Snowpiercer
Class Struggle
Between you and me, I’m going to be frank here. I’m not a socialist who will try to convince you of the correct way of governing, mainly because I’m not a socialist. I have a very minimal political agenda but if it came to a choice, capitalism is my go-to. Ever since beginning my film reviews, the film suggestions from my friends have been endless, topping one another in my film-priority list. There is, however, Snowpiercer, which was recommended to me by a friend some time ago. With its inspiration taken from French work “La Transperceneige”, the film is one of those futuristic endeavours that aims to impart a lesson or two to us, incorporating a real-world concern for global warming into its script. The premise of this film is straightforward and certainly challenges our beliefs on how society should be managed, bottled up within the confines of a Train To Busan-like sphere.
On the surface, Bong Joon-Ho’s (same director as Train to Busan) Snowpiercer is quite literally a linear story after a mass extinction event, leaving the world in an uninhabitable cold. The last fraction of humanity survives on a Noah’s ark of a train that will travel around the world in a supposed, eternal. The film chronicles the attempt of the impoverished members of the train’s tail section as they try to overtake the godlike captain at the very front, Wilford. While the tail section warriors led militarily by Curtis, and spiritually by Gilliam, make their way through successive compartments of the train, we are treated to a sort of live-action flowchart of the class system in a hierarchical society. It’s quite obvious that Snowpiercer is an allegory of class culture and how tensions innate within it lead to resentment and eventually, revolution.
Some have criticized the film for being so transparent in this respect, but the genius in director Bong Joon-Ho’s arthouse sci-fi action film is not in the message as such. Rather, through the tools and techniques of filmmaking, he conveys it. For example, it’s understandable symbolically why the tail section of the train might not have any windows. For passengers of that section, the train is literally, the world. Just as the lower classes in society are forced to be concerned almost exclusively with survival, living at the whims of ideologies invented by those of higher cultural standings. However, as Curtis and his band reach the front of the train toward the end of the film, we notice that those sections are also devoid of windows. In sauna cars and rave cars and drug cars, the affluent members of the upper class are just as encouraged as their counterparts to consider the train as the entirety of what there is. Even in the sacred engine room where Wilford maintains the life-giving machine he created, there’s an almost claustrophobic feeling. A feeling of only being able to see in the direction of the linear train’s linear path.
As Slavoj Zizek famously said.
It’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth, than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.
This philosophy is central to Snowpiercer. The first time the tail section looks laterally out the window, their response is as…
All dead.
As Gilliam attests, these people cannot see anything outside of the train, but death. Their focus is either forward or backward and all throughout the film, we see Curtis making choices that force him to look in either of these two directions, filmed by Bong Joon-Ho in beautiful profile. The front and tail sections are similar in another way. In the colour scheme, both are muted. In the back, it’s a mix of green and blue, and in the engine room, a kind of off-white predominance, a spoiled white symbolizing the false redemption of Curtis’ revolution. Indeed, as the film bears out, his revolution does not represent salvation for the sufferers of the train as he himself realizes when Wilford names him as the successor. Curtis is only perpetuating the system he seeks to bring down. Like so many revolutions in our world, Curtis and Gilliam’s revolution is in fact, an essential part of the exploitative system.
Bong Joon-Ho understands this. Visually, he is trying to direct our attention to another part of the train and another pair of protagonists. It is the middle section where windows outfit every car. It’s the middle section where a muted colour explodes into the full spectrum and it is two passengers from the middle section, Namgoong and his daughter, Yona, who eventually make the choice to derail the train and escape into a world all others deem to be frozen and dead. As Curtis fights his way forward, Namgoong is repeatedly concerned with what is outside the train, making sure his daughter sees that too. He explains to her what dirt is, how he used to walk on it. Yona is a train baby, which means she has never known any world but the train. Her father educates and protects her from the violence that defines the hierarchal struggle he wants her to escape.
By far the most symbolically rich scene of the film and the one I think Bong Joon-Ho is loudly signalling as the most important by his use of a full rainbow of colours is the car in which the middle-class (middle of the train children) are “educated”. Of course, like the front and the back, the middle of the train is meant to represent the middle class of something close to, but not exactly akin to contemporary capitalist society. Educated enough to think for themselves, yet comfortable enough to be highly susceptible to propaganda. The middle class is at once, the most important, the most dangerous cross section of society and the school is the place where the middle class is indoctrinated into a system that will exploit them and those less fortunate where ideology is most powerful. Indeed, this is how the members of the middle class become the tail section’s faceless oppressors all at the bidding of those who languish in hedonism and power.
Earlier in the film, Curtis figures out that the blunt tools of those oppressors’ guns are devoid of bullets yet when he gets to the school, the invisible and quand même real violence in this society lies and in a great false birth. Unlike the children in the middle section, Yona is given a true education which eventually comes to fruition in a truly lateral escape from their linear history. We, like Yona, are all trained babies born into a system that seems as immutable as the earth in Snowpiercer. Bong Joon-Ho gives us a poetic glimpse into how this system works and as he shows in the film, sometimes the best historian, is the final artist.
Ending
I believe that the ending of this film is also extremely symbolic. Instead of ending the film with Curtis taking over the train and potentially “fixing” the hierarchy, Bong Joon-Ho decides to end the film with destruction. This could be his message. Consider this: the tail end of the train is just as corrupt as the head end. Even Curtis at the end of the film was considering becoming corrupt once given power. Should Curtis become the leader, the hierarchy of the train would be continued, except this time the tail end would be the top while the head end would end up suffering for their “sins”. This is a reccurring theme. The shoe on the head. Regardless of who ever is on top, hierarchy leads to suffering. It is interesting how a linear style of film is used to present cyclic concepts. The cyclical movement of the train around the world is the same cycle of oppression of those in power and those at the bottom of society. The only way out of this vicious cycle is to destroy the train. And even then that destruction has another layer to it. In the film the train is compared to the world, and the people of the train to all of humanity. It can then be seen that the only solution to human oppression is the annihilation of the humans. The humans brought upon this global freezing in an attempt to correct the consequence of their global warming. Regardless of the class of capitalism humanity is the culprit for the destruction of the planet, except for the two lone survivors: the children, who were born into the world that was already broken and destroyed. The ending with the polar bear could signify that beyond all the human struggles and human conditions, there exists a world out there with different organisms.
It seems like Snowpiercer’s storytelling is identical to that of video games such as The Last of Us and the Assassin’s Creed series. A world is established through the designated “showcase path” and places NPC’s, posters on the walls, lines of dialogue and objects along the “corridor”. You hear people talking when you walk through that “corridor”, go on about their daily lives, do their jobs, music plays in the background. By the end of this walk, you have a world established. That is fine storytelling, just too commonly seen. Snowpiercer is not a revelation. It’s underrated, I’ll give it that. And like I said, the best historian, is the artist.
