April: Dark Narratives
The world is a home, so what happens when the house guests don't behave? Plus,
Hey y’all, welcome to April’s issue of Dark Narratives, the official writing newsletter for T.L. Bodine.
In this issue:
Some open calls and publishing opportunities worth watching
A contest you don’t want to miss
A comparison of the movies Parasite and Mother!, and what they have to say about living in a society
Let’s get this show on the road!
In pub news, there are a few open calls well worth scoping out:
Gabino Iglesias is at it again with his anthology prowess, this time calling out for Generation Dread, a collection of horror tales penned by young authors. Writers between age 15 and 19 are encouraged to submit. Details here:
If you’re outside the age range for that one, there’s also What One Wouldn’t Do, an anthology about the lengths people will go to achieve their goals. Scope out the submission requirements here: https://www.scottjmoses.com/what-one-wouldnt-do
Also, if you’ve got a new release in 2021, Pseudopod is looking for paid reprints. This publisher produces high-quality audio versions of short stories for their podcast format, and this is a great way to expand your audience and get paid. Check out the details here: https://pseudopod.org/2021/04/02/anthologies-and-collections-2021/
Author Elford Alley is running a contest you have to see to believe. If his book reaches 500 FREE downloads, he’ll raffle off his most prized possession: a totally authentic, definitely not suspicious at all, 100% awesome chupacabra head. Scope out the video here to learn more:
By the way, did you know that I write storytelling guides? My newest one, is about story structure, looking at multiple methods of arranging a story and why rigid structure is nonsense. I’ve got several other guides up as well that you may enjoy, all of them are pay-what-you-want, so go give them a look: https://gumroad.com/tlbodine
Although their critical reception was quite different -- Bong Joon-ho's Parasite earned Best Picture and a heap of other awards, and Darren Aronofsky's Mother! mostly earned angry and baffled audiences -- these two films, with their home-as-society conceit, work as book-ends of a conversation about society.
Let’s look at each film in action first, then see what taking them together might tell us about the world we share.
* Disclaimer: We're talking about Aronofsky's Mother! here, not Bong Joon-ho's own film called Mother. Which is also excellent but which has nothing to do with this post. Yeesh. Confusing.
* Disclaimer 2: Spoilers ahead for both films, so tread carefully if you haven’t seen them yet!
Parasite: Class Struggles and Toxic Symbiosis
Parasite is about a family living in poverty. Trapped by a system of rigid class inequality in South Korea, the Kim family work odd jobs and scrape out a living in their tiny basement apartment until an opportunity arises to change their fate. Teenage Ki-woo poses as a university student to secure a tutoring job with the affluent Park family, and soon — through a series of forgeries, falsified backstories and fresh names — the entire family has infiltrated the Park household to serve as tutor, art teacher, housekeeper and chauffeur.
This plan comes crashing down on them when they discover that the old housekeeper, whom they had displaced, is desperate to get inside by any means necessary…because her husband is living in the basement, unbeknownst to both the Park and Kim families. What follows is an unravelling of circumstances that unfolds in a tragic-comic series of disasters that end with the Kim family shatters. In the end, the father character Ki-taek has taken over the position of “secret basement dweller” in the house (now with a new affluent owner), and his son vows to work his way into the kind of wealth that would enable him to buy the house and set his father free, despite all of us knowing that this goal is essentially impossible.
What makes the circumstances of the Kim’s life so tragic — and so darkly absurd — is the complete arbitrariness of their misfortune. They are all perfectly qualified to hold the jobs they lied their way into; there is no reason they couldn’t have been hired honestly, if not for the rigid class structure and expectations laid on those jobs. The rich Park family are shown as out-of-touch and painfully naive to the point of being essentially helpless. It’s not clear what they do to amass the wealth that pays for their lifestyle, but it’s clear what they don’t do: mind their children, clean up after themselves, cook their own food, drive themselves, etc. Their wealth has infantilized them to the point of being utterly reliant on the same people who they disenfranchise.
So who, then, are the real parasites? Is it the poor people, living in the walls and infiltrating the home? Or is it the rich people, utterly helpless on their own and leeching off of the hard work of others? In the end, it’s both; the broken system makes parasites of us all, forcing members of society into a toxic symbiosis built upon mutual exploitation rather than mutual aid.
Mother! : Environmentalism and Religion
In Mother!, an unnamed husband and wife live together in a beautiful old home, which the wife has worked to painstakingly restore after it was damaged in a fire. The husband is a successful writer, much older than his wife and far more gregarious and care-free. One day, he meets a stranger and invites him into their home; soon the stranger’s own wife and children arrive and begin to take over the house, rudely intruding on the wife’s hard-earned homemaking. Things escalate beyond the point of absurdity as more and more people — ravenous fans of the author — pour into the home, destroying it. By the film’s third act, all pretense of realism has been abandoned as the house turns into a literal war zone, with riots and pyrotechnic battles taking place in the halls and (in the film’s most controversial scene) the mother’s newborn baby killed and eaten by fanatics. In the end, the house and wife both are destroyed in a fire — but the husband survives, just in time for us to see the cycle start over. Same house, same renovation project, new wife — an endless cycle of death and creation.
