Joon-ho’s “Parasite” explores the structural design of poverty behind Milwaukee’s redlining legacy

Motion pictures remains one of the last widely shared cultural reference points in an increasingly fragmented media environment. This series, Cinema as allegory: Using film to understand power, inequality, and civic life in Milwaukee, uses well-known films not as entertainment reviews, but as allegorical frameworks for examining contemporary political, economic, and social conditions. The articles connect themes such as political control, identity, propaganda, surveillance, nostalgia, privatization, segregation, and institutional failure to ongoing realities shaping Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the United States. Each is intended as an explanatory analysis grounded in history, civic structures, and public policy rather than literal comparisons between fiction and current events. The films serve as editorial vehicles for examining how societies interpret power, inequality, and the systems shaping everyday life.

Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 film “Parasite” treats architecture as a political system. Elevation, sunlight, drainage, and mobility all become markers of class position.

The wealthy live above the city in open space and quiet light, while the poor remain compressed below street level, exposed to noise, surveillance, and flooding. Stairs repeatedly divide those who ascend from those forced downward, turning movement itself into a measure of social power.

Nothing in the film’s geography feels accidental. Windows frame hierarchy. Rain exposes vulnerability. Distance from disorder becomes a luxury available only to those who can afford insulation from the city around them.

The film’s visual logic reflects much older urban patterns. Friedrich Engels described how industrial cities separated affluent districts from overcrowded labor quarters filled with smoke, disease, and waste.

In 19th-century Paris, Baron Haussmann redesigned entire neighborhoods partly to isolate elite districts from unrest and instability below them. “Parasite” updates that history for modern capitalism, where inequality is engineered quietly into the physical design of cities.

The Kim family’s semi-basement apartment, or banjiha, embodies permanent precarity disguised as normal housing. Originally expanded through Cold War-era civil defense policies in South Korea, banjiha units eventually became low-cost housing for the working poor.

Their partial submersion below street level creates constant exposure to dampness, poor ventilation, sewage overflow, and public intrusion. The family’s window sits at sidewalk height, reducing the outside world to passing feet, cigarette smoke, and drunken strangers urinating nearby.

The apartment is more than a backdrop. It functions as an economic trap. Survival depends on remaining employable, which means accepting menial jobs under increasingly degrading conditions. Housing insecurity becomes a mechanism of labor discipline.

Urban theorist Mike Davis described similar dynamics in the 2006 book Planet of Slums, where vulnerable housing systems produce populations living permanently on the edge of displacement. Bong visualizes that uncertainty without reducing it to policy language. The Kims remain physically close enough to serve wealth while structurally buried beneath it.

The Park residence exists at the opposite end of the city’s hierarchy. Elevated above crowded streets and hidden behind clean architectural lines, the home projects calm, order, and refinement. Large windows invite sunlight without exposing the poverty outside. Noise disappears. Flooding disappears. Labor disappears.

That tranquility depends entirely on invisible workers to maintain it. Drivers, tutors, and housekeepers absorb the friction required to sustain elite comfort, but only so long as they remain unobtrusive. The architecture itself helps erase their presence.

The illusion resembles postwar suburban expansion in the United States, where federally backed mortgage programs helped White suburban communities accumulate wealth while excluding Black neighborhoods from investment.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu later described how affluent classes transform space into cultural distinction, using geography to reinforce status and separation simultaneously. In “Parasite,” exclusion becomes aesthetic. Distance from insecurity begins to look like personal virtue rather than structural protection.

The film’s flood sequence destroys any illusion that catastrophe affects people equally. After heavy rain, the Parks experience the storm as a temporary inconvenience that clears the air before a garden party. For the Kims, the same rainfall becomes a disaster. Sewage floods the apartment. Possessions float through contaminated water. Overnight, private living space turns into an emergency shelter.

The storm changes nothing for one family and everything for the other. That disparity mirrors real urban disasters. During Hurricane Katrina, low-income neighborhoods in New Orleans suffered catastrophic flooding while wealthier and higher-elevation districts escaped comparatively intact.

Environmental scholar Robert Bullard spent decades documenting how pollution exposure, hazardous infrastructure, and environmental risk are disproportionately concentrated in poor communities. In “Parasite,” class hierarchy becomes visible through the flow of water itself. Social infrastructure decides who absorbs the catastrophe.

Milwaukee reflects many of the same structural divisions. The city remains among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, and many present-day environmental disparities align closely with 1938 redlining maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation.

Neighborhoods once marked as financially hazardous continue to experience higher asthma rates, aging infrastructure, reduced tree canopy coverage, and greater summer heat concentration. Segregation persists physically long after the original policies disappear from public language.

Research from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and federal environmental agencies has repeatedly shown that formerly redlined neighborhoods retain significantly higher surface temperatures than wealthier districts with greater infrastructure investment and green space.

Air pollution and freeway exposure follow similar patterns. Environmental inequality remains embedded directly into the city’s geography. The submerged apartment in “Parasite” is not distant fiction. Milwaukee contains neighborhoods still absorbing the environmental consequences of historical disinvestment decades later.

The film also exposes the contradictions inside modern service economies. The Parks depend completely on workers to maintain their lifestyle while simultaneously expressing discomfort toward the people serving them. Employees remain acceptable only when invisible.

That tension surfaces most clearly through the film’s recurring fixation on “smell,” which operates as a coded marker of class identity. Odor becomes associated with crowded housing, public transit, labor, and proximity to poverty itself.

The dynamic echoes older servant hierarchies common in Gilded Age American cities, where domestic workers occupied separate staircases, basement kitchens, and concealed quarters designed to keep labor hidden from elite households.

Sociologist Erving Goffman later described how stigma becomes attached to visible and sensory markers associated with social status.

In “Parasite,” class prejudice becomes instinctive, almost bodily. The film concludes with the son imagining that one day he will earn enough money to purchase the Park home and reunite his family. For a moment, the fantasy resembles upward mobility. Then Bong cuts back to the reality of the semi-basement, which remains unchanged.

The class system survives because aspiration replaces structural criticism. Workers are encouraged to imagine eventual entry into elite spaces instead of questioning why those spaces remain inaccessible in the first place.

Economist Thomas Piketty documented how wealth increasingly reproduces itself through ownership and inheritance rather than wages alone. Harvard economist Raj Chetty similarly found that ZIP code remains one of the strongest predictors of lifetime mobility and future earnings.

“Parasite” expresses those realities spatially instead of statistically. The distance between the basement and the hilltop is not simply financial. It is historical, environmental, and generational.

Milwaukee’s geography demonstrates how durable those systems become once embedded into infrastructure. Without sustained investment and policy intervention, cities continue reproducing the same divisions across generations by elevating some communities while leaving others permanently submerged.