Parasite’s vertical structure generalizes to global imperial supply chains and vaccine inequity.

Evidence

The South Korean director Bong Joon-ho works with a similar under/over shadow world in his 2019 film, Parasite, with the working class, treated like bugs in their subterranean lairs, coming upstairs to occupy the gilded lives of the rich they are tired of serving. This is more than Upstairs, Downstairs; it’s a metaphor for all the Shadow Lands of capitalism and imperialism: the teens in sweatshops in China, the kids in cobalt mines in Congo, the oil wars that fill our tanks, the migrants left to drown to protect the fantasy of a fortressed Europe. And now we can add the billions denied one shot of a Covid vaccine while those living in wealthy countries lined up for their third and fourth booster (that is, if they weren’t squandering their privileges with manufactured threats of “tyranny”). — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 796

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘upstairs/downstairs’ mental model familiar from A Midwife’s Tale’s stratified household economies — the underclass literally housed beneath the rich.