Although Bong Joon-ho's Parasite and the biographical film I Am Not Your Negro, based on James Baldwin's quotations and work, are opposed in terms of geographical and historical parallels, I believe that the things they claim or the inferences they make are quite parallel and on the same plane. Before going into the inferences made by these two films, let me first inform you about the direction of my article. My analysis of these two films will be based on two concepts. In the first part of my article, I will focus on the inferences that the director wants to give through technical concepts such as space, light, and perspective. In the rest of the article, I will analyze these two works as ideological discourses by ignoring the dynamics of cinema. To explain why, I will start from a technical point (Corrigan, 2007).

Every film can depict a family, a war, or a conflict between races at any given time, but the way they present this subject differs. The way the director conveys the scene and the story is as important as the dialog and everything else. Unfortunately, I am not your negro cannot be analyzed by me at this point, since it was planned as a documentary; it would make more sense to look at the director as a compiler and presenter of the work rather than as a direct representative of an ideology. On the other hand, the movie Parasite provides us with a lot of information on this subject. At the beginning of the movie, the location of the Kim family's house gives us, the viewers, the family's position in social life in a very obvious way.

The house of the Park family, which we saw immediately after the Kim family, was beautiful, bright, and of high quality, as if it were in the eyes of us, the viewers. It was like the antithesis of the Kim family, but the fact that the situation was so clear and obvious is what Marx (1996)1 wrote: But our age, the age of the bourgeoisie, has this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and more divided into two great hostile camps, two great classes in confrontation, as if the classes, who is who and for whom, were so obvious. In the scenes set in the neighborhood of the Kim family or the scenes with them, the colors were much more complex and chaotic; there was no clear harmony and order.

On the other hand, in the scenes with the Park family, the colors were much more calm and harmonious. Calmness and tranquility dominated the family's living space. I believe that the director used this contrast to draw the difference in the world between the two families 2. All works of art are based on memory; they are tools to make memory visible, to materialize it. So I think this use of Bong Joon-ho is a reflection of his memory, not forgetting that although he grew up in an upper-middle-income family, he is a sociologist who spent his youth and university life in Seoul.

Leaving aside the analytical and technical analysis of the film, I am prompted to continue from a more theoretical and philosophical perspective by Baldwin's quote, "I suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime has been committed. We have created a myth out of a massacre" 3. Emulation and adaptation perpetuate categorical inequality, often government-sponsored. Governments emulate the forms of other governments, including forms of inequality. Citizens then adapt by establishing routines that facilitate their own individual and collective projects. It made me think about his quote because this is exactly what it has become; we have normalized it so much that we have stopped doing it on purpose, and it has become a reflex.

The rain scene of the movie Parasite was very striking in this regard. While the Park family saw the rain as an entertainment material and focused on the magnificence and beauty of nature, the Kim family living underground was struggling to save their belongings by throwing out the water that flooded their houses, to mention what responsibility the Kim family has in this situation 4. The proletariat emerged not with poverty caused by natural causes, but with artificially produced poverty and formed the human mass formed by the destruction of the middle layers of social classes. In other words, the fact that they are at opposite ends of the human economy does not mean that they are not responsible for and cause each other.

On the other hand, Baldwin's statement, "The question is a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation," is exactly the reality of the Rain scene. However, at this point, we should not forget the poisoning of human power. In line with Marx's claims, the exploited, the oppressed, or the bourgeois, like the Park family, live in high-walled houses with no leaking water or any other problems, while they are flooded when it rains because of these families. But towards the end of the movie, when they were living in the house of the Park family, they had a great time when it rained; even the eldest son of the house would cheer every time it thundered, and they also tried to take the place of the housekeeper to get themselves in that position.

I think that this is a reflection of the fact that this proletarian class does not have any solidarity or identity within itself 5. When several people have in common a certain causal component of their life chances, we can speak of a "class" only insofar as this component is represented by economic interests in the ownership of goods. Although Weber's discourse is intended to cover a different topic, I think that the situation we see in the film schematizes this phenomenon. The lyrics of the song "Big Bill Broonzy—Black, Brown and White" from the movie I Am Not Your Negro are also very meaningful.6

I came into the world wanting to find meaning in things; my soul was filled with the desire to reach the source of the world, and then I saw that I was an object in the middle of other objects. In part of the movie, Ki Jung's reaction to Yeon Kyo's comments about Tabi and her knowledge of art is as if she is not supposed to know, or as if art is not a field she can belong to or be interested in. To summarize, these two works, which deal with very different turns and very different geographies, actually meet us as variants of very similar subjects.

References

1 Marx, K. (1996). Das Kapital (F. Engels, Ed.). Regnery Publishing.
2 Gianvito, J. (2006). Andrei Tarkovsky: interviews. University Press of Mississippi.
3 Tilly, C. (1998). Durable inequality. University of California Press.
4 Marx, K. (1843). Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Cambridge University Press, 1970. Ed. Joseph O’Malley.
5 Weber, M. (1965). Politics as a vocation. Fortress Press.
6 Fanon, F. (1952). Black Skin, White Masks. Penguin Books.