(Electronic music)
- (Jared) What’s up guys? Jared here to talk about a movie that feels about as cheerful
as living in 2020. Of course, I mean Snowpiercer, Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 film, based on a 1982
French graphic novel, that might mildly haunt your dreams, unless you’re really stoked
about cockroach protein bars. At first glance, the film seems like a reasonable precursor
to Bong’s more recent, grim meditation on income inequality in Parasite. But when some
of the snow starts to melt away, you’ll see that there’s so much more than meets
the eye.
At the core of Snowpiercer are two basic questions: 1. Is the system we live in inevitable, and
2. If so, what should we do about it? And also something about Ancient Roman law. We’ll
get to that. Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Snowpiercer. And spoilers ahead for
the end of the world.
But first a quick recap. Meet Snowpiercer, a world-touring train that, after a global
apocalypse, became home to the last remains of humanity. In the most literal caste system
imaginable, rich people exist in luxury in the front of the train, while poor folks exist
in squalor in the back. Everyone is supposed to worship Wilford, the train’s conductor
and architect, who sucks. Curtis, a kind of revolutionary Steve Rogers type, reluctantly
leads a revolt to take control of the train, spurred on by his mentor Gilliam - a kind
of more metal Nick Fury. Curtis and his motley crew embark on a bloody journey to the front
of the train. Along the way, they learn that the train is home to A. One dope aquarium
and sushi bar, B. a somewhat disturbing nightclub and C. sustainable agriculture. You know,
something for everyone. Finally, Curtis meets Wilford, who explains that this whole revolution,
like all the ones that preceded it, was planned as a means of population control.
- (Wilford) For optimum balance however there have been times when more… radical solutions
were required, when the population needed to be reduced rather… drastically.
- (Jared) And Gilliam was in on it too.
- (Wilford) Oh don’t tell me you didn’t know? Gilliam and I, our plan.
- (Jared) Also, Wilford, who at this point is old, wants Curtis to take his place, but
a tempted Curtis spots one-too-many labor laws being broken and refuses. He then orders
his comrade to blow the whole thing up. There are two survivors. The end.
So let’s just address the Milton-Friedman-shaped elephant in the room: This movie, like a lot
of Bong’s work, is very much about capitalism. A group of people is divided into the haves
and have nots, any resistance to this divide threatens to derail society - figuratively
and literally - and also we’re pretty sure the internships are unpaid.
One of Snowpiercer’s primary themes is how inevitable and natural this cruel system seems.
It even comes complete with a whole semi-religion to perpetuate belief in itself.
- (Mason) I, belong to the front. You belong to the tail. When the foot seeks the place
of the head, a sacred line is crossed.
- (Jared) And it’s not just the social order that is treated as inescapable. For that matter,
Wilford’s perpetually moving train is treated as the only source of life itself -- it’s
literally the ONLY option
- (Teacher) If we ever go outside the train? - (Kids) We all freeze and die!
- (Teacher) If the engine stops running? - (Kids) We’d all die!
- (Jared) Here, any alternative to the status quo is literal suicide. While trains frequently
symbolize modernity and progress, THIS train travels on an endless loop, making any semblance
of progress illusory. It’s literally just going around in circles.
The inevitability of the train’s caste system could be better understood with scholar Mark
Fisher’s writing on the concept of capitalist realism. As Fisher writes, capitalist realism
is “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic
system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to
it.” Basically - it’s easier to imagine the literal apocalypse than it is to imagine
the end of capitalism In the capitalist realist framework, there’s
no escaping our relentless adherence to capitalism, no matter how brutal the effects might be.
If that sounds a lot like Snowpiercer, scholar Gerry Canavan agrees, and he wrote a whole
paper about it.
Everything on the train exists under the guise of necessity - those in power are merely trying
to protect the collective, even if that means brutally hammering a guy’s arm off to prove
their dumb point. Of course, all the talk of “order” and “preordained” roles
happens a bit differently in the real world, but the logic is the same.
- (Wilford) Curtis, everyone has their pre-ordained position. And everyone is in their place except
you. - (Curtis) That’s what people in the best
place say to people in the worst place.
- (Jared) Inequality, OF COURSE, is necessary for the economy to persist -- any tweaking
of the free market will cause famine or end with gulags.
As Fisher puts it, capitalist realism posits, that “any problem can be solved by the market”.
Much as economists have long championed the simple beauty of the law of supply and demand
for distributing resources, those in charge of the train too champion the power of balance
and order in feeding everyone.
