Vertical Light: Architecture of Class
The Park home is a lantern: glass, white walls, and warm LEDs that create an atmosphere of controlled brightness. Every surface reflects light, creating a sense of openness and transparency that contrasts sharply with the Kim family's semi-basement. The farther from the ground, the warmer and cleaner the palette becomes—a visual metaphor for social elevation.
The Kim semi-basement is tinted green-gray, lit by street spill and the occasional glimpse of natural light from above. This color grading creates a sense of being underwater, of existing in a space that is both part of the city and separate from it. The visual language here echoes themes explored in The Shape of Water, where liminal spaces become sites of transformation.
When rain falls, warm hues vanish entirely. The green flood contaminates the Kims' space, proving that weather belongs to no class but damages unequally. The visual transformation from warm to cold, from light to dark, mirrors the family's moral descent as they become increasingly entangled in deception.
The Semiotics of Green
Green oscillates between aspiration and decay throughout the film. The scholar's rock gleams with mossy ambition—a gift that represents the family's hopes for upward mobility. Yet this same green appears in the basement mold, in the floodwaters that destroy their home, and in the grass of the Park estate that they can view but not own.
This dual nature of green—as both hope and rot—captures the precarious nature of social mobility. The color becomes a visual representation of the film's central tension: the desire to rise and the fear of falling. This symbolic use of color connects to other films exploring class through visual metaphor, such as the color language in Blade Runner 2049, where color tracks psychological and social states.
The Park lawn glows immaculate, an artificial pastoral that the Kims can observe from their window but never access. This visual barrier becomes a metaphor for the invisible walls that separate classes—walls that are maintained not through physical force but through economic and social structures.
Odor as Invisible Color
The film's most violent class marker is scent—the "subway smell" that clings to the Kim family. It functions like an unseen color grade, tagging bodies with their origin in a way that cannot be easily removed or disguised. When Mr. Park recoils from the smell, it is the climax of chromatic discrimination: an olfactory palette that cannot be laundered.
This use of invisible markers connects to themes explored in A Quiet Place, where sound (or its absence) becomes a powerful narrative device. In Parasite, smell becomes a class marker that is both invisible and inescapable, revealing how social hierarchies are maintained through sensory codes.
The film suggests that class is not just about what you own, but about what you cannot escape—the smells, the spaces, the colors that mark your origin. This theme resonates with explorations of identity and social performance, such as those found in Fight Club, where characters struggle with the markers of their social position.
Party Palette Collapse
The birthday party tries to enforce a cheerful pastel scheme—soft pinks, light blues, warm yellows. This color palette represents the Parks' attempt to maintain order and happiness, to create a controlled environment where conflict cannot enter. Yet blood red erupts through this beige order, shattering the illusion of harmony.
The palette revolt visualizes the impossibility of containing structural violence within polite aesthetics. The film suggests that the violence of class inequality cannot be hidden forever, that it will eventually break through the carefully maintained surfaces of privilege. This visual breakdown mirrors narrative structures in films like Inception, where controlled environments collapse under the weight of repressed emotions.
The final sequence—the Kim son's vision of buying the house—returns to warm, golden tones, but this is explicitly marked as fantasy. The color here represents not reality but desire, not achievement but aspiration. The film ends with the recognition that this warmth may never be achieved, that the color palette of privilege may remain forever out of reach.
Spatial Color Coding
Beyond individual colors, Parasite uses spatial color coding to reinforce class divisions. The underground bunker where Geun-sae lives is rendered in monochrome grays and browns—a space so removed from natural light that color itself becomes a luxury. This contrasts with the Park home's vibrant, saturated colors, creating a visual hierarchy that maps directly onto social hierarchy.
The film's use of vertical space—from the basement to the ground floor to the upper floors—creates a color gradient that tracks social position. This architectural approach to color connects to other films exploring space and class, such as the layered structures in Dark, where physical spaces reflect temporal and social relationships.
Key Takeaways
- • Color tracks altitude and access: warmth is a privilege, not a default. The visual language of Parasite maps directly onto social hierarchy.
- • Green doubles as hope and rot, capturing precarious mobility and the dual nature of aspiration in a class-stratified society.
- • Invisible markers (odor) work like hidden color grades enforcing class lines, revealing how social hierarchies are maintained through sensory codes.
- • Spatial color coding creates visual hierarchies that mirror social structures, using architecture and light to reinforce class divisions.