The film awards season has ended, which means we won’t be getting anymore great speeches from Director Bong Joon-Ho for the time being. However, his film Parasite leaves us with several conversations to discuss amongst ourselves, from the content of the film itself to its impact on the film industry.
While following the press for Parasite, I have been amused by some of the questions that interviewers have asked the director and cast of the film. Often times they are asked about their hopes for how the movie will lead the way for more international films to be accepted by Hollywood. A question like this seems innocent, but it reveals the Americentric gaze through which we have collectively imposed on the movie; it suggests that the responsibility rests on foreign filmmakers to prove their worth to us under the notion that America produces the best films. However, they are not the gatekeepers of the American film industry and the cinematic landscape exists way beyond our country. If the industry truly cares about the art of cinema, it should promote and support foreign movies so that stories from all over the world can be told here. “But international films aren’t marketable to an American audience,” you could counter.
Claims like that reduce stories to capital and inflate our sense of superiority. As a country, we have been on an over-extended power trip from the global and cultural authority that America possesses. It is hypocritical that we find it normal for people all over the world to consume American entertainment yet resistーand even be offended by the thought ofーexposing ourselves to content from abroad, especially when that medium is not communicated through the English language. Why should linguistic and cultural differences prevent us from watching foreign movies, though? If anything, those narratives possess the power to expand our understanding of the world, while showing us the universality of the human experience.
What can we do as viewers then? Well, we can collectively “overcome the one-inch barrier of subtitles” that Bong Joon-Ho spoke of when he won the Golden Globes for Foreign Language Film. But it’s more than just “overcoming” the act of reading subtitles while watching movies. We have yet to embrace that movies told in languages other than English, stories that come from a perspective different than ours, are worth our attention. What we truly need to overcome is the superiority we derive from our American egos.