Encountering the Civil Sphere Through Cinema: The Cinematic Gap as a Pathway to Civil Evaluation and Repair

Abstract

Despite being one of the most influential forms of media, cinema has yet to be theorized as a communicative institution of the civil sphere. Contrary to commonsense understandings of cinema as a medium for purifying representations of civil sphere ideals, this paper proposes a theoretical framework that opens up the black box of cinematic performance and theorizes processes of civil interpretation and evaluation: the cinematic gap. The cinematic gap describes an experiential space afforded by the medium’s fictional nature. Because cinema is ‘just fiction’, viewers are distanced from the ‘real civil sphere’ and permitted a space for thoughtful rumination on a cinematic performance’s presentation of civil sphere matters that is less reductive, more thoughtful, and more empathetic. As viewers can then apply these insights on the real civil sphere, the cinematic gap provides a space for thoughtful civil engagement and pathways to civil repair. This paper also identifies components of the cinematic gap which determine its ‘size’ – i.e., degree of distancing from the real civil sphere – as genre treatment and grounding in social reality. This theory is generated from responses to the 2019 Korean film Parasite, a highly successful black comedy-thriller that deploys and subverts commentary on class inequality.

Keywords

Civil sphere theory cinema cultural sociology

Cinema as a Communicative Institution of the Civil Sphere

Civil sphere theory conceptualizes civil society as a cultural terrain where ideals of solidarity, individual autonomy, and collective obligations are practiced, negotiated, and reinforced (Alexander, 2006: 4). As a theoretical framework, it offers an empirical and analytical approach that conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of the civil sphere as autonomous from others – the family, economics, religion, the state, and as I address in this paper, aesthetics (Alexander, 2006: 6). Moreover, civil sphere theory not only provides empirical descriptions of civil society and its meaning structures, but also theoretical pathways for critique and civil repair.

The ideal vision of the civil sphere is one where rationality, equality, altruism, and other civil values are upheld and practiced, but in reality, their anti-civil counterparts – irrationality, hierarchy, greediness – often erupt. The tensions between ideal and real trigger efforts at civil repair, such as social movement mobilization and episodic moments of societalization (Alexander, 2006: 7). But efforts at critique, on the micro level, do not achieve the same degree of recognition as large-scale interpretations and reactions to ongoing social events. This is where the communicative institutions of the civil sphere come in. Communicative institutions, such as journalism, novels, and cinema, provide frameworks to typify events in civil and non-civil terms, broadcasting these interpretations to civil society and reinforcing civil sphere discourse as legitimate and commonsense (Alexander, 2006: 70).

So far, civil sphere theory has focused on the communicative institution of journalism, one reason being, that journalism provides a continuous, highly visible, and widely consumed commentary about real social events, often in direct conflict with interpretations offered by institutional power. Journalism holds civil power in its ability to position events in terms of their import to civil sphere concerns and endorse change in accordance with civil society values (Alexander, 2006: 80). This has been investigated in contexts of both democratic societies (Harrison, 2019) and post-civil war solidarity building efforts (Pukallus, 2021). Another reason scholars have focused on journalism is the need to reconcile the argument that such ‘factual media of communication (Alexander, 2006: 80)’ actually operate in an interpretative, judgmental, and non-empirical manner (Alexander et al., 2016).

Far less attention has been paid to what Alexander (2006: 75) has called the ‘fictional media of communication’ and its role in bridging civil and non-civil spheres. This may be the case because it is primarily considered a form of ‘entertainment’, evaluated according to criteria of art and not facticity, and does not dialogue with civil society matters in an explicit way. In fact, from the inception of fictional ‘mass media’, scholars have warned of its nefarious effects on impressionable populations (Blumer, 2018; Jowett et al., 1996), stultifying effects on political consciousness (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1998; Marcuse, 2009), and the propensity to elicit polarizing interpretations (Bobo, 1988; Hall, 1980; Liebes and Katz, 1990; Morley and Brunsdon, 1999). These approaches suggest that fictional media, particularly in the form of cinema, are wholly outside of – if not antithetical to – the civil sphere.

These critical approaches also ignore the affordances that fictional media’s autonomy from the civil sphere provide. It is fiction’s very distance from the real civil sphere that permits novel and fresh civil evaluations of purportedly non-civil fictional events. Unlike the process of engaging with factual media, fiction creates a terrain for moral evaluation that is more tolerant, empathetic, and ultimately more conducive to civil repair.

While not explicitly related to civil sphere theory, cultural sociologists have recently turned their attention to written fiction and its capacity to elicit reflection on society. Focusing on the experience of novel reading, M. Angélica Thumala Olave shows how novels can facilitate deep evaluations of moral and ethical matters that reach and go beyond individual self-realization (Thumala Olave, 2018, 2020). In a similar vein, Anna Michelson finds that romance fiction novels act as an ‘aesthetic public sphere’: a space where real engagement with politics can occur, whether it be on political issues that are incorporated into the narrative or with political sentiments of hope and utopia (Michelson, 2021). Departing from the experience of novel reading, Jan Váňa (2021) has focused on the aesthetic affordances in fiction novels, proposing that they create an ‘iconic experience of reading’ which mediates and amplifies novels’ underlying social knowledge.

It is surprising, in light of this new interest in written fiction, that virtually no attention has been paid to cinema,¹ which holds at least as much – if not greater – societal prevalence in narrating civil and anti-civil themes. Cinema is a particularly powerful medium given its intense realism (Bazin, 1967; Hallam and Marshment, 2000; Kracauer, 1960) and widespread consumption (The Hollywood Reporter National Tracking Poll, 2020a: 754). Just how cinema exerts its fictional power will be my central concern in this paper.

