Everyone came to Bong Joon-ho through Parasite. Which means almost everyone is watching his career backwards — and missing the blueprint. Memories of Murder, his second film, contains every formal and political move he would spend the next seventeen years refining. This episode goes deep into the film most Western audiences still haven't fully understood: the political satire hiding inside the procedural, the tonal architecture that makes you laugh and then takes the laugh away, the final shot that became more devastating in 2019 than it was in 2003. And the specific things you miss when you watch this film without the cultural context it was made in.
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