Fat Little Parasite
In which I use the film Parasite to talk about coronavirus, mind manipulation and my own personal parasitism.
NOTE: This was originally published on March 10, 2020, on the now defunct (i.e. I stopped paying for it) dtoxxxx.com. I started writing this in February 2020 and posted it a mere three days before shit hit the fan, when Trump announced a state of emergency on — you remember — Friday, March 13. This was meant to be a dual podcast-blog project, which this post was the first entry of. This is a sample of what this project will look, feel, sound, taste and smell like. If you dig it, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Most, but not all, of the content here (writing and audio) will be behind the paywall.
Is it weird Parasite won Best Picture in the same reality that coronavirus propaganda is spreading?
Why, no. No, it’s not weird at all.
I mean, chalk it up to coincidence if you like. But something is — well, something is syncing up for some reason or another. At least for me.
Like, okay, so I watched Parasite the night it won Best Picture. Mere coincidence. I don’t have the coaxial anymore, so I’m not always in the loop of what’s on traditional tell-lie-vision and when. I only knew the Oscars were on because I searched Bong Joon-ho’s name on my phone twenty or thirty minutes into the film and saw he’d already won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Naturally, I smiled a smug-ass smile, because that’s what you do when you’re rooting for The Underdog when they’re up against The Establishment. (I love your movies, Quentin, I do, buuuuut idk. Also, yes, I realize everything about the Oscars is Establishment. JUST LET ME PRETEND.)
Watching the film turned out to be a cathartic exercise for me. It’s a bloody little parable about socioeconomic inequality in South Korea, with a sly nugget or two about late-stage capitalism, imperialism and colonialism sprinkled in for added flavor (and who doesn’t love a flavorful Korean dish?).
Beyond that, it’s also a film titled Parasite, which quite literally means
Wait what.
That’s not the definition I expected to see. WTF, Merriam-Webster?
Okay, so I didn’t know that word actually meant that. I thought it meant
You know, like a tick or a leech. Or bed bugs. Or a mosquito. Literally an organism feeding off another organism to survive.
LITERALLY FEEDING. NOT RECEIVING MONEY OR A PLACE TO SLEEP.
Seriously, are you not bothered by the first definition relating parasitic behavior to someone of a certain class sucking off — erm, leeching off the rich? Sorry, exploiting the hospitality of the rich. I’m bothered by this. And hot.
THAT IS NOT THE FIRST DEFINITION OF THIS WORD, YOU GODDAMN DICKTIONARIES.
Okay, so, catharsis.
Wait, I know what you’re thinking. I see that look on your face. (Turn around.) No, this is not the catharsis the film gave me. (No, I’m not standing behind you.) I think this is more of a real-time emotional release of alllllll the pent-up feelings I have re: language and how we use it these days and how our linguistic history is being rewritten online dictionary entry by online dictionary entry, wiki by wiki, tweet by tweet, snap by snap, all while the Doomsday Clock is TikToking down to the zero hour, when words like coaxial will be lost somewhere in the 5G ether (where what’s also going to be lost is all life on Earth). But, like, seriously, bro, where tf did you learn syntax? Your psycholinguistics are clearly memetic. Hey, speaking of parasites.
But, yes, catharsis. Long story short, I am one. A parasite, I mean. Or, I have been. But not in the way Merriam wants you to believe. (Or is it Webster now? I heard you get to choose these things while you’re potty training.) Nah, the parasite I found myself to be was more of the energetic variety. Know the term energy vampire? Yep, that was me. I was a motherfuckin’ bloodsuckin’ vamper. Gimme dat Tru Blood drank and watch me turn into a fat little parasite, as James Keenan so eloquently puts it in the soundtrack above.
The energy vampire thing wasn’t with everyone, only specific people. Well, one specific person. It’s always one specific person, isn’t it? Turns out it was a product of learned behavior that I projected onto this person. That, plus a lifetime of traumatic epigenetics, codependent relationships, and a brain that was scrubbed clean of the good saturated fattiness — myelin, kids — and rewired to be one of those grain brains you hear so much about now, in the Year 2020 of our Lord and Savior, the esteemed polymath Saccharide.
