Ted Audio Collective.
HBR presents. Hi everyone.
We're listening to After Hours.
I'm Young Ming. I'm Meher.
And I'm Felix. And this is Academy Awards Week.
What's the best performance in a film you've seen all year?
And I'm not just talking about the Oscars.
What's the most memorable performance you've seen this year?
Well for me, I think it's going to be maybe something on HBO, which would either be in Succession or Meryl Streep in Big Little Lies or Saoirse Ronan in Little Women.
Wow. Okay. How about you, Felix?
I don't know if you've seen it.
This Chinese movie, Ash is purest white.
Yes. You recommended it and I saw it.
It's so good. It's an amazing story about this relationship with a woman with a gangster.
And her name is Zhao Tao.
She's a Chinese actress.
And that performance just blew me away.
The sense of resilience in the way she portrays the character and these moments of tenderness at one and at the same time, I thought it was one of the very best performances that I've seen this year.
Wow. Yeah, nice pick.
My pick would be, I saw Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Oh, wow. That performance I thought was just so good.
But okay. So anyway, because it is Academy Award week, we're going to use this episode as an opportunity to go really deep on a couple of movies that really stayed with us.
The three of us could even imagine using either one of these two movies as fodder for a classroom conversation.
And so we're going to do a deep dive into Parasite as well as a deep dive into American Factory.
Okay, Parasite. So before we begin, huge spoiler alert.
If you have not seen this movie or the next movie that we're going to be talking about, you should just skip ahead to recommendations or check back on this episode after you've seen these movies.
And I would say that's particularly the case with Parasite because Parasite is one of these movies that you really want to walk in having no idea what the movie is about and having no idea how the movie is going to unfold.
So this is a big spoiler alert.
Okay, here, run it down for us.
So it's really an incredible movie.
It's fundamentally a story about two families, one relatively poor, low -income family, and another very, very wealthy in South Korea.
And what happens effectively is that relatively low -income family insinuates themselves slowly into the lives of this high -income family.
And it starts with the son becoming a tutor for that family, but he slowly gets the rest of his family into their household as people who work for them.
And this becomes a huge source of income, and then these two families' lives effectively become intertwined in a really fascinating way.
And then, of course, it all comes undone, and it comes undone in the most brutal and interesting way that you can imagine.
And so it's really, I think, a story that takes these two families and makes it into a parable about modern capitalism, in effect.
So this movie is nominated for best picture.
Yeah. And, you know, the three of us saw it.
We were so, so struck by this movie, all three of us.
For me, the movie so explicitly underscores how people experience the world in different ways depending on how wealthy they are.
And I'm talking about such ordinary things, things like traffic, things like food, things like the weather.
Yeah, the rain. Yeah, that's just remarkable.
Oh, my God. Yeah, yes.
You know, the wealthy family experiences this beautiful, cozy, cleansing event that clears the air of pollution.
And for the poor family, it is a devastating event that floods their home with sewage.
And it's also about how these different experiences colors your outlook on life.
It colors your mood.
It colors your disposition.
How much bitterness you're carrying around with you, and then, ultimately, colors your personality, who you are.
So there's this moment when the poor family is together, and one of them makes a remark about how a member of the rich family is actually, you know, a really nice person.
Right, mm -hmm. And the father in the poor family, he says, you know, I'd be a lot nicer too if I had money.
Yeah, yeah. Money is an iron.
That is a beautiful scene.
It irons out all the wrinkles.
Yeah. And I just thought, wow, that is so, so true.
Yeah, you know, there's so many things about this movie that are amazing.
First, I should just say, it is beautiful.
Like, it's just a beautifully shot movie.
But then the second thing is, I think it's about the interdependencies of these families that I think is so interesting, right?
So the poor family, in some sense, is aspiring to the wealthy family's life, and they're dependent on them.
And then similarly, one of the things the movie does incredibly well is this high -income wealthy family is kind of exposed to be entirely dependent on this class of labor providers who they let into their lives.
So to me, there's this sense in which the interdependencies of all our lives and how high -income affluent families can invite these people into your life who you don't even know and understand.
And similarly, the poor family is entering into a world that they kind of think about but they don't really fully know.
And so to me, that interdependence of the families was really, I thought, compelling.
There's an interesting spatial aspect also that I think is a reality in many cities.
Sometimes in the movie, you get a sense of, oh, they actually live not that close to one another.
And I think that struck me as such an important observation, particularly if you live in any big city, you live in Boston, you live in New York, you live in Seoul, your life depends in so many ways on people providing services for you.
