Reading Cold War Ruins in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite

This essay reads Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite and its surrounding discourses as significant texts for reconsidering US imperialism in Asia without recentering the US and while creating space to consider an alternative Asian American critique. It analyzes Parasite's representation of the haunting memories of the Korean War and the US as a figure of modernity by placing the film in longer histories of the development of the South Korean film industry in the 1950s, South Korea's rapid industrialization, and US support of South Korean military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and the social movements that followed in the 1980s, protesting the unequal class structures. Borrowing Jodi Kim's formulation of the Cold War as an epistemological project, I investigate how the shared lack of attention to the film's representation of the Korean War in selected reviews gestures to complex US interventions in Asia. By examining the film's representation of the history of the secret bunker and North Korean nuclear threat, I argue that these "Cold War's ruins" productively foreground the protracted Korean War and US militarism in Asia. Building on Lisa Yoneyama's transpacific critique, I suggest that these ruins of geohisorical violence elucidate the otherwise unrecognized transpacific entanglements.