In Bong Joon-ho's delicious satires, culinary provocation is the secret ingredient

In “Mickey 17,” the latest film from acclaimed South Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho, there is one line that perfectly encapsulates the wide range of thematic mainstays the writer-director has employed throughout his extensive career — and it’s one that you might not immediately catch. The film, about a crew chosen to colonize a new planet as Earth teeters on habitability, is packed to the gills with scathing takedowns of fascism and how its proponents advocate for the socioeconomic divide. These two subjects repeatedly crop up in Bong’s filmography, among other social, cultural and political messaging. In fact, “Mickey 17” is Bong at his most overt, taking advantage of the post-Oscar blank check Warner Bros. wrote him to make his points clear and concise, neatly packaged to be delivered to the most significant number of people possible.

But among all of Bong’s opining is a fantastic line that bores directly to the heart of his message. When the crew of the colonization mission discover that their new home, an ice planet called Niflheim, is inhabited by armadillo-like crawler creatures, they wonder what to do about this unanticipated roadblock in their efforts. The mission’s leaders, the failed politician Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his complicit wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) decide that a mass extinction is in order. When they capture a crawler, Ylfa cuts off its tail and throws it in a NutriBullet, blending it to a pulp before popping a finger into the mixture to give it a taste. Apparently, it’s delicious. With a smile creeping across her face, Ylfa exclaims, “This opens up a whole new world of potential sauces!” 

Collette throws this line of dialogue out so excitedly that it feels almost insignificant, little more than a joke that tells us about her character’s offbeat sensibilities. But look a bit closer, reading between the gobs of fleshy, rust-colored tail juice, and you’ll find that Ylfa’s exhilaration communicates much more than one person’s epicurean eccentricities. Exotic sauces are Ylfa’s hyperfixation, something for herself in a life otherwise entirely devoted to her husband and his malicious agenda. She’s found herself on a distant planet, eating dry, synthetic meat that desperately needs a dressing. But getting any sauce at all is a privilege of her position, one that few others on the spacecraft are afforded. The soldiers and colonizers are confined to bland, calorie-specific rations. Even in their wildest dreams, they could never imagine such a delicacy. For Ylfa, sauce is a status symbol, a priceless condiment that may prove rare enough to give her power sovereign from her husband’s name. Her mouth is watering, but there are dollar signs in her eyes just a few inches north.

With a single casual quip, Bong immediately gets to the root of his favorite motifs. Ylfa’s sauce enthusiasm addresses class disparity, the suppression of the proletariat, egomania and how food can unite people and tear them apart. But the truth is hidden in the candy-coated shell of dark humor, another of the director’s trademarks. Across his vast filmography, Bong has slyly proven himself one of cinema’s great gastronomes, incorporating food into nearly all of his work to stitch the fabric of each film together. Bong’s incisive portraits of contemporary life and its potential dystopian futures wouldn’t be complete without the cuisines that adorn his visions. Without food, Bong’s work would lose the indelible humanity that even his most outré, provocative films hold as a point of pride. 

While Bong has become most known and revered for his more recent spate of unconventional satires, his affection for culinary provocation tracks through his entire career, all the way back to his 2000 feature debut, “Barking Dogs Never Bite.” The film follows Ko Yun-ju (Lee Sung-jae), a lowly, unemployed man whose daily malaise and nonexistent job prospects are made all the more insufferable by a yapping dog somewhere in his apartment complex. Driven to desperate measures, Yun-ju dognaps a shih tzu and contemplates dropping it off a roof, but can’t bring himself to do it. He then tries to hang the dog, but can’t muster the wickedness there either. Finally, Yun-ju traps the dog in a locker in the building’s basement, where it dies, thankfully offscreen.

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Making a debut feature heavily centered on animal abuse is wild enough as it is, but Bong goes two steps further. The free-form jazz in the film makes the atmosphere almost farcical, a choice that feels even more strange when Bong introduces the apartment complex’s janitor, who has a taste for dog meat. Already, one can see Bong’s penchant for dark humor converging with his affection for food, and how divisive something as universal as sustenance can be. Later in the film, when the janitor prepares a stew for another dead dog — turns out Yun-ju didn’t get the right pooch the first time — the viewer can sense Bong is more than happy to push the limit. He wants to make his audience uncomfortable. Bong is not just depicting senseless animal abuse, but recalling racist pet-eating tropes slapped onto non-Western civilizations, still parroted today by the likes of Donald Trump and JD Vance, who would later become the filmmaker’s targets in “Mickey 17.”

But even before his films trended toward the political, Bong was interested in pushing the boundaries of what a filmmaker can and cannot say or suggest. In “Barking Dogs Never Bite,” he probes what viewers see as ethical food versus amoral, offensive cuisine. For us as humans, eating is primal, and because it’s so closely connected to our nature, Bong’s depiction of murdered dogs used for food causes a direct response in our brains. He’d like us to think this is sick filmmaking because it affects our perception of his characters. But Bong isn’t doing this for mere shock value. Feckless provocation is of no interest to him. Bong enjoys reminding us that unsympathetic characters often make the most compelling leads. These are the flawed, unlikable people that Bong loves to make us hate. That's what makes them interesting. If he can elicit that response, he’s already brought us closer to his art.