- (Wilford) We must always strive for balance. Air, water, food supply, the population.
- (Jared) Ultimately, the beauty of this so-called balance is incredibly ironic because, in order
to maintain it, the wealthy must orchestrate false revolutions as a means of depopulating
the poor - just as casually as they eat sushi twice a year to control the fish population.
- (Mason) This is only served twice in a year. IN January and July.
- (Tanya) Why? Not enough fish? - (Mason) Oh enough is not the criterion.
Balance.
- (Jared) The system is fundamentally unbalanced, and requires extensive intervention to maintain
itself, not unlike the way real world capitalism relies on bailouts for giant corporations
and big banks. In this case, though, it’s the train that is literally “too big to
fail.”
But there’s more depressing ideas to be found in Snowpiercer. Consider the way life
is treated in this world. 74 percent of the poor are killed off without second thought.
- (Mason) Precisely 74 percent of you will die.
- (Jared) Mothers have their children taken away, recruited as slave labor. Life in the
tail seems hardly worth living. Here’s where we get into the idea of necrocapitalism, the
depressed sibling of necropower, which we talked about in our Mad Max video, because
we apparently just love death-adjacent content.
Necrocapitalism, as conceived by scholar Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee, is the “practices of organizational
accumulation” ie gaining wealth, that “involve violence, dispossession and death.” In order
for this system to work, Banerjee explains, governments must create certain “spaces
of exception” where individuals do not possess rights - which is the tail section to a tee.
They are subject to violent policing, forbidden from free movement, and deprived of any autonomy.
So what happens to humans in spaces of exception?
To explain, Banerjee recalls philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of the ancient Roman
legal concept of the “homo sacer” - Latin for “sacred man.” The homo sacer, in Rome,
was kill-able but not sacrifice-able. In other words, they were so valueless that you could
just Grand Theft Auto them and leave someone fatherless, but you couldn’t do so in the
religiously meaningful kind of sacrificial murder way. The point is - the homo sacer
doesn’t even have the benefit of being oppressed within and by the law - they’re simply OUTSIDE
of the law. Banerjee, and Agamben, point to all kinds of modern equivalents of people
living as homo sacers. Agamben wrote of people in concentration camps, who existed in this
extra-legal hellzone, while Banerjee cites the victims of imperialism and colonization
in the search for profit. The lives lost due to environmental degradation, unsafe working
conditions, or resource wars are a kind of homo sacer. In Snowpiercer too, the tail-enders
exist in this strange outside-the-law-but-not-really position of the homo sacer. Their lives are
essentially meaningless, except insofar as they can be useful to those who actually matter:
- (Soldier) Are there any experienced violinists here?
- (Jared) Wilford selectively slaughters them like deer but flippantly saves 18 people
- (Wilford) Spare 18! To celebrate our eighteenth year!
- (Jared) Just to show that he can because he’s a douche-canoe. Banerjee uses these
ideas to posit that aspects of our economy are literally built on death and suffering
-- whether it be a worker who dies in a mining accident, a forest ecosystem that is plowed
away to make room for a factory, or a mercenary soldier who kills for pay. If necropower is
the politics of death, necrocapitalism is the economic system of death for profit.
To understand Snowpiercer, Canavan combines Fisher’s capitalist realism with Banerjee’s
necrocapitalism, taking the economics of death and projecting it INTO the future as the only
viable outcome, in a concept he calls necrofuturism. Or in his words, “those capitalist-realist
anticipations of the coming decades that anticipate the future as a devastated world of death.”
You know, like a world ruined by climate-change and the definitely-not-idiotic idea about
how to fix it.
As Canavan writes, “Necrofuturism posits a future that is doomed to continue modern
capitalism’s unsustainable and immoral practices even as those practices become more and more
destructive and self-defeating.” He argues that such a vision is the dominant modern
conception of the future. Whereas we once imagined a cool future with jetpacks and rad
alien sex, today we can only speculate if the 2030s will out-suck its 20th century predecessor.
Necrofuturism started blooming in the 1970s with movies like: Soylent Green, which imagines
a world ravaged by environmental destruction and overpopulation, to posit a VERY gross
scenario that we won’t ruin for you -
- (Man) Soylent Green is made out of (CENSORED)
- (Jared) And The Sheep Look Up, which imagines an America so toxified by capitalist tendencies
that the air is not safe to breathe - and OH you have to pay up for some clean oxygen.