Conceptualizing Mechanisms of Civil Repair through Fictional Media via Civil Sphere Theory

The most direct way of conceptualizing civil repair through cinematic performance is via its melodramatic power of direct moral purification. This is demonstrated through common narratives of civil protagonists combatting anti-civil antagonists, social realist depictions of marginalized groups, and novel representations of previously anti-mainstream groups (Alexander, 2006; Olesen, 2021). However, this commonsense understanding of fictional power as purification fails to enter into the black box of cinematic performance whose inner workings have been the subject of various interpretative efforts in media and film studies, varying from applications of psychoanalytic theory (Metz, 1981) and feminist critique (Mulvey, 1975), genre analysis (Neale, 2000), cultural studies (Hall, 1980), studies of classical Hollywood cinema (Bordwell et al., 1985), and critical analyses of Hollywood cinema (MacCabe, 1974). Illuminating as these studies may be, never has there been an attempt to uncover the black box of cinema in terms of civil sphere theory.

There are two ways that civil sphere theory can offer insights into the black box of cultural interpretation and its potential for civil repair. For one, civil sphere theory provides an analytic framework that organizes civil discourse into binary categories of civil and anti-civil (Alexander, 2006: 54–59). With this analytic framework, civil discourses within both cinematic texts and viewer interpretations can be made explicit and legible. In the first part of my results section, I will demonstrate how the binary discourse of the civil sphere comes alive in viewer interpretations and facilitates reflection upon civil sphere issues and civil repair.

Second, and more importantly, I will illustrate the affordances of cinema’s autonomy from the civil sphere, proposing a new theoretical framework that explains the civil power of cinema in eliciting reflexivity, critique, and civil repair: the cinematic gap. Through fictional re-imaginings of the civil sphere, the cinematic gap distances the viewer from the ‘real civil sphere’ and creates a space where viewers can digest, question, and evaluate civil sphere representations. Precisely because of its distance from the real civil sphere, civil sphere interpretations of cinematic events are more capacious, tolerant, and empathetic. In this manner, the cinematic gap facilitates thoughtful reflections on civil sphere concerns and civil repair.

Methodology

Case Study

My research aim was to generate a theoretical model that explains the mechanisms of interpreting the civil sphere through cinematic encounters. As such, I was operating under a ‘logic of discovery’ (and not a logic of verification), wherein my methodological goals served theory-building, and not empirical fact-finding (Luker, 2008). I therefore chose a theoretical case study: one of the most successful cinematic representations of civil sphere issues in recent times Parasite (2019).

Parasite is a South Korean film that centers on the class dynamics between two families from opposite ends of the socio-economic status spectrum and has been characterized as a genre-bending film that moves from black comedy, to thriller, to horror, and tragedy. Its genre-bending nature is important for the theoretical purposes of this study, as it can demonstrate the power of bold cultural performances in the civil sphere. Further, despite being a foreign film,² Parasite has achieved both critical and popular acclaim, with a 98% critics approval score and 90% audience approval score on the aggregated film review website Rotten Tomatoes.³ It has won numerous prestigious awards, including the Academy Award for Best Picture, the Palm d’Or, the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film, and the BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language. The film’s success, despite barriers to entry, make it a viable case study to assess cinematic power in the civil sphere.

Parasite is an ideal case study for investigating engagement with the civil sphere through cinema. The protagonists of the film are the Kim family, who occupy the lowest echelons of the socio-economic spectrum, folding pizza boxes for a living, and living in a semi-basement. Upon hearing about a job opportunity to provide tutoring services for the uber-rich Park family’s teenage daughter, the Kim family connives their way into working for the Park family, lying about their qualifications and finding ingenious ways of compromising current employees so as to take their place. In doing so, they are able to enjoy the material pleasures of living in the Park family’s mansion and are paid a sizeable income. The climax of the film begins when the Kim family learns that the former housekeeper of the Park mansion has been keeping her husband in the basement to protect him from loan sharks. One night, the former housekeeper finds out about the Kim family’s ruse and threatens to expose them, leading to a series of dramatic events and confrontations that jeopardize the Kim family’s position. That night, torrential rainfall floods the Kim’s home, leaving them homeless for the night. The next day, they are forced to return to work and because they have lied about their economic status, they are unable to disclose the truth of their circumstances to the Park family. In a flurry of dramatic events, the Kim patriarch murders the Park patriarch after observing him recoil from the stench of sewer – and poverty— on his person.

Data and Methodology

My data collection strategy also coincided with a ‘logic of discovery’ (Luker, 2008) and constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz and Belgrave, 2012) . As I was more interested in theorizing cinematic interpretation of civil sphere themes rather than dissecting interpretative differences among a population, I sampled for descriptive richness, breadth, and theory-building. I conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with participants over Zoom or telephone and analyzed 116 critic reviews and 400 audience reviews drawn from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Interviews were an ideal method for this research as they provided in-depth insight into the ‘imagined’ cultural meanings that viewers generated vis-à-vis the civil sphere – distinct from behavioral enactments of civil sphere ideals (Lamont and Swidler, 2014) . They also afforded the possibility of eliciting a variation in what Pugh (2013) calls ‘meta-feelings’, or ‘how we feel about what we feel’. In this case, interviews elicit reflexivity on how viewers feel about civil sphere ideals through the process of cinematic viewing. Online reviews supplemented my interview data and were used to enhance and corroborate my findings, also acting as a ‘tacit control group’ of viewers with varying degrees of cinematic literacy and degrees of preference toward the film (Luker, 2008).

For the interviews, I employed a snowball sampling method. Keeping with the goal of theoretical sampling (Strauss, 1987), I did not apply a rigorous representative sampling technique (i.e. sampling X number from X category) as the dependent variable of analysis was not demographic differences (although it is undoubtedly the case that processes of interpretation vary depending on gender, class, educational, etc. backgrounds). Instead, I screened prospective participants with questions relating to their demographic background and cinema-watching habits and accepted participants for study as I saw fit throughout the data collection process (see Table 1 for a descriptive table of interview participants). Most participants watched the film one to two days before the interview. It should be noted that most interview participants achieved degrees in higher education, but that occupational and class backgrounds varied considerably, and higher-educated participants often revealed that they came from working-class backgrounds.