At the same time, none of them can actually live close to where you are.
These are the people who have these crazy commutes, spend like hours going back and forth.
The other thing that struck me was how the film uses height, elevation as almost a metaphor.
And so the wealthy house is located on this big hill.
And so to get there, you're walking up, up, up.
And then the poor family literally lives underground.
And when they're going home, you see them just traveling down.
And even when they get home, even to grab Wi -Fi or something, they have to try to grab a signal from above ground.
And then meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, in the basement of the rich house is despair and desolation that we weren't even aware of.
And then the one scene I got to tell you that really best captured it for me was that moment when the poor man that is stuck in the basement with his dying wife, he's desperately trying to signal someone above ground using Morse code.
And he's using his head to pound the signal.
He's just trying to send an SOS above ground.
It's so unbelievable that scene.
And it's interesting because using space in this way, especially this last way you mentioned young me, which is there's this thing going on in the basement, which is bubbling up, but then turns into violence.
It seems a little hackneyed, but it's done so well, like as a metaphor that it's okay.
The other kind of metaphor that runs through is on smell, the use of smell and how alienating people find certain smells and how the fluent family really characterizes the poor family by their smell.
It seems like a metaphor that you wouldn't pull off, but the movie pulls off these things like smell and location and space to just analogize everything, which is really, it's really amazing.
I had that same experience that you had me here.
The rich family has a party towards the end of the movie and it would have been so easy to make all of that look completely ridiculous.
But what's really marvelous about the movie is when you see the wife worrying about the party, and is it going to be done right?
And is it the right people, the right food, the right everything?
And somehow that doesn't feel ridiculous.
That feels real, too.
That is maybe the most amazing thing about the movie, that it doesn't fall into this trap of saying, oh, look, here are people with real problems, and then there are other people whose problems are just completely ridiculous.
No, I mean, the party -related issues are as real to the rich people as some of the Wi -Fi issues are real to the poor family.
Yeah, they could have so easily turned the rich family into a caricature.
Yeah. Right, but they didn't.
They didn't, yeah. So what single scene will stay with you for a really long time?
I got to tell you, for me, it's the one around smell and when the poor family, they're hiding under that table.
Yes, yes. And the rich dad doesn't know they're there and the rich dad's telling his wife that he can't stand how the driver smells.
Right. And it just fulfills your worst nightmare about what rich people really think about those less fortunate when they don't think anyone's listening.
The thing I liked in that scene is he says, he doesn't cross the line except his smell.
His smell crosses the line, you know, which I thought was amazing.
My favorite scene was there's a father -son scene in the less affluent family after they've been flooded out and they're in the gym and they're lying down, and the son talks about this stone, which is also a little bit of a metaphor.
The father asks him why he's carrying around the stone, which is about materialism and acquisition, and the son says the stone won't leave him, like he can't get rid of the stone.
And, you know, there's this element of kind of acquisition and materialism that has infected our lives, as in part the movie is saying, and once it's in, you can't get rid of it.
And that father -son relationship was really beautiful, I thought.
Especially, yeah. Maybe my favorite scene is the one we briefly alluded to when you see the rich person in the car after the rain, when they talk about what the rain was like for them.
Yes, yeah. And you realize after having seen how the rain caused havoc for the poor family, that you see even something as natural, trivial as rain is experienced in such dramatically different ways.
I thought that was almost like a metaphor that sort of summarizes the much of the film.
Yeah. The character that will stay with me the longest, I think, was the daughter Kijang, the poorer family's daughter.
She's so great. I agree.
She's obviously so intelligent and so capable of hoodwinking this rich family into thinking she's a brilliant art therapist.
And she carries herself with such dignity and such a strong sense of ego and self that even in her first interaction with the rich woman, the rich mother, she's able to completely dominate the conversation and say, hey, I need you to go away now while I work with your son.
This is what needs to happen now.
You need to leave the room.
And I just thought the way she gathered herself in that interaction was so amazing.
I'm actually with you.
I thought that scene, and she in particular, she's kind of the brains in some ways behind the whole thing, but also the degree to which she so quickly was able to inhabit the role of power and so easily kind of able to be, you know, I am the powerful one in the situation and you will leave the room.
I thought that was fantastic.
How about you, Felix?
Maybe the character that made me most think about this, the person who's the caretaker before the poor family moves in.
Oh, the first housekeeper?
Yeah. It's a smaller role, but I think the way you see she has a persona as long as she serves the rich family.
And then when she gets kicked out and when she comes back, she's a different person.
