Don’t worry, folks. It doesn’t matter who gets nominated for the Oscars or BAFTAs or any other awards: The debate is over because Elon Musk, The Internet’s Favorite Billionaire™ has announced that his favorite movie of 2019 was Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. In a related story, Bill O’Reilly said Bombshell was his favorite movie and there’s absolutely no f@#$ing way Elon Musk watched Parasite, is there?
For the uninitiated, Parasite tells the story of the Kim family, barely scraping by on the margins of Seoul society in a literal underground apartment where people regularly urinate outside their windows, until they manage to ingratiate themselves into the lives of the Parks, an extremely wealthy family who lives in a gorgeous palatial home. And wackiness ensues as the Kims enjoy living the high life at the expense of their employers. Wait–not wackiness. Tragedy.
It is a film, at its core, about inequality. It’s complex, beautiful, disturbing– everything we expect from Bong Joon Ho, who previously gave us Snowpiercer and Okja, which both have similar themes about how the rich oppress the poor and force them to exist in a brutal society so they can live pleasantly.
Elon Musk, whose net worth is somewhere between $27 and $30 billion depending on Tesla’s stock value at the moment (and what’s $3 billion here or there, amirite?) is well known not only for his business enterprises and philanthropy but also his internet presence. He’s well known for starting fights with the people trying to rescue trapped Thai soccer teams in underwater caves, and other wacky fights with people on Twitter. So when he weighed in on 2019’s best movie, the Twittersphere and all of Film Twitter held our breath in anticipation:
First of all, thank you Renata for asking the question we all so dearly needed to know the answer to. The man who made unforgettable cameos in Iron Man 2 and Machete Kills (he sent Machete to space on a SpaceX rocket! Reminding us that in 2020 what we really need is the long-promised Machete in Space!) has definite opinions on film, and we should pay attention to them.
Also interesting here is the context, as this wasn’t just like an AMA thread, this was Elon being Elon, replying to this thread. .So, either Elon just ingested some really excellent edibles, or he’s low-key trolling here. The correct answer he should’ve given is Avengers: Endgame. Everybody saw it, so it’s not like it’s out of the realm of possibility he did. Also, he’s long tried to position himself as the real-life version of Tony Stark– and this is Tony’s movie. It’s literally a movie where the billionaire snaps his fingers and saves the universe. That should be Elon Musk’s favorite movie, and there’s no shame in admitting it. Or why not Ford v. Ferrari? He’s a car guy, that’s definitely a car guy movie.
But he goes ahead and answers Parasite for his favorite movie. What does this mean? There are two options: he didn’t see Parasite but wanted to sound cool. (He had just admitted that Cats would have more cultural salience than Star Wars. I mean, who does that? [Briefly checks Twitter because pretty sure I’ve said almost exactly that]) OR he did see it but completely misunderstood it.
People who want to believe option 1, there’s a strong case for that. It’s sort of Occam’s Razor argument. Cool guy wants to appear cool on Twitter, so mentions the movie all his other cool friends really like. Simple Enough.
But for option 2, we’re going to have to dive into some pretty deep spoilers to try to deconstruct exactly what movie Elon thought he saw.