Table 1.

Descriptive statistics for interview participants.

	N	%
Gender
Female	14	56%
Male	11	44%
Race/Ethnicity
Caucasian	14	56%
Black	5	20%
Asian	3	12%
Hispanic	2	8%
Other	1	4%
Age
18-24	5	20%
25-29	7	28%
30-34	1	4%
35-39	3	12%
40-44	0	0%
45-49	0	0%
50-54	2	8%
55-59	2	8%
60-64	3	12%
65-69	1	4%
70-74	1	4%
Nationality
American	16	64%
Canadian	9	36%
Highest level of educational attainment
Not a high school graduate	0	0%
High school graduate	3	12%
Some college or associate degree	3	12%
Bachelor’s degree or higher	19	76%
Number of hours spent watching television or movies per week
0-2	5	20%
3-5	3	12%
6-9	4	16%
10-14	9	36%
15+	5	20%

In addition to providing additional data, critical reviews provided cinephile readings of the film, and online audience reviews provided a range of positive or negative receptions of the film. The total number of critics’ reviews were collated from the Movie Review Query Engine (mrqe.com). For the audience reviews, I sampled from a variety of ratings (from 1 star to 10 stars) and manually chose ones that were detailed and classed ‘most helpful’ by other users (on IMDb, users can ‘thumbs up’ a review if they find it to be helpful).

I embraced a grounded theory approach where I employed a ‘constant comparison method’ of alternating between my data and theory construction, constantly writing memos throughout the data collection process and referring back to them and raw transcripts (Charmaz and Belgrave, 2012). Keeping with my research question, I coded viewers’ civil sphere evaluations and the way they made sense of and justified their civil reflections. This involved paying particular attention to how viewers described characters’ motives and relations in civil or anti-civil terms (Alexander, 2006: 57–58). I also coded for descriptive terms that illustrated viewing experiences in an effort to uncover aesthetic affordances of cinema as a communicative institution of the civil sphere. Using grounded theory, I corroborated theoretical insights that emerged throughout the data collection and analysis process, testing to see if they held up with other participants. In my results section I illustrate emergent themes and then construct a theoretical framework based on these themes.

Results

Uncovering Civil Sphere Discourse in Binary Interpretations of Anti-Civility in Parasite

Civil sphere theory offers a framework for analyzing civil discourse organized along a civil / anti-civil binary. I show that Parasite elicited evaluations of the characters’ civility, and moreover, I found that civil sphere binary discourses served as a resource from which viewers could re-negotiate anti-civil codings and facilitate civil repair through newfound understanding.

For a minority of viewers, impressions of anti-civility overpowered the film’s contextualization of the Kim family as victims of the capitalist system. A conservative reading of the text mobilizes the binary of honest work as civil / deception as anti-civil, illuminating the Kim family’s manipulative tricks in a rather unflattering light. In these cases, the Kim family’s deceptive ruse generated strong attitudes of disgust. For instance, one IMDb reviewer revealed awareness of the film’s social commentary, but was ultimately left appalled by the Kim family’s despicable actions. They note,

And here am I thinking[,] how is capitalism the villain in a story of a murderous, cheating, fraudulent family of Kims who decide to get rich at the expense of others (i.e. work in a non-capitalistic way). But in a world where socialism is on the rise; where the poor demand the rich to pay for their living because why not; where an individual is responsible for everyone else but himself/herself [−] this movie is the type of crap that would sell.

One of my interview participants, Lorenzo, a 52-year-old franchise manager, also expressed intense disapproval toward the Kim family and former housekeeper’s schemes:

The family’s being scammed twice, right? . . . I don’t know anybody personally who would actually do that to somebody. . . It’s kind of shocking that not one, but two people, or two bunches of groups. . . would tak[e] advantage of [the Park family’s] wealth.

According to these viewers, the Kim family’s actions fall squarely under the category of ‘anti-civil.’ However, the majority of viewers – among both online reviewers and my interviewees – were forgiving of the Kim family’s misdemeanors. These viewers were more politically progressive and contextualized the Kim family’s trickery as products of social circumstance. For example, Delilah, a 61-year-old retired small business owner and former stay-at-home mom, sympathized with the Kim family and could understand that their immoral actions were driven by dire circumstances. She ruminated,

The wealthy and poor. . . sometimes people do things because they get tired of the way they’re treated. . . it happens in real life. I believe that’s why sometimes there’s crime: it’s because sometimes the less unfortunate people get tired of not being able to get ahead. . . and sometimes they get a little taste of something. . . like selling drugs. . . It changes people. . .

To take another example, Marisa, a 24-year-old mental health counselling student expressed

I felt for the family [even though] what they were doing was not so great. . . You know, [they were] going about bettering themselves. I do understand what it is to get to that point where you feel that that’s the only way you can go about things.

The polarized responses to anti-civility in Parasite provide a preliminary mapping of civil sphere interpretations of the film. In the next section, I will identify the cinematic affordances that enabled viewers to err toward a more positive interpretation of the film’s moral ambiguity. This demonstrates how, despite the Kim family’s evidently morally sketchy actions, the film facilitated the necessary degree of contextualization and re-evaluation that redeemed them and facilitated civil repair.

Re-evaluation through Fictional Distance

Fictional media creates a space where moral judgment is allowed greater freedom. Presented before a viewer is a fictional set of characters and events that have no connection or consequence to real life. Because characters are ‘made-up’, viewers are more likely to freely evaluate their contentious actions without the moral prerogative of harsh critique. Moreover, cinema – in the tradition of classic Hollywood cinema – produces powerful sketches of characters that behave in psychologically consistent ways within a temporally-bounded set of events (Bordwell et al., 1985). Through a film’s social realism, characters’ psychologies are influenced by external circumstances such as their socio-economic status and material conditions (Hallam and Marshment, 2000: 184). As such, cinema presents highly realistic characters whose (anti-)civil motives are explainable by the rich psychological and sociological context that is so necessary for a narrative’s coherence. This vivid contextualization is precisely what fueled the progressive reading of the Kim family’s perfidious manipulation. Taken together, cinema presents highly realistic and comprehensible characters and circumstances that are subject to a fairly low level of moral scrutiny.