And I thought the acting in particular, you experience someone from a completely different side, which I really thought was amazing.
The other character who I thought was amazing was actually the mother of the less affluent family because you seldom see that kind of a character on the screen, right?
So she's a very feisty and aggressive person and not soft around the edges, right?
She's a great character as well.
And she also transforms and becomes this caretaker type in her new role inside the rich family.
The first housekeeper, the relationship she had with the wealthy family, you know, you meet her and you think, whoa, she is so deeply embedded in this family.
She's essentially a member of the family.
And then you see, oh no, she's completely dispensable.
You know, the minute they decide to get rid of her, she's gone with no emotion and goodbye, you are now out of our lives.
It's so striking. You know, one of the things we're like not emphasizing enough, I think, is just how funny the movie is.
You know, I mean, there are these scenes and they're so ingenious, like the allergy to peach stuff, you know, and the way they kind of plant peach fuzz around the old caretaker to kind of get her to lose her job and the whole TB thing.
I mean, it's hilarious.
It's really like a laugh out loud funny, which is also so amazing about this movie, which is you're laughing out loud and then you're also just struck by the profundity of what they're trying to depict in these relationships between these families.
Yeah. If you were to try to tell someone why they should really consider going to see this movie, why it's worth spending two hours, what would you say?
I think it's a very smart commentary to perhaps the most important conversation that we're having now around inequality.
Not how to think about inequality in the big sense, but inequality in a really personal sense.
So you see, like every little facet of people's lives is just deeply, deeply influenced by where they are in the socioeconomic and financial order.
I think that's right.
It's kind of thinking not about inequality in the large sense, but in the small sense of day to day life.
But to do that with empathy for everyone is just a really startling act.
That's so true. I mean, the minute you start to feel your emotions turning against someone.
So when the first housekeeper and her husband, they're trapped and they're very hurt in the basement and they are just desperate down there and they're trying to get help and they can't.
Yeah. And you start to feel bad about the other family that did this to them.
That movie cuts to the other family and they're trying to save their home because sewage is flooding their home and they are in the most dire straits.
It's really, really something to see.
My final question, who won the movie?
I think no one. I mean, because of the way it ends, I think, I think there's sort of a sense of loss.
You know, the son of the less affluent family, the poorer family is in some sense the thread that runs through the whole thing.
He's the first one inside the rich family and he survives at the end.
And that last scene where he dreams of becoming rich and having the father come up from underground.
I thought that was, I mean, it's like sense chills in my spine.
Like it just, you know, and then the cycle of aspiration that this is getting rise to after all of that, I thought that was really touching.
So I think the son of the poor family, I think is really amazing.
Yeah. I sort of agree.
It is hard to identify a winner.
Maybe Bong Joon -ho.
Yeah, I agree. The director is amazing.
And Korea, of course, Korea also.
Actually, that was the other interesting thing about It Young Me, which is even the depiction of Korean society.
I thought that was also really amazing.
Yeah. It's an amazing movie.
Okay. Thanks, guys.
Okay. The other film we wanted to talk about was American Factory.
This is a documentary that is nominated for our best documentary at the Academy Awards.
Felix, you want to run it down first?
Yeah. So it's a story about a plant in the United States.
It used to be a General Motors plant that gets shut down.
And the documentary really kicks in after GM has left the plant.
And you see a Chinese billionaire comes along and he wants to reopen this facility.
In the process, many of the same workers that used to work in the GM plant then get to work in this Chinese owned plant.
And the story is really the story about how the Chinese billionaire, but even more so the Chinese workers who get sent from China to the facility, how they tried to make this company work.
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about it that's amazing to me is in a world where like nuance is hard to find.
This is a movie that has a really deeply nuanced view, not just of China and the US, but of globalization, of the decline of labor and organized labor, automation.
I mean, in a sense, you don't know what to think at the end, right?
Because there's no like, oh, here comes somebody who's the good person.
And that person's a bad person.
It's just so deeply nuanced.
And the amount you can learn from watching this movie, if you want to understand the world today and modern capitalism and trade, this is a movie which gives you a deeply nuanced understanding.
And in my experience, I found I had these, I don't know, five, 10 minute stretches where I was in completely different camps.
So there was a part of the movie where I was totally in the American camp.
God, what is it like these Chinese, they come here and they don't respect our labor standards, they are pushing the workers too hard.
And then it cuts to the Chinese manager who gets sent from China and his task is to somehow make it work as well as in China.
And then you think, yeah, what is it with these American workers?
Why can't they replicate what a Chinese plant looks like and how that works?
