Your Film Professor

NOTE: First, this essay is an expansion of a blog post I wrote on Snowpiercer. Second, as I say, this isn’t a blog post but rather one of my academic essays. I hadn’t intended to post any of my academic essays on my blog (this is the third one I’ve published) but have changed my mind for some of them, essays that are either too long to be published elsewhere or, in the case of this essay, that I think work better for my blog, e.g., in terms of creating necessary links that clarify points in it and controlling links and images I want to use for it.

To my mind, the dystopia film Snowpiercer (2013, Bong Joon-ho) is just such an invaluable film due to its incredible capacity to cuttingly capture — or “cognitively map” – how our current and future dystopian milieu is informed by transnational globalized capitalism. In her “pretrauma imaginaries” work, E. Ann Kaplan captures the power of dystopian works: “Anxiety about the future incited by such [dystopian] fantasies may produce traumatic emotions similar to those of PTSD and a disabling uncertainty about one’s own future. But engaging in such fantasies may, on the contrary, offer what I call ‘memory for the future,’ less a disabling anxiety than a productive warning to bring about needed change” (18). Like Kaplan, for me, dystopias are incredibly valuable if they reveal the very real dystopian (and deeply “traumatic”) elements presently in our present reality, by showing us the potential (and probable in many cases) endpoints of such elements. Renowned science fiction studies scholar Darko Suvin similarly – and famously – pronounced what would go on to be thought of as perhaps science fiction’s most vital role: “SF is, then, a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (20). In other words, science fiction – and here I think this especially applies to dystopias (and utopias!) – “estrange” us from our present reality, give us an “alternative” reality in which to compare and interrogate our own reality (or, in the case of more positive representations of the future, an “alternative” reality which we can actually contemplate as a desired way of being) and force us to see our reality in all its dysfunctionality and self-destructiveness, and, then, hopefully, spur us to change course.

These theories of “pretrauma imaginaries” and “cognitive estrangement” intersect with two other vital conceptual frameworks, the first one “characterized as the event,” a conception originated by Alain Badiou and advanced by Phillip E. Wegner:

“An event, in Badiou’s special sense, is something that has ‘happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is’…what enables the truth process—the event—meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the situation…Events are irreducible singularities, the ‘beyond-the-law’ of situations’ (Ethics 41;43;44). The event marks what in the alternate history is known as the nexus, the moment of the possibility of a break in the historical continuum and the unexpected emergence of a wholly new world. Moreover, Badiou further notes that the event does not spontaneously erupt full-blown from the situation, but rather ‘compels us to decide a new way of being’ (Ethics 41). In acting according to this decision, in becoming ‘the bearer [le support] of a fidelity’ to the event, undertaking the hard labor of remaking the world in light of the event’s truth content, the individual has the rare opportunity to become a subject. Crucially, Badiou points out that the ‘subject, therefore, in no way pre-exists the process. He is absolutely nonexistent in the situation ‘before’ the event. We might say that the process of truth induces a subject.’” (Ethics 43) (His italics Wegner 229)

Wegner also intersects the conception of cognitive estrangement with “history”: “It is precisely through this modernist operation of estrangement that science fiction texts such as The Years of Rice and Salt [2003, Kim Stanley Robinson] teach us to think of what we take as most fixed and natural in our world as historical and the end result of human energies” (252). Finally, intersecting with all of this is Marxist scholar Fredric Jameson’s conception of “cognitive mapping,” the visionary way that art can “map” the globalized capitalism apparatus in all its complexities, and, in Wegner’s words, “reawaken the capacity to imagine, and subsequently to produce, new forms of collective political life” (47).

As I will go on to show, I believe that Snowpiercer does all of the above, “cognitively map” our present transnational, globalized capitalist state of being, reawaken our place (“subjectivity”) in history – “teach” us that “fixed” ideologies such as capitalism are “historical” constructs “and the end result of human energies” (and thus not “fixed” and subject to change) – and teach us that there is an ever-present potentiality to create alternative (“evental,” “utopian”) directions, which has to be undertaken via a “new form of collective political life.”

The Didactic-Cognitive Map of Dehumanizing (Globalized, Transnational) Capitalism

Again, to my mind, the reason this film is just SO important is because it cuts through the fog of ideological distractions and misdirections (e.g., consumerism, status quo/reformist [capitalistic] rhetoric, patriotism, nationalism, etc.) and didactically spells out the REAL of ruling class ideologies in a way that is almost miraculous. As Jameson has suggested, we need a didactic aesthetic that allows for “the reinvention of possibilities of cognition and perception [and] that allow social phenomena once again to become transparent, as moments of the struggle between classes” (Afterword in Aesthetics and Politics 212). Most vitally, Snowpiercer especially does that, hyper-accentuate “the struggle between classes,” suspiciously rare in mainstream cinema these days, and though that alone would make this a capitalism allegory, other signifiers in the film cement this idea, e.g., the conspicuous Wilford corporate logo, the rhetoric of “revolution,” and many other subtle and not-so-subtle signifiers, which I discuss below. Moreover, when asked by Charlie Jane Anders if “humans are doomed to wreck our own habitat,” Bong Joon-ho Bong responded “that it’s not humans per se, but capitalism that’s destroying the environment,” a pretty clear — and startling (!) — pronouncement by Joon-ho.

No scene informs this sensibility better than this one: To punish Andrew (Ewen Bremner), the father of Andy, a child they have taken (Andrew has thrown a shoe and hits and bloodies Claude as she takes his son away), they put his arm outside the train for seven minutes. While he is losing his arm, Minister Mason (played by the always precious Tilda Swinton) – conspicuously wearing a fur coat (!) – gives one of her disturbingly meaningful speeches, holding up the shoe while she says:

“This is so disappointing…Passengers. This is not a shoe. [cut to the tail section people on their knees listening to her] This is disorder. This is size-ten chaos. This, see this? [Referring to the shoe] This is death. In this locomotive we call home, there is one thing that is between our warm hearts and the bitter cold. [cut to Andrew suffering] Clothing? Jeans? No, order. Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen 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. [cut to close-up of her holding the shoe…places it on the head of Andrew] 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. [cut to man drawing a picture of Andrew with the shoe on his head] I am a hat, you are a shoe. I belong on the head, you belong on the foot. Yes? So it is….”

This moment in the film encapsulates so much in our ideological history, in terms of a created ideological (conditioned) norm that seems natural and normal and not to be questioned it is so ingrained in us, the social Darwinist idea that a class hierarchy is “natural and normal,” that lower Others (lower/working class in this case, though of course this disturbing “sociopolitical” hierarchical “measurement” has been historically used to keep other Others – especially people of color and women – buried at the bottom of a sociopolitical well) are born into their “preordained” and fixed station in life, and that a ruling elite is necessary to run the world. Incredibly, this historical norm still exists today, many still believing that some are born to be a “shoe” (ruled) and some are born to be a “hat” (ruler). Perhaps the most famous refutation of this most heinous of purposeful fallacies is Stephen Jay Gould’s masterful work The Mismeasure of Man, this passage getting at the crux of his deconstruction of this long-held myth of a genetic hierarchy of human beings, which of course is periodically revised for “sociopolitical” purposes:

“The reasons for recurrence are sociopolitical, and not far to seek: resurgences of biological determinism correlate with episodes of political retrenchment, particularly with campaigns for reduced government spending on social programs, or at times of fear among ruling elites, when disadvantaged groups sow serious social unrest or even threaten to usurp power. What argument against social change could be more chillingly effective than the claim that established orders, with some group on top and others at the bottom, exist as an accurate reflection of the innate and unchangeable intellectual capacities of people so ranked?”

Not only does this summation/refutation of social Darwinism speak to the scientific fallacy of innate (higher) intelligence but most cogently speaks to and refutes this moment in the film, where Minister Mason (speaking for Wilford/capitalistic order) “recurs” yet again this archaic ideological fallacy for its own ulterior purpose to keep the “lower” train compartment people from rising up.