In my interviews, I found that politically progressive viewers were able to evaluate the moral ambiguity of the Kim family from either a detached, impartial perspective, or through deep identification and understanding. Viewers could see the Kim family as characters operating within a solely fictional context with no moral consequences, or as fully fleshed-out characters with complex motivations and intentions. In the former case, the severity of the Kim family’s moral failings was reduced. In the latter case, their anti-civility was re-evaluated under the purview of their circumstances.

The reduction of the Kim family to characters in a film could be seen in interviewees’ tendency to ‘root for’ them as protagonists working toward a goal. For example, Karen, a 35-year-old finance analyst, expressed an alternative framing of merit within the context of the Kim family’s ruse. She said,

As a viewer I was really rooting for the Kim family because this was a really smart plan that they had hatched and I wanted it to work out for them. So the idea that, like, it doesn’t really matter where you lay your head at night – you know, like a motivated person is a motivated person, and I think it showed that we can have many strengths and skills without necessarily having a piece of paper from a university saying so.

Other participants were less detached when it came to their investment in the Kim family’s fate. They expressed a level of connection with the characters that went beyond an attitude that reduced them to characters in a confined film. This deeper investment in the protagonists’ fates gave way to thorough assessments of the characters’ psychologies and motivations. For instance, Selena, a 32-year-old web developer, expressed ambivalence toward both the Kim and Park families. This suggested that her gut reading of the Kim family’s actions was that they were anti-civil. However, as she continued to ruminate, she recognized that categorizing the Kim family as anti-civil was also unfair. She expressed,

There was some part of me that was like, you know, that’s kind of okay. It’s a little, you know, a little shady. But, you know, [the Kim family] really need the money. . . And then past that it started to make me think, like, oh my god, where do I draw my line. . . I felt uncomfortable. It just wasn’t okay and then, you know – just the fact that they were taking advantage of this family. But then you have to ask yourself, like, yeah, but. . . the Park family rather is um. . . It’s like they’re kind of dysfunctional as well. They don’t really care about each other. They don’t really care about really much of anything. . . There’s just a lot of stuff for me to think about and I guess things I probably previously hadn’t wanted to think about. And in that sense, I think it’s a good thing that they brought up that kind of conversation. . .

I think I need to understand myself more – like where I draw my lines and, you know, how I feel about a lot of these things, and then kind of maybe try to understand society a little better. . .

Selena’s indecisive evaluation of the Kim family suggests that the film was successful in contextualizing their morally corrupt actions in a complex set of circumstances. She admitted that ‘she previously hadn’t wanted to think about’ the set of moral dilemmas presented by the film, demonstrating how the movie compelled her to watch given its status of being ‘just fiction’. From there, the fictional narrative created enough distance from the burdensome reality of civil life to facilitate her reflections.

Sabrina, a 35-year-old chef, also expressed some degree of ambivalence, but ultimately understood that both the Kim family and the former housekeeper were acting out of desperation. She ruminated,

I’m always convinced that my skills and talents alone will carry me as however far as I can carry myself. . . but of course there is the reality of life where you have to fight for certain things. . . and you are going to get people who are conniving and calculating. . . And it was really sad, especially when, the original housekeeper – we find out that her husband was in there as well. That really kind of struck me in a way, because I guess it’s a matter of really survival. . . I guess to some extent I’ve never really experienced, I guess, that sort of suffering, where out of desperation you have to trick people. . . just so you could get ahead.

While Sabrina first expressed belief in the civil code of hard work and merit, she was reminded of the ‘reality of life’ where manipulation and cunning are necessary to achieve upward social mobility. She even expressed empathy toward the former housekeeper, demonstrating deep understanding of their motivations. For both Sabrina and Selena, the film’s narrative trappings created a space where they could reflect on the complex moral issues at hand. Regardless of their initial gut intuitions which subscribed to the civil / anti-civil binary, the film’s fictional nature permitted re-evaluations of the Kims’ anti-civility and crafted convincing contextualization of the Kim family’s dire socio-economic circumstances. With this newfound contextualization and understanding, viewers like Selena and Sabrina were able to engage in a process of civil repair, whether by rigorous reflexivity or redefinitions of anti-civil qualities like deception.

Reevaluation of the Civil Code Through Fictional Distance

Re-evaluation through Exceptional Fictional Distance: The Role of Genre and Narrative Innovation

While all fictional media provides opportunities for flexible moral evaluations of civil sphere themes, I found that Parasite was a particularly capacious film. Time and time again, as I interviewed participants, their experience of the film was one of awe. Viewers found that the film had a ‘shock factor’, and ‘kept you on edge’. By creating such a captivating and awe-inspiring experience, viewers were compelled to withhold immediate moral reprehension. This deep immersion had two iterations in the film that corresponded with the film’s genre turn from black comedy to thriller and horror. For the first half of the film, the Kim family slowly infiltrated the Park family through a series of clever ruses, conveying a sort of satiric comedy of manners. The second half of the film featured a flurry of high-stakes events triggered by the Kims’ discovery that the former housekeeper was hiding her husband in the basement in order to protect him from loan sharks. With the former housekeeper threatening to reveal the Kim family’s ruse and a number of close encounters culminating in a violent bloodbath at the Park mansion, the film turned into a thriller and horror.

