Because this article is written in response to the spate of mainstream media reviews accompanying the release of Snowpiercer, first on the internet and then in theatrical distribution, rather than present a synopsis and review of the film, the author instead considers both the critical responses to the film and ruminates philosophically on the political, cultural and historical influences on Bong Joon-ho. The reader who has not yet seen Snowpiercer may enjoy reading Charles Karel Bouley's Huffinton Post review, or some other introduction to the film in addition to this afterword.
Now that the reviews are all in on Snowpiercer and near-unanimously showering accolades on South-Korean director, Bong Joon-ho, for his singular, rampaging essay on the human condition, we will likely see a second wave of commentary trickle in, this time by the serious cultural critics who specialize in exhuming the deeper social and political contents and implications reflecting such conditions as those informing contemporary class relations in general and the outbreak of violent conflicts around the world in particular. It is no surprise, then, that some veteran cineastes may be wondering what all the fuss about a branded sci-fi entertainment can be about.
It is because our post-9/11 era is without a serious cinematic masterpiece of war chronicling the array of lacerations and brutalities of the last thirteen years that audiences around the world have turned to science fiction for their pregnant, if not always explicit, visionary reflections of social unrest. Always the eager genre to sermonize moral positions on the most extreme malversations within contemporary culture, science fiction has never been bolder than in its openly politicized summation of the dark and violent predispositions of the human condition in its post-9/11 incarnation amorality, rage and brutality. And as the Snowpiercer has been released in the U.S. during the escalating conflicts in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine, the film will no doubt yield a second wave of commentary drawing corollaries between screen and battlefield.
For being without a more realistic reflection on war, we are an oddity. Like so many of the shards of history that we call eras and epochs, ours has been rent from continuity by a willful cataclysm of unimaginable depravity and agonizing death. But the serious, historicizing film that will translate the traumas and quests of the post-9/11 era into an iconography of contemporary warfare and class relations remains to be made. So far, only Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty count as our sole masterpieces reflecting the events and dominant ideologies of the post-9/11 era in America, and affecting its allies and enemies. But Bigelow's films depict individuals engaged in their own private battles respective to the war in Iraq and the war on terror without iconically capsulizing what became known as the battle of civilizations that began with the collapse of the World Trade Towers and proliferated in the ongoing chain of international and civil wars still disfiguring the Middle East.
To articulate the myriad complexities and players of so great an intercontinental and crosscultural war zone, we still await a singular work of art or entertainment that can summarize whatever new morality can be fashioned in the manner that helped to shape the antiwar era, first with the bombs dropped on Vietnam and Cambodia, and then scathingly summarized in a cinema of dissent by Robert Altman's MASH, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone's Platoon.
Before Vietnam, the cinema of the postwar era, cognizant that its viewers were still convulsing from the disclosures of concentration camps and the previously unknowable annihilations brought on at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, withdrew into the low-hanging existentialist and anti-colonialist anxiety of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. By contrast, the Great War years and its aftermath saw the nationalist celebrations of Howard Hawks's Air Force and Roberto Rosellini's trilogy, Open City, Paisan and Germany Year Zero. And though it took over a decade for World War I to become memorialized for audiences of the newly emergent cinema with Lewis Milestone's All Quiet of the Western Front and Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, we who are at approximately at the same lapse from 9/11, yet facilitated with the unprecedented digital capacity and megabudgets of the commercial industry are the independent filmmakers alike, must still await an iconic screen vision of the transformation of our pre-9/11 selfs, be it self-indulgent or self-critical.
Of course, there is nothing new about finding recourse in science fiction for expressing our political and moral contingencies--especially those reflecting our deepest anxieties--which might otherwise not be seen in the light of screens. In the 1950s and 1960s, sci-fi was the only mainstream vehicle for potentially subversive cultural criticism, however much it was handicapped by B-movie budgets and reduced largely to parody and subtext. But from the 1970s to the mid 2000s--the era of our self-conscious, self-appointed "postmodernism"--dystopian science fiction, posed as a liberated, if ironic, commentary on social ills, was sustained and enriched widely by enthralled intellectuals and mainstream audiences alike. When not sufficiently sustained in their appetite for the semiotics of warfare with the nostalgic revisionism of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, audiences turned to the more steady and ubiquitous diet of mythopoetic cyberpunk rebellion envisioned in Blade Runner, Mad Max, the Alien quadrilogy and The Matrix trilogy. But none of these visions ventured so far into the new dystopia to picture the logical materialism that informs the most brutal endgames, those reaching back to the medieval and renaissance religious allegories of end times, as has Snowpiercer.
In this light, it is rare that a film reflects all the injuries that homo sapiens self inflict in one simulated microcosm of the human condition. But that is precisely and enthrallingly what Bong's end of times thriller does. Or really, what we do as we find Snowpiercer greedily eating up all the malignancies and mayhem we can project onto it. In fact, we can attribute Snowpiercer's open reception to all life's anxieties and loathings to the film's evasion of easily-identifiable genres, combined with its broad, furious sweep of human cruelty and desperation--a combination that makes it a truly rare and authentic vehicle of moral and political, if potentially delusory and unstable, political prognostication. All of which is a tribute to the film's daring capacity to synthesize high-minded, avant-garde political allegory, off-key ironic black humor, and unrelentingly-brutal social conflict, in the wrapping of a summer entertainment.
Not since Sergei Eisenstein filmed Battleship Potempkin and October:Ten Days That Shook the World, and Fritz Lang introduced Metropolis, has a depiction of class struggle leading to violent revolution been so prominently placed in the foreground of a mainstream screen. All of which makes Snowpiercer the more remarkable for Bong's setting of his final solution to class difference and the final revolution that meets it head on in an exceedingly long train shuttling the last few hundred remnant humans and other life-forms allowed to survive the freezing over of the earth.
The eco-factor in Snowpiercer strategically anchors the story's relevance to our time, despite that it is only through the long-winded exposition of characters that we learn of the botched attempt to stop global warming with chemical coolants ejected into the atmosphere. Both the lateness and the ineptness of the attempt to reverse global warming on face value implicates a Republican-like denial of climate change, especially given that the remedy to be released into the earth's atmosphere has destroyed all life on earth except those high-net worth individuals with the resources to buy their way onto the train.