In this context, the film gives us the “return of the repressed” of our capitalist system, a system that seems to project an equal opportunity, egalitarian sensibility but which in reality propagates an elitist system that creates enormous disparities and iniquities, hyper-accentuating a self/Other (rich/poor, capitalist/laborer, imperialist/imperialized, colonist/colonized, master/slave, ruler/ruled) dichotomy. Entailed in this false surface narrative is this still egregious myth of upward mobility, that if one is born into poverty one can lift one’s self up to a higher station, but as this film strikingly realizes — by making upward movement to front compartments rare if not impossible — this is just a myth as numerous studies have shown where only a small percentage of people move themselves upward (signifying that this myth is ideological programming). (See James Surowiecki’s great piece on this point.) But then this myth of upward mobility is absolutely necessary because that is the only way to defend the indefensible, that in a capitalist system, a lower/working class is required, which the film also brilliantly gets at with such allegorical clarity, e.g., using the children as necessary “tools,” cogs for the essential running of the train(/capitalism), allegorically signifying the working class in general, a dangerous insight indeed. (I’ll come back to this point.)

Most cogently, Snowpiercer remarkably “maps” out the present and future direction of a globalized transnational capitalism. Via another important Suvin dictate of modern science fiction, Wegner stresses the importance of how science fiction can teach us something about our present globalized capitalist way of being:

“One of the fundamental and less commented upon lessons of Suvin’s work is that, from its emergence in the late nineteenth century, science fiction represents a significant global modernist practice, its estranging visions of other cognitive worlds providing a way of bringing into focus the dramatic transformations and conflicts that define the experiences of an imperialist capitalist modernity and its world system.” (14)

Jameson stresses something similar, how allegorical thought is a way (“instrument”) to “map” the “world system” or globalized capitalistic order:

“This it is which now attempts to refashion national allegory into a conceptual instrument for grasping our new being-in-the-world. It may henceforth be thought to be at least one of the fundamental allegorical referents or levels of all seemingly abstract philosophical thought: so that a fundamental hypothesis would pose the principle that all thinking today is also, whatever else it is, an attempt to think the [globalized] world system as such.” (His italics, Geopolitical Aesthetic 3-4)  

As I have stressed, this (allegorical, narrative, cognitive mapping) figuration is precisely what makes Snowpiercer such a radical text, because it does that, give us our “new being-in-the-world.”

More pointedly, Snowpiercer “maps” a globalized-capitalist movement that, in short, concentrates wealth more and more in the hands of what William I. Robinson calls the “transnational capitalist class.” That’s part of the brilliance of this film, how in collapsing the historical and geographical space of capitalism into this one train space, we can better see how (A) capitalism is not reducible to simply a nation-state entity and (B) how in our present and future time, capitalism has indeed transcended nation-state boundaries to become an island onto itself. In terms of the former, Robinson stresses the ideological-historical nature of nation-states:

“Nation-state-centric approaches reify institutions by substituting them for social forces and then giving them a fixed character in causal explanations, so that, for instance, national states are bestowed with agency in explaining global political and economic dynamics. Institutions such as states, however, are not actors with an independent life of their own; they are products of social forces that reproduce as well as modify them and that are causal in historical explanations. Social forces operate through multiple institutions in complex and shifting webs of conflict and cooperation. We need to focus not on states as fictitious macro-agents but on historically changing constellations of social forces operating through multiple institutions, including state apparatuses that are themselves in a process of transformation as a consequence of collective agencies….

   To get beyond nation-state centric ways of thinking we need to keep in mind that a study of globalization is fundamentally historical analysis. When we forget that the nation-state is a historically bound phenomenon, we reify the nation-state and by extension the interstate system or the world system founded on nation-states. To reify something is to attribute a thinglike status to what should more properly be seen as a complex and changing set of social relations that our practice has created, one that has no ontological status independent of human agency.” (His italics, 11)

In other words, over the course of centuries, we have “reified,” or ideologically fixed, nation-states in place as natural (as in natural and normal and not artificially constructed) entities, instead of what they are, “products of social forces that reproduce as well as modify them,” e.g., like any other ideological construct (capitalism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, religious belief systems, etc.) nation-states exist as a state of (symbolic) cognitive-normative indoctrination and it is only that which maintains our belief in them as fixed causal “agents.” Perhaps no ideological figuration has more profound implications than this point that Robinson makes: In getting across this ideological (ontological) conception, again, that nation-states are purely historical-ideological constructs and not some natural and fixed phenomenon, we can then not only understand how this nation-state model can be radically displaced for a transnational globalized model, as Wegner says above (“reawaken the capacity to imagine, and subsequently to produce, new forms of collective political life”) we can more positively see how this nation-state centric way of being limits our horizon of collectivity, working class individuals continually fragmented due to ineluctable nation-state divisions. By creating this penetrating (as in penetrating this most ideologically fixed cognitive norm) “map,” Joon-ho slices through this barrier to collectivity and productively collapses nation-state ideological norms into a more properly utopian binary, between (transnational, globalized) capitalism and a (transnational, globalized) utopian-collectivized (working class) humanity collectively working to bring the former down.

In terms of Robinson’s latter point (how capitalism has morphed into a “Transnational State Apparatus”), his monumental work Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity works through the extreme complexity of this movement, which we can at least begin to grasp with his opening outline:

“In my view globalization constitutes a qualitatively new epoch in the ongoing and open-ended evolution of world capitalism, marked by a number of qualitative shifts in the capitalist system and by novel articulations of social power. I have highlighted four aspects unique to this epoch. First is the rise of truly transnational capital and a new global production and financial system into which all nations and much of humanity have been integrated, either directly or indirectly. We have gone from a world economy, in which countries and regions were linked to each other via trade and financial flows in an integrated international market, to a global economy, in which nations are linked to each other more organically through the transnationalization of the production process, of finance, and of the circuits of capital accumulation. No single nation-state can remain insulated from the global economy or prevent the penetration of the social, political, and cultural superstructure of global capitalism.

     Second is the rise of a Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), a class group that has drawn in contingents from most countries around the world, North and South, and has attempted to position itself as a global ruling class. This TCC is the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale…. Third is the rise of Transnational State (TNS) apparatuses. The TNS is constituted as a loose network made up of trans- and supra-national organizations together with national states that functions to organize the conditions for transnational accumulation and through which the TCC attempts to organize and institutionally exercise its class power…. Fourth are novel relations of inequality, domination, and exploitation in global society, including an increasing importance of transnational social and class inequalities relative to North-South inequalities that are geographically or territorially conceived.” (His italics 2)

As Robinson goes on to relate, the “unprecedented” concentration of capital is staggering:

“There has been an historically unprecedented concentration of wealth and power in a few thousand global corporations, financial institutions, and investment funds. The extent of the concentration and centralization of capital in the hands of the TCC (transnational capitalist class) and the TNCs (transnational corporations) it controls is truly astounding. The concentration of capital is understood as the expansion of capital as it is reinvested. The centralization of capital is understood as the amassing of many capitals into fewer capitals and as ever-greater control by fewer capitals. Unlike earlier epochs in the history of world capitalism, this concentration and centralization involves the amassing and growing power not of national but of transnational capitalist groups. A 2011 analysis of the share ownerships of 43,000 transnational corporations undertaken by three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology identified a core of 1,318 TNCs with interlocking ownerships. Each of these core TNCs had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to twenty. Although they represented only 20 percent of global operating revenues, these 1,318 TNCs appeared to own collectively through their shares the majority of the world’s largest blue chip and manufacturing firms, representing a further 60 percent of global revenues – for a total of 80 percent of the world’s revenue.” (Robinson 23)

As I say, Robinson develops his disquisition through a rigorous and extraordinarily developed thesis throughout his book but I think the above quotes nicely figurates this seminal shift in capitalism, the crux of which has informed a transnational class that “has established itself as a class group without a national identity…does not identify with particular nation-states” (Robinson 27). Here too, I think Snowpiercer cogently allegorizes this fundamental shift in capitalism, via Wilford in particular – an allegorical figure who figurates this coalescing of a “transnational” capitalism – and the upper train compartments, sparsely populated with what can be seen as transnational class figures. In other words, Snowpiercer allegorically “maps” out this shift in capitalism, where a transnational capitalist class elite becomes the new hegemon and where a globalized poor become a peripheralized and compartmentalized (sequestered) mass.

