Bong Joon Ho Screenwriter Analysis

 

Bong Joon Ho Screenwriter Analysis

Bong Joon Ho is someone whose name has started being said by everyone recently. He took the world by storm with his critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning, masterpiece, Parasite. A tale of class in modern South Korea, with punchy satire and killer plot twists! Bong always had a passion for writing and specifically making films from the young age of fourteen. In his early childhood years, he would create and draw stories in storyboard templates, his passion for storyboards can also be seen recently as he released a “graphic novel” of his film Parasite in 2020 featuring the storyboard he drew. He was a co-founder and a part of a film club in university called “Yellow Door” where he screened and was exposed to American films which he illegally got hold of due to their unavailability in Korea. This makes sense as to why Bong’s films are so unique and original.

Bong made three short films all in 1994, White Man, Memories in My Frame and Incoherence. After this he then got jobs writing for the films Motel Cactus & Phantom: The Submarine. Not much is known about these two films due to their non-existent international release. But in 2000 Bong finally got his big feature debut and released Barking Dogs Never Bite, a film about a man who kills his neighbours’ dog and starts to fall down a very messy path which intertwines with the woman looking for disappearing dogs. The film although simple in comparison to Bong’s other work is still a fun time, sticking more to the comedy side of dramedy. But nonetheless it’s still engaging, funny and without spoiling it, has a really great scene in a basement (which seems to be a frequent thing in bongs work.)

But after this Bong found a clear storytelling style and idea of the kinds of themes he likes to tackle in his work. In the films Memories of Murder (2003) and Mother (2009) he explores the incompetence of the Police and Detectives in South Korea and how they end up worsening brutal situations by looking for the wrong people. In The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017) he explores the ideas of pollution and American capitalistic greed. The Host opens with American scientists releasing deadly chemicals into The Han River causing the creation of a deadly monster. In Snowpiercer the world is left in ruins after years global warming caused the ice caps to melt and freeze over civilization, giving people no choice but to live on a train that divides people by class into separate carriages, the poor being at the end and the rich at the front. Okja is about an American entrepreneur who is responsible for making genetically modified pigs which she plans to use to create an unethical snack product.

Which leads us to Parasite, Bong’s latest and most popular film to date, which sort of like Snowpiercer follows the division of class in the form of a family of low income, infiltrating a rich families house and reaping the benefits of doing so. Parasite I think represents a shift in Bong’s writing, before this Bong’s writing was commonly compared to the idea of a monster movie, accept sometimes the monsters in his films are not quite literal, this could be the police and murderers in Mother and Memories of Murder or America in The Host (which is personified by an actual monster) and Okja. In Parasite the lines blur as to who is the monster of the film, which is the point, the title “Parasite” allows us to explore the possibility of which side of the story is the real Parasite in the situation they find themselves in.

After the success of Parasite it seems the sky is the limit for Bong, with a few Oscars now on his shelf and all of Hollywood watching him to see what he does next, it shall be interesting to see what monsters creep onto his script pages soon.