And.
I mean.
Fuck.
This is not one of those realizations you want to have about yourself — what, that you drain the energy of someone you love and adore so very much because of reasons. You repeat behaviors based on past conditioning, and not just once or twice, but over and over and over and over, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, whatever Latin phrase makes sense here, and you do this until someone else comes along and rattles your brain stem a little and shows you that the apples you were picking from said stem weren’t the good, organic, non-GMO apples but the pesticide-ridden, genetically modified apples, and you’ve not only been serving these up to your houseguests all this time, but you’ve also been sneaking into the kitchen in the middle of the night, slicing them up, dipping them in some shoddy, mass-produced peanut butter (I’m looking at you JIF — or is it GIF?), and gorging yourself on them like they’re some immovable feast. And, sometimes, that person rattling your stem is someone you love and adore. Sometimes it’s a therapist. Sometimes it’s someone just wanting to do some good and help people who feel helpless (thanks, Alan Robarge!). Sometimes it’s all three. *grinning face with sweat* Ultimately, though, they’re just showing you the poisoned fruit. Someone else has to uproot the tree and plant a new one. You already know who that person has to be.
Be kind to yourself, though, because accepting you’re a fat little parasite is not an enjoyable experience, so it’s important to just sit with it at first, process it, feel it, then unplug for a bit and, I don’t know, watch a movie or something.
And then, maybe, if you’re lucky, that movie will take you to the next level of woke (or whatever the SJW bots are calling it on Twitter now).
Of course it’s trendy to review Parasite after its Best Picture win, so I’ll refrain from that. (Plenty of others have done this better than I could anyway, including this nifty little breakdown on the Unspooled podcast and some written reviews here and here. There’s also the titular connection to one of Bong’s previous films, 1978’s Up in Smoke. Oops, wrong Bong. I meant 2006’s The Host (edit: more on this film specifically in a future post). A parasite requires a host, see. It also requires, apparently, some plagiarism. So, you are Establishment after all, Joon-ho!)
Instead, I want to do what I think any good critic or reviewer should do: apply what I took from the film to myself and my life...while simultaneously talking up an allegedly plagiarized piece of work for its oh-so-poignant social commentary that was then recognized by an affluent social class as the best film they projected onto the wall-sized screen of their home movie theater in the last twelve months.
All snark aside, moviegoing (moviestreaming, whatever) is an intimate experience between film and audience. This is why certain films resonate with certain people. This is why any critic or reviewer should be able to tap into their own life experience and tell us why a film is good. If it’s just a thematic and technical breakdown, ehhhhh. I get the choices made by the cinematographer are important from a creative standpoint, but if you want me to take this seriously as Art, please share the personal impact it had on you. Anyone can recap a film. Share something you relate to at a deep emotional and/or psychological level. Something that hits you in the feels, as my Instagrammar check suggests I phrase it.
So, yeah, let’s get intimate and talk about mind manipulation. Ever-so-slight spoilers ahead for those who care.
There’s a moment early in Parasite when the Kim family is sitting in their terribly humble abode, packed like sardines in this tiny, bug-infested apartment that’s sunken below street level, folding pizza boxes to make money. The physical atmosphere is so confining it’s almost like they’re
— wait for it —
quarantined.
Dun dun dun!
Anyway, an exterminator is outside spraying his toxic concoction everywhere, and it’s about to invade the Kim’s airspace through their open windows. Someone says something about closing the windows, and Ki-taek, the family patriarch, says fuck it, let them gas us. (Or something, idk, it was in Korean.)
It’s an interesting scene, metaphorically speaking. Here we have an exterminator doing exterminator things and the Kims welcoming it into their home (and their lungs). Yet, they’re unfazed by it. A toxic concoction meant to kill parasites doesn’t bother them whatsoever. In fact, they welcome it.
