What’s left of humanity—after we broke the
world—is crammed in a speeding train that circles a frozen Earth … forever.
Bong Joon-Ho’s motion picture Snowpiercer is a stylish post-climate
change apocalypse allegory. A dark pastiche of surrealistic insanity, welded
together with moments of poetic pondering and steam-punk slick in a frenzied
frisson you can almost smell. Joon-Ho
casts each scene in metallic grays and blues that make the living already look
half-dead. The entire film plays like a twisted steam-punkish baroque symphony.
Violence personified in a garish ballet.
The train’s self-contained closed ecosystem
is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a
In a recent interview with io9, Joon-Ho said, “the science fiction genre lends itself
perfectly to questions about class struggle, and different types of
revolution.”
Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), an imperious
yet simpering figure who serves the ruling class without quite being part of
it, reminds the lower class that:
"Order is the barrier that holds back the flood o death. We must all of us on this train of life remain in our allotted station. We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position. Would you wear a shoe on your head? Of course you wouldn't wear a shoe on your head. A shoe doesn't belong on your head. A shoe belongs on your foot. A hat belongs on your head. I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on the head. You belong on the foot. Yes? So it is.
In the beginning, order was prescribed by your ticket: First Class, Economy, and freeloaders like you. Eternal order is prescribed by the sacred engine: all things flow from the sacred engine, all things in their place, all passengers in their section, all water flowing, all heat rising, pays homage to the sacred engine, in its own particular preordained position. So it is.
Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the front. You belong to the tail.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the sacred line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe."--Minister Mason
It's all about the engine for both front and tail. It saved humanity, after all. It is their future. Curtis tells his colleagues that they will move forward: "We take the engine and we control the world. It's time we take the engine."
“Reform and revolution are shibboleths that distinguish liberals from radicals,” explains Aaron Bady
of The New Inquiry. “While liberals want to reform
capitalism, without fundamentally transforming it, radicals want to tear it up
from the roots (the root word of “radical” is root!) and replace capitalism
with something that isn’t capitalism…If you’re the kind of leftist who thinks
that the means of production just need to be in better hands—Obama, for
example, instead of George W. Bush, or Elizabeth Warren instead of Obama, or
Bernie Sanders instead of Elizabeth Warren, and so on—then this movie buries a
poison pill inside its protein bar: soylent green is people.”
“Reform and revolution are shibboleths that distinguish liberals from radicals,” explains Aaron Bady
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| Curtis (Chris Evans) |
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| Gilliam (John Hurt) |
The train “eats”
the children of the poor; using them to replace the sacred engine parts that have
worn out in a kind of retro-transhumanist collaboration of human and machine and
creating a perverse immortal cyborg entity. Only, the individual children die
in the process and need to be constantly replaced to maintain the eternal
whole. They have become cogs in a giant wheel of eternity.
Curtis’s revolution is doomed from the start; once he reaches the front, it is revealed to him that the entire conflict and
resulting deaths were orchestrated all along to help maintain population
balance. Wilford
(Ed Harris), the genius who created the train with a perpetual motion engine,
tells Curtis once they meet that, “this is the world…The engine lasts forever.
The population must always be kept in balance.” Which begs the obvious
question: why not just get rid of all of the lower class “scum” (as Mason calls
them)? That would make room for the privileged. What purpose do these lower
class serve? Well, aside from providing their children as parts to the sacred
engine, they are there to be hated, feared and despised by the elite. When the
soul is empty and needs “filling” but can’t be filled, then it finds a
substitute.
Aaron
Bady of The New Inquirer relates,
“Instead of giving Texans a health care system, for example,
late capitalism
gives them the illegal immigrant, to hate, to fear, and to dis-identify with.
Prisons do more and more of the system-maintaining work that was once done by
schools and hospitals: instead of giving us something to want, they give us
something to fear, hate, and kill. And so, we eat ourselves.” We die to live.
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| Nam (Song Kang-Ho) |
Wilford grooms
Curtis as the new engineer and reveals to him the true nature of the engine.
“You’ve seen what people do without leadership,” says Wilford to Curtis. “They
devour one another.” This is dark irony considering what the train is doing.
And it is when Curtis discovers this awful truth that his reformist revolution
comes to a dead halt and he makes a decision that takes him into the realm
beyond the train.
This movie is
about hard choices and transcendence. … Save humanity, but at the consequence
of our souls? Or transcend a machine that has robbed us of our souls at the
expense of our mortality? The film continually questions our definition of what
life is; what makes life worth living.
Peter Frase of Jacobin Magazine shares that, “it’s all the more effective because
the heart of that critique comes as a late surprise, from a character we might
not expect.”
Namgoog Minsoo (Song
Kang-Ho) is a spaced-out drug addict that Curtis ‘liberates’ from a drawer to
help them open the gates to the forward sections. Like everyone on the train,
Nam is a little crazy. But he differs in one important way: he believes there
is hope outside the train. Unlike his reformist brothers, he’s looked outside
the construct, studied the realm beyond the train. Perhaps it is drug-induced
fantasy. Perhaps he’s simply had enough of a lifetime of “non-life” onboard the
train and would rather die outside to truly live, even if for a brief moment.
When the chance for this moment materializes, we, like Nam and his daughter
Yona (Ko Ah-Sung), are more than ready to jump the train. In fact, we’re
desperate to get off this shadow game of bread and circuses. Even if it means
freezing to death in moments.
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| Wilford (Ed Harris) |
Only Yona and one
of the rescued children from the engine, survive the train crash, thanks to
Curtis’s truly revolutionary decision.
“Is it more
revolutionary to want to take control of the society that’s oppressed you, or
to try and escape from that system altogether?” asks Joon-Ho.
I felt a cathartic
surge of relief when the train
As Yona and the
child crunch through the snow in the quiet depth of coldness, they glimpse a
polar bear. There is life! Perhaps not humanity. But life on Earth.
And in that
connection, we live.
Even if just for a moment.
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visitwww.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.