With the cataclysmic deep freeze of the continents and oceans into a single global glacier, all life but those high-net-worth individuals possessing privileged foresight onto the enhanced engineering of a leading entrepreneur could buy their way onto the train. The labor and food required for the journey was allowed to "gate crash" the train, so long as the intruders proved themselves strong and resourceful enough to fight and kill their way aboard before the train door slammed shut and bolted. As the high-net-worth passengers in the distant and unseen front cars of the train became increasingly outfitted with aquariums and terrariums that maintain their aristocratic expectations of luxury, albeit now brought down to the scale of sushi and fresh vegetables, the no-net worth underclass that crammed the train's tail has been envisioned with all the impoverished ferocity rendered by Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens during the Industrial Revolution. Except that the 19th-century authors never foresaw feeding their have nots with a cannibalism consuming children, the elderly, the disabled and--for those poor too lofty for the supreme degradation--the devouring of one's own limbs.
The wealth of such horrific passages lies in the real historical episodes of famine informing them. Snowpiercer could easily have been informed by the 19th-century American accounts of the John Frémont expedition that in seeking to chart out a Southern Pass over the tallest peaks of the Rockies, fell victim to the winter of 1842-43 as they approached the San Juan mountains. Moe famous is the Donner Party, stranded high in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the Winter of 1846-47, half of whom consumed their dead. Whatever accounts served Bong and his co-scripter, Kelly Masterson, or for that matter the creators of the French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige, which served as Bong's inspiration, the moral wealth that accompanies such accounts of infamy and heroism, as in Snowpiercer, derives entirely from those souls who either resorted to, or refused, devouring human flesh.
In this initiation to the train, the presumed gate crashers may have been better left dead, given that in the early days of their survival and forced isolation by the oligarchal class at the front, their extinction was calculated, cannibalism and all. Once the population has sufficiently decreased at the rear, the elite feeds and wins the tentative allegiance of the disenfranchised survivors with a single daily meal made of an appallingly-black gelatinous protein extracted by mysterious origin. There is never a moment we aren't aware of the precarious class relations dependent entirely on how well the exploited labor and commodified bodies of the proletariat class perform. There is also a middle, security force class that is allowed added if unseen benefits to buffer and thereby keep the train's population stable at the the expense of the most impoverished.
That Bong is able to conflate a political model of class warfare from the combined history, literature and political theory of the 19th Century and the cgi and social perspective of 21st-century science fiction leaves us pondering what contemporary real-world social and political inequalities and their potential escalation into revolutions and genocides are being consiously invoked. Not that it matters what world events Bong simulates. It's the viewer's projection of their own experiences and readings that propel s the action vitally forward. But that as well fits with Bong's vacillation between supplying us a philosophical and an absurd approach to the godlike view of class warfare, depending whether we momentarily enjoy the elite rationalization of human annihilation or the existentially absurd urgencies of the have nots. And if we are unable to keep from being overwhelmed by our godlike view, we can do, as my companion in the theater did, hide our heads under the seats.
If the violence is largely perceived as something greater than the sum of its atrocities, it is because the headlines of new stories informing our impression of civilization compels us to feel morally justified when we see in Snowpiercer a kind of feudal prognostication of the ghastly toll of casualties and destruction mounting in Gaza, Iraq, and Syria. Or when we see in the film the kind of intensifying political strife that could at any moment break out in Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, the Ukraine--or really anywhere that class and ideological tensions are near to boiling over. It's the strife that James Joyce called the nightmare of history from which we can't awake, a nightmare especially convulsive when history supplies us with the memories and accounts that warn us of what anarchy might ensue, failing a solution to the joblessness, debt and homelessness which continues to rise and destabilize the global economy.
If I here belabor the corollaries between the miseries seen in the film and those we know directly in real life, it is because Snowpiercer reads onscreen as if it had foreseen the apologies offered by the mainstream critics for audiences not wishing to dwelling on the politics and violence onscreen, as I have here. There's no reason we must enter the fray onscreen we are assured. It's all an allegory we are told, without informing us to what such unrelenting ferocity and inhuman disfiguration are allegories of. It's yet another dystopia, goes the most blatant euphemism for fascist self-loathing externalized by the film's depiction and accounts of extermination. Chief among these apologies is the not-to-be-forgotten and commercially-imposed imperative that the film functions chiefly as entertainment--fun as one critic reduces it--which is as much willful short shrift as anyone can expect from the corporately-employed media commentators whose collective mission is to fill theater seats and sell DVDs.
Whether we agree with or blame the mainstream critics' avoidance of the film's real-world correspondences, irony resonates in the critic's evasive silence and apology by mirroring, if not fulfilling, Snowpiercer's depiction of the propagandists who dispense the manipulative disinformation issued to the train's underclass. Our critics may lack the over-the-top parodies faultlessly performed by Tilda Swinton, as the fascist Minister of Information churning out the grist of the train's propaganda machine, or that of Alison Pill as the kindergarten teacher instilling reverence in her young charges for the train's sacred "Eternal Engine" and its maker-made-savior and deity, Mr. Wilford. With certain of the mainstream critics duplicating the film's portrayal of societal controls, we find the truths of the drama spillover from the screen onto reality through the dispersion of untruths. And so revolve the ironies of relativistic thinking infinitely.
The critics are right about one thing. We alone should choose whether or not to identify the film's analogies with our present-day global conflicts. But a greater wealth of dramatic tension comes knowing that the civil war we watch onscreen does no more than mirror the unrelenting class struggles demarcating human history. For that matter, it is for entertainment's sake that we consider such correspondences to bring the drama to life, and to do that we are best off contemplating ther social and economic interpretations of the pregnant yet malignant antagonism growing around the world between capital and labor, orthodoxies and sectarian heretics, authoritarian regimes and democratic mobilizers, militaristic occupiers and escaping refugees, global powers and economically paralyzed nations. Finally, for the sake of self respect we should ignore the advice that battles such as those simulated in Snowpiercer have little significance to our lives.
To do so would be to forget that Snowpiercer was being made at the height of the International Occupy Movement. Which means that the unfathomable nightmare that we watch onscreen can and should be discussed in terms of the 1% of high-net worth individuals around the globe having either, through the ineptitude or malversation of their sponsorship, killed off 98.99% of the earth's 99% low-net worthers, then enslaved the rest. Now that's entertainment.