Aronofsky’s Mother! is densely packed with symbolism and allegory, making it hard to parse on a casual reading — but the filmmaker hasn’t exactly been shy about the film’s intended interpretation: The husband is God, the wife is Mother Earth, and the destruction of the house is the rise of man and climate change.
It's helpful to understanding this analysis to know that Aronofsky is himself a secular Jew deeply concerned with environmentalism. Indeed, he was so fed up with viewers missing the allegory in his film that he’d go on to make Noah, a much more hamfisted attempt at showing environmentalist themes by way of Old Testament storytelling. But if you go into Mother! knowing the intent, the symbolism becomes clear; the plot works beat-by-beat through much of Genesis — here’s a link that maps it all out in detail.
Laws of Hospitality and the House as World
Both Parasite and Mother! confine the bulk of their action to the home, with the house acting as a microcosm of the greater world. In Mother!, the house is a stand-in for the earth itself, the stage of all of human history to play out on a small scale. In Parasite, homes are metaphor for class status, visual shorthand for wealth and security.
Both films provide a similar central conflict: Outsiders infiltrate a home and treat it as their own, bringing down chaos in the process. Before the more specific horrors and commentary seep in, this simple scenario is already both resonant and terrifying. Is there any fear more primal than that of inviting someone into your most intimate space, only to discover they are not who you think they’ll be? Is anything more viscerally uncomfortable than the thought of strangers entering your home unbidden and judging you for the way you live?
There is mythic precedent for this storyline. One obvious parallel: the children’s story of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” in which an outsider enters a family’s home, eats all of the food, breaks the furniture, and takes the bed for herself. That the homeowners are bears and the stranger is a fair-haired girl child — the obvious audience stand-in — works to soften the blow, but even young children can tell that Goldilocks is a very bad house guest.
Rules governing the behavior of guests and hosts are prevalent in multiple cultures and for centuries of human history, and stories about what happens when those contracts are broken show up time and again. The ancient Greeks were especially fascinated with “xenia,” or sacred hospitality, and hosts and guests alike were expected to follow the rules. When they didn’t, disaster would follow — the Trojan War being a major example of the kind of chaos that would unfold from failing to maintain appropriate behavior. The Bible, too, is concerned with hospitality, with many of its decrees laying down rules for the treatment of travelers and neighbors. One of Sodom’s many sins was its bad xenia, bad host behavior that would lead to the city’s ruin.
We even see an analog to these ancient hospitality laws remastered in the contemporary A Song of Ice and Fire. George R.R. Martin takes care to establish the rules of a guest-and-host relationship, especially in regards to the breaking of bread — and even provides a grisly fable for what happens when those rules are flaunted. That cannibalism is a natural progression from poor hospitality tells you a lot about how we continue to feel about xenia.
We Live In a Society (Sorry)
So: That brings us back to Parasite and Mother!
If the house is a stand-in for the world, then what does that make us, the people living under its metaphorical roof? Are we the homemakers, guardians of the hearth and keepers of hospitality? Or are we the travelers and interlopers treading upon the welcome mat of our earth?
Well…both, really.
The reason for the persistent popularity of xenia as a trope is that it’s a handy shorthand for that inescapable fact of human life: we live in a society. Unlike most other animals who live in closed-off communities or prowl the world solo, fighting with those they encounter, humans have established a social structure built on the interaction of multiple unrelated groups peacefully exchanging resources. The advantage of this arrangement is that we don’t have to worry about fighting for our every meal and territory. The disadvantage is that there are rules to follow to keep everyone in line — and even when those rules are unfair, a failure to abide by them can and will end in disaster.
In Mother!, we are meant to sympathize with the homemaker. We watch with unfolding horror as the home she poured hours of effort and care into becomes casually destroyed by guests who cannot abide by even the simplest of requests or even manage to summon an ounce of self-preservation. In Aronofsky’s view, humans are idiot outsiders on Mother Nature’s home turf — unwelcome and destructive.
But what good does this sort of misanthropic environmentalism really do anyone? Anthropomorphic Earth-Mothers aside, who really benefits from the treating humans as an unwanted infestation? Is this a useful way to think about our respective roles in the house-as-world paradigm?
If there’s a recurring theme in the history of xenia tropes and a history of sacred hospitality, it’s that being a good host is more important than being a good guest. To be sure, guests must do their part to honor traditions when they can. But it is the homeowner — the person with the power in the relationship, the one who can turn away a guest at the door or withhold food and shelter to someone with no other recourse — who has the greater onus of responsibility. The ancient Greeks knew it. The Bible knows it.
And that is why Parasite, for all its biting cynicism, is a far more humanist film than Mother! It acknowledges that breaking the rules has consequences, but that those consequences may be worth facing if it means an opportunity to challenge damaged, exploitative systems. A badly behaved house-guest is nothing compared to a cruel host.
Mother! and Parasite offer separate warnings, but one thing is clear: In our world, we may all at times be both host and guest, and it is our duty to act responsibly in both roles lest we find ourselves facing damning consequences.
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