And that was so well done.
And up until the end, I had like almost zero sympathy for the Chinese investor.
And then the scene when he's alone in the car and he thinks about, he grew up poor and his dream was to make this work in the world and how that dream gets shattered in the process of trying to increase efficiency in the American plant.
So at that moment in time, I even fell for him.
It was like, oh my God, it's heartbreaking all around.
So just like you, my emotions just kept swinging back and forth between these two camps.
You start out and you cannot help but be sympathetic to these American workers.
And then when they go to, you know, they go visit this Chinese factory and they walk in and they're looking at this factory line and they're seeing the efficiency, the cleanliness, the synchronicity of the workers, the focus and the concentration.
There's no loitering, there's no joking around, there's no banter.
And the American very quietly says to the person standing next to him, we hope someday to get this good.
And then the very next scene they walk outside and they see what happens to the broken glass.
So these factories produce broken glass and that broken glass has to get recycled.
And the way that they do it in this Chinese factory is they're people picking through it by hand without very much safety equipment, the most tedious and delicate and dangerous work.
And they look at this and they just think that is crazy.
That is crazy. And so in a span of 10 minutes, you have gone back and forth and back and forth.
Wait, whose side are you on here?
In fact, I think that scene, the whole set of scenes when the Americans go to China are the most astounding parts of the movie to me, because they really make your head spin.
And you're seen in particular with The Broken Glass, it's almost painful to watch because you can see how dangerous it is.
I think that whole sequence, the ability to see the Americans go there.
And of course, then you also learn that the labor standards in China are complicated and they're working 12 hours a day.
But that whole set of sequences is amazing.
And then there's this really interesting counterpart that Chinese managers that get sent to the US, how they're sort of trying on the suburban life.
Right. And what is it like and you have free time and you're learning about sports, and that's as much a fish out of water kind of experience, where it's a beautiful mirror to all the scenes in China, where you just see these enormous distances between cultures and what we take for granted.
What was your favorite scene?
I think for me, it's the Chinese investor in the car because I had sort of said, okay, for most people it's complicated, but it's pretty clear there's like one guy who's the bad guy.
And then it turns out, yeah, that's actually a little more complicated as well.
So I think that will stay with me for a long time.
It's an incredible scene because you look at him and up to now he's been this daughtering old man with a lot of money.
And in that moment he becomes this human and you start to think, oh my God, he came from the poorest background.
And you just start to imagine what his journey has been like.
And that dream to make it work in the United States.
Yes. It's incredible how they humanize him so quickly.
I agree. What about Yuma here?
I think there's that glass scene, which is still, I think it's so visceral because you can feel the danger of picking glass and they talk about safety goggles.
The other scene that is in a way quite harrowing is when the American manager goes to China and then starts to talk about American workers in this really, really derogatory way.
And you kind of see his inner autocrat come out, and then he kind of comes back and he wants to organize them in a line at the beginning of a shift in the way that he's seen them do in China in kind of a quasi -militaristic way.
So I thought that was also really compelling.
What was yours, Yangmi?
So there was this one scene where the Chinese managers are educating some of the Chinese workers on how to work with Americans.
Mm. Mm, yes. That's hilarious, actually.
It's so funny. Yeah.
Some hilarious lines.
So one of them was what you need to know is that they believe that from the moment their children are born, they're supposed to shower their children with encouragement.
Right. What this means is that everyone grows up super overconfident.
So everyone you meet will be overconfident in their abilities.
There's so many funny lines.
The other moment, and this is more trenchant, but when they finally have the union vote.
And up until then, you don't know how it's going to come out, and to the extent that you had to predict, you would predict that it would be very closer that the union would win because people really don't feel like they're being treated fairly.
And yet they have the vote, and the union vote loses in a landslide.
And it was almost this sense of resignation, this whole group of workers understanding that, wow, the good old days are gone forever.
In fact, this one guy said, boy, I used to have such a good life at GM, and I'll never make that kind of money again.
It's gone forever, yeah.
And they talked to that young woman who votes against the union, because she doesn't remember that old time, but she kind of thinks this is the way it's going to be.
Yeah. This movie so underscores the human cost of efficiency and globalization.
And then to top it all off, the very end hints at the automation to come.
And the future of work, and there is so much to think about in our responsibilities in managing that transition.
So who won this movie?
You know, there is a pair of a Chinese worker and an American worker who are furnace supervisors, and they become really good friends.
And they are, I think, the winners in the sense that they have this friendship.
And the friendship kind of endures in a way.