However unready corporate-sponsored criticism is to interfacing with the global news sharing the very same pages, links and networks covering the growing disillusionment with leaders over the prolonged economic downturn, even the most generic corporate synopses can't avoid naming class warfare as the malefic action consuming Snowpiercer's entire story arc--if a story arc is what such a flat, minimalist and sustained theme can be called. The important distinction is that Snowpiercer may be the first mainstream entertainment entirely devoted to the phenomenon of class warfare. No matter how discrete the corporate aversion is to seeing itself implicated in a story about the last gasp of the human species as we know it, the people who will see themselves in the film and then acknowledge that their political interests are ignored by certain mainstream critics will invariably see through and recognize the paternalistic hand of authority at work, whether it manifests as corporate oligarchy or as repressive and murderous authoritarian regimes.
Yet even without such a time-specific political and economic setting, Snowpiercer courts historical contexts to elaborate what is no more nor less than an exceedingly graphic, if fittingly apocalyptic denouement to the history of human civilizations and tribes that has been marked by unrelenting genocide and nihilism. Anyone who thinks the film's script to be over the top need only consider that estimates now hold that 70,000,000 Chinese were annihilated in Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, while 61, 911,000 Soviets and Germans were murdered by Stalin's Gulag State, while 10,000,000 noncombatants were murdered by Hitler's stormtroopers and camps. Add to this the more recent genocides of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge; the Vietnamese killed by Viet Cong; the slaughter of Tustis at the hand of the Hutus in Rwanda; the range of ethnic cleansings of Bosniaks, Croatians and Serbs in the Balkans, and the sustain starvation of North Korean peasants and Sudanese and Somali refugees.
There is no mistaking Snowpiercer's modeling of the total oligarchical domination that we now find choking the prosperity out of societies and cultures through the kind of market machinations that ushered in the 2008 recession and which still threaten to undermine the free trade and enterprise that only a decade ago promised to alleviate poverty, crime and disease everywhere on earth. More succinctly if cosmologically put, Snowpiercer is that idealistic destroyer of world views which, in the mechanistically politcal sense, was bleakly foreseen by Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx centuries ago.
If we can look forward to what interpretations more in-depth and informed cultural and academic commentaries will hoist onto Snowpiercer, it is because of what's missing so far in the mainstream critics' coverage of the film's one-dimensional rampage by an impoverished and miserable humanity. And that is both a discussion of the film's mythopoetic reflection on real-political divisions and ideologies at work in the world and, feasibly, it's effect as a morality tale intent on stimulating serious political debate and activism.
Of course, no one wants to be cast, or to cast oneself, offensively in Snowpiercer's parable about the miseries heaped onto an underclass by its overlords to the extent that any semblance of a middle class is diminished to stereotyped-casting as puppet-like headmasters, storm troopers, technocrats and the beautiful sextoys of the ostentaciously rich--the only semblance of a middle class recognizable in Snowpiercer. We should as well be mindful that the Left is as capable of stereotyping its political opponents as the Right. In this regard, even the artists among the train's underclass are revealed in Snowpiercer to be eagerly seeking the favor of the dictator-deity when a call from the front of the train to the lumpenproletariat at the rear is for a symphonic violinist. While recalling similar beckon calls in such holocaust films Playing for Time and The Pianist, the apotheosis of the artist chosen to serenade the great and deified Wilford (a clear swipe at the megalomania of Mao Tse-Tung and Joeph Stalin) results in the violent separation of the man from his equally talented violinist wife, who is then and there assaulted and permanently branded with a brutal gash across her face.
The great value of narrative art and entertainment is the facility it supplies for us to analogize what happens on the screen, stage, or paper with the circumstances of our own lives. All of which is reason why we should think about what happens onscreen in relation to our lives, not least of all, those of us dependent on corporations for our livelihood.
But much thought can also be gleaned by considering how Snowpiercer acts out a model of the perennial civil war of homos sapiens drawn for us by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. As in Hobbes, the human charnel of Snowpiercer are shown to be gullibly mesmerized and roused by remote, even invisible leaders, who look to violence and brutal suppression to achieve their aims, whether they have the support of the mob or buttress their supremacy with cruelty and annihilation--allusions easily fitting two of the more ruthless princely profiles Niccolo Machiavelli paints for his usurpers and mobilizers of the warring Italian states throughout the Italian Renaissance.
The third political model seen onscreen as the embodiment of action, is the division of human beings that, though imposed by the combined requirements of survival, opportunity, and resourceful ability, catalyzes rebellion against the forced exploitation degrading human relations to degrees of servility and slavery. In this regard, Snowpiercer opens at the end of the last stage of class conflict that Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels foresaw necessitating cyclical revolutions, and which we learn through exposition far into the film, that had recurred repeatedly onboard the train over the course of seventeen years.
SPOLIER ALERT: For maximum suspense, read the remaining commentary only after seeing the film.
Although the political struggle is played out as one huge rampage through the train and the film, by contrast, only at the obligatorily-explosive finale do we learn that all the strife and its deadly consequences has a natural yet mechanistic end in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem--in this case really a mechosystem ingeniously designed by Wilford. The feudalistic reasoning offered for the necessitation of war and death will strike modern audiences accustomed to prosperity and democracy as inhuman and demonic, but in fact it is a logic that has been induced by the history of human existence and employed by autocratic regimes and tribes the world over. The rationalization to which I refer is the so-called imperative of population control and healthful living space that in times and places of overcrowding manifests in the imposition of death sentences and the soldiering of conflicts, even in some cultures, the human sacrifice to blood-thirsty deities.
In Snowpiercer, we hear a maniacal variation on Darwin's natural selection unfold, one that manifests both in the animal food chain and the survival of the fittest evolutionary principle combined and served up in a particularly delusional but enthralling and largely one-way conversation between the films twin antagonists, as the clock to extinction clicks away. We met the rebel leader Curtis, lent a shade of reticence and cluelessness by Chris Evans, at the beginning of the film, and it is his mythopoetic character arc as a Prometheus figure of the Occupy generation who, like his Greek origin, introduces fire to the train's underclass for its defense. But this final scene offering rationalization and even empathy is given us to savor our introduction to the train's entrepreneur-engineer-turned-mythic savior.
