MA Thesis: Class division and family in Parasite and Shoplifters: through the lens of transnational auteurist expression
A qualitative research that aims to analyse the ambivalence within the notion of transnational film culture in how it engages in cultural power struggles against dominant Western-centric cultural norms and standards but also evolves and develops along Western hypercapitalist values and expectations.
This multi-method qualitative study aims to investigate such issues through the comparative film analysis of Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Shoplifters which focuses on these two films’ social critique on neoliberalcapitalism and its impacts on social class systems and the institution of family in contemporary South Korea and Japan. These considerations are further developed in a discourse analysis on critics’ reviews of Parasite and Shoplifters which aims to stress the ambivalence of Bong Joon Ho’s and Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s status of transnational film auteur in how the term both foregrounds and overrides cultural specificity and national identity. The controversial notion of auteur is used as a framework in this research to represent the contrast between the two directors’ thematic and stylistic authorial distinctiveness and the possible universalisation and generalisation of the topics they approach in their films. The lens of auteurism thus allows for another angle of approach for the ambivalent character of transnational cinema. Overall, this study explains the cultural stakes that reside in the concept of transnational film culture and it arouses concerns around issues of cultural assimilation and cultural homogenisation within a Western-dominated global film scene.