More pointedly, this dystopian future portends surplus population growth, joblessness, and an overall fascist state of being:

“We should recall fascism is a particular response to capitalist crisis that seeks to contain any challenge to the system that may come from subordinate groups. In this regard, central to the story of global capitalism and global crisis, as well as to the specter of neo-fascism, is a mass of humanity involving hundreds of millions if not billions of people who have been expropriated from the means of survival yet also expelled from capitalist production as global supernumeraries or surplus labor, relegated to scraping by in a ‘planet of slums’ and subject to all-pervasive and ever-more sophisticated and repressive social control systems.” (Robinson 163)

“Social controls” include “gated communities, policing, panoptical surveillance, spatial apartheid, prison industrial complexes” (Robinson 96) and various immigration controls to highlight just some of mechanisms in place to control rebellious (“surplus”) populations. Robinson’s use of the conception “planet of slums” is also important here, a reference to Mike Davis’s vital book Planet of Slums, where he documents the extremely disturbing rise in “slums” all over the world:

“There are probably more than 200,000 slums on earth, ranging in population from a few hundred to more than a million people. The five great metropolises of South Asia (Karachi, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Dhaka) alone contain about 15,000 distinct slum communities whose total population exceeds 20 million. ‘Megaslums’ arise when shantytowns and squatter communities merge in continuous belts of informal housing and poverty, usually on the urban periphery.” (26)

And as Davis emphasizes, “megaslums” are a fairly recent phenomenon: “Although some slums have long histories – Rio de Janeiro’s first favela, Morro de Providencia, was founded in the 1880s – most megaslums have grown up since the 1960s” (27). The future prospect of humanity is even bleaker:

“The late-capitalist surge of humanity, then, has already taken place. As Jan Breman, writing of India, has warned: ‘A point of no return is reached when a reserve army waiting to be incorporated into the labour process becomes stigmatized as a permanently redundant mass, an excessive burden that cannot be included now or in the future, in economy and society. This metamorphosis is, in my opinion at least, the real crisis of world capitalism.’ Alternately, as the CIA grimly noted in 2002: ‘By the late 1990s a staggering one billion workers representing one-third of the world’s labor force, most of them in the South, were either unemployed or underemployed.’ Apart from the de Sotan cargo cult of infinitely flexible informalism, there is no official scenario for the reincorporation of this vast mass of surplus labor into the mainstream of the world economy.” (Davis 199)

Here again, Snowpiercer remarkably registers this extreme condition of masses of people “warehoused” in slums and elite transnational capitalists in “gated communities,” cutting themselves off from this mass of humanity, transforming this miniature world into a fascist “social control” state, which I think is strikingly echoed in this passage from Davis as well:

“With a literal ‘great wall’ of high-tech border enforcement blocking large-scale migration to the rich countries, only the slum remains as a fully franchised solution to the problem of warehousing this century’s surplus humanity. Slum populations, according to UN-HABITAT, are currently growing by a staggering 25 million per year. Moreover, as emphasized in an earlier chapter, the frontier of safe squattable land is everywhere disappearing and new arrivals to the urban margin confront an existential condition that can only be described as ‘marginality within marginality,’ or, in the more piquant phrase of a desperate Baghdad slum-dweller, a ‘semi-death.’ Indeed, peri-urban poverty – a grim human world largely cut off from the subsistence solidarities of the countryside as well as disconnected from the cultural and political life of the traditional city – is the radical new face of inequality.” (200-201)

Like our real world, the train in Snowpiercer divides humanity between “slum-dwellers” and a “transnational capitalist class.” In this way, Joon-ho can “cognitively map” our present “planet of slums” via allegorically reducing whole populations to smaller masses of people. In this way, too – e.g., on a more measurable, personal, cognitive scale – Joon-ho can zero in on what capitalism is in general and more pointedly what it has become specifically, a transnational, globalized capitalism, and especially what it is doing to people and what it will do to people, reduce people to a “semi-death.”

(I will come back to all the above in the course of my analysis of the film.)

Ideological Indoctrination

As the film also stresses, capitalism depends for its being sustained by indoctrination, as we most glaringly see with the school room sequence, where we see rigorous indoctrination at work, the teacher’s over-the-top indoctrination program cutting through the complexity and hidden reality of ideological programming that works on us every day, here too Joon-ho mapping out the normalizing (programming) that goes into our normalizing ideological belief systems, e.g., capitalism, class hierarchies, and patriarchy to name the three key ones in this film. This educational programming is reinforced by the “so it is”/” know your place” rhetoric by Mason, a point of declaration that suggests the irrefutable it so registers the definitive, a key brainwashing technique used by power. In this programming rhetoric, however, the deconstructive part of who we are can’t help but to exploit the gap in this logic, that just saying “so it is” is not enough, is never enough. That’s why propagandistic rhetoric is less effective unless packaged with other ideological-hegemonic mechanisms, including giving the working class a carrot (e.g., living wages, benefits, consumerist-escapist material possessions, etc.) and the myth of dreaming of upward mobility, not to mention the larger ideology behind capitalism in general, e.g., that this economic system is the natural and normal (only!) economic system possible – or even equated with being an American, going against it then equated to being anti-American (this sensibility has especially been the case historically as the much feared and demonized Soviet Union stood for the only posited alternative to capitalism, “communism,” though of course the “communism” of the former Soviet Union was “communism” in name only) – all of which we get in the ending moment between Wilford (Ed Harris) and Curtis (Chris Evans), which I discuss below. Part of the literal consequences of this train configuration is that they can’t emulate these other bribery chips (though it is hinted that some people are allowed to move “upward” to other sections of the train) and thus they have to depend on this ruling class rhetoric, which both creates the ferment of revolution as well as better stripping away the veneer of this seeming healthy system.

Consumption (Vampire) Symbolism

In the above opening sequence, we see the soldiers round up the kids, and Claude (Emma Levie), a woman with a conspicuously bright yellow-goldish coat, comes forward to collect two of them, her yellow-goldish coat really standing out in the otherwise darkly colored space with darkly colored clothed people. After Andrew throws a shoe and hits Claude, she strangely dabs her finger in her blood and sucks the blood off.

One of the many moments that hyper-emphasizes the contrast between the haves and have nots, Claude’s yellow-goldish coat speaks to her “rich” (excess) life (and the sickness of it) while the drab colors of the “tail section” people speak to their drained of life (of color) mode of being. The wonderful touch of her sucking her own blood wickedly speaks to the vampire nature of the elite (transnational capitalist) class. This becomes a recurring motif throughout the film, where we get numerous explicit and implicit references of how this train (transnational globalized capitalistic) system is a cannibalistic system, a system that consumes people and a system that creates people who consume other people. Most obviously, we get this with the literal reference of the tail section people having to resort to cannibalism to survive (see below), though there are more subtle signifiers of this consumption motif:

In another compartment, the tail section group encounter very grim looking men in masks waiting for the rebels, their hands holding axes and with their dress they almost look like butchers or something out of a horror movie. To reinforce this notion, a fish is brought forward and they plunge their axes into it, bloodying them, again, not to subtly signifying that they will “gut” the tail section people “like a fish.” Here too we get the “return of the repressed” or Real of capitalism (e.g., we become “cognitively estranged” from our own reality and see the Real), that capitalism has always turned people into Others to be consumed or disposed of. Indeed, by compartmentalizing humanity in this way – by putting them in the rear end train compartments – again, a metaphor for gated communities and sequestered “megaslums,” we can see how this already self/Other dynamic becomes even more compounded, since cognitive divides (self/Other dynamics, e.g., in this case, rich/high and poor/low) become literal divides, people divided by “gates,” which, in turn, further makes it easier to see those Others on the outside of the “elite” as disposable. Of course, the “train” signifier in general also provocatively evokes other historical atrocities such as the Jews getting rounded up into “cattle cars” and shipped to their slaughter.

