing he provides his friends with. He also gifts them a viewing stone, which is meant to bring wealth to those who possess it, thus introducing a major motif which will percolate through the rest of the movie. Ki-woo places heavy significance on this stone and sees it as a metaphor for the family’s status beginning to slowly rise.
The entire Kim family eventually is able to start working for the wealthy family, the Parks (the way they come to be employed is entirely unethical, but the meaning of the title Parasite is a topic for a whole other essay). In their newfound position, the Kims feel as though things are looking up. Ki-woo even uses the stone to threaten a man who regularly urinates outside their home. It gives him a feeling of power and hope which he never felt before, particularly with the lewd intruder.
Meanwhile, there is a couple who is of even lesser socioeconomic status than the Kims, and that is the Park’s former maid, Moon-gwang, and her husband. Mrs. Kim took Moon-gwang’s job, leaving her unable to provide for her husband who is secretly living in a hidden bunker beneath the Park’s house to avoid loan sharks. The Kims, who for so long have been the downtrodden, lowest of lows, are for the first time feeling like they are above someone else, and their attitude immediately becomes one of entitlement. Instead of being understanding and compassionate and offering to help, they threaten to turn in Moon-gwang to the authorities. Ki-woo eventually even goes as far as planning to use the stone, the symbol of hope, to threaten Moon-gwang.
But that isn’t before the Kim’s entire semi-basement is flooded and they have to spend the night in a crowded gymnasium with others whose homes have been ruined. Ki-woo lies on the hard floor clutching the stone to his chest. They had their situation made so perfectly and he thought the stone was to be some sort of positive metaphor, but now he’s left clutching to what he can. It’s only about 10 minutes later in movie time where the stone, and effectively, hope, finally slips out of Ki-woo’s hands, which leads to Moon-gwang’s husband throwing the stone on Ki-woo’s head. This was the world’s way of saying, this is what someone in your situation gets for thinking there is hope.
In an incredible climactic scene, violence breaks out at the Park’s garden party and Ki-woo’s sister is tragically killed, his father goes into hiding in the very bunker which they felt as though they were above, and Ki-woo himself spends months recovering from brain trauma. Each night, Ki-woo’s father tries to send a message to his son using the house’s lights and Morse Code, and Ki-woo imagines himself becoming independently wealthy and reuniting his family. But the final shot of the movie is a retread of the opening shot; the camera tilts down to show Ki-woo sitting in the semi-basement, implying that after everything the family has gone through during the film, nothing has changed or will change for them. They’re back at square one and there isn’t much reason to believe they will ever make it out.
On one hand, it baffles me when I like a movie which is this pessimistic. I try to be optimistic whenever I can and Parasite just doesn’t fit that bill. But on the other hand, I appreciate honest and real depictions of life, which the film certainly does provide. I absolutely adore the movie, but no matter how many times I rewatch it, I don’t think it will ever make it higher on my favorite movies list. Everything above it has more of a sense of happiness and optimism, which I typically want when watching a movie.
And this is why The Shawshank Redemption is so lasting for me. Coming in at number seven on my favorite movies list, there is certainly a lot more than just the theme that I love about the movie. It’s got great characters, a wonderful feel, and of course, an all-time great twist ending. But for the purpose of this piece, I obviously want to focus on its main theme of hope.
Shawshank lives and dies with its main character of Andy Dufresne. Andy was wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover in the mid-1940s and was sentenced to two life sentences in Shawshank Prison.
The beginning of the movie is pretty bleak. Even though we learn for sure that Andy is innocent, the evidence is totally stacked against him. Meanwhile, we find Red, Andy’s eventual best friend “on the inside,” being rejected by the parole board. Speaking about their own parole hearings, the other inmates joke, “I’m up for rejection next week!” No one seems to think there is any sort of potential for life outside of prison. They’ve accepted their fate.
This is most heartbreakingly clear with Brooks, a man who’s been in prison for over five decades. He’s become so institutionalized that he doesn’t know what to do with himself once he’s released from prison. The man ran the prison’s small library and cared for an injured bird, and that’s all he wanted. So when he was sent back to the real world, he became overwhelmed and sadly took his own life.
In contrast, Andy seems determined to never become like Brooks. He refuses to let himself become institutionalized no matter what those around him think because he knows there is more to life than the inside of prison walls. In the short term, Andy does things just to feel normal: he gets beers for his friends, shapes chess pieces out of stone, plays music for the rest of the prisoners to hear, and establishes a better library than the prison has ever had. Andy just wants people to remember that there is more to life, “that there are things inside you they can’t touch,” even if costs him two months in solitary confinement.
And Andy certainly has plenty of reasons to feel hopeless and pessimistic. Prison life is bleak, but it is even more so when you are actually innocent like he is. At the beginning of his sentence, he always has to be on edge because there is always the threat of violence from the guards, which we see on his first night, and from fellow inmates, which we see when he is abused by the Sisters gang. And later on, he’s totally at the mercy of the warden. Andy even experiences pushback on his hope from Red, who tells him hope can drive a man insane and that it is dangerous. But nonetheless, he overcomes it all.
When put side by side with Parasite, Shawshank’s story, and especially its themes, seems so simple. Even though the world is telling him that he should have no hope, Andy refuses to have that attitude. He says, “Get busy living or get busy dying.” That quote along with, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies,” are the whole movie boiled down to its core. Andy always knew there was more to life than being locked up with nowhere to go. He even says he didn’t expect this storm to last as long as it has, which implies that he knew it would eventually pass.
Andy of course escapes from prison after digging a tunnel through his cell wall for almost two decades. His persistence and refusal to let go of hope is what kept him going for such a long time and it paid off in the end.
In both Parasite and Shawshank, the main characters face situations which are unfair. But the difference in attitude each movie has about the respective situations remains stark. It’s easy to get bogged down in the hopelessness that Parasite presents because it is so real. But the positivity that can come from Shawshank is good and worth working for. Because as Andy says, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”