These twists and turns elicited surprise, deep immersion, and reflexivity in viewers. Selena, whose conflicted moral evaluation I quoted above, commented that the film was ‘just a wild ride, something that you talk to your friend, or your spouse, or you know, whoever.’ Zara, a 22- year-old entrepreneur, said that she was ‘completely shocked by the end. . . The entire movie gripped me.’ Beatrice, a 70-year-old retired teacher, described the film as

Unbelievable. Just so refreshing, so we loved it. Different. Dark comedy, and then, then it wasn’t. A little bit thought provoking too, the kind of film where you talk about it when it’s over. Some films you don’t bother.

Everything happened quite quickly – you, you’re stunned, you take it in. . . you were, I don’t know reeling, from one to the other. . .

In the wake of this flurry of events, Beatrice reflected on the moral culpability of the Kim patriarch, expressing,

I think basically they were all good people, but they just went off the rails. Okay, just, [the Park family] were everyday people. [The Kim family], they were a little out there, but they all had – I want to say jobs – I suppose folding pizza boxes is a job. They just wanted the best for their family. They led their lives. [pauses] It was all believable. Even the murder. [pauses] . . .You know, you just catch your breath, but truth is stranger than fiction.

Interviewer: Can you elaborate a little more on what you mean when you say, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’?

Just, I do a lot of reading and a lot of the time, you find out what you’re reading is based on a true story, or a thread of a true story. And you’re like, what, no, that could never have happened! And so, truth is stranger than any fiction someone could write.

Beatrice’s reflections illustrate an interesting dynamic between cinema’s ability to suspend disbelief and elicit faith in the unbelievable. She articulated a sentiment of awe toward the extraordinary events of the film, demonstrating how fiction functions in creating a space where deep evaluations of feasibility and morality can occur. The fact that Parasite was a particularly incredulous film compelled viewers to really make sense of characters’ motives and moral culpability.

For some viewers, the riveting experience of watching the film did not generate newfound moral evaluations. Larry, a 59-year-old retired franchise manager, exemplified this tension of retaining moral disapproval but acknowledging the film’s cinematic mastery:

It really came to life in terms of where the Kims lived . . . [their] conditions, and not really wanting to do a lot about it, and just wanting to take advantage of the situation that would benefit themselves. . . so I don’t think we had seen a movie quite like this one, you know, for the entire time, because it just kept going on itself as it went throughout. . .

I just liked the way [the filmmakers] built the layers on each other, and it left you guessing as you went along so you really had to sit there and watch until the end, to see what happened. . . Maybe the point for me was it wasn’t as predictable given how they did it, how the family got themselves into the Park family. . . It was hard to preconceive what some of the coming scenes would be. . . sometimes when you watch a Hallmark movie, you know what will happen next. . .

While Larry did not change his mind about the Kim family’s anti-civil actions, he still thoroughly enjoyed the film. He expressed the same shock and awe that emerged from the film’s unpredictability. Larry’s statement underscores the film’s ability to create an unrelenting space of disbelief, which for some offered a chance for a renegotiation of the anti-civil code, and for others, did not.

The specific formal qualities of Parasite which enabled such incredulous reactions were the tonal and genre shifts that created riveting cinematic experience. Many of my interviewees described the film as ‘two films in one’, while others were more specific in identifying the genres at hand. Critics in particular make note of Bong’s mastery of genre integration. For instance, David Ehrlich from Indiewire.com writes:

The director refers to his furious and fiendishly well-crafted new film as a ‘family tragicomedy,’ but the best thing about Parasite is that it gives us permission to stop trying to sort his movies into any sort of pre-existing taxonomy — with ‘Parasite,’ Bong finally becomes a genre unto himself.

Or take this perceptive comment by one IMDb audience reviewer:

‘Parasite (2019)’, like many South Korean efforts I’ve seen, essentially starts out as one thing and ends up another, constantly tightrope walking a razor-thin tonal line. Indeed, this balance between light and dark is probably its best aspect. The piece delivers moments of humour alongside moments of horror, each as genuine as the other. It’s always entertaining, whether comedic or unsettling, and it’s very well-made, to boot.

The fictional space that Parasite created was constructed through artful genre maneuvering that created suspense, surprise, and thrill. In this space, viewers lost themselves in the cinematic world of the Kims, only to find themselves with fresh perspectives on the civil sphere they had just departed.

Fictional Distance Mediated through Grounding in Reality

In my analysis of reactions to Parasite so far, I first raised the role of fictional distancing in facilitating reflexivity in civil evaluation. I then proposed that the exceptional degree of aesthetic originality in Parasite – through genre innovation – facilitated deeper immersion and reflexivity among viewers. This insight would suggest that the greater the fictional distance from reality – the more absurd, the more unlikely – the more effective in compelling reflexivity. This explains the success of fantasy and dystopian fiction, which often fashions political scenarios that reflect existing or past iterations of totalitarian regimes in the real world.

I found something very different, however, to be at work in responses to Parasite. Rather than its performative power depending only on the distance that fiction provided, the reflection it facilitated was actually enhanced by its grounding in feasibility. Parasite, however absurd, existed in a fictional world contemporaneous with our own. This was shown when viewers commented on the film’s ability to create accurate and truthful depictions of class relations. They also commented on the fact that these depictions were heightened by the film’s hyperbolic features, but in a way that did not veer into the realm of fantasy.

For example, Karol, a 25-year-old entrepreneur, commented, that the film

take[s] strings of, like, really believable class interactions. And they, they like. . . I don’t want to say hyper it. What’s the word I want to use. . . I don’t know, they really put it to an extreme. . .. It was OD [overdose].

Delilah, the 61-year-old retired small business owner and stay-at-home mom I quoted earlier, expressed a similar sentiment to Karol but specified where the film drew from real life. She reflected,

I think this sort of thing happens all the time. I mean, not to that level. But, people take advantage of other people. . . People get greedy. Everybody is different. Some people let wealth get to their lives. . . You see it in movies all the time. But the way this movie was put together, it was crazy.