Which begs the question:
Is this family of parasites living behind some sort of biofilm?
Okay, that’s probably not the question it begs, but it’s a fun one to entertain if you’re both a health and film nerd.
Instead, maybe this is the question it begs:
Who exactly — or what — are the parasites in this story?
Glad I asked.
The story of Parasite in a nutshell is this: The impoverished Kim family schemes their way into working for the well-to-do Park family. The Kim son becomes an English tutor to the Park daughter; the Kim daughter becomes an art therapist for the Park son; the Kim patriarch becomes the Park family driver; and the Kim matriarch becomes the Park family housekeeper. How they get these jobs is fun to watch. I won’t spoil that here.
That said, we can look at the parasitic relationship in this film in three ways:
The Kims are the parasites feeding off the Parks;
The Parks are the parasites feeding off the labor of the Kims, as well as the capitalist system that enables it;
Or, capitalism itself is the parasite, feeding off the minds of everyone and influencing their behavior to begin with
It’s possible there’s a fourth option too:
4. All of the above
This last option is my favorite because none of these are mutually exclusive. Either way, there seem to be multiple parasitic relationships in play. Thus is Life, I reckon.
This scene I just described, as early as it is in the film, is where I sat up a little straighter and did the whole furrowed-brow-narrowed-gaze thing. Granted, I had no idea how the next two hours would play out, but it was clear this film wanted my attention. Ever feel like something — a film here, an album there, a book over yonder — is just meant for you? Yeah, me too.
Suffice to say, you have my attention, Parasite.
Which is a great segue into coronavirus and Toxoplasma gondii.
First things first: I don’t know what a virus is.
Second, neither do you, neither does your Facebook-addicted aunt, neither does your cable news propagandist of choice, and neither does anyone talking about this anywhere for that matter.
And third, neither do actual medical practitioners or scientists because they’re still debating it (although this guy seems to explain it well). (Edit: Now a dead link, but it was a tremendous breakdown that seems to have been scrubbed during the 2020 Purge of Truthful Information.)
Besides, germ theory is still just a theory, so let’s conserve that big debate energy for something more useful like whether Quentin should have gotten that Best Director nod (because he is, after all, one of the best plagiarists Hollywood has produced). (And no, that’s not actually an argument worth having. I just like callbacks.)
(Also just a theory: Since corona is Latin for crown, and crown is the seventh chakra, would coronavirus be a virus of the crown chakra? Ooh, now we're getting somewhere! Anyway.)
I also don’t know what the endgame of the coronavirus panic could be (edit: I do now!), and I stopped browsing /conspiracy long ago so I could maintain some semblance of sanity, which means I don’t have the wild ideas I would have had if I wrote this in, say, the year 2017 Saccharide. (By the way, don’t click that link. If you already did, I’m sorry. Also, enjoy the ride. It’s like free-falling 33 stories down in the Tower of Terror.)
But here’s something to consider, and yes, this comes from many years of high-level paranoia, but also from some key discernment tricks I learned along the way, so, again, something to consider:
This whole thing miiiiiight just be fear-mongering to scare you into doing something — or not doing something.
And that list of things you choose to do or not do because of PANIC is endless. Some key examples:
Making poor dietary/lifestyle decisions
Gathering in public spaces
Traveling out of town or country
Voting for a specific political candidate
Stopping the use of paper money
Agreeing to less body autonomy
Begging for local quarantines
Shutting yourself in your house
Avoiding all human contact
Living life like an actual human being with an actual life worth living
So, like, relax. If you’ve ever had a chest cold, you’ve already had coronavirus. And unless your immune system is already seriously compromised, you’ll be fine. Some Vitamin D (sunlight!), Vitamin C with ribose, zinc, oregano oil and ACV with the mother(fucker) will do the trick (and will kill more parasites than the ones causing that chest cold to begin with). (Note: If you supplement with D, make sure you stack it with A, K2 and a healthy fat like olive oil or coconut oil.)
