"Parasite" and the Scent of Shame
You can tell when someone grew up poor, if you look closely enough. They’re the people who check their bank balance every day. They’re the people who look a little sweaty at the idea of splitting the bill in a restaurant, but even more so when someone offers to pay for them. Admitting they need help with anything is a challenge. If they’re parents, often they go overboard in buying things for their children, proving that they can afford to buy the latest hot holiday toy, even if it puts a dent in their finances. They simmer in silence while listening to conversations about private schools, European vacations, and $150 haircuts.
But, mostly, they worry about their smell.
Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is not just the best film of 2019, it’s also perhaps the best film about class rage, and the vast, insurmountable disparity between rich and poor ever made. A funny, creepy, and ultimately harrowing story about a poor family that forces itself into the sterile bubble of a wealthy family, it hits some all too familiar, painful notes: the patronizing, distant politeness the rich express towards the poor, rich people’s belief that their children are inherently “gifted,” how an inconvenience for wealthy people can be a life-changing disaster for those less fortunate. Though their financial situation improves a bit once the Kim Family begins working for the Park Family, they’re often subtly, passive-aggressively reminded of who they are, and where they come from.
This is most starkly illustrated when Kim Ki-taek (Song Kang-ho), employed as the Parks’ driver, listens to Mr. Park (Lee Sun-kyun) complain about a bad smell. The smell, Ki-taek realizes, is coming from him. Does Mr. Park know that? Most likely, although he’s too polite to say so directly, believing that it’s better to simply harp on it until Ki-taek gets the message. He does, and the look of shame and simmering anger in his eyes is the point when Parasite makes the turn from a comedy into something darker and more disturbing.
It’s hard to say definitively what “poor people smell” is, because there isn’t just one universal smell. There also isn’t one universal cause for it, although undoubtedly people who’ve never experienced it would smugly insist that it’s the smell of neglect. We know, of course, that not all poor parents are neglectful parents, and wealthy parents are perfectly capable of neglecting their children. It’s just easier to focus on and pass judgment against what we can see, and hear, and smell.
Sometimes it is simple neglect, children who lack responsible adults in their life to teach them basic skills, such as the importance of clean clothing and wiping properly. Other times, it’s a little more complicated. Lack of access to a washing machine, perhaps. No hot water. So few clothes that they’re worn several times between washes. For me, it was living in a small apartment with parents who smoked constantly, like they knew it was eventually going to go out of style, and where our meals, when they didn’t come out of a can, were an endless array of fried breaded things. Our apartment always smelled like cigarettes and old, stale cooking oil, and it got into my hair, my clothes, everything. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I lived in a home that didn’t reek of cigarette smoke, and now the smell of it is nothing short of repugnant.
That stubborn Puritanical streak in Americans that results in some women reaching their thirties without ever having an orgasm also carries over into bodily hygiene. Body odor is a particularly taboo subject, as illustrated in the fact that a large percentage of body care products, especially those marketed towards women, exist to mask our natural scent. Being special and unique snowflakes means we all have our own signature bouquets, if you will, and as members of polite society it’s incumbent upon us to spray, rub, or smear on our skin whatever is necessary to cover it. There’s been a small but vocal movement to simply rely on plain old soap and water to keep any offending odors at bay, but the overarching message remains: it’s our duty to be as pleasing to the eyes, the ears, and the noses of our fellow men as possible. To be seen in public in worn, stained clothing, to have a bit of armpit stink, is to be pitied and looked down upon.
It didn’t matter that I bathed regularly. I smelled like my house, just as you can, frankly, tell if someone lives in a house with too many pets. You could be fastidiously clean, but that pungent smell of smoke, cooking grease, animals, it lingers, and it clings, and it travels with you, right up other people’s noses. It’s a bellwether of the disadvantaged, like head lice, though neither is always related directly to an unclean body. That is to say, rich kids can get head lice too, but it’s quietly addressed, without the shame and the finger-pointing. The rich raise their children to not feel shame for anything, whereas the poor learn to feel shame simply for existing.
Kids will tell you your flaws to your face, and they won’t let you forget them. If you peed your pants in second grade, by middle school you’ll still be known as the kid who peed his pants. It was pointed out to me once that I smelled, and all the knock-off drugstore perfumes and cheap body lotions in the world didn’t rid me of that designation for a very long time. It was a mark, I had been categorized as an undesirable by people raised to believe that they had the right to designate another human being as such. The worst part about it was that there was no real solidarity with the other poor kids. There was a hierarchy there too, with the kids who really did live in motel rooms or in houses that didn’t have reliable plumbing at the bottom, and the rest of us hating and fearing them.
Ki-taek, to outward appearances, doesn’t look unclean. There’s no indication that he’s indifferent or ignorant to the idea of personal hygiene. It’s the tiny, cluttered basement apartment he lives in with his family, where a neighbor urinates literally right outside their front window. It’s faulty plumbing, lack of access to laundry facilities, lack of the things people like the Park Family don’t just take for granted, they believe they’re entitled to it. Up until Ki-taek’s son manages to get the entire family employed by the Parks, they were earning money by folding pizza boxes. The film doesn’t explain how the Kims ended up in the situation they’re in, leaving it up to the audience to apply their own biases and assumptions. They’re just trying to exist. Ki-taek doesn’t mean to offend Mr. Park’s delicate nose, but he does. His existence is an offense, and Mr. Park would prefer to never have to deal with him at all, except for the fact that he’s his employer.
I’m not poor anymore. I’m not rich either, but I do alright enough that paying the bills each month isn’t a terrifying game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. I have clean clothes. My teeth aren’t in good shape thanks to bad genes and poor nutrition as a child, but there’s not much I can do about that right now, because even as we close in on 2020, cosmetic and restorative dentistry still isn’t covered under insurance. Most importantly, I don’t smell. I know this, because I check, multiple times a day. I own enough scented body washes and lotions to open a small store, and I still worry.
When someone sits next to me on the subway, and then gets up to move to another seat, my immediate thought is because I smell bad. Whenever I receive body wash or soap as a gift (which, let’s face it, is a pretty standard “I didn’t know what else to get you” gift), I always wonder if there’s an underlying message to it: you’re disgusting, sort yourself out, for God’s sake. It always ends up shoved in the back of the space underneath my bathroom sink, never used.
I think, occasionally, of a co-worker at a job I had in my early twenties, who had an...issue with body odor. She was frank about her home situation, with an unemployed husband and a couple of kids, trying to get by on this $7 an hour job. Her odor wasn’t pungent, but it was noticeable, yet, rather than address it with her directly, with respect and empathy, some of us ignored it, while others took a mean girl approach, frequently exclaiming “It stinks in here!” and making a production out of spraying air freshener around the office as much as possible. They were passive-aggressive in her presence, and mocked her behind her back, and still no one simply said this is a problem, let me help you.
I was no better. I ignored it, and nodded politely at the jokes made at her expense. I alternately felt guilty, and relieved that it wasn’t me, although who knows what people say about you when you’re not in the room, particularly if they feel above you in some way? I wish that I had the guts to say something, to tell them to either be adults about it or shut up. But we can’t do that. That’s not how polite society works. You put on your good face and your best appearance, and you never, ever make people have to think about what life might be like for others who don’t look like them.
Strangely, the older I get, and the further removed I become from being one of the kids who smelled funny, I find myself reacting to people’s snickering and complaints about those beneath them much like Ki-taek in Parasite, glowering in silence, bristling with an unshakeable shame, undeniable anger, and something that feels a little like hatred. If a class rebellion every truly happens, the time to turn the tables on those who mock, turning them into objects of derision and finger-pointing, will be deliciously sweet.