As played by Ed Harris, Wilford is the striking image of Machiavelli's Prince who manically believes he is balancing "all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict" with those "benefits given little by little, so that the flavor of them may last longer".
It is as the two adversaries become acquainted in a truce over a meal--call it a last supper, fittingly of meat, the first time in seventeen years for Curtis, a daily dish for the god. Over the absurd cordiality of the meal, the image of gentility that masks so many of history's atrocities, we hear the kind of rationalization of genocide premised on the dire need for living space--the Lebensraum that Hitler introduces in Mein Kampf and sold to the economically strapped and overcrowded German citizenry of the 1920s and 1930s. But then living space is the modern variation of the ancient rationalization of the requirement of territory to justify war, given that the overcrowding that comes with the population growth of the last century. And it isn't restricted to the Nazis, given that Israeli Likud Deputy Knesset Speaker, Moshe Feiglin just last week justified the emptying Gaza of its Palestinian residents when he writes that Gaza "will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel." I must immediately add that living space is equally the concern of Hamas, however little they can do about it.
It matters little that in Snowpiercer, despite the pains Bong took to racially diversify the principal cast, among whom the continents are ostensibly represented, just as the forced extinction is imposed on a racially heterogeneous crowd. It is revealing, however, that the first class compartments of the train, secured with impenetrable doors and several cars outfitted with industrial, agricultural, and aquatic compartments sustaining and entertaining the train's oligarchical class, except for the children, appear to be whites who have absconded with the young of all the races onboard, and who are either indoctrinated in a pedagogy of propaganda or enslaved in the bowels of the train to facilitate locomotion.
If Bong's revolution appears more true to Hobbes' paranoid vision of the mechanistically-inborn imperative in all humans to savage competition, no doubt it is because since the 18th-century, revolutions, whether waged in democratic liberty or in the name of Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, all devolved into dictatorships against the earlier inhabitants, classes and rulers, and in Communism's case, against the very proletariat it was supposed to liberate. Is it enough to site the French Revolution that took over a century to dispense wider democratic liberties without the persecution of one class by another? Or the American Revolution whose exalted humanism was thwarted flagrantly by the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement and disenfranchisement of Africans and their descendants? If these, the revolutions to later yield the most accomplished of democracies can be seen to inform Snowpiercer, is there any hope that we might someday identify a feasible model of government that has not been marred by an historical fear of difference?
To my knowledge, neither Bong nor his co-scripter Kelly Masterson, nor Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette--the creators of Le Transperceneige, have made any statement invoking this formidable trimurti of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx. On the other hand, Bong as a South Korean can only be intimately familiar with the Marxist, Machivellian and Hobbesian machinations of the father and son supreme leaders of North Korea, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un. As for the rest of us, even our most populist attitude toward modern equations of power, class and conflict are shaped by what has been disseminated into the mainstream by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx--and at no time more virulently than when a resurgence of protests, and any one of the protracted crises--joblessness, homelessness, military interventions--punch a hole through our prosperity charts and peace treaties.
No one in recent decades has surpassed Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx in the analysis of cruelty, repression and extreme degradation, and calling them to mind, as Snowpiercer does in the universal language of actions or in retrospect enriches our interpretation of several categories of scenes throughout the film. But that shouldn't stop the viewer from pulling out his or her favorite political theorist to project onto the film's iconography and rationale.
Finally, the most salient distinction with regard to Snowpiercer's entertainment value is that, whereas all the other dystopian flicks before it bring some semblance of moral superiority if not political victory for all their heroes' striving, nihilism consumes both sides of the Snowpiercer equation with near equal disregard for such human values as valor and righeousness. The only operating principle, if a principle is what it can be called, is the end that complete entropy allows.
And yet even in that end a new Adam and Eve revive hope in the longevity of the human race. But to anyone who is an avid viewer of the Alien films recognizes, the survivors left to repopulate the humankind can be as rapacious an organism at odds with all other life forms in its path.
It is true that if we of the post 9/11 era had a masterful war film, or a film portraying the atrocities of our time matching such films as The Killing Fields, Hotel Rawanda, The Battle of Algiers, and the scores of Holocaust productions, we would be bestowed a more potent vehicle of catharsis for the historical recollections of real genocidal pathology still to be endured by survivors so many years after their resue. On the other hand, such films don't in general strive to embody the Hobbsian politics of the human condition that can be universally seen to apply while receiving the projections of everyone everywhere. For specific wars and genocides are treated by the modern international community in their denial as aberrations, when in fact history gives every indication that ethnic cleansings haven't been the exception but until recent centuries were the rule of the majority of hostile relations between civilizations, states and tribes.
Neither do the historical genocide and war films give vision to existentialist essays on the imperative of rebellion in the face of fascism imposed by the Left and the Right. Bong, by contrast, has provided us with the particularly chilling allegory of our new millenium. To imagine that the demise of rich and poor alike will result in class warfare is not something that we can rise above through high-minded ideology, reason, science or faith in God or humanity, but rather what we must either submit to in the unyielding force of nature that governs creation and entropy. Our only defense against such an overwhelmingly dystopia is to recall that the cosmology on which it is based is also a human contrivance and thereby as likely to be an epistemological conceit (of knowing the meaning of the world, the purpose of a God) as it is a logically incomplete calculation (in predicting overpopulation, global warming, sea level rise).
The society we watch is without Locke's Social Contract, without a system of consents. And if the film promotes a Hobbesian view of human nature as I think it does, it is also without a model of heroism. For in place of heroism we find a compulsive competition at work, one which is operative at the very foundation of human nature and thereby reduces even the highest achievements of culture and civilization to a mechanistic variation of stimulus and response, the efforts of Curtis and his ilk in waging rebellion are recontextualized as no more than an animalistic imperative for survival.
The end.
...having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune. This arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1531
In seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits ... For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1531
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. ... It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Karl Marx and Fridrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
Karl Marx and Fridrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.