Delilah could clearly see very real instances of human greed and desperation reflected in the movie, but specified that the movie brought these patterns of human nature to ‘another level’. While other movies demonstrate these themes as well, it was clear that Parasite stood out. Parasite balanced hyperbole with realism, never swinging in either direction too far so as to lose its efficacy.

Talia, a 24-year-old cook, expressed this balance even more clearly:

I think the fact that it was realistic is what made it so good. . . because you could imagine that really happening. . . Like the rich family. . . you could meet a family like that in real life, and the poor family, even though they turned out really sinister, you could imagine someone being in that position and you could put yourself in their shoes as well. . .

I think that it was just the perfect amount of exaggeration because it seemed like something that could really happen, minus the family that was living in the basement. . .

If the plot were less believable, I might not like the movie as much. Like I might say, I understand what they’re trying to do here, this is generally entertaining, but it’s not something that I would review as highly. It just loses some of its credit, I guess?

For Talia, Parasite achieved believability, relatability, and hyperbole that was just the ‘perfect amount of exaggeration’. In balancing these elements, it went beyond mere entertainment and achieved social messaging that was ‘credible’.

Another participant, Joe, a 26-year-old aerospace engineer, reflected on every event in the film that may have initially seemed to be unrealistic, but then came to the recognition that they were in fact quite feasible. For instance, he recognized the Kims’ elaborate ruse as a reflection of how ‘poverty forces us to do things like forge documents. . . [It] forces us to act as if we’re not in poverty . . . so we’re not treated differently.’ He then commented on how the film’s more extravagant and awe-inspiring elements provided a necessary counterweight to what could otherwise be an intense, rather unpleasant film featuring class commentary. Distinguishing Parasite from ‘ultrarealism’, he expressed,

I mean the benefit of the kind of unrealistic parts of things is, you know it – you don’t have to be like completely enveloped in this haze of just brutal realistic sadness. Like I was comparing it a lot to The Pursuit of Happyness [− that] Will Smith movie. . . Like that’s ultra realism.

These quotations illustrate rather subtle and complex appreciations of the balancing act between hyperbole and verisimilitude, but echoes of such sentiment were found in many participants’ reactions, albeit in less explicit fashion. Participants would express sentiments of both disbelief and critical awareness, but at different moments of the interview. They appreciated both elements of the film but were unable to articulate them as symbiotic elements.

In the next section, I will propose a theoretical framework that explains how Parasite mobilized the elements discussed above, and how it illustrates that encounters with the civil sphere can be effectively mediated through cinema.

Theorizing Fictional Media Encounters with the Civil Sphere: The Cinematic Gap

In this section, I will propose a theoretical framework that illustrates the encounter among viewer, cinematic performance, and civil sphere: the cinematic gap.

The cinematic gap describes the experiential space where cinematic viewing occurs. It characterizes the distance that spans between the ‘real civil sphere’ and the world of cinema. The cinematic gap was illustrated whenever viewers characterized their experience as engrossing, shocking, captivating, or other descriptors which belied their momentary fixation on the cinematic world – and not the civil sphere proper. However engrossing, the process of encountering cinematic depictions of the civil sphere within the cinematic gap and then exiting out of the cinematic gap also engenders newfound understandings of civil sphere issues. I will first describe what the cinematic gap is, its variations in size, and its two organizing qualities of depiction and treatment of civil sphere. I will then describe how the mechanisms of the cinematic gap facilitate evaluations and re-evaluations of civil sphere issues, which have the potential to effect civil repair.

In my analysis, I identified how viewers could experience the cinematic gap in terms of fictional immersion, which could take on hyperbolic or realist qualities. I found that fiction created an environment for more relenting and sympathetic moral evaluation of civil sphere issues. I found that hyperbolic fictional representations of the civil sphere – specifically through means of genre innovation – was particularly conducive in ushering in civil re-evaluation, for they compelled viewers to get lost in the film’s internal diegesis, ponder what they had witnessed, and emerge with newfound insights. Finally, I found that the hyperbolic representations of the civil sphere in Parasite were moderated by realism, lending the film greater credibility in its depiction of civil sphere issues.

Size of the Cinematic Gap

Civil sphere representations can be achieved on a spectrum of possibilities ranging from the hyperbolic to the realistic. In the former type of representation, the viewer is distanced from their own civil sphere by the imaginative affordances of fiction. In the latter, the viewer is given more direct access to the real civil sphere by virtue of similarities between on-screen representations and real life. These variations in distance characterize the cinematic gap’s size.

The cinematic gap can be large or small. Larger cinematic gaps occur when cinematic civil sphere depictions are so absurd, outrageous, or unfamiliar that a viewer senses little to no connection to their own civil sphere at the time of viewing. A prime example of a film with a large cinematic gap would be a dystopian thriller, where allusions to civil sphere issues are present but similarity to actual civil sphere conditions is limited. Smaller cinematic gaps occur when cinematic civil sphere depictions are more similar to the civil sphere of the viewer. Examples of films with small cinematic gaps would be historical fiction depictions of real events or contemporary social issue dramas. The size of the cinematic gap is determined by the viewer’s interpretation, but its construction is largely shaped by the creative efforts of screenwriters, directors, actors. For instance, dystopian thrillers by nature of the genre are more conducive to creating distance between viewer and real civil sphere. However, some viewers might be extremely well acquainted with the dystopian thriller conventions and cognizant of their analogies to real world politics. For such a viewer, the distance between cinematic performance and civil sphere might be reduced.

