One of the most striking colours in Bong Joon-ho’s award winning film Parasite (2019) is orange. The film presents a world where extreme poverty and extreme wealth maintain a ruinous symbiotic relationship: where the poor transform into parasites to survive, and the rich act as heartless parasites, leeching off each other in an endless cycle, causing constant anxiety and a large scale social neurosis. But how does the colour orange contribute to the diseases caused by capitalism, the scourge of modernity?
Picking orange in Parasite is not to say that the film is orange, or predominantly orange, but there is a weighted presence of rusty orange hues in several compositions throughout various settings, either by dominating the screen or by being accented within the frame. Let’s take a closer look at how the film composition reveals a strategic use of colours, lights and textures as a combination of elements in thematic visual storytelling. Spoiler alert: the essay may discuss surprise turns, so we suggest watching the film first.
Orange: the Colour of Warmths vs Neurosis
Orange, as we know it, can be pleasant and warm, like an atmospheric candlelit dinner in a romcom, or it can be dangerously hot like the endless murderous deserts on the planet Mars in Ridley Scott’s The Martian. In Parasite, orange picks up another vein: the orange hues in this South Korean masterpiece of black comedy / thriller are meant to convey an overall unnerving vibration, imbalance, in Bong Joon-ho’s word ‘neurosis’.
The neurosis is meant to underline the distress caused by the dysfunctional nature of capitalism, a deficit in functioning where the system keeps making the rich richer and the poor poorer, in an abhorrent entanglement of parasitic relationships.
Film colour analyses frequently associate warmth with orange, which reaches back to the very beginning of colour films (and most likely to the early days of fine art). Natalie Kalmus the colour director of almost every Technicolor films, in her Color Consciousness guide as a consultant calls orange, along with red and yellow, a warm, advancing colour. Orange gives warmth through the literal heat of fire, or by triggering comforting emotions, like that of the idyllic sunset in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which offers a ‘pleasure in the cinematic artifice’ according to Jurgess (Jurgess, p32). But researchers also observe that orange may express apathy or decomposition (as in the orange scenes in Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel where the orange phase is associated with decay, the communist decomposition of the once grand and majestic red hotel), sociability, as in the orange scenes in Cuaron’s Little Princess where the little girls connect with each other through fantastic stories, or Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited in Lilly Mtz Seara’s visual essay on colour psychology). Aside from heat, warmth, orange can be the colour of toxicity, like ‘the orange smoke from hell’ emitted by the napalm in Coppola’s anti-war psychological film classic, Apocalypse Now (1979). This is the kind of toxicity, a metaphor of toxic relationship (social warfare?) that is perhaps closest to the neurotic vibes in Parasite.
Orange – Connection and Contrast
The dominant shade of orange could perhaps be best described as various degrees of intensity of rusty orange, present in both the rich (smooth) and the poor settings (murky). It connects the worlds of the wealthy upper class Seoul residents shown through the extravagant life of the Park family, the lucky few residing in hilltop villas and that of the lower class workers, like the Kim family, living in a shabby concrete jungle at the bottom of the hill, which is a spatial metaphorical indication of the bottom of society. Although orange is present at both levels of the capitalist hierarchy, the colour itself is induced into contrastive saturations, textures, shapes and overall strikingly dissimilar cinematographic contexts. To paraphrase Peacock’s observation ‘colour does not work alone’ (Peacock, p109), orange in Parasite does not work alone: as a stylistic, non-representational element, the rusty hue adheres itself to other elements of film composition, specific lightings as well as textures (Melville cited by Peacock, p2). The study of orange images shows a consistent use of rusty shades, that is, an overall consistent film colour strategy rather than isolated occurrences. Orange is the colour that visually subverts the idea of (a baseline of the etiquette) ‘not crossing the line,’ a social value of utmost importance to the rich Mr Park, who ‘can’t stand people who cross the line.’ Yet Mr Kim, the driver makes attempts at ‘crossing the line’ by asking intimate questions, only to be reminded by Mr Park that his approaches are unwelcome and may cost his job (as Mr Park complains to his wife, ‘ [Mr Kim] always seems about to cross the line’). Untameable rusty orange that knows no boundaries, in this sense, foreshadows how Mr Kim will eventually cross the line, going beyond to the very end, by stabbing Mr Park.
Saturation of Orange as Class Distinction
In the impoverished part of Seoul (an imaginary but realistic district), most of the orange is present in the form of cheap orange street lamps: the lights can tint the faces, or be reflected on rainy pavements and the gushing rain water. By decreasing luminosity and visibility, the orange sodium lit streets, which our eyes perceive as darker, not only hide the shapes of poverty in the neglected urban areas , but by blurring the edges to blackness, they evoke the dim hiding places of some of the most well known parasitic animals, cockroaches. At the same time, the badly lit cityscape of darker streets shift the colour palette to brownish orange, resembling clay-coloured faeces in the flood of sewage, and/ or the rain mixing with diluted unstable soil, (where the poor are literally unsupported, as the soil, eroding, is unable to support their standing). These are the most striking scenes in Parasite that go against the common notion that orange is a warm colour, or ‘the warmest colour.‘
By contrast, orange in the affluent uphill apartment is often paired with natural light (wooden panels with a seemingly natural orange shade) or with a mysterious ochre-orange radiance emanating from the stone walls conveying comfort and cosiness. The tent in the garden was specifically instructed by Bong to emanate a pleasant orange glow, which is the only reference to the colour orange in the film script of Parasite.
