
About a month ago, rising YouTube star, writer, and filmmaker Houston Coley penned a piece reviewing the movie Parasite. His conclusions were essentially that the movie forces us to be empathetic towards both rich and poor, and that, in the end, violence isn't the solution to solving wealth and class inequality. Coley's implication seems to be that change cannot occur from the bottom-up—instead it must flow from the top-down. He states as much when he concludes with the following:
"I think many of us, including those who belong to the middle-class, probably have a level of self-inflicted ignorance toward the margins, too. When you start to feel empathy for the have-nots, it often demands action, and that’s scary. But if Parasite does anything in the lives of the middle and high-class people who see it, I hope it shines a light on those margins, creating empathy and demanding action."
While I had other problems with the review—primarily how it side-steps the role that race and ethnicity play in creating class division in South Korea—I'll focus the bulk of this article on analyzing the claim that we should rely on the empathy of the middle and upper classes to create positive change in society.