Labor in the Arts

A space to engage with how pro-worker narratives manifest in culture and the arts.

Spivak Lipton introduces a new blog series exploring labor and employment issues in various artistic mediums including theatre, film, television and digital platforms. Art functions as a reflection, catalyst, and critique of the world in which we live and offers its audience an opportunity to feel unified within their experience. It is our hope that we can humanize our work through a weekly examination of theatre, film, and television with themes of labor empowerment and provide an entertaining perspective on labor and employment law.

Byline: Harley Winzenried, Spivak Lipton Legal Assistant & Freelance Theatre Practitioner

The Paradox of Parasite

The 2019 black comedy thriller, Parasite, won a leading four awards at the 92nd Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best International Feature Film. It was the first non-English film to win Best Picture and the first South Korean film to receive Academy Award recognition. Why all of the hype?

It’s masterful film-making, in which every detail is nuanced and intentional. This film is beautiful in its horror, comedic in its tragedy, and universal in its specificity. Director Bong Joon-ho captures the duality of the human condition, while simultaneously convicting the system that disregards it.

When we are first introduced to the working-class Kim family, we literally meet them below the level of the street in their semi-basement apartment. Bong describes the residence in an interview, saying, “You’re still half overground, so there’s this hope and this sense that you still have access to sunlight. And you haven’t completely fallen to the basement yet. It’s this weird mixture of hope and this fear that you can fall even lower.” This motif of physical level to represent status is maintained as we see the son, Kim Ki-Woo, ascend staircase after staircase to the home of the wealthy Park family. On recommendation from a friend, he feigns status as a university student in order to interview for a position as an English tutor. Following his acceptance of the position, Ki-Woo recommends his sister, Ki-Jung, masquerading as an accomplished art school graduate to be an art tutor to the Parks’ other child, who the Parks believe to be troubled. Over time, the Kim children scheme to extract the Parks’ housekeeper and driver, securing employment for their parents as well. This action emphasizes the limited employment opportunities among workers; in this system, the working class cannot make any kind of gain except through someone else’s loss.

Despite the moral duplicitousness of the Kims’ machinations, it’s delightfully satisfying to watch the Kims in action as they hilariously manipulate the naive Park family. The film takes care to emphasize that the Parks are not evil, but merely detached from reality and desperate to hold onto what they believe is necessary to have a comfortable life – portrayed as a life filled with significant indulgence and luxury far, far removed from the living conditions of most of us. They have a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo because their entire existence is predicated on it. Throughout the film, Mr. Park repeatedly references a “line” that the staff in his home must respect; while this “line” refers to an employees’ professional conduct, it is also a means by which the ruling class can maintain their superiority. The working class abides by this division, adhering to the myth that they can one day achieve the same material success of the wealthy. It is this illusion of upward mobility that enables the maintenance of the economic status quo and creates divides among the working class. 

The Kims are cunning, capable, and determined people. They are not unlike the Parks, dedicated to their families and improving their quality of life; however, they lack access to the resources to achieve the security and stability necessary to achieve these universally-shared goals. The Kims are virtually powerless (by conventional means) and the fulfillment of their economic needs is in the hands of those who believe they are easily dispensable and replaceable thus subjecting the Kims, and similar working class families, to very precarious circumstances. This system creates inherently toxic, unsustainable relationships and the workers are incentivized to turn on one another in order to survive by seizing whatever opportunities are within their grasp. Through a violent, chaotic climax, the invisible has been made visible, the gradual has become immediate, and it is with a desperate urgency that we are confronted with the realization that the parasite is not the poor siphoning the resources of the rich, but the system that traps, exploits, and dehumanizes all of us.

Parasite is available for streaming on Hulu.

Byline: Harley Winzenried, Spivak Lipton Legal Assistant & Freelance Theatre Practitioner

Finding Our Feet

“The life that you knew is no longer going to exist. And not only is it no longer going to exist, but you’re not going to have access to it.”

--Lynn Nottage, on the people and circumstances that inspired Sweat

Heralded by the New Yorker as “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era,” Lynn Nottage’s Sweat presents an intimate and arresting depiction of the de-industrialization of America’s workforce in the early 2000s. Through the lens of an after-work barroom hangout, Nottage binds her audience to eight steel mill colleagues who are forced to navigate the effects of sudden unemployment. As they attempt to find security, the stakes of their situation are made more difficult by their complicated relationships with one another. The play was presented by The Public Theater in October of 2016 before transferring to Broadway. It was nominated for three Tony Awards, and won the 2017 Obie Award for Playwriting and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

In a 2018 interview with Simon Hodgson, Nottage stated that the play is “about working people who felt incredibly marginalized and unseen, and about how they can assert themselves in a landscape that refuses to recognize their dignity.” The work uses a non-linear structure, with scenes of the present book-ending the plot of the past. Nottage uses this structure to emphasize how our lived experience affects our present selves. When we transition from the present to the bar, we are met with a habitual ease as the characters indulge in a too-familiar confidence in the future. They make proclamations like “Come hell or high water, I’m taking that cruise through the Panama Canal.” These statements exhibit dramatic irony, infusing the characters’ solid understanding of their life with an obvious tension- because we know what’s coming next. Even as evidence surfaces that layoffs are a possibility, these claims are routinely dismissed. “That rumor’s been flying around for months. Nobody’s going anywhere.” This eerily echoes the COVID-age trend of every “in the highly unlikely event” sentiment that eventually ends up happening. Gravity doesn’t work the same way it did before.

When the unthinkable (and inevitable) does occur, these characters are overcome with rage and disbelief. As they search for some kind of logic to justify their new reality, they ask, “I run the full mile, I put in the time, do the right thing. But, dude, tell me what I did wrong, huh?” It is in this way that the play acknowledges and indicts the inequities that brought about these events. In order to cope with the desolation of their own reality, Nottage’s characters return to the safety of the familiar. The stage directions poignantly note that “Tracey laughs. She’s a laugher, it’s her refuge.”

The play concludes with the image of “four men, uneasy in their bodies, [who] await the next moment in a fractured togetherness.” Nottage does not offer any answers, but presents the silent truth of the moment in all of its vast complexity. Her play gifts us with the beginning of a vocabulary to process our circumstances, to consider that our own perspective can be seen and understood. That’s what this is. An offering to wait for whatever the next moment may bring in our own fractured togetherness.

Byline: Harley Winzenried, Spivak Lipton Legal Assistant & Freelance Theatre Practitioner