Balance and Culling

In another important sequence we get Minister Mason interrupting a fight between the forces of Wilford and the tail section people. What she says is telling:

“Happy Yekaterina bridge, you filthy ingrates. You people, who, were it not for the benevolent Wilford, would have frozen solid 18 years ago today. You people, who suckled the generous titty of Wilford ever since, for food and shelter. And now, in front of our hallowed water supply section no less, you repay his kindness with violent hooliganism. You scum. Precisely 74 percent of you shall die. [cut to Curtis throwing an axe at her, which is blocked] My friend, you suffer from the misplaced optimism of the doomed. This is going to be good.”

Also part of this “vampire” or cannibalism subtext in the film is the way that the capitalists (Mason and Wilford) use the idea of “balance,” in the sense of coldly rationalizing humanity, making humans numbers (74%!), culling them as they would animals or dead weight, so as to maintain what they call a “controlled eco-system,” a deeply dehumanizing element. I think David Harvey sums up this historical nature of capitalism (or, for his specific focus, capital), the way that capitalism has historically seen people as disposable:

“Environmental disasters create abundant opportunities for a ‘disaster capitalism’ to profit handsomely. Deaths from starvation of exposed and vulnerable populations and massive habitat destruction will not necessarily trouble capital (unless it provokes rebellion and revolution) precisely because much of the world’s population has become redundant and disposable anyway. And capital has never shrunk from destroying people in pursuit of profit. This was true of the recent appalling tragedies of fires and building collapses in the textile mills of Bangladesh that have claimed the lives of more than a thousand workers. Toxic waste disposal is highly concentrated in poor and vulnerable communities (some of the worst sites in the USA are in Indian reservations) or in impoverished parts of the world (toxic batteries are taken care of in China in insalubrious conditions and old ships dismantled at considerable human cost on the shores of India and Bangladesh). Deteriorating air quality in northern China is reported to have reduced life expectancy in the population by more than five years since 1980.” (249-250) 

And this echoes what got humans into this end-of-species scenario to begin with, capitalism being wholly about unsustainable profit, wealth accumulation, growth and expansion to the detriment of all else, including (disposable) Others and the environment, a deeply dystopian (un-balanced!) sociopathy.

Here too we get a decided link between these two interconnected layers of meaning, the former (“culling”) becoming the “return of the repressed” of the latter, or, in other words, the former reveals the reality of this globalized capitalism, a sociopathic system/ideology that is wholly about seeing the great mass of humanity as disposable, which can only be the case of the inexorable drive by capitalism to sustain an “out of balance” way of being that makes climate change worse, climate change being the absent cause of humanity’s decimation in the film:

“For capitalism, accumulation of capital is everything, the Earth and its inhabitants nothing. If value is created by the exploitation of labor, this nonetheless requires constant expropriation of a natural environment which is considered a free gift to capital. In its narrow pursuit of profits, the capitalist system points inexorably to creative destruction on a planetary scale. Karl Marx theorized this as the problem of the metabolic rift, in which capitalism robbed the Earth itself as a basis of the accumulation of capital.

   At the current carbon-emission rate, the world will break the global carbon budget (i.e., will reach the trillionth metric ton in cumulative carbon emissions) in seventeen years, threatening out-of-control climate change. Other planetary boundaries are also being crossed: resulting in the sixth extinction, ocean acidification, the disruption of the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, loss of forests, global freshwater shortages, etc.” (John Bellamy Foster, https://www.globalpolicyjournal.com/blog/19/11/2018/interview-climate-change-product-how-capitalism-values-nature)

Climate Change, or, Putting Life Out of Balance

At least part of the message of this film is about putting life back in “balance,” which of course is backgrounded by the whole climate change premise, again, humanity having put life out of “balance,” creating an unsustainable lifestyle that in effect ended all life on the planet. Many scholars (Hans A. Baer, Naomi Klein, John Bellamy Foster, to name just three prominent scholars) have stressed that capitalism is causing this very real dystopian future, another crucial marker of this film’s allegory. In their monumental work The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Richard York sum up this axiom:

“The ecological rift referred to in the title of this book is the rift between humanity and nature. The world is really one indivisible whole. The rift that threatens today to tear apart and destroy that whole is a product of artificial divisions within humanity, alienating us from the material-natural conditions of our existence and from succeeding generations. Our argument, in brief, is that a deep chasm has opened up in the metabolic relation between human beings and nature—a metabolism that is the basis of life itself. The source of this unparalleled crisis is the capitalist society in which we live.

     Ironically, most analyses of the environmental problem today are concerned less with saving the planet or life or humanity than saving capitalism—the system at the root of our environmental problems. As Derrick Jensen and Aric McBay cogently write in What We Leave Behind, we live in a culture in which there is an ‘inversion of what is real and not real,’ where ‘dying oceans and dioxin in every mother’s breast milk’ are considered less real than ‘industrial capitalism.’ Hence, we are constantly led to believe that ‘the end of the world is less to be feared than the end of industrial capitalism…. When most people in this culture ask, ‘How can we stop global warming?’ that’s not really what they are asking. They’re asking, ‘How can we stop global warming without significantly changing this lifestyle…that is causing global warming in the first place?’ The answer is you can’t. It’s a stupid, absurd, and insane question.’

     Jensen and McBay go on to state: ‘Industrial capitalism can never be sustainable. It has always destroyed the land upon which it depends for raw materials, and it always will. Until there is no land (or water, or air) for it to exploit. Or until, and this is obviously the far better option, there is no industrial capitalism’” (7-8)

Climate change then becomes the macro vampire/cannibalism subtext to the micro vampire/cannibalism subtext focused on above. Though climate change seems to be put behind the film’s main plot line (since it has already happened), the fact of this human caused second ice age, and how that extreme shift in climate intersects with the vampire/cannibalism motif in the film overall, keeps climate change bracketed throughout the film. We cannot see how the transnational capitalist class on the train continues on this vampire/cannibalism system (in effect, in short, consuming the tail end occupants) and not link this to how capitalism itself sucked the life out of, cannibalized the planet and its people.

The Ark Metaphor and Other Christian Signifiers

 Adding to the levels of this allegory complexity, the film uses an “ark” metaphor for the film. This declared reference (e.g., calling the train an “ark”) wouldn’t seem to fit, though, since Wilford wants to translate the Biblical narrative for his own ends, keep intact this capitalist system, emulate the system that was (instead of the Biblical narrative of a “cleansing” the Earth of “sin” and renewing humanity)so as to transfer this system smoothly when the train (“ark”) is no longer needed, e.g., releasing the animals and human beings back into the world sets in motion “natural” processes once again. However, on the other hand, the film itself  (e.g., Bong Joon-ho) wants to emulate the Biblical narrative more precisely, suggesting a more progressive “renewal” of humanity in a more humane direction, even to the point of creating an alternative “Adam and Eve” (see below for more).

More generally, I suspect that Wilford has instigated this attempt at casting the train and himself in Christian terms (“sacred,” “eternal,” “preordained,” etc.) because it is his attempt to do what rulers used to do in ancient times (and to a degree still do today), e.g., make themselves the voice and hand of God and thus ensure that the “masses” keep their place. I suspect that this element in the film is also probably part of the film’s anti-capitalism project, informed by Marx’s famous dictum that religion is the “opiate of the masses,” e.g., that which keeps them distracted keeps them controlled.