I have shown that Parasite has features of both a small and large cinematic gap. I first found that viewers were distanced from the civil sphere by virtue of cinematic immersion. The phenomenological experience of watching the film’s plot and genre twists momentarily suspended viewers’ disbelief. Awareness of the civil sphere issues implicit in the film was lowered while viewers were left reeling, totally immersed in the film’s events. However, I also found that viewers’ disbelief was mediated by the film’s social realism, which often allowed viewers to make connections between the film and real civil sphere issues. The fact that viewers consistently referred to the film’s plausibility and made no reference to feelings of aesthetic estrangement – which is often the case with foreign films – further suggests its success in conveying social realist themes that took on a universal character. The former element suggests the operation of a fairly large cinematic gap, while the latter elements suggest the operation of a relatively small cinematic gap. Of course, every viewer experiences a different-sized cinematic gap, and are influenced by prior experiences, knowledge, and familiarity with cinematic conventions. Based solely on the fact that viewers did connect with the film’s characters and intended themes, one could say that it had a small cinematic gap. However, because of its ability to create a dynamic cinematic world where both cognitive and moral critique were suspended, its cinematic gap could not be described as less than medium.

Elements of the Cinematic Gap: Treatment and Depiction of the Civil Sphere

Based on my findings, I propose two organizing features of the cinematic gap. When describing their experience, viewers described the still-apparent social realism of the film’s plot points and character motivations. They also alluded to deep immersion into the film’s absurd plot and genre twists. These two experiential elements can be simplified as the film’s depiction of the civil sphere, and the film’s treatment of the civil sphere.

A film’s depiction of the civil sphere refers to a film’s substantive representation of civil sphere themes that are derived from social life. Parasite depicted civil sphere themes relating to class inequality, doing so through its grounding in social realist depictions of poverty and wealth, as well as metaphorical devices such as the eponymous ‘parasitism’ of the Kim-Park family. Depictions of the civil sphere can be more or less ‘realistic’ – that is, close to actual civil sphere conditions. The case of Parasite involved its relaying of a story that was, however incredulous, still feasible. And while a depiction of civil sphere does not analytically relate to genre – whose relevance will be explained in reference to treatment of civil sphere – robust depictions of the civil sphere are often seen in genres such as historical fiction, political thriller, fantasy, and dystopia.⁴ Parasite transcended these categories and managed to create a story of class warfare on the level of inter-family relations through a family heist-gone-wrong.

A film’s treatment of the civil sphere refers to the organization of plot and story via the formal elements of film, such as genre, cinematography, and soundtrack. In the case of Parasite, the most prevalent component of its treatment of civil sphere issues was its genre innovation. It featured an outlandish plot that shifted in genre from black comedy to horror/thriller. Viewers made reference to the film’s treatment of the civil sphere when they ascribed descriptive terms such as ‘unique’ or ‘unexpected’. An audience of cinephiles, however, would frame these characteristics as a departure from genre norms. Treatment of civil sphere refers to ascription to or departure from the intertextual verisimilitude which affords cinema its cultural power – that is, cinema can be powerful because its conventions have achieved cultural legibility, but cinema can also be powerful when it modifies and innovates these conventions to effect illegibility. I will explain this further in my discussion of cinematic gap mechanisms.

A film’s treatment and depiction of civil sphere issues interact to generate a cinematic gap. In tandem, they create more or less distanced representations of the civil sphere. In Figure 1, I have mapped out these two components of the cinematic gap, showing different configurations of their interaction.

Figure 1.

A typology of different configurations and sizes of the cinematic gap. The cinematic gap features two organizing features: formal organization and cultural content. Cinematic formal organization varies from conventional to innovative, and cinematic cultural content varies from realistic to unrealistic. The further a film approaches the bottom right section of the diagram, the larger its cinematic gap.

As seen in Figure 1, the treatment of the civil sphere ranges from conventional to innovative. The more conventional, the smaller the cinematic gap, and the more innovative, the larger the cinematic gap. In the case of Parasite, viewers often alluded to its ‘shocking’ and ‘unique’ qualities, owing largely to its innovative mixing of thriller, horror, tragedy, and black comedy.

The depiction of the civil sphere ranges from realistic to unrealistic. The more realistic, the smaller the cinematic gap, the more unrealistic, the larger the cinematic gap. Parasite’s depiction of the civil sphere was anchored in present-day realities of class inequality in South Korea, depicting the living conditions of the uber rich and working class. However, the film also presented rather extreme situations involving desperation for social mobility and survival that ‘could’ happen in real life – but only upon reflection.

In combination, these two features of the cinematic gap generate more or less felt distance from the real civil sphere. The extent to which cinematic civil spheres are conventional/innovative or realistic/unrealistic can vary viewer-to-viewer based on their positionality, but on a general level, audiences with shared structures experience similarly-sized cinematic gaps. That is to say, previous media representations of the civil sphere and everyday encounters with the civil sphere create similar baseline expectations of civil sphere representations. For instance, we generally expect morally purifying and transcendent narratives of good triumphing over evil because we have been exposed to such narratives time and time again. Because these expectations are a prevalent cultural structure and shared by the majority of those who consume fictional media, the cinematic gap generally operates in a universally similar fashion.

Mechanisms of the Cinematic Gap in Relaying Civil Spheres and Facilitating Re-evaluations of Anti-civility

The cinematic gap creates distance between the viewer and the civil sphere. In its most simple form, it describes the affordances of fiction: it allows viewers to suspend disbelief or experience some form of escapism. Counterintuitively, this distancing from one’s present civil sphere does not lead to the total eradication of one’s awareness of civil sphere issues. Rather, the cinematic gap – which creates distance from the ‘real’ civil sphere – is a mechanism that activates thoughtful reflection on civil sphere issues. As I demonstrated in the results section, viewers felt themselves totally immersed in the internal diegesis of the film’s controversial plot points and unexpected trajectory. This elicited thoughtful reflection on the film’s ‘meaning’ and the characters’ motivations.

