Unlike Donald Trump, I was eager to see the first foreign language film to win the Best Picture Oscar, though my own mother opined that there should be a dubbed version so “Americans can see it.” Parasite realistically depicts the woes of a poor family living in a frequently flooded basement-apartment in Seoul, dispelling my view that South Korea is a rich country that takes care of everyone. Are there any such countries left in the world? The college-age son gets a chance to tutor a wealthy middle school girl and gradually his entire family insinuates their way into the employment of hers, without revealing that they are related. They are smart, the wealthy family is gullible, and the situation at first seems more or less workable, perhaps a benign parasite offering a small benefit to its host. Shouldn’t the wealthy support the less fortunate?

In order to get the housekeeper position for the mom, the family frames the current housekeeper, which reveals a completely unanticipated situation, a parasite already in place as it were, a situation that could have been handled with working class solidarity, but the temptation of money to be made clearly overmatches any fellow-feeling toward strangers. If everyone had kept his or her wits about them instead of reacting…

…it would have made no sense, because the key difference between the wealthy and the poor is depicted in the way they react to situations and think about solutions, with some breathtakingly bad judgment and self-defeating choices on offer right through the bloody denouement.

The third parasite in this movie is the wealthy family itself, who are clueless as to why someone would not debase themselves or forego sleep if paid enough. Don’t they deserve to be exploited? Yet the poor family, smart as they are, can’t halt their rush to self-destruction. Is there the possibility of partial recovery? The justice system in South Korea tends toward mercy, and the ending is ambiguous. Do they deserve to recover?

This movie unpacks a lot of ideas which are still roaming about my head. As a bonus, Morse code plays a role. Maybe a side effect will be a revival of Morse code, which will be useful if our society collapses in an ultimate bloody battle between rich and poor, red and blue, secular and religious, this religion and that religion, autocrats and democrats, and so many other fault lines.