Recently, the film Parasite won a leading four awards at the 92nd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. It became the first South Korean film to receive Academy Award recognition, as well as the first film not in English to win Best Picture. So for the past two weeks, Brenda and I made “Parasite” the theme of our class. We read a Korean news article about “Parasite” and watched the film Parasite.
The news article we read is about the social problem disclosed in the film Parasite, which is “불평등(inequality)”. The news article compared the inequality phenomenon in South Korea and that in the US. The main idea is that compared to South Korea, the inequality disclosed by the film Parasite is much more serious in the US. The article reasons this idea by providing scientific data and explaining those data in terms of metaphors that people can easily understand. But our purpose of reading this news article was not to learn from the context, but to learn more about the written Korean language. Brenda and I focused more on the structure of the article, the structure of a single sentence and the level of formality.
This news article is a formal article. After reading this article, the first characteristic I learned about formal Korean article is its structure. Usually, the main idea is provided at the very beginning of the article. The main ideas are always clearly stated in one sentence before the articles start. Then, the authors will give plenty of reasoning to support their main claims. In the last quarter of the whole article, the author will give the counterclaim. This section will only make up a small part of the article. And will be given the reason why the counterclaim does not justify itself as soon as the counterclaim is briefly explained.
As I was reading those formal written Korean language and trying to understand the meaning of them, I found that the structure of each single sentence was very complicated. In a formal style article, sentences are usually written in an inverted sentence pattern. In another words, I need to read from the end of the sentence, then back to the beginning in order to understand the meaning. This would be a challenge for me, while learning formal-styled Korean written language. Also, lack of vocabulary will be another challenge. So I will keep memorizing more vocabulary and practicing using grammatical rules in each Korean class. I will also keep reading Korean articles with Brenda, and I believe I will make progress at the end of this semester.
Keeping this article in mind, I watched the film Parasite. I paid more attention to the inequality between wealthy people and poor people the film was trying to expressed while watching. Before watching this film, I thought it would be a very heavy realistic film, making people realize the serious social problem by watching a painful and ironic story. But in fact, the movie is fun, but also full of anger, and a strong sense of injustice.
Comments
Great post! I've watched Parasite and I think it is a great movie! The recognition it is receiving is well deserved. I think the inequality in Korea is a big issue as well. It's interesting to see how inequality is prevalent in all cultures. America isn't the only country that deals with this issue. As an American I was still able to relate to the universal problem of inequality, that Parasite touched upon.