Resumen

The film Parasites by Bong Jon-Hoo (2019) has raised numerous criticisms of the economic and social model that predatory capitalism has made in recent decades, especially in Asian countries. It is not just the conditions of employment or the exploitation of work, but the personal, familiar and social consequences that shape new behaviours and attitudes in this postmodern society. In fact, if the platonic cave myth serves us for the distinction between truth and falsehood, for the distinction between reality and fiction, Parasites poses an even greater challenge because it alerts us to the existence of multiples caves, to a certain underground that it is more real than that described by Dostoevsky in Notebooks of the underground. The human condition gains visibility in this dialectic movement between the visible and the invisible, between the seen and the unseen, between the known and the ignored; the hard reality, unlike the platonic model, is not on the surface, the place of hyper-modern fiction, but it is in the (at the level of the) underground, a place without fiction, where the fight and the survival strategies are designed to face the real. This essay seeks to make a critical reflection on the underground man and his circumstances through Parasites.