[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on -empyre_

[Vanouse, Paul]

Hello Junting,

Ah, yes, thank you for connecting this! I saw Parasite in a small theater here in Buffalo about a week before quarantine began, but I hadn’t yet processed it fully. I think I was so struck by the genre crossing and irreverence toward familiar (perhaps colonial) plot structures that I hadn’t unpacked the "poor people’s" scent thread throughout the work. It does update/reframe the 19th Century notion of urban masses living in stinky dense low areas of the cities--in this case, literally underground and below the water-level.  

In another light …if anyone is putting together an anthology on smell and disease  through present, I suppose one should also add supersensers, like Joy Milne from Scotland who actually detected her husband’s Parkinson’s disease and many others through their scent. 

Paul

> On Apr 16, 2020, at 11:12 AM, Junting Huang <jh2358 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I am particularly struck by Paul’s comment on the profound relationship between odor and disease, as well as its historical ties to classism and racism during the Victorian era. Many would perhaps recall a recurring motif in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019), the Kim family’s “poor man's smell.” 
> 
> Parasite is not its original title, but this new title has so forcefully crystalized the idea that the poor is often characterized as disease-ridden. In the beginning of the film, the family are bathed in the stinky smoke from the public fumigation because they can’t afford disinfectant to kill stinky bugs. Bong also talked about the chemical substance that Korean police in the past used to disperse protesters: “It was a very traumatic smell. It’s impossible to describe: nauseating, stinging, hot … It’s strange, sometimes I smell it in my dreams.”
> 
> Junting
> 
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