Now that the reviews are all in on Snowpiercer and near-unanimously showering accolades on South-Korean director, Bong Joon-ho, for his singular, rampaging essay on the human condition, we will likely see a second wave of commentary trickle in, this time by the serious cultural critics who specialize in exhuming the deeper social and political contents and implications reflecting such conditions as those informing contemporary class relations in general and the outbreak of violent conflicts around the world in particular. It is no surprise, then, that some veteran cineastes may be wondering what all the fuss about a branded sci-fi entertainment can be about.
It is because our post-9/11 era is without a serious cinematic masterpiece of war chronicling the array of lacerations and brutalities of the last thirteen years that audiences around the world have turned to science fiction for their pregnant, if not always explicit, visionary reflections of social unrest. Always the eager genre to sermonize moral positions on the most extreme malversations within contemporary culture, science fiction has never been bolder than in its openly politicized summation of the dark and violent predispositions of the human condition in its post-9/11 incarnation amorality, rage and brutality. And as the Snowpiercer has been released in the U.S. during the escalating conflicts in Gaza, Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine, the film will no doubt yield a second wave of commentary drawing corollaries between screen and battlefield.
For being without a more realistic reflection on war, we are an oddity. Like so many of the shards of history that we call eras and epochs, ours has been rent from continuity by a willful cataclysm of unimaginable depravity and agonizing death. But the serious, historicizing film that will translate the traumas and quests of the post-9/11 era into an iconography of contemporary warfare and class relations remains to be made. So far, only Katherine Bigelow's Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty count as our sole masterpieces reflecting the events and dominant ideologies of the post-9/11 era in America, and affecting its allies and enemies. But Bigelow's films depict individuals engaged in their own private battles respective to the war in Iraq and the war on terror without iconically capsulizing what became known as the battle of civilizations that began with the collapse of the World Trade Towers and proliferated in the ongoing chain of international and civil wars still disfiguring the Middle East.
To articulate the myriad complexities and players of so great an intercontinental and crosscultural war zone, we still await a singular work of art or entertainment that can summarize whatever new morality can be fashioned in the manner that helped to shape the antiwar era, first with the bombs dropped on Vietnam and Cambodia, and then scathingly summarized in a cinema of dissent by Robert Altman's MASH, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Oliver Stone's Platoon.
Before Vietnam, the cinema of the postwar era, cognizant that its viewers were still convulsing from the disclosures of concentration camps and the previously unknowable annihilations brought on at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, withdrew into the low-hanging existentialist and anti-colonialist anxiety of Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory and Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers. By contrast, the Great War years and its aftermath saw the nationalist celebrations of Howard Hawks's Air Force and Roberto Rosellini's trilogy, Open City, Paisan and Germany Year Zero. And though it took over a decade for World War I to become memorialized for audiences of the newly emergent cinema with Lewis Milestone's All Quiet of the Western Front and Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion, we who are at approximately at the same lapse from 9/11, yet facilitated with the unprecedented digital capacity and megabudgets of the commercial industry are the independent filmmakers alike, must still await an iconic screen vision of the transformation of our pre-9/11 selfs, be it self-indulgent or self-critical.
Of course, there is nothing new about finding recourse in science fiction for expressing our political and moral contingencies--especially those reflecting our deepest anxieties--which might otherwise not be seen in the light of screens. In the 1950s and 1960s, sci-fi was the only mainstream vehicle for potentially subversive cultural criticism, however much it was handicapped by B-movie budgets and reduced largely to parody and subtext. But from the 1970s to the mid 2000s--the era of our self-conscious, self-appointed "postmodernism"--dystopian science fiction, posed as a liberated, if ironic, commentary on social ills, was sustained and enriched widely by enthralled intellectuals and mainstream audiences alike. When not sufficiently sustained in their appetite for the semiotics of warfare with the nostalgic revisionism of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, audiences turned to the more steady and ubiquitous diet of mythopoetic cyberpunk rebellion envisioned in Blade Runner, Mad Max, the Alien quadrilogy and The Matrix trilogy. But none of these visions ventured so far into the new dystopia to picture the logical materialism that informs the most brutal endgames, those reaching back to the medieval and renaissance religious allegories of end times, as has Snowpiercer.
In this light, it is rare that a film reflects all the injuries that homo sapiens self inflict in one simulated microcosm of the human condition. But that is precisely and enthrallingly what Bong's end of times thriller does. Or really, what we do as we find Snowpiercer greedily eating up all the malignancies and mayhem we can project onto it. In fact, we can attribute Snowpiercer's open reception to all life's anxieties and loathings to the film's evasion of easily-identifiable genres, combined with its broad, furious sweep of human cruelty and desperation--a combination that makes it a truly rare and authentic vehicle of moral and political, if potentially delusory and unstable, political prognostication. All of which is a tribute to the film's daring capacity to synthesize high-minded, avant-garde political allegory, off-key ironic black humor, and unrelentingly-brutal social conflict, in the wrapping of a summer entertainment.
Not since Sergei Eisenstein filmed Battleship Potempkin and October:Ten Days That Shook the World, and Fritz Lang introduced Metropolis, has a depiction of class struggle leading to violent revolution been so prominently placed in the foreground of a mainstream screen. All of which makes Snowpiercer the more remarkable for Bong's setting of his final solution to class difference and the final revolution that meets it head on in an exceedingly long train shuttling the last few hundred remnant humans and other life-forms allowed to survive the freezing over of the earth.
The eco-factor in Snowpiercer strategically anchors the story's relevance to our time, despite that it is only through the long-winded exposition of characters that we learn of the botched attempt to stop global warming with chemical coolants ejected into the atmosphere. Both the lateness and the ineptness of the attempt to reverse global warming on face value implicates a Republican-like denial of climate change, especially given that the remedy to be released into the earth's atmosphere has destroyed all life on earth except those high-net worth individuals with the resources to buy their way onto the train.
With the cataclysmic deep freeze of the continents and oceans into a single global glacier, all life but those high-net-worth individuals possessing privileged foresight onto the enhanced engineering of a leading entrepreneur could buy their way onto the train. The labor and food required for the journey was allowed to "gate crash" the train, so long as the intruders proved themselves strong and resourceful enough to fight and kill their way aboard before the train door slammed shut and bolted. As the high-net-worth passengers in the distant and unseen front cars of the train became increasingly outfitted with aquariums and terrariums that maintain their aristocratic expectations of luxury, albeit now brought down to the scale of sushi and fresh vegetables, the no-net worth underclass that crammed the train's tail has been envisioned with all the impoverished ferocity rendered by Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens during the Industrial Revolution. Except that the 19th-century authors never foresaw feeding their have nots with a cannibalism consuming children, the elderly, the disabled and--for those poor too lofty for the supreme degradation--the devouring of one's own limbs.
