Prophetic Hyperbole in Parasite and The Parable of The Rich Young Man
SPOILER ALERT: spoilers in what follows.
When we think of the Old Testament prophets, we think of their frequent critiques of the rich and the powerful for their mistreatment of the poor, widows, and orphans. Reading and hearing their words, their critiques seem fair and reasonable to us. For example, we can easily agree with the prophet Amos: it is appalling that many in ancient Israel were eagerly waiting for an end to their festivals so that they could return to the market and “buy the poor for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals” (Amos 8:6). We can also understand the prophet Isaiah’s anger that the needy were turned aside, the poor robbed, and widows treated like spoils of war (Is 10:1-2). Overall, it is easy to receive the prophets’ message because we already agree with them that these things are unjust. Thus, the prophets seem reasonable to us: they speak what is true, and so they act rightly, even appropriately.
But this is not the picture that Jewish theologian and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel paints of the prophets. According to Heschel, the prophets are anything but proper members of society. As Heschel explains:
We and the prophets have no language in common. To us the moral state of society, for all its stains and spots, seems fair and trim. . . . So many deeds of charity are done, so much decency radiates day and night; yet to the prophet satiety of the conscience is prudery and flight from responsibility. Our standards are modest; our sense of injustice tolerable, timid; our moral indignation impermanent (The Prophets, 9).
In this portrayal, the prophets start looking less reasonable, less composed. They show an extreme sensitivity to evil. In fact, they seem fixated on it and refuse to be appeased. Their language also becomes less understandable, less proper. It seems hyperbolic and sometimes offensive. So, Amos calls the women of Bashan cows and everyone in Israel, not just the rich and powerful, are portrayed as “trampling on the poor.” Is this not an exaggeration, and if so, what are we to make of it?
Prophetic Hyperbole in Parasite (2019)
This prophetic hyperbole is paralleled by Director Bong Joon Ho’s 2019 film Parasite. Parasite follows two families, the rich Parks and the poor Kims. The son of the poor family, Ki Woo, lands a job as the English tutor for the rich family’s daughter. However, noticing how gullible and naïve the Parks are, Ki Wook begins to plot, with the help of his family, ways for all of them to get hired by the Parks. They frame the Park family’s current workers for various misdeeds and in turn replace them. The sequences are funny as each new family member that gets hired recommends the next while the Parks remain completely oblivious to their scheming and familial ties. Halfway through the film, the Kim family relishes the success of their schemes and are shown enjoying the Park’s family home while the Parks are away on a camping trip. They bathe in the Parks’ luxurious bathtub, lay in the daughter’s bed, and enjoy copious amounts of food and alcohol. The Kims, for all intents and purposes, have become parasites, leeching off the rich family. The viewer cannot help but feel some sympathy for the Parks.
However, it is at this halfway point that the tone of the film shifts. The Parks’ former housemaid, Moon Gwang, rings the doorbell and asks to go to the basement, claiming she forgot something there the day she was fired. The Kims, along with the viewer, learn a horrific fact. Moon Gwang’s husband, Geun Sae, has been living in a secret bunker in the Parks’ basement, hiding from loan sharks. With the introduction of Geun Sae, the film becomes more and more disconcerting as the Kims and the housemaid become afraid that each will reveal the others’ secret to the Parks. Thus, a power struggle begins that ends in a bloody birthday party at the end of the film.
One scene is particularly shocking. In it, we learn that during all his years living underground, Geun Sae has assigned to himself the “job” of turning the lights in the Park family’s hallway on and off from a series of light switches in the basement. In this scene, Geun Sae’s hands have been tied up by the Kims, but he still tries to diligently fulfill his job, slamming his head on the light switches, as he cries out, “Mr. Park, you feed me and you house me. Respect!” We also learn that he frequently sends morse-coded messages of appreciation to Mr. Park for “letting him live” in his basement by flickering the lights on and off. Mrs. Park interprets the morse-code as “the sensors going batty,” revealing that the Parks believe their lights have motion sensors. The scene is most jarring. Geun Sae’s warped and belittled sense of self is contrasted to the completely thoughtless and oblivious existence of the Parks.