And I thought that was like the deep humanity of that story, and to see those two people, that friendship was really amazing.
He says, he's my Chinese brother.
And I think he says it after he's been laid off, Felix.
I think the biggest winner is the audience.
Like this deeply humanizing aspect of the movie, where you see all of these people who are trying to make something work, and it's really complicated.
Having so many opportunities to see through the eyes of another culture, I thought was really just remarkable.
I think on one of those, sorry, I didn't mean to make you go down this path, Youngby, I was just thinking about a moment when I changed my mind, and I just wanted to share one of the moments, which is, you know, organized labor, it's easy to caricature them.
But there are these moments in the movie, especially one I remember so vividly, where you have a Chinese manager who has photos on his phone, and he points to a worker who is a pro -union worker.
And he says he's going to fire him in the next two weeks prior to the vote.
Like there's real targeting.
And that it's kind of chilling, but it also makes me realize that as somebody who's grown up after the decline of organized labor began, sometimes I don't always appreciate fully enough those battles that were won and that were fought.
And I thought that was one thing the movie did for me that was really new.
Like it made me really think hard about organized labor and what those battles were and how they won them and how important that was.
And if unions are increasingly a thing of the past, what is the new mechanism that we'll use to ensure that there is not exploitation among the workers who are most vulnerable to it?
The one other thing I'll say before we close is I remember when I heard in the news or something, I'd heard that the Obamas had signed a deal to produce films for Netflix.
And when that news came out, I thought, what, what are they going to do?
So this is one of their first offerings for Netflix.
They produce this movie, and it makes me really look forward to what else they have in store for us.
Yeah. No, I think if they can replicate what they've done here again, it'll be fantastic.
We need more content like this.
Great. OK, picks, recommendations.
I've got a movie themed one.
I got a movie themed one, too.
Oh, me as well. Great.
We all got movie ones.
Good. So mine is I've been playing around with Disney Plus, the service.
And one of the things that I've discovered is there's a category there called shorts.
And it has all of their Disney shorts, including all of their Pixar shorts.
And so you know how whenever you watch a Pixar movie, they often have a little short something before the movie, a little short film right before.
And it's usually maybe three or four minutes long.
And they're really just so delightful.
You can find the entire collection there.
And one of the things I've discovered is whenever I just have a little bit of time, what I've found myself doing is I just go there and I just find like a little nibble, a little bite of something.
And they are all so consistently delightful.
So that's my recommendation.
If you're ever want almost like Amoose Boosh, then it's a little Amoose Boosh for movies.
That's fantastic. That's a wonderful recommendation.
Love it. What about you guys?
I have a movie recommendation that is sort of related to the parasite conversation that we just had.
There was an earlier movie called Shoplifters that takes place in Japan.
And in many ways, it echoes those exact same themes.
So you see a family in Tokyo who's homeless, and that I think that alone is remarkable.
You know, what is homelessness in Japan and in Tokyo like?
And it's the story of this family and about a girl that is abused by her parents.
They take the girl in and it's the interaction between the girl and the family or the group of people who are homeless.
And it has the same connotation of rich and poor, of right and wrong.
So if you loved Parasite and you haven't seen Shoplifters yet, it's absolutely worth seeing.
That's great. Me here.
All right, so I have a movie pick, which is actually kind of a pick about a whole series of movies.
So about 50 years ago, this English filmmaker, Michael Apted, started filming a cohort of kids, and it was called 7 Up.
And it was just about like these 15 kids from different dimensions of society, different class levels.
And what he ended up doing over the subsequent 56 years is making a movie every seven years where he interviewed them.
And so it became 14 Up, 21 Up, and now there's 63 Up, which is also nominated for the Oscars.
And it is just a spectacular effort.
You really see the full trajectory of a human being.
And there are all types here, and there's somebody who ends up having mental health issues.
There's some people who do well.
Some people who don't do well.
There's divorces. There's job losses.
It's the whole kaleidoscope of life.
And you care so much about these individuals by the end of it.
Well, one of them passes away, unsurprisingly.
And the loss is like amazing because you've gotten to know them over time.
So it is really, I think, a spectacular series.
So presumably there'll be one when there's 70.
Yeah. Well, so Michael Apted is now I think 80 or 85 or something like that, the maker of it.
But it'll likely continue.
So anyway, it's just a really fantastic series.
Okay, great. So those are our picks for this week.
And see you at the Oscars.
See you at the red carpet.
Yeah. See you on the red carpet.
Thanks, everyone, for listening.
This is After Hours from the HBR Podcast Network.