The wealth of such horrific passages lies in the real historical episodes of famine informing them. Snowpiercer could easily have been informed by the 19th-century American accounts of the John Frémont expedition that in seeking to chart out a Southern Pass over the tallest peaks of the Rockies, fell victim to the winter of 1842-43 as they approached the San Juan mountains. Moe famous is the Donner Party, stranded high in the Sierra Nevada mountains during the Winter of 1846-47, half of whom consumed their dead. Whatever accounts served Bong and his co-scripter, Kelly Masterson, or for that matter the creators of the French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige, which served as Bong's inspiration, the moral wealth that accompanies such accounts of infamy and heroism, as in Snowpiercer, derives entirely from those souls who either resorted to, or refused, devouring human flesh.
In this initiation to the train, the presumed gate crashers may have been better left dead, given that in the early days of their survival and forced isolation by the oligarchal class at the front, their extinction was calculated, cannibalism and all. Once the population has sufficiently decreased at the rear, the elite feeds and wins the tentative allegiance of the disenfranchised survivors with a single daily meal made of an appallingly-black gelatinous protein extracted by mysterious origin. There is never a moment we aren't aware of the precarious class relations dependent entirely on how well the exploited labor and commodified bodies of the proletariat class perform. There is also a middle, security force class that is allowed added if unseen benefits to buffer and thereby keep the train's population stable at the the expense of the most impoverished.
That Bong is able to conflate a political model of class warfare from the combined history, literature and political theory of the 19th Century and the cgi and social perspective of 21st-century science fiction leaves us pondering what contemporary real-world social and political inequalities and their potential escalation into revolutions and genocides are being consiously invoked. Not that it matters what world events Bong simulates. It's the viewer's projection of their own experiences and readings that propel s the action vitally forward. But that as well fits with Bong's vacillation between supplying us a philosophical and an absurd approach to the godlike view of class warfare, depending whether we momentarily enjoy the elite rationalization of human annihilation or the existentially absurd urgencies of the have nots. And if we are unable to keep from being overwhelmed by our godlike view, we can do, as my companion in the theater did, hide our heads under the seats.
If the violence is largely perceived as something greater than the sum of its atrocities, it is because the headlines of new stories informing our impression of civilization compels us to feel morally justified when we see in Snowpiercer a kind of feudal prognostication of the ghastly toll of casualties and destruction mounting in Gaza, Iraq, and Syria. Or when we see in the film the kind of intensifying political strife that could at any moment break out in Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, the Ukraine--or really anywhere that class and ideological tensions are near to boiling over. It's the strife that James Joyce called the nightmare of history from which we can't awake, a nightmare especially convulsive when history supplies us with the memories and accounts that warn us of what anarchy might ensue, failing a solution to the joblessness, debt and homelessness which continues to rise and destabilize the global economy.
If I here belabor the corollaries between the miseries seen in the film and those we know directly in real life, it is because Snowpiercer reads onscreen as if it had foreseen the apologies offered by the mainstream critics for audiences not wishing to dwelling on the politics and violence onscreen, as I have here. There's no reason we must enter the fray onscreen we are assured. It's all an allegory we are told, without informing us to what such unrelenting ferocity and inhuman disfiguration are allegories of. It's yet another dystopia, goes the most blatant euphemism for fascist self-loathing externalized by the film's depiction and accounts of extermination. Chief among these apologies is the not-to-be-forgotten and commercially-imposed imperative that the film functions chiefly as entertainment--fun as one critic reduces it--which is as much willful short shrift as anyone can expect from the corporately-employed media commentators whose collective mission is to fill theater seats and sell DVDs.
Whether we agree with or blame the mainstream critics' avoidance of the film's real-world correspondences, irony resonates in the critic's evasive silence and apology by mirroring, if not fulfilling, Snowpiercer's depiction of the propagandists who dispense the manipulative disinformation issued to the train's underclass. Our critics may lack the over-the-top parodies faultlessly performed by Tilda Swinton, as the fascist Minister of Information churning out the grist of the train's propaganda machine, or that of Alison Pill as the kindergarten teacher instilling reverence in her young charges for the train's sacred "Eternal Engine" and its maker-made-savior and deity, Mr. Wilford. With certain of the mainstream critics duplicating the film's portrayal of societal controls, we find the truths of the drama spillover from the screen onto reality through the dispersion of untruths. And so revolve the ironies of relativistic thinking infinitely.
The critics are right about one thing. We alone should choose whether or not to identify the film's analogies with our present-day global conflicts. But a greater wealth of dramatic tension comes knowing that the civil war we watch onscreen does no more than mirror the unrelenting class struggles demarcating human history. For that matter, it is for entertainment's sake that we consider such correspondences to bring the drama to life, and to do that we are best off contemplating ther social and economic interpretations of the pregnant yet malignant antagonism growing around the world between capital and labor, orthodoxies and sectarian heretics, authoritarian regimes and democratic mobilizers, militaristic occupiers and escaping refugees, global powers and economically paralyzed nations. Finally, for the sake of self respect we should ignore the advice that battles such as those simulated in Snowpiercer have little significance to our lives.
To do so would be to forget that Snowpiercer was being made at the height of the International Occupy Movement. Which means that the unfathomable nightmare that we watch onscreen can and should be discussed in terms of the 1% of high-net worth individuals around the globe having either, through the ineptitude or malversation of their sponsorship, killed off 98.99% of the earth's 99% low-net worthers, then enslaved the rest. Now that's entertainment.
However unready corporate-sponsored criticism is to interfacing with the global news sharing the very same pages, links and networks covering the growing disillusionment with leaders over the prolonged economic downturn, even the most generic corporate synopses can't avoid naming class warfare as the malefic action consuming Snowpiercer's entire story arc--if a story arc is what such a flat, minimalist and sustained theme can be called. The important distinction is that Snowpiercer may be the first mainstream entertainment entirely devoted to the phenomenon of class warfare. No matter how discrete the corporate aversion is to seeing itself implicated in a story about the last gasp of the human species as we know it, the people who will see themselves in the film and then acknowledge that their political interests are ignored by certain mainstream critics will invariably see through and recognize the paternalistic hand of authority at work, whether it manifests as corporate oligarchy or as repressive and murderous authoritarian regimes.
