The object of this paper is to clarify the ethics of coexistence and the perception of Korean modernity in director Bong Joon-ho's movie Parasite, winner of the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and the 2020 Academy Award for Best Picture, and his first feature film, Barking Dogs Never Bite. Although there about 20 years separate the two movies, they treat the same subject using a unique narrative grammar that incorporates and intermingles the genres of drama, thriller, and black comedy. The fusion of these genres makes both movies “paradoxical texts” that reveal the contradictions and absurdities inherent in Korean social reality. This paper particularly focuses on the fact that Parasite expands the backwardness and absurdity of Korean capitalism that Bong Joon-ho explored in Barking Dogs Never Bite into a universal capitalist structure in which he explores the relationship between labor and capital. Paradise also deepens the paradoxical relationship between the negative perception of Korean modernity and the ethics of coexistence first explored in Barking Fogs Never Bite. In tracing the evolution of Bong Joon-ho's ideas and craft, this paper not only examines both the formal aesthetics and the subject focus of films, Ed: but also presents the unique aesthetics of Bong Joon-ho's movies, represented as “Bong Tail” and “Aesthetics of Beep.” Ed: Please clarify. I couldn't find reference to these terms.

Bong Joon-ho, genre convergence, modernity, backwardness, absurdity, ethics of coexistence