Introduction
George Orwell is an English writer, and his work includes political and literary essays journalistic essays, novels, and poetry. Once in his novel, The Road to Wigan Pierce, the author mentions, “The lower classes smell” (Orwell 76). In his works, he characterizes smells as a trait of poverty (Brant 13). Propaganda, injustice, global lies – this face of war becomes the most unbearable for Orwell (Dunder and Pavlovski 43). One can overcome national enmity, religious discord, and differences in education, character, and intelligence, but physical disgust is impossible. No matter how much people wish each other well, secretly, a person will shudder squeamishly at the stinky smell. Children are raised with the preconception that the poor are unclean and different from the established part of society. Bong Joon-Ho’s 2019 film Parasite uses the symbol of smell to describe lower-class people as has been done in Orwell’s work.
Discussion
A man named Ki-Taek, his wife, his son in his twenties, and his slightly older daughter live in a semi-basement apartment: they have cockroaches, and the phone and Wi-Fi are turned off for non-payment. All four are out of work, gluing together pizza delivery boxes, so they do not starve. However, once the son’s friend, going abroad, bequeaths him a job as a tutor, and English lessons with a schoolgirl from a wealthy family. This family, led by businessman Park, consists of four people and owns a luxurious designer mansion. The first mention of smell is expressed by the son of a rich family, sniffing out the driver and the new maid: “They all smell the same!” (Ho). The whole Ki-Taek family gradually moves there, surviving the previous servants and hiding their kinship: he drives Mercedes, his wife becomes a housekeeper, his son, respectively, teaches English, and his daughter deals with the younger child’s art therapy.
After a while, Mr. Park begins to quietly complain to his wife about the smell coming from the new driver. She notices that “that smell stays in the car; it’s like the smell of old radishes or boiled water” (Ho). He cannot even describe it exactly because it is the smell of poverty, unfamiliar to him – it becomes clear that the contradictions between them are much deeper than first thought and will one day require radical solutions. This further confirms Orwell’s words about the smell of the lower classes. The author wants to convey that the poor differ from the rich in thinking about things like smell.
In the basement, the workers discuss the problem of their stench and suggest that they try washing with different kinds of soap or washing their clothes with different detergents and separately. However, they conclude that it is the smell of the basement, and it is useless to fight it: only to move out, which they are not ready for – they are not yet used to good salaries, and their mindset is that of beggar crooks who have smiled on their luck. This is the new symbol imposed by the smells in the film, which has not been mentioned by Orwell and Corbin. The poor people in the film are lazy, lying, brazen manipulators. It is quite symbolic that the low-income family lives in a semi-basement, and every time they have to climb a ladder to get to the rich people’s house. Moreover, on the night the low-income family had to flee the rich house in the pouring rain, they went lower and lower until they found themselves in the flooded basement.
Few members of the “better class” do not have an instinctive aversion to black work. People vividly imagine the uncleanness that has become a ritual attributed to the occupations associated with domestic servants. As it appears to any person of refined taste, some of the duties usually assigned to servants are inextricably linked to the defilement of the soul. Alain Corbin’s book suggests that people in this profession smell quite different. The chapter
The Stench of the Poor explains to the readers in which ways the outdoors of the poor can be presented in a work of art and what symbolic value they contain (Corbin 155). The smell of economically unprotected groups of people always reveals the basic attributes of the poor life, including cheap soup, shampoo, and the scent of clothes. Secondly, the smells represent the peculiarities or the conditions of poorly paid work. In the film in question, however, the treatment of servants is quite ordinary. Rich people are shown in such a way that working with their hands is difficult and unexplored for them. They consider black work unworthy of themselves, so they hire poor people to do their whims. They feel they are superior to these people in everything; their smells are different.
Bong Joon-Ho’s attentiveness, combined with his undeniable talent as a storyteller, allows Parasites to go beyond an emotional thriller and even a spectacular satire imbued with the author’s wicked humor. Bong Joon-Ho masters the material with such ease that his film’s individual details and elements are filled with a much more powerful metaphorical charge. What distinguishes the director from Corbin and Orwell is that Bong Joon-Ho describes smell more delicately. He does not say directly that poor people smell bad but only alludes to a distinctive smell.
The architectural mystery becomes, just remembering the country where the action unfolds, an obvious and unmistakable symbol of the unhealed traumas of recent Korean history without any directorial cues. The rock of material success becomes a literal illustration of the severity of society’s delusions about itself. Here, finally, the very words about the peculiar smell emanating from some of the characters prove easy to continue – and find that Bong Joon-Ho is making it clear that it is not the poor who stink of failure, it is the stench of all modern life in its infinitely unjust way of doing things.
The problem is that this contempt is based on the level of physiology: smell, appearance, and habits. Moreover, no single factor that brings social strata together-education, trying to look neat, and behaving politely-destroys the physiology that wins out in the end. Poor people can only stop stinking by moving to another social stratum and establishing themselves in it by moving into higher housing, simply washing their bodies or washing their clothes will not help because the smell of poor, dirty, and moldy housing is absorbed into their clothes and hair.
Conclusion
Thus, smell functions similarly to George Orwell’s statement. It symbolizes the unfair inequality of people in society; even if a person is neatly dressed, literate, and pleasant to talk to, there will still be factors that distinguish him from a materially wealthy person. This characteristic of disgust shows that people’s perceptions come not from a person’s inner world but from their wealth. They consider it inappropriate for an established person, so they hire poor people, the working class.
Works Cited
Alain Corbin. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1986.
Brant, Clare. “Smelling.” The Routledge research companion to travel writing. Routledge, 2019. 249-261. Web.
Dunder, I., and Marko Pavlovski. “Through the Limits of Newspeak: An Analysis of the Vector Representation of Words in George Orwell’s 1984.” 2019 42nd International Convention on Information and Communication Technology, Electronics and Microelectronics (MIPRO). IEEE, 2019.
Ho, Bong Joon. Parasite. Neon, 2019.
Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. Secker & Warburg 1965.