It becomes clear in this scene that the parasites are not simply the poor, but the rich, whose luxuries come at the cost of the poor’s livelihood and even sense of self. The scene is haunting and hyperbolic. Yet it would be a mistake to watch it and say, “This is ridiculous. Surely it is not the case that in every basement there is a poor man responsible for our motion sensored lights! Surely the Parks cannot be blamed because of a deranged man who lives in their basement whom they know nothing about! This is extreme and therefore untrue.” But, hyperbole does not communicate truth by a strict correspondence to reality; rather, it shows us the truth by shattering our own individual made-up and false realities. In other words, hyperbole is aimed at lulled consciences. By shocking our sensibilities, it hopes to make us more aware of the injustices that we routinely ignore or that have become so commonplace that we fail to be affected by them. Indeed, while there may not be a poor man living in our basements responsible for our nonexistent motion sensors, there is a poor man, woman, or child somewhere responsible for many of the goods we enjoy.
Since the Parks do not know about the man in their basement and his suffering, we might be tempted to say that they are not responsible for his misfortunes, and thus, to also exonerate ourselves. But there are various moments in the film where the director wants to be clear that there is a difference between just being “nice” versus being good. The Parks are “nice.” They do not explicitly or directly do anything wrong to anybody. But, as Mrs. Kim hints, the Parks are nice because they are rich, and ultimately, their niceness amount to nothing more than naïve indifference and neglect. For example, Mrs. Park expresses happiness at a night of heavy rainfall, completely unaware of the plight of those whose basement apartments were flooded due to the rain, while Mr. Park consistently complains about (and dramatically sniffs at) bad smells, making the Kims uncomfortable as they know they are often the source of it. Isolated, these actions would at most seem lamentably oblivious, but when placed in relief against the man in their basement and the struggles of the Kims, whose apartment (and sewage) was flooded by the rain, we realize that the Parks, despite all their “niceness,” are culpable. Thus, the exaggeration, the unbelievable existence of the man in the basement and the unceasing misfortunes faced by the Kims, is necessary in order to highlight the extent of the Parks’, and our own, indifference to the poor.
In this way the director is like the prophets. His depiction of the state of society, of the relationship between the rich and poor, is hyperbolic. But this is the purpose of prophetic hyperbole: to show us through its own exaggerations how exaggeratedly indifferent we have been. The fantastical story of the man in the Parks’ basement might be necessary for us to start turning our heads towards the poor in our streets.
The Rich Young Man (Ruler)
The story of the rich young man also serves to reorient us through hyperbole. The rich young man, like the Parks, appears perfectly nice and upstanding at first glance. The charges laid against him seem too severe for someone who followed the law from his youth. Why should his ability to attain eternal life hinge on this one act? Unlike when we read the prophets and their incessant critiques of the rich, the Gospels here paint a pretty sympathetic picture of a rich person. This is someone we can identify with.
But just as soon as our identification with the rich man is made, just as quickly does he fail to live up to Jesus’ standards, and so the condemnation comes: “How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God! . . . Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:23-25).
We immediately want to defend ourselves or distance ourselves from the rich young man! “Surely, the issue is because he is too rich to care, but I care about the poor.” Or we start to question the wisdom or practicality of Jesus’ command.
But the disciples, what do they do? They continue to identify with the rich young man and see to the core of the problem: the kind of radical love and care for the poor demanded by Christ is difficult, indeed impossible, not just for this one rich person, but for everyone! Thus, the disciples were “astounded” and asked “who then can be saved?” (Mark 10:26). They see everyone’s salvation at stake, not just the rich young man’s. Why are the disciples, and indeed all of us, being implicated alongside the rich young man? What have we done? Doesn’t it seem excessive and hyperbolic to suggest that we are like this rich young man?