Chris Evans and Ah-sung Ko in "Snowpiercer" (Radius/TWC)Bong made a similar move in 2013’s “Snowpiercer,” his first English-language film and the movie that marked a turning point in his career. In that film, a massive train running around an apocalyptic Earth is the only remaining sign of life. The iron vessel carries the haves and the have-nots, and there are far more of the latter than the former. The elite occupies the front of the train while the working class and destitute are packed in toward its tail, forced to eat black, gelatinous protein blocks while the powerful enjoy twice-annual sushi and other non-synthetic grub. (Speaking of grub, the protein blocks are made of roaches — yum!) 

After a proletariat uprising led by the rabble-rouser Curtis (Chris Evans), the resistance makes their way through increasingly swanky train cars, seeing how the aristocratic side of the surviving population lives. The strain of constant, violent battles and the emotional wear of their efforts eventually take a toll on Curtis, causing him to confess the grim realities of his life from the early days in the train’s tail to Namgoong (Song Kang-ho), a new ally. “You know what I hate about myself?” Curtis asks. “I know what people taste like.” Here again, Bong experiments with how far he can push the boundaries before his intrinsically likable hero becomes a villain in our minds. A little cannibalism? Sure, maybe we can excuse that for a great guy like Curtis, who had no other choice in survival. That is until Curtis has a sucker punch line of dialogue that follows: “I know babies taste the best.”

It’s horrifically dark, perhaps as dark as Bong’s films ever get — though he certainly gives himself a run for his money time and again. But it’s yet another example of how thoughtful Bong is when incorporating food, and its importance in our day-to-day lives, into his work. As Bong began to look toward the future with “Snowpiercer,” he saw a world teeming with food anxiety caused by climate catastrophe and knew that it would be a pivotal way to claw at the audience’s heartstrings. Curtis’ revelation is gutwrenching not just because it’s innately macabre, but because it asks the viewer to imagine a world where they could face a similar predicament. Could they stomach it?

The Kim Family (Woo-sik Choi, Kang-ho Song, Hye-jin Jang, So-dam Park) in Parasite. (Courtesy of NEON + CJ Entertainment)That question also appears in one of Bong’s best films, 2003’s “Memories of Murder.” In the movie, a small-town police officer in South Korea, played again by Bong’s frequent collaborator Song Kang-ho — who also leads 2006’s “The Host” and 2019’s “Parasite” — investigates a series of rapes and murders. The crimes are the country’s first of such a violent nature. Song’s character, Park Doo-man, sits at his desk, chowing down on his lunch while looking over grisly crime scene photos. When a colleague asks him how he can stomach such a thing while eating, Doo-man replies that the food fuels his “shaman’s eyes,” which he uses to identify potential suspects. Here, Bong once again points to food as a tool for essential nourishment. Doo-man can’t work to the best of his ability unless he eats, even if it means desensitizing himself to life’s gruesome truths.

Acclimating yourself to a new consciousness so severely that it affects your capacity for empathy is another theme Bong has been keen to visit throughout his career. We’ve seen it in his three most recent films, “Okja,” “Parasite” and “Mickey 17.” In “Okja,” meat industry tycoons are after a young girl’s pet super pig. The genetically modified animal could bring in billions of dollars in revenue if brought to the meat-eating market. (This also recalls the controversial pets-as-food narrative from “Barking Dogs Never Bite.”) But in “Parasite” and “Mickey 17,” food is one of the primary dividing lines between the affluent and disadvantaged. 

In the Oscar-sweeping former film, the Kim family lives in a semi-basement apartment, scraping by folding pizza boxes for spare cash and spending it on low-cost barbecue and ramen. That is until they worm their way into the lives of the wealthy Park family, getting jobs as their caboodle of servicepeople. Suddenly, their existence is inundated with premium Korean sirloin and delicious fresh peaches, which the Kims use to send the Park’s housekeeper into anaphylaxis knowing about her severe allergy. But taking advantage of their employers’ wealth causes the Kims to quickly forget their humble beginnings, resulting in their bloody, devastating downfall. In “Parasite,” Bong constructs a multilayered question over who the titular leeches are. The answer is never clear; everyone is too busy feeding on everyone else, seeking enough sustenance to go from mere survival to living life. 

While a similar narrative runs through “Mickey 17,” Bong’s use of food within the film’s story is more compassionate and forgiving than in “Parasite.” The crew members of the space shuttle are confined to their daily rations, but two personnel, Mickey (Robert Pattinson) and Nasha (Naomi Ackie), bond over their time in the cafeteria together. It’s where they have a moment to talk and laugh about the absurdity of their situation. Like all of Bong’s films, things eventually go to hell, and Ylfa politicizes their food with the discovery of tail sauce, forging planet Niflheim’s first capitalist venture. 

But for all his uses of food as a source of carnal provocation and capitalist fracturing, Bong also allows food to be the root of love and community. In all of these movies, there are scenes where characters share their meals. Food isn’t merely a point of stress, it’s also an object of fellowship. Dining together is a chance to court one another, or scheme, perhaps even a chance for characters to level their heads after something awful happens. Just as often as it’s used to sow division, food is incorporated to bring people together, and to remind these characters — and the viewer — that no matter how dire things become, nothing feels quite as human as sitting across the table from someone you love, deciding who deserves the last bite of gelatinous protein block.