The “Gate” Metaphor

Another element that gets at the class imperative is the “gate” motif, e.g., the passageways between compartments separated not by doorways but “gates,” and that becomes a key metaphor: A “gate” suggests something more than a door, a barrier that can be used to keep people out or in, which, in turn suggests a “prison” for at least the tail section people who are forced to live in only their space, their “gate” shutting them off from the rest of the train (world), which, in turn, extends this metaphor to think of their position not only in terms of being “prisoners” but also in terms of what I’ve touched on above, being kept in their place, suggestive of the growing movement of “gated” communities. “Gated” communities – also termed “off world” communities or “edge cities” – are a ramification of the “megaslums” and growing poverty around the world. Davis says,

“If the poor bitterly resist eviction from the urban core, the well-heeled are voluntarily trading their old neighborhoods for fantasy-themed walled subdivisions on the periphery. Certainly the old gold coasts remain – like Zamalek in Cairo, Riviera in Abidjan, Victoria Island in Lagos, and so on – but the novel global trend since the early 1990s has been the explosive growth of exclusive, closed suburbs on the peripheries of Third World cities. Even (or especially) in China, the gated community has been called the ‘most significant development in recent urban planning and design.’

   These ‘off worlds’ – to use the terminology of Blade Runner – are often imagineered as replica Southern Californias. Thus, ‘Beverly Hills’ does not exist only in the 90210 zip code; it is also, with Utopia and Dreamland, a suburb of Cairo, an affluent private city ‘whose inhabitants can keep their distance from the sight and severity of poverty and the violence and political Islam which is seemingly permeating the localities.’” (114-115)

The extremely disturbing implications of this “significant development in recent urban planning and design” is this desire for the elites of the world to solve extreme poverty not by addressing it but by avoiding it, creating a space where they can live in the vacuum of their own perfumed existence.

The “gate” also functions in terms of a potential “gateway” to a higher plane of existence, which may be just moving to a higher “class” (upper train compartment) though it may also signify moving to a higher or better (alternative) way of life (system/ideology). In other words, taken out of the specific (realistic) context of its intended function, the “gate” metaphor speaks to a general sense of a liminal space that informs a movement between ways of being in general, which as we see at the end, is the only way out of this dehumanized system, to blow open the gate that leads out of it.

The Living Dead

Another key motif in the film is the “living dead” motif. We get this most conspicuously with the front end elites: The front section people move towards the survivors in a “zombie” like fashion, which is also reinforced by the zombie-like, lifeless personas of some of the elite figures (well, actually all of them seem to at least lack any real degree of emotion), e.g., Claude, not to mention that Wilford’s primary goon, Franco (Vlad Ivanov), rises as if from the “dead.”  Moreover, a secondary motif is the “drawers” element in the film, which furthers the dehumanization stress in the film – e.g., that bodies (replacing machine parts, kept in drawers like a pair of socks, “individual units”) are objectified – especially in this deeper implication of coding them as “dead” (this drawer imagery suggests a “morgue”). In terms of the former (the front section “zombies”), my sense is that because they only live for their consumerist appetites and thus lack any sense of meaning or purpose, they are deeply alienated—they have lost what it means to be alive/human. The contrast to the tail end section occupants is striking, in that their revolutionary spirit gives them purpose and meaning, or, in other words, informs what it means to be human/alive.

In terms of the latter part of this motif, it is interesting to think of Nam (Kang-ho Song) as a special case in the film. Apparently, because Nam is an engineer, he was a front-end section occupant and so would seem to be part of this elite class. But it is clear that Nam is no superficial elite living for his consumerist appetites. He seems to be the only character who wants to escape the train and begin life anew, signally his understanding of how dehumanizing the train/capitalism is to him and Others. Unfortunately, Nam also understands that one can only escape the train when the exterior environment can sustain life. In this sense, Nam probably takes the kronole (he is a Kronole addict) as a way to alleviate his own feelings of (“living dead”) alienation, which is most punishing for enlightened individuals who can see all too clearly how dehumanizing this capitalism ideology is. Indeed, Wilford might have “orchestrated” putting Nam (and Yona!) in the drawers because Nam is unusual in that he thinks for himself, sees beyond the surface of things to see the darker truths hidden in this oppressive system (we get hints of his intelligence and wisdom sprinkled throughout the latter part of the film, especially that telling comment from him to his daughter about the Inuit woman who led the “Revolt of the Seven” and who taught him that it would be possible to live outside the train) not to mention that he consistently watches that buried-in-the-snow-plane to see when the outer environment would be safe to live in, a suggestion that he is waiting for the time when he can escape the train, all of which speaks to him as a dangerous element on the train, probably too dangerous for Wilford who demands absolute conformity to him, though, of course, because he is an engineer too precious to outright kill. Nonetheless, because he is too dangerous — his independent, agentic thought, his desire to reject the train/capitalism — he must be “put away,” hidden from the people.

Kronole

The element that most allegorizes consumerism/stimulants is the kronole thread in the film. This “drug” thread informs a key device that keeps people distracted from class consciousness and/or activist engagement in general. One of the key mechanisms that keep people in place is offering them stimulation fixes (yes, drugs, but also gambling, shopping, sex, etc.) so as to keep them “distracted” from seeing their oppressed condition, much less do anything about it. We kind of get this in the tail section where we see a figure who is clearly addicted to the drug but more so see this in the front sections with the elites who are clearly drugged out zombies and care only for their appetites (perhaps a way to distract the elites from, uh, more procreative activities?). Interesting to note too that this drug is made from industrial waste and thus speaks volumes about the insanity of capitalism in general: Since kronole is industrial “waste,” or the toxic consequences of capitalism/consumerism, one could metaphorically make the leap and see this consumption and addiction to kronole as also the consumption and addiction to this toxic ideology.

Deeper into the Train, More Examples of the Monstrousness of Capitalism

As I say above, the film allegorizes capitalism most pointedly via its stress on class hierarchy, the train compartments signifying the extreme disparities between “upper” and “lower” classes, the lower class of course at the far end of the train and each successive train compartment signifying higher (upper) classes. Strikingly, the train compartments closest to the “engine” reveal upper class figures who gluttonously live for their appetites, a searing indictment of our own excessive wealthy figures. If we were to see most, if not all, of these situations in our everyday world, we probably wouldn’t give them a second thought. However, in the specific context of this film, where we suture ourselves into the plight of the tail section people and their lives of severe deprivation (among other degradations, we discover that their diet includes eating bugs!), these images of the upper sections signify something else altogether, e.g., the obscene excess and disparity that inform this train/capitalism – or, in Robinson’s terms above, a “transnational capitalist class.” And then this too becomes part of the biting allegory of this film, registering cognitively this state of things in the real world, where this extreme disparity is the “norm,” people in this country and all over the world living in a similar or worse state of deprivation (“planet of slums”) while others live in a state where all of their needs are met and where they live a life of luxury. Perhaps the most heinous part of (transnational, globalized) capitalism is how it allows the above, creating conditions that allow a tiny minority of people to have everything at their disposal, including excessive amounts of luxuries while Others (including children) not only live a life of deprivation and degradation but in fact die every day from preventable maladies including malnutrition and multiple diseases and other health complications, many of which are caused by capitalistic enterprises that literally destroy natural environments, toxify land, food, water, and air. As I pointed out above in my “kronole” section, part of what keeps this system and those in power intact is also just a general pacification of the masses in general, via consumerism, which we also get allegorized with the numerous images of upper section people gluttonously living for consumerist pleasures, wearing what looks like designer clothes and jewelry, drinking highbrow wines, decorating spaces with upper crust decor, and so on.