This counter-intuitive finding has been similarly expressed by theorists, starting with Bertolt Brecht and his theory of the ‘alienation effect’ (Brecht, 1964). However, while Brecht advocated for total alienation from the experience of the theatrical production’s realism – in order to generate critical audience reaction – I found that the cinematic gap works not through distancing from the cinematic experience, but rather through distancing from the viewer’s civil sphere. Similar to Brecht, the monumental cinema studies journal Screen Theory in the 1970s spearheaded a highly critical attack on the compositional cohesion of Hollywood cinema (Rosen, 2008).⁵ Colin MacCabe’s critique of the hegemonic meta-discourse of cinematic realism presumed that it had a stultifying effect on viewers’ consciousness (MacCabe, 1974). For that reason, he and other theorists suggested that only avant-garde cinema could elicit a sufficient degree of detachment from the hegemonic qualities of the cinematic medium and give way to activated political consciousness (Gaines, 1999; MacCabe, 1976; Mulvey, 1975). This line of theorizing suggests that only through the innovative treatment of civil sphere representations can substantial reflexivity be achieved. As I have demonstrated, it is not so much treatment as description, not so much total distancing from cinematic performance as distancing from one’s own civil sphere that elicits critical reflection on social issues.

The cinematic gap functions in facilitating thoughtful reflection on not only civil sphere issues, but also more specifically on representations of anti-civility. In Parasite, the moral ambiguity of the protagonists’ ruse either appalled, surprised, or delighted viewers. Instances of moral discomfort over the Kim family’s trickery were mediated and reduced by the fact that it was distanced from the realm of feasibility. Within the civil sphere of the film, selfish behavior was understood as part of an elaborate cascade of cinematic events, but it was the deft crafting of believable characters and motives that ushered in re-evaluations of morally dubious behavior into reasonable responses to dire circumstances. While a smaller cinematic gap could generate some degree of reflexivity, it became clear from the animated discussion I had with participants that it was their shock and awe that created opportunity for deep reflection. This deep reflection exonerated the Kim family from their trickery, incorporating them into the civil sphere despite their anti-civil actions. As such, the cinematic gap permits pathways to civil repair. Through suspension of not only disbelief but also critical intuition, the cinematic gap permits a capacious space for civil inclusion.

Conclusion

When discussing the role of communicative institutions in the civil sphere, one assumes that positive and conventional portrayals of civility promote civil sphere values and keep the civil sphere alive. In fact, most fictional media on the civil sphere has followed this model, portraying heroic acts of civility in the face of oppressive anti-civil forces. This is the case in both historical fiction and conventional fantasy fiction, where heroic political leaders, superheroes, and chosen underdogs rise to the occasion to combat anti-civil antagonists. Alternatively, fictional media has also made gains in incorporating previously primordial civil actors into the civil sphere by portraying them in a positive, noble light. This describes the contemporary project of diverse representation in the media, a concern that consumes the film industry in all aspects of production, from diverse representation in creative personnel to casting choices (Rosenthal et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2020). Implicit in this project is not only the assimilation of subaltern qualities into existing civil codes of conduct and existence, but the dissemination of alternative trajectories of civil existence. While these media representations of the civil sphere have been extremely important in perpetuating civility as normative ideals, there has been less theoretical discussion of subversive depictions of the civil sphere and their place in reforming and sustaining the civil sphere.

In this paper, I proposed that cinema has great potential in eliciting deep reflexivity on civil sphere issues, not through positive and conventional portrayals of civil sphere themes, but through extra-ordinary fictional re-imaginings of the civil sphere. Through my analysis of viewers’ responses to Parasite, I developed a framework for theorizing encounters with the civil sphere in cinema: ‘the cinematic gap’. The cinematic gap describes the distance between a viewer’s preconceptions of the ‘actually existing’ civil sphere and their encounter with alternative cinematic civil spheres. This distance can be large or small, its size characterized by the degree of distance a viewer feels from one’s actual civil sphere. I have further suggested that the cinematic gap is organized by two components: formal organization of the film, or the treatment of civil sphere, and the cultural content of the film, or the depiction of the civil sphere. The treatment of the civil sphere varies from innovative to conventional, and the depiction of the civil sphere varies from unrealistic to realistic. These two components interact to create smaller or larger cinematic gaps which in turn allow widely varying configurations.

The power of the cinematic gap lies, counterintuitively, in its distance from – not likeness too – real life civil sphere conditions. The cinematic gap creates a form of escapism that does not evade the moral imperatives of residing in the civil sphere, but rather a form of escapism that creates a novel form of civil participation. The civil participation I am referring to is the act of suspending harsh civil evaluation in favor of greater understanding and empathy for morally dubious characters operating in cinematic civil spheres. In a way, this space of civil re-evaluation is not dissimilar to John Rawls’ hypothetical ‘original position’, in which the preconditions for envisioning a theory of justice are that the material circumstances under which one is born are unknown (Rawls, 1971). While Rawls’ theory is a hypothetical thought experiment meant to justify universal conditions of fairness and equality, the cinematic gap is an empirically real space where individuals are given the opportunity to reflect upon imaginary civil sphere conditions that offer commentary and critique on real civil sphere matters. As I have demonstrated through my analysis of responses to Parasite, characters’ anti-civil actions were evaluated in the morally forgiving and illustrative imaginary space of fiction. As such, fiction, through the cinematic gap, places viewers in a version of the Rawlsian original position: a position where it is easier to evaluate anti-civility with more impartiality, understanding, and empathy.

The cinematic gap provides a way of conceptualizing the role and power of cinema as a communicative institution of the civil sphere. By distancing viewers from their own civil spheres, the cinematic gap enables them to temporarily withhold intense moral reprobation and give way to more thoughtful reflection. It provides insight into the potential for cinema to create spaces for the sorts of civil re-evaluations that underlay civil repair.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the members of the first Civil Sphere Theory Working Group conference in Trento and Jeff Alexander for making civil sphere theory come alive for me. Many thanks also to my advisors and reviewers for pushing me toward theoretical clarification. It is from your contributions, comments, and insights that I have been able to write this paper.

Funding

This study received financial support from the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology.

Notes

Author biography

Jessie Dong is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Yale University and a Junior Fellow at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology.

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