I mention all this because Media Hype is an entry-level class in parasitism and mind manipulation.
This is what we deal with every day, everywhere we look. It’s all some sort of -tainment, be it info-, enter- or entrain- (yes, this doesn’t make sense here but roll with it), because anything we consume is in-forming, literally forming in our minds a perspective that, at its root, isn’t ours to begin with. That’s what marketing is. That’s what media is. That’s what salesmen do. That’s what influencers do. They try to influence us. Persuade us. Manipulate us into doing things that aren’t good for us, like programming ourselves to watch the same thing at the same time every weak-night or weak-end, or buying things we don’t need, or paying attention to things not worth paying attention to, or giving time and energy to things not worth giving time and energy to. That’s why it’s important to steer clear of things that stir up fear inside us. Fear breeds paranoia, and paranoia breeds dis-ease in the mind, which in turn breeds dis-ease in the body, which then lowers the body’s immune defenses, which then allows parasites to do their little wiggly dance, and that little wiggly dance then manifests as a sore throat and a stuffy nose (or worse, if they’ve been on the dance floor long enough).
So, you have these — oh, let’s see, what to call them? Ah, yes, a callback! You have these energetic parasites inside you that have taken root because whatever program you’re streaming on whatever tracking device you’re streaming it on has in-formed something inside you. And when you combine those flavors of parasites with the other, literal parasites inside you — and yeah, you definitely have some of them crawling around your stomach and your brain and your blood — you’re now what I call naturally buggin’. (This is different from artificially buggin’, which is what all those trendy tracking devices are doing to you, although there’s a connection between both, believe it or not. *tinfoil hat intensifies*)
Now, if we think those energetic parasites are the only things that can in-form our minds, we need to read up on Toxoplasma gondii. TLDR: These parasites (and others like them) can literally take control of the mind of their host.
Consider the implications. Your decision-making could be influenced not just by some slick social media ad or your nightly propaganda of choice or whatever porn video you watched recently, but also by
GODDAMN BUGS LIVING INSIDE YOU.
There’s a link at the end of one of those articles that sends you to something about fatal attraction phenomena, which itself has something to do with cat urine, parasitic infections, and maybe even borderline personality disorder and some of its associated behaviors. So, as someone who
a) has a cat;
b) had chronic sinusitis until about two years ago;
c) has been in therapy for months talking through what could have made me a fat little parasite to begin with; and
d) has been wondering if my parasitism means I have some sort of identifiable mental health disorder,
seeing a link between parasitic infections and mental health and decision-making ability definitely raised my blood sugar a few points.
And it makes me wonder:
Who exactly — or what — are the parasites in my story?
And the answer to that turns out to be simple:
Thirty years of poor nutrition
Unhealed, unresolved and unintegrated trauma
Learned and conditioned behavioral patterns, including addictive behaviors
Lack of emotional intelligence and availability in friends and family
So, there ya have it. The Four Horsemen of the Individual Apocalypse. It’s not any more complex than that. Once you wake up to that truth, it’s kinda silly how simple it is, how a hug here or a conversation there could have made all the difference.
Here’s an example that checks all those boxes:
You’re in a relationship with someone you love. Legitimately love. You can see how, if you catch a couple breaks, this is a relationship in which you and your partner can both thrive together for decades to come. But the relationship starts to go south for reasons beyond your control. There’s some outside pressure that reminds you of past relationship experiences — negative experiences — and guess what happens? You’re triggered, that overused, not-quite-understood psychological term that means a past experience YOU HAVEN’T DEALT WITH EMOTIONALLY makes you feel something negative inside you that then, in most cases, gets projected onto someone else. You get angry about the situation — again, it’s beyond your control — and yell at your person, treat them terribly, make them feel as sad and as depressed and as hurt as you feel. The moment passes, and with it comes some clarity, which is when you realize you’re unsure how or why that reaction manifested in the first place. But it continues to manifest, to the point where now you’ve compounded the first problem with a second problem: your own shitty recurring behavior, brought on by something you already experienced with someone else, somewhere else, somewhen else, and now you’re treating this person — whom you love and want to be with so very much — like you wish they weren’t staring at the same sun as you.
