Teaching PARASITE!

I’d solicited Parasite readings on Twitter and Facebook, and there was some interest in the results, so I figured I’d consolidate what i’m doing on the blog for anyone who wants to see what I’ll be doing.

This is for the course on the “hypercontemporary,” all texts that were either created or rose to prominence between 2019 and 2021. It’s one of two films the students chose for the film sequence in the course; the other one they picked is Soul, which makes for a nicely odd one-two punch.

I landed on a two-day structure. Day one is politics:

• Dan Hassler-Forest, “Bong Joon-ho: Love in the Time of Capitalism”
• Matthew Flisfeder, “Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus”
• ADDED LATE! Alex Tabarrok, “The Gaslighting of Parasite“
• Anne Anlin Cheng, “The Shell Game: From Get Out to Parasite“
• Jason Read, “On Class and Subjectivity in Parasite and Knives Out“

Day two is devoted to matters of form, both with respect to the way Bong puts the film together but also the complicated way we read Parasite as Westerners encountering a subtitled film from an Asian nation whose politics and culture are not especially well-known to the US and European audience:

• Ju-Hyun Park, “Reading Colonialism in Parasite”
• Su Cho, “Subtitles Can’t Capture the Full Class Critique in Parasite“
• Bettina Makalintal, “In Parasite, Food Is a Violent Weapon of Class Struggle”
• Sara Coughlin, “The Signature Noodle Dish in Parasite Tells a Complicated Class Story”

The sandbox post is wide open this week but I do invite their thoughts about what the rumored HBO adaptation might do differently.

As I noted on Twitter, Parasite was the last film I saw in a movie theater before the world ended so this is very much a “nature is healing” moment for me personally. I can’t wait to talk about it.

I got a good question on Twitter: “Did you come across any pieces critical of the film?” Here’s the answer, such as it is…

Not really! I think it goes to the prejudices and preferences of academics and critics in an almost laser-guided way.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 27, 2021

The negativity comes in more in the way US audiences are missing out on big parts of the film because of cultural context stuff they don’t even know they don’t know.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) March 27, 2021