It’s picturesque. The teepee, emitting a pleasant orange glow. Against the backdrop of beautiful trees. Seen through the shimmering veil of pouring rain.
Textures and Patterns Combined with Orange
Besides the context, orange is purposefully paired with distinctive structures and textures, hectic or formless in the poor district, clear cut and balanced in the rich family’s house. The texture of the orange in the two worlds marks the class system, one is porous, permeable, dissolves and disintegrates, signifying instability while the other is more solid, balanced, pleasant seemingly signifying stability, which is gradually challenged as the final murderous birthday scene unfolds.
In the poor downhill areas, orange is matched with chaotic criss-cross lines, like the dense net of electric wires, the edges of buildings or the seemingly endlessly long stairs that separate poverty at the bottom of the hill from luxury at the top of the hill. In the rich neighbourhood, however, orange is organically part of well paced constructivist shapes: the mathematical clarity of the grid of shelves of the display cabinet, the calm pace of the wooden panels in the security gate, the harmonious rhythm of the orange wooden floor. Nevertheless, there are signs of tension, fear, unhappiness: the mother’s worried about the son’s potential schizophrenia, the initially beautiful orange display cabinet is revealed to serve as the gateway to the bunker, the pit of human existence, the surprise location, with paint peeling off the wall in the barely lit orange tinted bunker, which is matched with the greens of horror and decay.
Orange Colour as a Subtle Juxtaposition
Orange as the overall colour that seeps through the divisive dark/light as well as poor/rich colour palette may not jump out as an obvious choice for colour coded juxtaposition in Parasite at first sight. The subtlety of the directorial choice to contrast a single colour, i.e. rusty orange exclusively via the textures, perhaps lies in the fact that visual storytelling tends to contrast different colours in film scenes rather than the same colour through the surfaces it attaches to.
For instance, Melville points out that colour ‘also appears subject to endless alteration arising through its juxtaposition with other colours’ (Melville cited by Peacock, p2). He also remarks that colour can assume specific meanings on specific surfaces. In Bong’s Parasite the two ideas need to be combined into a single conclusion, namely that the same colour will offer different perspectives through the juxtaposition of surfaces.
Regardless of the class status, the rusty hues of orange cross the lines, conveying a shared societal neurosis, distress and anxiety arising from the parasitic relationship between host and parasite in an ambiguous world where being a parasite also means being a host. Parasitism in the form of capitalism – and expressed through an identical colour – haunts its residents everywhere, serving as a caveat where lack of solidarity has led us, in a world where lack of solidarity does not limit itself to the hiatus between the rich and the poor but that of the poor and poorer.
The Filmmaker on Orange in Parasite
Bong Joon-ho has explicitly commented on his colour choice in several interviews, which evidences how colour-conscious his choices were in Parasite. Yet, it may come as a surprise that the complete film has been remade – frame by frame digitally re-worked – into a black and white version after all the painstakingly detailed colour compositions, which may make you wonder whether it is Chromophobia or ‘just a nod to the classics.’
Quote from Bong Interview on Film Maker magazine
Filmmaker: I think that realism comes through in the color palette of the film as well, which feels more muted than your last two films. How did you develop the color?
Bong: The colors are realistic and what we see around our daily lives, but as an accent we wanted a scarlet-orange color. So, when you see the character of Min bringing that stone to the poor family, he feels like a figure from an extraterrestrial world, someone who lives in another universe because he’s rich. When they’re drinking soju, you see this warmish orange streetlamp behind him. Also, in the kitchen of the rich house, right next to the black fateful door leading to the basement, you see the orange case. That color is pretty but also has a subtle neurotic anxious sense, and it was used to emphasize the door in the kitchen.
Bibliography
Dillaman, D. 2019. They Came From Within: Bong Joon-ho on Parasite. [online] Available at: https://filmmakermagazine.com/108126-they-came-from-within/#.YbiD5PHP3LB [Accessed 1 November 2021].
Jurgess, T. 2011. Windows and Mirrors: Metaphor and Meaning in Cinemas Past and Present. [online] Available at: https://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/04/30/10/00001/jurgess_t.pdf [Accessed 5 November 2021].
Kalmus, N., 1935. Color Consciousness. In: A.Dalle, B. Price, 2006. Colour: The Film Reader. Oxford: Routledge. Ch.1. (Online available here)
Peacock, S., 2019. Colour. Manchester: Manchester University Press. (Online available here)