Each story depicts capitalism as stupendously enduring, even as it leads to rampant death
and destruction. Necrofuturism has become so ubiquitous now as to be arguably the primary
form of futurism, seen everywhere from Wall-E to The Hunger Games to The Road to West World
to Adventure Time.
Now, necrofuturism is certainly vividly depicted in Snowpiercer. We have the post-apocalyptic
world where, in response to:
- (Newscaster) Mankind’s warming of the planet.
- (Jared) Caused, presumably, by rampant global capitalism, 79 countries release the artificial
substance CW7 into the atmosphere, which ironically freezes the world and kills most of humanity.
This is particularly necrofuturistic - here capitalist logic has destroyed the world not
once but twice.
But unlike other bleak apocalypse films, Snowpiercer tries to actively combat the necrofuturism
of our own imaginations. Rather than being a necrofuturistic film as such, it’s arguably
a critique of necrofuturism.
As Canavan argues: Life aboard the train was NOT an inevitable reality - rather it is a
“deliberately designed atrocity machine: someone laid the tracks, someone built the
train, someone is even now driving the cars and stoking the engine.” If ‘cramming
a bunch of people into one car to subsist on cockroach bars’ is inevitable, it’s
only because someone, ie Wilford, deliberately wasted space on an entire car of pools, or
another one of saunas, and whatever the hell this one is. If the kind of order Wilford
wants is “necessary,” it’s only because he designed it to be so. The artificiality
of the world is best demonstrated by the deliberate and intensive system of propaganda it necessitates.
As seen in the classroom scene, such propaganda and Wilford-worship is imperative to maintaining
this arbitrary order, even among those more fortunate.
That brings us to the end of the film, where Curtis has the option of inheriting Wilford’s
position, thus maintaining order and taking on his supposed preordained role. But he doesn’t.
Instead, he sacrifices his arm to save a child - and instructs his friend to blow a hole
in the train, which causes an avalanche that seems to kill almost everyone aboard.
But was such destruction necessary? At the beginning of the film, Curtis promises his
friend that when they take over the front of the train, things will be different - they
will rule justly and fairly.
- (Curtis) We’ll be different when we get there.
- (Jared) Having seen what he’s seen, and learned that even the noble Gilliam is complicit
in the train’s brutal architecture, he appears to no longer harbor any such hope. Rather,
in a fitting allegory for total revolution, Curtis ultimately decides that there IS no
better life to be had aboard this train, that the only escape is to tear it down entirely,
in the hopes that something new might spring out of it. And it does - two so-called “train
babies” survive, and step on to solid land for the first time. As they wander out, there
are two ways we can view this: One, these kids are literally screwed and potentially
might be eaten by that cute polar bear. Or two, they are venturing out onto untouched
snow to metaphorically construct a new world, a better, more compassionate mode of human
existence. So, kind of hopeful, against all odds?
Rather than merely warning about a necrocapitalist future, the film offers important lessons
on orienting revolutionaries, who Bong appears to more-than-just-a-little hope will rise
up against a system he reviles. Most notably: the lesson that rebelling with people of different
backgrounds and from different stations in life is critical for a revolution to succeed.
The members of the tail-end are diverse, and not all of them even speak the same language.
Yet a translator device allows Curtis to work with the higher-status Namgoong, who has “fallen”
due to his drug addiction. Similar moments of solidarity come in our torch-marathon to
the frontlines, where everyone- men, women, and children provide a valuable role in the
battle for the front. This stands in stark contrast to Bong’s more recent film - Parasite
- in which members of the working class bicker over crumbs from their benefactors instead
of working together. With these different backgrounds come different knowledge. Indeed,
it’s clear that Namgoong understands that the snow is melting because of his past relationship
with an Inuit woman
- (Jared) Like her, he is convinced that the earth is warming:
- (Jared) Later, we see him preoccupied with a single snowflake, and eventually deploying
his snow-knowledge to create an avalanche and derail the train.
It’s also worth noting that this cooperation is often juxtaposed with those on the top.
The train crew, too, use translators, but only to bark orders at the masses. And in
the classroom, a poster of Native Americans is shown in the background - perhaps asking
us to consider what it means to treat a group of people as an object of study rather than
to LEARN from them. All of this seems quite fitting for a film by Bong Joon Ho, who is
often credited with forging the way for a new, transnational form of film.
But what do you guys think? Are we being too optimistic, or is there secretly hope embedded
in this at-first-totally depressing film? Or is everything just awful forever? Let us
know what you think in the comments. Mad thanks to our incredible patrons for supporting the
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