Spatiality, territoriality, places: cartography around the film Parasite

This chapter examines Parasite through a geographical lens, using Michel Serres’ and Claude Raffestin’s reflections on parasitism, relationality, and spatiality as conceptual anchors. The film’s narrative is interpreted as a complex interplay between spatial configurations, social antagonisms, and forms of territorial production. By distinguishing between space and territory, and between self‑referential and hetero‑referential dimensions of fiction, the analysis proposes four pragmatics of interpretation that illuminate the film’s spatial grammar. The chapter also explores the mappability of Parasite, its relation to real urban iconographies of Seoul, and the symbolic architecture of class difference. Through this framework, the film emerges as a cartographic device that stages, represents, and reconfigures contemporary socio‑spatial relations.