BIOFILM: The Host As a Narrative Roadmap for 2020-21
Bong Joon-ho's 2006 monster movie offers glimpses into the oh-so-predictable Covid Narrative.
To build off the Parasite writing that I did a year and a half ago, I couldn’t help but revisit another Bong Joon-ho film recently. I first watched The Host years ago when DVD by mail was a thing — still a thing, btw — but I couldn’t help but view it differently on the rewatch.
It’s a badass monster movie on the surface, and it has a lot of overlap with Parasite beyond the thematic and titular connection. What I really want to flesh out, though, is the movie’s function as a narrative roadmap for the year 2020-21.
Major spoilers ahead for those who care.
In the wake of the discovery of a monster in the Han River — note the river’s name here — the threat of a seemingly nonexistent virus causes everyone to freak the fuck out.
Politicians, unelected bureaucrats, the media and medical professionals use this threat to violate human rights and drop an experimental and dangerous chemical agent onto the public, some of whom protest the use of the chemical agent because they clearly understand this kinda thing typically does more harm than good and fundamentally understand the concept of informed consent and body autonomy.
Meanwhile, the only sane, rational people are cut off from their family, quarantined and thought to be delusional mental cases by medical professionals playing charades and parading around in the medical equivalent of Halloween costumes, all the while exhibiting no understanding of what a virus really is or how it functions both in nature and in the human body. (Nature and the human body are not two separate things, mind you.)
The result: a lot of innocent people die.
And what happens to the monster that started this whole thing anyway? Was it swiftly dealt with shortly after its discovery by the experts and the authorities, which is what you’d expect from people in such positions of power?
Nope.
It’s allowed to run loose while the controversial chemical agent is developed, surely the final hammer and sickle into the coffin of this monster that these same people actually created.
Wait what?
Oh you must have forgotten the beginning of the movie! I hope you’re smoking a hash pipe at this point
because plot twist!
The physical monster in the river isn’t the real monster in the story. You have to go alllllll the way back to the beginning to identify the actual monster — a goddamn American scientist working in a South Korean lab who knowingly orders the dumping of formaldehyde into the river, which creates this mutant river creature to begin with.
Doh!
Does this narrative sound familiar?
Now, I’m not saying I believe this whole Wuhan-Covid thing,1 but it’s hard to ignore the similarity in the story here. Is the metascript2 just pulling storylines from movies and embedding them into our shared reality? Methinks so.
Anyway, the river monster is killed by the sane, rational people in the end, who then decide to enjoy a nice meal together and turn off the fucking news while they do so.
Let that be the lesson here — and hopefully the destination in which this roadmap finally takes us.
Actually, I’ll go on record and say it’s some grade-A, lab-created fiction.
Oh, you don’t know what I mean by metascript? Good. Neither do I. I’ll define it soon. Suffice to say it has something to do with everything.