At the same time, people around you know what’s going on, to an extent, but no one ever asks you how you feel about it. No one seems to care how — or if — you’re emotionally processing this.
Which leaves you alone.
Isolated.
Nothing to comfort you but pizza, pornography and whatever other vices you’ve created to cope with situations like this, because you sure as hell don’t know how to at this point. And then the relationship ends. Horribly. And the way it ends is — well, that’s a story for another time. Needless to say, it traumatizes you. Legitimately and literally stores that traumatic feeling in your brain and body.
You come out of this situation thinking the ending was beyond your control when it really wasn’t. Your perception was warped by everything you’d experienced prior to that and also during it. And now you’ve dug yourself a hole so far down that no one in their right mind with the right directions would even come close to finding you. Oh, you can describe the place, sure. You can describe how it looks and smells and sounds and maybe even feels, but no compass points this direction. Worse, you’ve not just dug a hole for yourself, you’ve also created a pattern of behavior that’s linked to the traumatic ending of this relationship, one that will both subtly and overtly influence you for years to come. And just when you think you’ve forgotten about it, guess what? Here it comes around the bend again to remind you that
YOU CAN’T JUST FORGET ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY, HOMIE.
Forgetting about it doesn’t change a damn thing.
But there’s hope.
You’ve matured. A lot. You’ve somehow grown more self-aware, which is both a blessing and a curse for so many different reasons. Regardless, you’re grateful for the reminder this time. Because it shows you that you’re a parasite, yes, and this is important to know, but it also shows you you’re a host too and that you still have some of those nasties crawling around inside that dis-eased brain of yours.
It also shows you what you knew all along:
This person loves you.
And that feeling you had, that you can both thrive together for decades to come, wasn’t some fairy-tale, Disneyfied bullshit. It was real. Is real. Or maybe it was and now it isn’t. Or maybe it wasn’t and now it is. Whatever. What I’m trying to get at is, who else can shine a light into your darkness and illuminate the best version of you other than that person? Who else could inspire you to DO THE FUCKING WORK? Who else could inspire you to sit down and write about your own parasites as a way to help exorcise them from your brain and your psyche and your energy body and even your physical body too because doesn’t this all work together somehow? Literally, who else could do this?
And if Bong Joon-ho is your answer — well played, sir or madam, well played.
Okay, so Bong Joon-ho isn’t the answer to those questions, but what can you say about a film — and a director; Bong’s done this before — that takes all those disgusting -isms to task? If ya ask me, those -isms — any -isms — are the viruses that need eradicated. Fat little parasites, they are. And I’d know, trust me. Takes one to know one.
But something something something Parasite is Art, with a capital A. And it is. Because it says something. Says something about the sociocultural dynamics we’re all struggling with on some level, and it says something waaaay personal to me that went beyond the auteur’s intended meaning. And that is what turns art into Art. (Edit: In hindsight, this film seems to be advocating against capitalism and for communism. Not a fan.)
That’s why I gravitate toward certain types of sounds and stories. That’s why I shared that TOOL song all the way back up at the beginning. I gravitate toward things with meaning, things that emanate from a frequency where Intellect and Psyche and Spirit and Heart merge together and form some hybrid über-stimulus that makes me have to dig just a bit deeper to understand what exactly might be happening, and even then my interpretation is just my interpretation, my perspective, and it may be different than yours, yes, and that’s fine, but damn do I need to stop projecting that into and onto every situation I’m in. Except for situations like this, because, like, this is my detox.
So, yeah, this is what I thought of the movie Parasite. Or, rather, what the movie Parasite made me think of. Parasite is absolutely a biofilm, and I use biofilm here in a newly defined sense: in reference to the film itself being biographical for so many of us.