Family Structure and Social Dysfunction

Parasite (2019) | Shoplifters (2018)

Through the examination of family structures and socioeconomic status, the determinist relationship between crime and social dysfunction manifest in Bong Joon-ho and Hirokazu Koreeda’s films—Parasite (2019) and Shoplifters (2018), respectively. It is in these films we explore the inequities of access to resources, education, occupation, and residence as they relate to socioeconomic status. Often, said inequities are solicited under the idiom of “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps,” and while the proverbial phrase, “poverty is a state of mind,” holds some truth, defining others’ pursuit of happiness under privileged, socioeconomic positioning is inapt.

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Social dysfunction is a product of disharmony and conflict within a society and manifests when its community is unsuited for the functions it is intended to perform. The Shibata meta-family in Koreeda’s Shoplifters demonstrates this agent of social dysfunction as meta-parents Osamu Shibata (Lily Franky) and Nobuyo Shibata (Sakura Andô) fail to recover from their social setback forcing the family to rely on Hatsue Shibata’s (Kirin Kiki) deceased husband’s pension in order to survive.

Despite having jobs, thus adequately contributing to society, the Shibata meta-family must shoplift their day-to-day goods—divergent from the dominant morality of their social order. Additionally, the children, Shota Shibata (Jyo Kairi) and Yuri “Juri” Hojo (Miyu Sasaki), are unable to properly develop cognitively, recurrently stating, “only kids who can’t study at home go to school” (Shoplifters).

Though the Shibata meta-family appears to make the most of their rough, shanty home, and exults in the comfort of their crafted family, Koreeda suggests it is all merely a façade when the Shibata meta-family apathetically attempts to abandon Shota at the hospital in the wake of his fall.

Moreover, Koreeda implies that there is no easy fix to this complex problem. The institutions meant to solve the issue at hand performed perfectly, i.e., Shota going into foster care and Yuri being returned home; however, it only worked in favor of one of the children—Shota, as Yuri was brought back to her abusive parents, thus continuing the cycle.

Given the characteristics of the Shibata meta-family, the argument could be made that the social dysfunction emerged as a consequence of the fundamental qualities in which brought them all together—crime or an indifference to the internal and external consequences of one’s actions contrary to public welfare and/or morals.

Therefore, we examine the Ki family in Bong’s Parasite in an attempt to isolate the element of social dysfunction as it relates to socioeconomic status. The Ki family cons their way into a symbiotic relationship with the (wealthy) Park family by which they assume roles and occupations they are “unfit” for.

However, to describe the Ki family as unfit is an oversimplification of the issue: no member of the Ki family is unqualified for the positions they incur from a lack of capability; rather, they deceive the Park family with fallacious certifications entering agreements under false pretenses—a crime fueled by the inequities of access to proper education thus appropriate occupation.

Like the Shibata meta-family, the Ki family revels in each other’s presence, and each member of the Ki family contributes in their own way to the greater good of their functional family. However, given the tragedy resulting in Ki Taek’s (Song Kang-ho) isolation, Ki Woo’s (Choi Woo-sik) brain damage, and Ki Jung’s (Park So-dam) death, we interpret a dysfunctional family unit to not be the root cause of social dysfunction. Instead, Bong suggests class discrimination, illustrated in the mise-en-scène positioning the Ki family banjiha or “semi-basement” as low-slung, perhaps so low-slung that one cannot sink any lower unless they go completely underground, i.e., die.

The societies in which both the Shibata meta-family and the Ki family exist in have awarded them with injustices, indicating the achievement of basic, human rights is a plight for the impoverished, reducing the access to resources, education, occupation, and residence to a mere luck of the draw considering which social class one is born into. As Koreeda and Joon-ho have supported, social dysfunction will continue to propagate if societies are unable to equip its members with equal accesses to basic, human rights.

The external pressures unjustly placed on the poor are deterministic in their relationship with crime; therefore, reducing the solution down to “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps” or “bringing back nuclear families” ignores the relevant complexities thus mischaracterizing the root of the problem.