I want to suggest that other apparent “excesses” and “exaggerations” in the story, such as the amount of the young man’s riches, or the austerity of Jesus’ command, are there to test us. They are there to reveal to us whether, upon hearing Jesus’ words, we will distance ourselves from the rich young man and make excuses for our own relationships to money and the poor by saying, “well, it is not as excessive as that of the rich young man,” or whether we can also find ourselves condemned and indeed, ultimately find the excess in ourselves, and not in the story. Just as in the prophets and in Parasite it is not just the rich who trample on the poor, but all of us, so in the story of the rich young man it is not just he who fails to give all to the poor and follow Christ, but us as well. The story is not just there to condemn one rich young man, but to warn the rest of us “who lie upon beds of ivory, and stretch [ourselves] upon [our] couches . . . but are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph!” (Amos 6:4,6). If we fail to grasp this about prophetic hyperbole, we refuse to let the prophets actually speak to us and condemn us, not just the “rich” and “powerful,” categories which we can all too easily disassociate ourselves from.
Ironically, then, it is only through the excesses of the prophetic critique, especially in its preposterous or exaggerated depictions of the rich, that we can also implicate ourselves, and in doing so, realize that the universal condemnation issued by the prophets in the end is also not all that exaggerated. The exaggeration of the prophets leaves us with two choices: distancing ourselves from the critique because it is not “realistic” enough, and thus condemning ourselves further, or, realizing, through the absurdity of the prophets’ hyperbolic language and depictions, the absurdity of our own lives, in all its extravagance and overconsumption, which we take for granted, and always at the expense of others. The latter will also result in self-condemnation, but one that leaves us open to change.
The Solution to Our Excess
As to the possibility of change, or repentance, this is one significant difference between Parasite and the story of the rich young man. In Parasite, social injustice and inequality eventually come to a head in violence and murder, with both rich and poor alike dying. But the systems of oppressions that were previously in place ultimately remain intact and are simply occupied by new characters. For the director, social inequality leads to violence, and violence can only re-produce the same class system which, once again, tends towards class warfare. While Parasite levies a critique at the rich, then, or at least satirizes the life of the rich, it provides no true solution to the disparity between the classes, much less to the injustices already committed. At the very least, it rightly sees socio-economic upheaval as providing a cyclical, rather than final, solution.
The story of the rich young man does offer a final solution. This may seem a strange suggestion, since the story is not ostensibly primarily about the poor or the relations between the poor and rich, but about a young man sincerely searching for “eternal life.” But the young man is rich, and in his quest for salvation the fact of his wealth cannot be ignored, and thus Jesus asks him to give all of his belongings to the poor. We must note that Jesus is not simply asking him to give up everything, but to give it all up for the sake of others. Therefore we, along with the rich young man, are not only confronted with our unhealthy attachment to our possessions, but also with how they make us callous to the plight of the poor and distract us from our desire to follow Christ. The solution offered by the story of the rich young man, then, is to subordinate wealth and possessions to higher goods, such as love of neighbor, and ultimately, eternal life.
But this formulation runs the risk of making the story lose its bite. So, lest this hierarchy of goods seem simple enough to achieve, let us not forget that only in giving up everything can we truly prove our love of neighbor and love of God. If this seems an impossible task, let us also not forget Jesus’ words to his disciples when they ask “who, then, can be saved?”: “with man it is impossible, but with God all things are possible” (Matt 19:26; Mark 10:27). It is only by the grace of God that we can truly recognize the extent of our excesses and abandonment of the poor, and it is only by the grace of God, then, that we can truly receive the prophetic critique and accept personal responsibility in any productive manner. The prophets, for all their critique, always saw a glimmer of hope; they always called for repentance. But true and full repentance, the kind that can achieve a more just world where poor and rich ultimately do not exist, where social violence does not become the norm, requires an excess of love to counter our excess of greed and indifference. It requires the kind of love that makes the impossible possible, and so the kind of love that only God can provide.
