Parasite: Class & Performance
This working-class family lives in a cramped semi-basement and slowly replaces the staff in the wealthy household.
What is the Kim family?
Squid Game is described as taking pressures from everyday Korean life and turning them into this kind of intense situation, where players’ lives are on the line.
What are “extreme survival challenges”?
Across stories like Parasite and Squid Game, rich and poor characters often live in different spaces, have different chances, and are treated differently. This major theme focuses on the gap between social groups.
What is class inequality?
This wealthy family lives in an elegant hilltop house and hires the Kims one by one, believing each of them to be unrelated professionals.
What is the Park family?
According to our slides, this skill matters more than strength in the games and often decides who survives.
What is emotional control/calm decision-making?
Many characters take dangerous jobs, make risky choices, or enter deadly games because they owe money or can’t afford basic needs. This financial theme keeps pushing them back into harm.
What is debt and economic pressure?
Much of the film’s class theme is shown through these structures, connecting the rich house, the city streets, and the poor neighborhood.
What are stairs?
We described the tension in Squid Game as coming from something unexpected. Instead of chaos, most of the tension comes from this.
What is silence/stillness/control?
Instead of breaking down in public, characters often stay calm, polite, or emotionless to protect their chances or pride.
What is a performance of strength / emotional control?
This recurring detail about the Kims’ bodies becomes a way for the Parks to mark them as “different” and lower class, even when the Kims hide every other part of their identity.
What is their smell?
In Squid Game, even during the most violent and chaotic rounds, the players who last the longest usually rely less on weapons and more on this pair of qualities to plan their moves and stay in control.
What are “calmness and calculation”?
Whether it’s competing in deadly games, fighting for a job, or holding onto social status, many stories are less about happiness and more about just staying alive and getting through the system. This core theme focuses on hanging on, no matter the cost.
What is survival in an unjust system?