Yet even without such a time-specific political and economic setting, Snowpiercer courts historical contexts to elaborate what is no more nor less than an exceedingly graphic, if fittingly apocalyptic denouement to the history of human civilizations and tribes that has been marked by unrelenting genocide and nihilism. Anyone who thinks the film's script to be over the top need only consider that estimates now hold that 70,000,000 Chinese were annihilated in Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, while 61, 911,000 Soviets and Germans were murdered by Stalin's Gulag State, while 10,000,000 noncombatants were murdered by Hitler's stormtroopers and camps. Add to this the more recent genocides of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge; the Vietnamese killed by Viet Cong; the slaughter of Tustis at the hand of the Hutus in Rwanda; the range of ethnic cleansings of Bosniaks, Croatians and Serbs in the Balkans, and the sustain starvation of North Korean peasants and Sudanese and Somali refugees.
There is no mistaking Snowpiercer's modeling of the total oligarchical domination that we now find choking the prosperity out of societies and cultures through the kind of market machinations that ushered in the 2008 recession and which still threaten to undermine the free trade and enterprise that only a decade ago promised to alleviate poverty, crime and disease everywhere on earth. More succinctly if cosmologically put, Snowpiercer is that idealistic destroyer of world views which, in the mechanistically politcal sense, was bleakly foreseen by Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Karl Marx centuries ago.
If we can look forward to what interpretations more in-depth and informed cultural and academic commentaries will hoist onto Snowpiercer, it is because of what's missing so far in the mainstream critics' coverage of the film's one-dimensional rampage by an impoverished and miserable humanity. And that is both a discussion of the film's mythopoetic reflection on real-political divisions and ideologies at work in the world and, feasibly, it's effect as a morality tale intent on stimulating serious political debate and activism.
Of course, no one wants to be cast, or to cast oneself, offensively in Snowpiercer's parable about the miseries heaped onto an underclass by its overlords to the extent that any semblance of a middle class is diminished to stereotyped-casting as puppet-like headmasters, storm troopers, technocrats and the beautiful sextoys of the ostentaciously rich--the only semblance of a middle class recognizable in Snowpiercer. We should as well be mindful that the Left is as capable of stereotyping its political opponents as the Right. In this regard, even the artists among the train's underclass are revealed in Snowpiercer to be eagerly seeking the favor of the dictator-deity when a call from the front of the train to the lumpenproletariat at the rear is for a symphonic violinist. While recalling similar beckon calls in such holocaust films Playing for Time and The Pianist, the apotheosis of the artist chosen to serenade the great and deified Wilford (a clear swipe at the megalomania of Mao Tse-Tung and Joeph Stalin) results in the violent separation of the man from his equally talented violinist wife, who is then and there assaulted and permanently branded with a brutal gash across her face.
The great value of narrative art and entertainment is the facility it supplies for us to analogize what happens on the screen, stage, or paper with the circumstances of our own lives. All of which is reason why we should think about what happens onscreen in relation to our lives, not least of all, those of us dependent on corporations for our livelihood.
But much thought can also be gleaned by considering how Snowpiercer acts out a model of the perennial civil war of homos sapiens drawn for us by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. As in Hobbes, the human charnel of Snowpiercer are shown to be gullibly mesmerized and roused by remote, even invisible leaders, who look to violence and brutal suppression to achieve their aims, whether they have the support of the mob or buttress their supremacy with cruelty and annihilation--allusions easily fitting two of the more ruthless princely profiles Niccolo Machiavelli paints for his usurpers and mobilizers of the warring Italian states throughout the Italian Renaissance.
The third political model seen onscreen as the embodiment of action, is the division of human beings that, though imposed by the combined requirements of survival, opportunity, and resourceful ability, catalyzes rebellion against the forced exploitation degrading human relations to degrees of servility and slavery. In this regard, Snowpiercer opens at the end of the last stage of class conflict that Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels foresaw necessitating cyclical revolutions, and which we learn through exposition far into the film, that had recurred repeatedly onboard the train over the course of seventeen years.
SPOLIER ALERT: For maximum suspense, read the remaining commentary only after seeing the film.
Although the political struggle is played out as one huge rampage through the train and the film, by contrast, only at the obligatorily-explosive finale do we learn that all the strife and its deadly consequences has a natural yet mechanistic end in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem--in this case really a mechosystem ingeniously designed by Wilford. The feudalistic reasoning offered for the necessitation of war and death will strike modern audiences accustomed to prosperity and democracy as inhuman and demonic, but in fact it is a logic that has been induced by the history of human existence and employed by autocratic regimes and tribes the world over. The rationalization to which I refer is the so-called imperative of population control and healthful living space that in times and places of overcrowding manifests in the imposition of death sentences and the soldiering of conflicts, even in some cultures, the human sacrifice to blood-thirsty deities.
In Snowpiercer, we hear a maniacal variation on Darwin's natural selection unfold, one that manifests both in the animal food chain and the survival of the fittest evolutionary principle combined and served up in a particularly delusional but enthralling and largely one-way conversation between the films twin antagonists, as the clock to extinction clicks away. We met the rebel leader Curtis, lent a shade of reticence and cluelessness by Chris Evans, at the beginning of the film, and it is his mythopoetic character arc as a Prometheus figure of the Occupy generation who, like his Greek origin, introduces fire to the train's underclass for its defense. But this final scene offering rationalization and even empathy is given us to savor our introduction to the train's entrepreneur-engineer-turned-mythic savior.
As played by Ed Harris, Wilford is the striking image of Machiavelli's Prince who manically believes he is balancing "all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict" with those "benefits given little by little, so that the flavor of them may last longer".
