Movies & TV

I think it's a mistake to read the story as a straightforward allegory, but overall I think its politics are good. For better or worse, this is not a Socialist Realist movie, but rather one that is playing with complexity and ambiguity.

Not once does the film hint at the underlying economical system as the reason why the rich are rich and the poor are poor.

Actually it very much does, although some of the context is harder to parse if you're not familiar with Korean society. The poor family ended up in their situation because the father dumped their savings in to a fad restaurant too late to cash in on the trend and got ruined. The brother, while intelligent, lacks the elite credentials his friend has, until his sister forges a diploma from Yonsei University (this is one of the universities you are desperate to get into if you want to stay on the elite track that leads to employment at a conglomerate like Samsung). There is a very narrow track to success in Korea and it's a lot easier to walk if the way is greased by money and private tutors like the wealthy family has.

A chud could easily see the rich family as the honest entrepreneurs and the poor family as poor because of the negative behaviors they exhibited, and there is nothing in the film that would dispute that interpretation.

Chuds are famously bad at interpretation. But we here should be able to realize that the poor are rarely model victims. The rich family are able to be polite and nice because of their money. The poor family not only do what it takes to survive, but lacking class consciousness, are mostly concerned with becoming rich themselves. That's realistic as hell in my experience. Upon finding out there's someone even more exploited than themselves (the couple in the basement), they're mostly concerned with maintaining their own upward trajectory and are willing to use violence to maintain it. You could read the basement couple as a metaphor for the third world if you were so inclined.

With the poor family getting punished for their deception, and the son resolving to make money to save his father at the end (presumably through more "honest" means), it even displays the "pull yourself by the bootstraps" belief.

I don't think the text really supports this reading. The idea that the (now brain-damaged) son's fantasy of becoming rich is a realistic one is laughable. If anything I think it's critiquing a bootstraps mentality.

Finally, I want to touch on the movie's critique of the way in which the Korean elite are colonized by America. The wealthy family (particularly the mother) constantly use English words to show their sophistication. Their son is obsessed with cowboys and Indians, and it's the wealthy father's insistence that the poor father wear the Native American headdress that triggers the violent denouement of the movie.