Davis (with Jeremy Seabrook) captures the disturbing and bizarre phenomenon of not only living obscenely gluttonous lifestyles but this movement to “disembed” the “transnational” elites from the low Others:

“Fortified, fantasy-themed enclaves and edge cities, disembedded from their own social landscapes but integrated into globalization’s cyber-California floating in the digital ether – this brings us full circle to Philip K. Dick. In this ‘gilded captivity,’ Jeremy Seabrook adds, the Third World urban bourgeoisie ‘cease to be citizens of their own country and become nomads belonging to, and owing allegiance to, a superterrestrial topography of money; they become patriots of wealth, nationalists of an elusive and golden nowhere.’” (120)

They are Robinson’s “transnational capitalist class,” which, as I’ve touched on above, translates to a “superclass” detached from the mass of humanity and detached from nation-state identity markers and alliances: “Transnational capitalists and globalizing elites in the former Third World, and from the former First World, can increasingly aspire to detach themselves from local dependency – the need to generate a national market, to assure the social reproduction of local subordinate groups, and so forth – and instead utilize the global economy to accumulate capital, status, and power” (Robinson 36). Chrystia Freeland puts this new “transnational capitalist class” this way:

“The rich of today are…different than the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of the new super-elite [whose] members are…becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residence in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation onto themselves.” (43)

And here we come back to the “gated community” or “off world” phenomenon: “Integral to this process are exclusive clubs and restaurants, ultra-expensive resorts in all continents, private as opposed to mass forms of travel and entertainment and, ominously, increasing residential segregation of the very rich secured by armed guards and electronic surveillance” (Sklair 46). Finally, this is a class structure that crazily entails a built-in structure of (“objective”) violence:

“Yet we must also examine the structural causes of the systemic origins of these dimensions of crisis that in their outward manifestations afflict humanity on a daily basis and at so many lived levels. We must not forget that beneath the manifest violence that is so visible around the world and that draw the attention of the global media is the less visible structural violence of the system in which we live, what philosopher Slavoj Žižek calls ‘objective’ violence – ‘objective violence is precisely the violence inherent to this ‘normal’ state of things’ and is typically invisible to those who do not suffer it. It is structural violence when 85 percent of the world’s wealth is monopolized by just 10 percent of the world’s people while the bottom half of adults worldwide owns barely 1 percent of the total (actually, the top 2 percent within the top 10 percent own half of the planet’s wealth), when food stocks are thrown into the oceans even as millions go hungry, when billions of dollars are spent on plastic surgery and cosmetics even as billions of people go untreated for easily curable diseases, and when more money is spent on prison-industrial complexes than on educational facilities.” (Robinson 18-19)

I contend that the upper train compartments – and especially the deeply allegorical figure of Wilford himself (more on him below) – allegorically registers all of the above, especially in terms of this latter point, the structural “objective violence” of this transnational class, e.g., how via being utterly disassociated from the tail end occupants and via consuming the vast majority of the limited resources, the nature of this built in extreme disparity and “disembeddedness” innately equates to a structural violence of (“culling,” disposing of) Others.

The Train’s Engine Compartment, Signifying the Engine of Capitalism

Like all of the other “upper” compartments, the engine is a striking contrast from every other compartment (especially the “tail section” compartment!), sleek, clean, with touches of signifiers that exemplify wealth and power (fine wood, furniture, clothes, food [playing on a “steak” motif] and wine, table ware, spacious) though also minimalist and cold, the surrounding elements emphasizing both Wilford’s character and I think his own state of being, a coldly calculating, unempathetic authoritarian figure (strikingly, even his bathrobe has designs that echo the engine core, signifying that this man is literally mechanistic). In short, in other words, the engine section perfectly realizes this film’s allegory, perfectly embodies the dehumanizing (Darwinian survival of the fittest) nature of capitalism.

Then we get a long exchange and essentially a speech by Wilford; here are some of the most important excerpts:

Wilford: “You are the first human being to have walked the total length of this train, tail to engine…. None of your people have ever been here, to the engine. I’ve never been to the tail section.”

Curtis: “Why not? Too dirty for you? Don’t want to rub against the vermin of the tail section?”

Wilford: “Do you think my station is without its own drawbacks? It’s noisy. And it’s lonely.”

Curtis: “Right. Steaks. Plenty of room. This whore to bring you anything you want.”

Wilford: “Curtis, everyone has their preordained position. And everyone is in their place except you.”

Curtis: “That’s what people in the best place say to the people in the worst place. There’s not a soul on this train who wouldn’t trade places with you.”

Wilford: “Would you trade places with me?”

Curtis: “Fuck you.”

And then a little later, after Wilford has taken Curtis to the engine core:

Wilford: “I just wrote it. [Wilford brings Curtis one of those red notes] It’s for you, Curtis. Here. [it reads simply: “Train”] I am old. I want you to take my station. It’s what you always wanted. It’s what Gilliam wanted, too. You must tend the engine, keep her humming. Look, Curtis…beyond the gate. [shot of empty section of the engine compartment] Section after section, precisely where they’ve always been and where they’ll always be, all adding up to what? The train. And now, the perfectly correct number of human beings, all in their proper places, all adding up to what? Humanity. The train is the world. We, the humanity. And now you have the sacred responsibility to lead all of humanity. Without you, Curtis, humanity will cease to exist. You’ve seen what people do without leadership. They devour one another.”

Wilford: “Look at them. That’s how people are. You know. You’ve seen this. You’ve been this. Ridiculous. Pathetic, aren’t they? You can save them from themselves. This is what Gilliam saved you for. Curtis…this is your destiny.”

For me, this whole speech by Wilford speaks to three crucial ideas: First, most conspicuously, this moment becomes the final barrier/test for Curtis, his moment when he confronts his own inner (cannibalistic) demons. Even more difficult than the physical barriers, Wilford’s appeals to Curtis put up the much more daunting psychological barriers, a combination of using Curtis’ adulation of Gilliam (in absentia Gilliam [John Hurt] in effect validates Wilford’s words, validates the capitalistic system), Wilford tapping into Curtis’ latent dehumanized self (e.g., that Curtis knows what a baby tastes like suggests a predatory self potentiality–I’ll come back to this below), and Wilford offering up a capitalistic fantasy bribe, offering up that which is most valuable for tail section people, space and fulfilling one’s appetites (steaks!). Second, and also informing the first, is Wilford’s inexorable appeal, an “end of history” notion, where the train/capitalism is all there is, all there can be, so better to run it – or reform it – than fight it, since fighting it only leads to suffering and death. (Ingrained here too is Curtis’s earlier words, where his plan is apparently not to actually change the “system” — deconstruct this idea of the “eternal” train/capitalism by working towards a day where they can stop the train — but to make it better, e.g., “reform” it, a misguided view that can only lead to, lead back to, the status quo, the maintaining of a class hierarchy.)

Perhaps most crucially, this moment speaks the false surface/Real (or “return of the repressed”) of a capitalist system. That is, since Wilford allegorically embodies this system, we can see in this moment both the false facade of this system and its monstrous Real, e.g., Wilford’s appeal is not only inexorably logical, rational, reasonable, it is also pitched emotionally, Wilford casting himself as a benevolent patriarch/capitalist, even to the point of seeming to be merciful in his approach to his convincing explanation of maintaining a necessary – necessary because the train’s resources are limited though this probably only means necessary so the elites can maintain their elite lifestyle – “balance,” culling people through faux revolutions instead of just systematic executions. Similarly, we see how capitalistic elites enable this survival of the fittest system through similar rhetoric, using language (“free markets,” “libertarianism,” etc.) that suggests a fair and egalitarian system. But, as we see, when Timmy and Andy are exposed — conjoined by Wilford’s monstrous, predatory words (“thank goodness the tail section manufactures a steady supply of kids”) — we can see Wilford/capitalism for what it is, a system that consumes Others. Punctuating this later idea is Timmy being “hidden” in the bowels of the train engine, a visual illustration of this idea, that Timmy (and Andy) are the “hidden” Real of this system, the exposure of them to the light of day signifying that they are also the “return of the repressed” of this system, a system that cannibalizes (consumes) children/Others. This consumption of children in the film echoes the exploitation and horrible abuse of over a million children all over the world, working for little to nothing, in dangerous conditions, 6-7 days a week, twelve or more hours a day. To take just one example, thousands of children in the city of Varanasi “are kept in captivity, tortured and made to work for 20 hours a day without a break. Little children are made to crouch on their toes, from dawn to dusk every day, severely stunting their growth during formative years” (UNICEF 35).

