Rich People Love 'Parasite,' a Movie That Roasts Rich People

Chrissy Teigen posted a tweet this weekend, as she's known to do: "Phew Parasite was so fucking good!!" The sentiment is unimpeachable, and had that endorsement of Bong Joon-ho's 2019 smash hit been shared by… basically anyone else, the Bong Hive would have surely risen up in support.

Instead, the top replies to Teigen's tweet included a stock photo of a mirror and memes about a lack of self-awareness. This of course is because Parasite is an absolute skewering of the rich, and Teigen, obviously, is rich.

For those who haven't seen it, Parasite is Bong's class-focused masterwork about a poor Korean family who cons their way into roles as a wealthy family's help. When the poor family gains the illusion of the upper hand, havoc ensues, and it becomes clear that Parasite is a dark indictment of the upper class and the damage they cause.

Which is to say: Parasite is not a movie one might expect to be endorsed by the wealthy. Yet Teigen isn't the only millionaire—or even billionaire—who apparently loved it. On Christmas Eve, Elon Musk (net worth: about $23.6 billion) tweeted that Parasite was his favorite movie of 2019. (He claimed Black Mirror, meanwhile, was his favorite TV series of the year, which also feels a little too on the nose.) A few days later, former President Barack Obama included Parasite in a list of his favorite movies of the year.

At best, Parasite casts the wealthy as aloof and unconcerned; focusing only on their lives, they're oblivious to the suffering around them. At worst, Parasite frames the rich as implicit in violence, perpetrators of inequality—and even as the real villains. For the rich to love a movie that clearly hates the rich… well, that kinda proves Bong's point.