remade as of 4/20 lol

Interesting essay on the specific Korean context of Parasite that keeps getting erased in order to highlight the unversality of the film. Goes through the entire movie so if you still haven’t seen Parasite don’t read it.

“Parasite has made history, which is a euphemism for achieving Western recognition — history’s qualifier. Recognition itself hinges on the gaze, and the imperial variety suffuses Parasite’s critical reception. In an early and emblematic review, Manohla Dargis[1] notes in The New York Times: “The story takes place in South Korea but could easily unfold in Los Angeles or London.” Parasite’s setting is rendered an obstacle that must be transcended as a precondition to its recognition.

In other words, the film has to be made applicable to “Los Angeles or London” to become legible. Dargis’s review isn’t particularly egregious, but it’s emblematic of the conceit of many critics, exceptions notwithstanding. The emphasis on universality is achieved through a negation of the particular in a typical display of liberal chauvinism. Consequently, the more Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece is regarded, the more it seems to vanish in the spectacle of its acclaim. Parasite has made history; never mind how history has made Parasite.

gamer wife: oh no! f :( is there anything i can do?

anders, who is only here because the warden said so:

TW: Child Abuse

Hawke’s first memory is of templars. He’s four. Maybe five. He’s made of limbs and dreams and nothing can shatter them. No tree is too high, no future too big. His world is made of little boys’ magic, and not the magic of men.

He’s in a market. Not the market, because he can’t remember which town or what shop, just a market. The summer sun glints off the blue glass of a child’s bauble, and he wants it as much as a child wants anything. But glass costs coin, and his father explains they don’t have the copper Hawke knows is in his pocket.

It’s not a tantrum - it’s not - it’s just a question. Why not? Why not why not why not, but his father isn’t listening to him, isn’t even looking at him, and so he asks again, a little louder every time until he’s screaming it and his father is dragging him into an alley.

There’s no lecture. No discipline. No cuffing, pinching, or spanking. His father smothers him - one giant sweaty hand swallowing up his face and all his protests. Shut up, Malcolm snarls, and in that moment he is Malcolm and not father and Malcolm is mad and so Hawke shut ups.

He sits in that alley, suffering, suffocating, his father’s bulk hunched over him while a procession of templars marches past. More than anything, Hawke remembers their swords. The rattle of metal in wooden sheaths, the sunbursts emblazoned on their hilts, the idle hands that finger them. He hates those hands because he can’t hate the one on his mouth.

“That was Flint’s treasure that we had come so far to seek, and that had cost already the lives of seventeen men from the Hispaniola. How many it had cost in the amassing… perhaps no man alive could tell.”