In short, this whole speech again encompasses the logic of capitalism, including giving us a kind of living embodiment of capitalism and/or a typical feature of those who run the system (“engine”), a kind of god-like position (Ed Harris doing his “Christof” character from The Truman Show!) who can only see humanity in terms of a capitalistic system (e.g., bodies used to maintain the system, maintain the god-like position of those who run the system/engine). Also informed here is just how seductive this system can be for those indoctrinated to it, Curtis’s split self getting wooed here in a way that is extremely difficult for him to resist, especially as we factor in all of the other elements that inform his character, which I will come back to below.

Timmy the Engine “Part”

Curtis a Christ Figure

For me, there is another element to the “balance” motif in the film, the “balance” of sustainability and of creating a world where humans aren’t just thought of as tools (using children as machine parts) or numbers (74%) but keeping the “spiritual” intact, which is especially represented by Curtis. Curtis is a man who has lived his entire “second” life trying to redeem himself of the horrors he has committed (he knows what babies taste like). In an incredible complex maneuver, Joon-ho even makes Curtis a Christ figure (that shot of him across from the one-armed Christ figure prefigures Curtis sacrificing his arm at the end), but he is a Christ figure that will not just die for humanity’s sins but will die for his own ghastly monstrous deeds, a Christ figure that faces the “devil” so to speak – though this devil is capitalism incarnate (e.g., Wilford) – and confront the very worst of humanity, which includes his own imbalanced state of mind, the part of humanity/himself that can be tempted with the capitalistic bribe of running the “engine” (not unlike Christ being tempted by Satan in the desert), a return to his cannibalistic self.

And here is where it gets really complex: Curtis took on this revolution because of his belief in what Gilliam represented, a kind or “pure” goodness of humanity (Gilliam sacrifices his arm and apparently his leg for other tail section people to eat, saving at least one baby). And thus when he realizes that Gilliam is as much of a capitalist as Wilford (e.g., the two sides of capitalism, the unempathetic sociopath capitalist and the decent, reformist, democratic socialist capitalist), a man who apparently believes that capitalism can work (or perhaps is the only necessary choice), even if it means sacrificing people for the greater good, Curtis’s belief in the cause of “revolution” wavers. This wavering signifies just how out of “balance” Curtis still is, Wilford able to tap into that latent ruthless capitalist that Curtis used to be, the human who could resort to cannibalism to survive, again, cannibalism often used as a metaphor for capitalism since capitalism is very much a predatory, dog-eat-dog, survival of the fittest economic system that literally consumes people. In this context, then, the film becomes a general commentary on how capitalism degrades humanity in general, influences it, reduces it to its most primitive self.

So, in this singular moment when Wilford tempts Curtis, Curtis can only see how monstrous this system – and the people who run it (including, now, Gilliam) – are and in this revelation, his capitalist side so to speak, which, again, we know is part of who he is, that which keeps him “unbalanced,” that which Wilford can appeal to — again, using Gilliam as a de facto endorsing agent — rises to the surface and for a moment Curtis seems ready to capitulate to the will of Wilford and, in absentia, Gilliam, both embodying this capitalistic system.

It is only when Yona (Ko Asung) reveals Timmy that Curtis is reminded of why he really committed himself to this revolution, not because of Gilliam and his fatherly influence but because of the cannibalistic nature of the system – that turned him into a literal cannibal – a system that will swallow up innocent children to keep it going (e.g., that it makes bodies disposable, tools, Timmy and Andy replacing “extinct” parts), and in seeing this, he sees all too clearly what the REAL of the system is, taking him back to his own moments of predatory cannibalism, a way of being he can’t go back to. In effect, he can’t “eat” (consume) children again, can’t devour Timmy.

And, then, that finalizes the Christ narrative, which a former student of mine, Jennifer McKinnis, beautifully sums up:

“Curtis is human consciousness. Curtis struggles with wanting to be good, wanting to repent for being a selfish and terrible human being, and thinks that he can atone for his transgressions by doing the right thing for the lowly tail passengers.”

As McKinnis cogently gets at here, Curtis can redeem himself and humanity (us) as well – fulfill the Christ narrative – as he resists this dehumanizing, predatory system that has so beaten him down (his long history of suffering, his unbelievable losses, Gilliam’s shattering betrayal, Wilford’s inexorable power and slippery rhetoric) and his “consciousness,” his “spirit,” can be self-actualized in the direction of an alternative, “reborn” (“spiritual”) humanity, a shift in being that we can enact with him: In seeing the REAL, he can finally see why he needs to do what he needs to do, sacrifice himself for the greater good of not just humanity surviving and not just for the revolution but for Timmy and for making himself human again by saving a child instead of eating him so to speak. And he can only do that by destroying a system that can only be predatory, cannibalistic.

The Strange Hand Gesture

At certain key moments in the film, we get this strange hand gesture, first by Minister Mason and then later by Wilford. Most curiously, we also get a similar gesture by Timmy, though for Timmy, the gesture has real meaning (he seems to be clearing dirt out of some sort of chamber, apparently his “part” function). Inscribed in this is the idea of a “preordained position,” something both Wilford and Mason say when they make the gesture, Timmy then seeming to fulfill this idea by being forced to be the “tool” (“slave”) that Wilford and Mason maintain that he is. The gesture motion seems to suggest Wilford and Mason’s belief in the “eternal engine” (and am I mistaken in thinking that the gesture kind of imitates the core of the engine protruding out and then spiraling back in???), which, in turn, informs this idea of a “preordained position,” the repetitive, circular nature of the gesture suggesting this, making the gesture a kind of coding that power tries to turn into a religious symbol, representing the “sacredness” of the train/system. However, by linking this gesture to Timmy, we can see just how ideological – arbitrary – this coding gesture is, Timmy’s gesture utterly deconstructing the intent of this symbolic gesture, revealing it to be not just arbitrarily conceived but representing the Real of this system, e.g., in effect, “slavery” (or turning human bodies into “tools,” objects), which, in turn, speaks to a deeper realization, how religions and other ideologies (capitalism) use such signifiers (icons, symbols, rhetoric, etc.) as a way of normalizing or aggrandizing oppressive belief systems/ideologies.

Yona and Timmy, An Alternative “Adam and Eve”?

So, let me end by addressing the film’s controversial ending, controversial in the sense that it seems to be a grim ending to a grim film, well, grim in one very large aspect of it, e.g., the ending calamity seeming to suggest that everyone but Yona and Timmy die! (Side note: Joon-ho has said in interviews that he thinks there are other survivors of the avalanche, he just didn’t have the budget to shoot any other survivors.) And I must confess that I’m with those who didn’t like the ending in this regard, that Joon-ho didn’t have more survivors. I too hate that the “tail section” people struggle and struggle and struggle, only to just die in the end, and not die from fighting back against power – which, by the way, I think is why the film hasto be grim, since, historically, revolutions are bloody business, with lots of suffering and tragic deaths – but die in an avalanche! (My hope is that more people did survive, which helps offset this despairing seeming reality.)

Having said that, for me, that doesn’t negate the power of the film overall. Moreover, my goodness, I’m just amazed by how so many people read this ending way, way too literally, too realistically, especially considering that this film is created to be read metaphorically, allegorically!

For me, this ending is a more secular rebirth of humanity moment, a play on the “Adam and Eve” narrative, though the rebirth isn’t coming from a “white” Adam and Eve (and, yes, in literal, historical, anthropological terms, Adam and Eve could NOT have been white but in western/Eurocentric representations, they are always coded as white) but rather an Asian “Eve” and an African American “Adam.” Moreover, clearly Yona is going to be the leader of this humanity, birthing not a patriarchal-phallocentric line but a more anti-patriarchal or gender-neutral line, signifying a much, much different direction that humanity will presumably take. For one thing, since this film is an anti-capitalism film and since capitalism is arguably birthed from a patriarchal, phallocentric, hypermasculine sensibility (e.g., authoritarian, dominating, unempathetic, hierarchal, etc.) this more matriarchal direction fits, in that it suggests an antidote to this former dystopian direction, moving us in a more utopian direction, especially when we conjoin this matriarchal-gender neutral sensibility with this incredible “diverse” beginning. And one can hope that, having experienced the awfulness of a capitalist sensibility on the train, Yona will want to take humanity in a different direction.

