What We Can Be taught From the Loanwords in ‘Parasite’

A24

Welcome to The Queue — your day by day distraction of curated video content material sourced from throughout the net. Right now, we’re watching a video essay that appears at how Parasite’s use of loanwords endears it to Oscar voters.

Forged your thoughts again to the much less, uh, pandemic-y a part of 2020, when Bong Joon-ho‘s Parasite gained the Academy Award for Greatest Image. Good instances.

Parasite‘s awards sweep made appreciable waves so far as subtitles and the “one-inch tall barrier” afflicting American audiences are involved. However as immediately’s video essay notes, much less has been mentioned about the truth that the primary non-English language movie to win the Oscar for greatest image has a good quantity of English in it. So what offers?

Certain, Parasite narratively consists of English as a result of Ki Woo (Choi Woo-sik) is educating Da Hye (Jung Ji-so). So there’s a narrative purpose for the movie’s English. However what to make of the loanwords that incessantly infiltrate the characters’ sentences? Or the code-switching that each the Parks and the Kims sometimes partake in?

Whereas the presence of English is probably going not an intentional thematic thread, it’s however revealing. As Bong Joon-ho himself mentioned, basically, all of us reside in the identical nation known as capitalism. And it simply so occurs that capitalism is particularly fluent in English.

The next video essay tugs at a wide range of threads: from Bong Joon-ho’s career-long engagement with non-People struggling in American programs; to South Korea’s longstanding push-and-pull in opposition to outdoors, colonizing forces; to Parasite‘s pointed invocation of trivialized indigenous iconography. This essay is a thought-provoking place to begin … and proof that, not like different greatest image winners, we’re going to be speaking about Parasite for a few years to return.

Watch “English. Language. Motion pictures. Parasite.”

Who made this?

This video essay on Parasite‘s use of loanwords is by Kyle Kallgren, who creates video essay content material on the literary and philosophical fringe of cinema … in addition to the mucky enterprise of creating video essays itself. You possibly can subscribe to Kyle over on YouTube right here. And you may observe Kyle on Twitter here.

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Associated Subjects: Academy Awards, Parasite, The Queue

Meg Shields is the standard farm boy of your goals and a senior contributor at Movie College Rejects. She at present runs three columns at FSR: The Queue, How’d They Do That?, and Horrorscope. She can be a curator for One Excellent Shot and a contract author for rent. Meg might be discovered screaming about John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’ on Twitter right here: @TheWorstNun. (She/Her).