After their 19th century vacation in the last episode, Sean and Cody swim back to roughly the present day and immediately find themselves drowning in Korea’s environmental problems as depicted in Bong Joon-ho’s sardonic tragicomedy Parasite. When Kim Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) bluffs his way into a job as a tutor to the fetching daughter of the rich Park family, he thinks he can get his own poor family out of their squalid subterranean Seoul rat-trap. But as the Kim family completes their infiltration of the Park household, a series of bizarre surprises turns the Kims’ cushy gig into a bloody nightmare of class warfare. Environmental issues discussed include climate change, rainfall and flooding in modern Korea, and the linkage between economic dislocation and environmental problems.

How and why is Parasite the ultimate climate change movie? Why is Korea, and especially South Korea, being punished by climate change sooner and more severely than most parts of the developed world? What happened to South Korea’s once-robust middle class, and is the same thing now happening to the U.S.? How much more rain now falls in Korea than did 250 years ago? Why did Donald Trump absolutely hate this movie without ever having seen it? What’s the ghoulish secret ingredient of Kettle Korn that makes it taste so good? Why are there so many fried chicken restaurants in Korea? Would anyone actually build a house like the Parks’ shown in the film? What does this film have in common with Great Expectations and Sherman’s March, featured on previous episodes? All these questions are burping to the surface through your toilet in this wet, sloppy and disaster-capitalized episode of Green Screen.

Parasite (2019) at IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6751668/ Parasite (2019) at Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/parasite-2019/

Next Movie Up: 12 Monkeys (1995)

Additional Materials About This Episode