Millions of people have lost their homes, the vast majority of the lower end of the social scale, from flooding in the last year. 200,000 currently in Sudan, and the current flooding in Florida, not to mention Harvey, Ilmeda, Karen, Dorian.
Mitang flooded hundreds of homes in South Korea this month.
How can an audience charge a theme as over-determined when it plays out nearly daily? And, further, what does it say when a audience can pin events in their social context so easily on the screen, but not as it happens in their life?
Bong made a great choice with the deluge, almost a challenge to his audiences to tie the film to back to reality. Some would live within the movie and critique it as obvious, looking simply how it functions on a thematic level. (Bong has a habit of this, he threw the challenge of the slaughterhouse in a Okja, knowing it’d be read as some absurd, over-wrought horror creation, but no, it was true to the machinery in any slaughterhouse.) The question seems to be this: do you simply view the movie, or do you also view the world around it?