Okay, so what do we do with the polar bear? I smile when I hear that the first thing so many think when they see the polar bear is that it will eat our poor Yona and Timmy. As I say, I was so surprised by this reading, a reading that totally never occurred to me! Supporting my reading, Joon-ho has said that he included the polar bear as a symbol of hope, presumably signifying that life can now exist outside the train, signifying that Yona and Timmy will not only survive in the inclement environment but prosper. My other sense in choosing a polar bear is that the polar bear has become enormously symbolic, the poster “child” (or animal in this case) for global warming/climate change. Because of global warming and the melting of the ice sheets in the polar bear’s natural environment, polar bears are seriously endangered, drowning and starving. (I’ve watched some pretty heartbreaking documentaries on this sad state for polar bears.) And since global warming is a direct consequence of an insane capitalism that only cares about unsustainable profit, wealth accumulation, growth and expansion, and is barreling ahead in an unsustainable way of being (e.g., continuing to emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by corporate polluters) one could easily make the leap that this polar bear – like Yona and Timmy – is another freed victim of capitalism, free to live in a sustainable world where polar bears and humans can co-exist. And, by the way, no one mentions this (that I have found anyway) but in making Yona clairvoyant, she is coded as “special,” suggesting that she has the “power” to not only survive but flourish in the most difficult situations, as we have just seen from her surviving more dangerous predators than a lone polar bear.

History is the “Potential That Only Our Efforts Can…Realize”

James Berger perfectly captures the important endpoint of the film:

“The post-apocalyptic sense almost always entails the desire for another, more complete apocalypse, just as apocalyptic imagining follows some social or conceptual breakdown…. The world is dead but does not know it is dead. It awaits the Second Death… which will be the obliteration of the symbolic order in its entirety: the end both of the world and of the conceptual possibility of a world.”  (42-43)

In effect, Berger’s conceptualization of a post-apocalyptic sensibility is materialized in Snowpiercer, where we get an initial apocalyptic scenario – again, in trying to address climate change, the world only brings on a deep freeze that obliterates the world except for those who find their way onto the train Snowpiercer – which in effect is the end of the world, though the post-apocalyptic world is an attempt to hang on to the “symbolic order” (global capitalism, patriarchy, phallocentrism). In this way, we can see that “the world is dead but does not know it is dead.” In destroying the train, the tail end train occupants and we the spectators seek a “Second Death… which will be the obliteration of the symbolic order in its entirety: the end both of the world and of the conceptual possibility of a world.” That’s the new possibility for humanity, e.g., in the form of Yona and Timmy we get the potential and probable shift to an alternative history. Wegner puts it this way:

“Critical post-apocalyptic texts both interrogate the pseudo-event of a supposed apocalypse, showing the vital political importance of being able to recognize them as such, and then educating the reader’s desire for an authentic event: not the end of the world, but the end of a world, that of the current socio-political or symbolic order we call global or neo-liberal capitalism.” (94)

In other words, it isn’t the actual “event” of the apocalypse that matters but the ensuing post-apocalyptic “event” of ending one “world” and creating a new one, e.g., ending “the current socio-political or symbolic order we call global or neo-liberal capitalism,” here represented literally and allegorically by the train Snowpiercer and those who run it, and creating a new one, here represented by Yona and Timmy, though also represented in absentia by Curtis, Nam and the many other tail end train revolutionaries who materialized this critical “event” (e.g., creating an alternative post-capitalism history).  

In this way, Wegner reveals the deeply pedagogic and revolutionary potential of science fiction in general:

Science fiction in this affirming vision is understood to be a form, not unlike the works of Homer or Shakespeare, that delights and teaches, conveying through popular narrative forms the most significant truths. Science fiction is also one of what I name in this book’s first section the evental genres, teaching its audience new ways of thinking about history, and brushing against the postmodern and neo-liberal commonplaces that drill into us the myths that history is finished, fundamental change is impossible, and there are no alternatives. Science fiction encourages us to…glimpse once more the infinite possibilities that surround us, and to recall our immense collective capacity to make new worlds. It is precisely these lessons that make science fiction…so threatening to the reigning concern. (His italics, 230-231)

I would strongly argue that this is what Snowpiercer does for us, not just “delight” us but “teach” us to once again think historically, in terms of thinking “revolution” once again, thinking about creating an alternative history. Indeed, that is what the tail end resisters accomplish: Despite the “end of history” rhetoric/hegemon (“know your place”/“so it is”) and despite the seeming impossibility of taking over the train (capitalism) and even more so, ending the train (capitalism) and creating a new way of life outside of the train, the tail end resisters collectively “teach” us what it means to materialize an “event” and create a “new world.” Wegner elucidates this potentiality for an “imminent” “event”: “In short, where Paradise [1997 Toni Morrison] teaches its readers that an event, a break with the current order, is imminent, The Windup Girl [2009, Paolo Bacigalupi], reinforces the lesson, against those who would instruct otherwise, that events are always immanent, a fundamental part of any possible world” (101). Note Wegner’s clever use of the terms “imminent” and “immanent,” the first term – the more commonly used term – speaks to how an “event” – the break from our present history and the shift to a “new world”/history – is always on the brink of happening, a vital reminder for spectators, while the term “immanent” importantly emphasizes that an “event” is latent within a system that necessitates it, because it (e.g., global capitalism) is an apocalyptic system/ideology. Wegner also says that “an authentic act represents a kind of leap of faith into a void where the very conditions themselves are changed irrevocably by this decision. What is really at stake here then is the power to act: belief or faith…is precisely the basis of action, and it is this form of radical, dare we say revolutionary, action that has been drained from the (post)modern world” (83). Again, that then becomes the quintessential lesson of Snowpiercer, not just to recognize the need for revolutionary change but to reignite our will to act.

But that will to act stems from the second part of Snowpiercer’s lesson, that acting must come in the form of collectivizing, which Wegner (via Jameson) puts this way:

“In effect, Robinson’s entire novel functions as a form of what Jameson calls cognitive mapping, working to help its readers move beyond the old national model of belonging—a model that has witnessed a vicious resurgence in the aftermath of 9/11—and rather to think of themselves as part of a larger global collective. If there is a way forward, if there is to be a challenge to the stagnations of the present, then these hard lessons must be learned not only intellectually, but in the depth of our lived everyday existences…. And it is this kind of new conceptualization of ourselves as members of common global community that is necessary if we ever hope to truly begin to live history in new ways.” (255)

All told, these are the lessons magnified by Snowpiercer, revealing how only a collectivized (global) “community” – fomenting from “everyday existences” of (“semi-death”) living – can enact a revolutionary “event” that can give us an alternative history of being. In other words, like the tail end revolutionaries, Snowpiercer teaches us/engages us once again in the act of resisting and, ultimately, seizing on the potential “event” that will enact an alternative future, materializing for us that history is never “closed” but always in fact open:

“Conversely, The Shawshank Redemption [1994, Frank Darabont], as with The Years of Rice and Salt [2003, Kim Stanley Robinson], challenges this vision of historical closure, teaching its audience that another future is indeed possible if one adopts a proper historical perspective—patience and perseverance, a sense not of guarantees but of potential that only our efforts can bring to realization.” (Wegner 149)

Snowpiercer teaches us this lesson as well: The train is a seemingly “closed” train (human made “ecosystem”; if you leave it you will die) that seems inevitable and inescapable (“so it is,” “sacred,” “eternal”), its repetitive (circular) route also punctuating its inexorable drive in a singular (historical) direction. But the metaphor of the train also reveals to us our way out, that as we come to see, the train is ultimately a human made mechanical (mundane) object that can be stopped and deboarded, if not demolished, which then reveals to us how like a train, capitalism is not “eternal” but can also be stopped, demolished.  And since capitalism is a historical (ideological) construct, and since history too is the sum of our will to act or not act, we can collectively choose an alternative historical (utopian) drive forward.  

Works Cited

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