It is as the two adversaries become acquainted in a truce over a meal--call it a last supper, fittingly of meat, the first time in seventeen years for Curtis, a daily dish for the god. Over the absurd cordiality of the meal, the image of gentility that masks so many of history's atrocities, we hear the kind of rationalization of genocide premised on the dire need for living space--the Lebensraum that Hitler introduces in Mein Kampf and sold to the economically strapped and overcrowded German citizenry of the 1920s and 1930s. But then living space is the modern variation of the ancient rationalization of the requirement of territory to justify war, given that the overcrowding that comes with the population growth of the last century. And it isn't restricted to the Nazis, given that Israeli Likud Deputy Knesset Speaker, Moshe Feiglin just last week justified the emptying Gaza of its Palestinian residents when he writes that Gaza "will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel." I must immediately add that living space is equally the concern of Hamas, however little they can do about it.
It matters little that in Snowpiercer, despite the pains Bong took to racially diversify the principal cast, among whom the continents are ostensibly represented, just as the forced extinction is imposed on a racially heterogeneous crowd. It is revealing, however, that the first class compartments of the train, secured with impenetrable doors and several cars outfitted with industrial, agricultural, and aquatic compartments sustaining and entertaining the train's oligarchical class, except for the children, appear to be whites who have absconded with the young of all the races onboard, and who are either indoctrinated in a pedagogy of propaganda or enslaved in the bowels of the train to facilitate locomotion.
If Bong's revolution appears more true to Hobbes' paranoid vision of the mechanistically-inborn imperative in all humans to savage competition, no doubt it is because since the 18th-century, revolutions, whether waged in democratic liberty or in the name of Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat, all devolved into dictatorships against the earlier inhabitants, classes and rulers, and in Communism's case, against the very proletariat it was supposed to liberate. Is it enough to site the French Revolution that took over a century to dispense wider democratic liberties without the persecution of one class by another? Or the American Revolution whose exalted humanism was thwarted flagrantly by the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement and disenfranchisement of Africans and their descendants? If these, the revolutions to later yield the most accomplished of democracies can be seen to inform Snowpiercer, is there any hope that we might someday identify a feasible model of government that has not been marred by an historical fear of difference?
To my knowledge, neither Bong nor his co-scripter Kelly Masterson, nor Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette--the creators of Le Transperceneige, have made any statement invoking this formidable trimurti of Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx. On the other hand, Bong as a South Korean can only be intimately familiar with the Marxist, Machivellian and Hobbesian machinations of the father and son supreme leaders of North Korea, Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un. As for the rest of us, even our most populist attitude toward modern equations of power, class and conflict are shaped by what has been disseminated into the mainstream by Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx--and at no time more virulently than when a resurgence of protests, and any one of the protracted crises--joblessness, homelessness, military interventions--punch a hole through our prosperity charts and peace treaties.
No one in recent decades has surpassed Machiavelli, Hobbes and Marx in the analysis of cruelty, repression and extreme degradation, and calling them to mind, as Snowpiercer does in the universal language of actions or in retrospect enriches our interpretation of several categories of scenes throughout the film. But that shouldn't stop the viewer from pulling out his or her favorite political theorist to project onto the film's iconography and rationale.
Finally, the most salient distinction with regard to Snowpiercer's entertainment value is that, whereas all the other dystopian flicks before it bring some semblance of moral superiority if not political victory for all their heroes' striving, nihilism consumes both sides of the Snowpiercer equation with near equal disregard for such human values as valor and righeousness. The only operating principle, if a principle is what it can be called, is the end that complete entropy allows.
And yet even in that end a new Adam and Eve revive hope in the longevity of the human race. But to anyone who is an avid viewer of the Alien films recognizes, the survivors left to repopulate the humankind can be as rapacious an organism at odds with all other life forms in its path.
It is true that if we of the post 9/11 era had a masterful war film, or a film portraying the atrocities of our time matching such films as The Killing Fields, Hotel Rawanda, The Battle of Algiers, and the scores of Holocaust productions, we would be bestowed a more potent vehicle of catharsis for the historical recollections of real genocidal pathology still to be endured by survivors so many years after their resue. On the other hand, such films don't in general strive to embody the Hobbsian politics of the human condition that can be universally seen to apply while receiving the projections of everyone everywhere. For specific wars and genocides are treated by the modern international community in their denial as aberrations, when in fact history gives every indication that ethnic cleansings haven't been the exception but until recent centuries were the rule of the majority of hostile relations between civilizations, states and tribes.
Neither do the historical genocide and war films give vision to existentialist essays on the imperative of rebellion in the face of fascism imposed by the Left and the Right. Bong, by contrast, has provided us with the particularly chilling allegory of our new millenium. To imagine that the demise of rich and poor alike will result in class warfare is not something that we can rise above through high-minded ideology, reason, science or faith in God or humanity, but rather what we must either submit to in the unyielding force of nature that governs creation and entropy. Our only defense against such an overwhelmingly dystopia is to recall that the cosmology on which it is based is also a human contrivance and thereby as likely to be an epistemological conceit (of knowing the meaning of the world, the purpose of a God) as it is a logically incomplete calculation (in predicting overpopulation, global warming, sea level rise).
The society we watch is without Locke's Social Contract, without a system of consents. And if the film promotes a Hobbesian view of human nature as I think it does, it is also without a model of heroism. For in place of heroism we find a compulsive competition at work, one which is operative at the very foundation of human nature and thereby reduces even the highest achievements of culture and civilization to a mechanistic variation of stimulus and response, the efforts of Curtis and his ilk in waging rebellion are recontextualized as no more than an animalistic imperative for survival.
The end.
...having led an enormous army, composed of many various races of men, to fight in foreign lands, no dissensions arose either among them or against the prince, whether in his bad or in his good fortune. This arose from nothing else than his inhuman cruelty, which, with his boundless valour, made him revered and terrible in the sight of his soldiers, but without that cruelty, his other virtues were not sufficient to produce this effect.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1531
In seizing a state, the usurper ought to examine closely into all those injuries which it is necessary for him to inflict, and to do them all at one stroke so as not to have to repeat them daily; and thus by not unsettling men he will be able to reassure them, and win them to himself by benefits ... For injuries ought to be done all at one time, so that, being tasted less, they offend less; benefits ought to be given little by little, so that the flavour of them may last longer.
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, 1531
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. ... It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Karl Marx and Fridrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society. In these crises a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.
Karl Marx and Fridrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, 1848.