Snowpiercer: - Or when doesPolitical allegory overwhelm artistic merits? (SPOILERS)

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

A little bit of back-story on this. Going back to last August, I had been visiting relatives in the Dallas area. We wanted to watch a movie after dinner, and since the one we wanted wasn't yet available for streaming, we went with the highly rated (by users and critics) "Snowpiercer".

I will be the first to admit, that I'm not a fan of allegory. It's a blunt tool where more deft and subtle means are generally more to my taste, but that being said, I can and did appreciate that this, as a film, was generally a very well made and produced allegory by Bong Soon-Ho. Up to the ending, I could still find a lot to appreciate in the film, even if I didn't agree 100% with it's suppositions.

But the ultimate act that resolves the conflict in the film stuck in my craw. I'm going to discuss spoilers and plot now, so if you haven't seen the film and want to with no foreknowledge, now would be the time to bail.

The allegory is basically in an ice-encrusted Earth of the near future, all human life survives on a perpetual motion train, with the lowest classes kept in the rear of the train and the few of the upper classes live in a blissed out and luxurious setting. The closer you go to the engine, the higher up the class system you go. Those in back are kept under gunpoint in the back, until an inciting event (the abduction of one of the poorer black children from the back, is taken to the front) catalyzes a revolt led by Chris Evans' character.

All right, I get it. This isn't subtle stuff, but allegory tends not to be anyway. They fight their way from car to car to the front of the train, only for Evans to be eventually be presented with the duty of maintaining the train in the status quo himself and replacing the current engineer and the inventor of the train as the one to keep things going (the black child is shown to be representing third-world labor in that he is the only one small enough to fit in an engine crawl space where he performs manually, the function of a critical part which has broken and can't be replaced, and which keeps the train running).

For most of this, I was at least still on-board and interested in finding out what the director was actually going to say with his resolution. And then I found out.

Evans decides rather to sabotage the train, derailing it and killing the vast majority of the people on board (representing the entirety of global humanity), to free the black child from his confined station. Only that child and one other minor survive. (though survival in this case means facing a bleak frozen landscape with the only other visible inhabitant being a polar bear, who looks like he wouldn't mind finishing off the two remaining humans all by himself).

The takeaway (and I'm not the only viewer who has read this as the intended ending - Devin Faraci of Badass digest, fairly well known among internet critics, has also pointed this out as a favorable aspect), is that ultimately the global system as it exists now cannot be changed and it would be better if the whole thing was uprooted at once, even at the cost of the vast majority of human life on the planet, to accomplish this. It doesn't make it any better when one realizes that Evans' character makes this decision to derail the train unilaterally, with all classes, including the one he originated from, being unaware that any decision was being made on their behalf that will end their lives.

To me, this made the ending horrific, where the intent seemed to be that people should view it as right, hopeful, etc. But it can't be gotten around that this is in a not subtle way, advocating that genocide is preferable to what we have now.

We rightfully look at films like "Birth of a Nation" and "Triumph of the Will" as examples of art being used in service of morally indefensible ideologies, but yet here is a film that without much of a fig-leaf, is pretty much of the mind that it thinks you and the vast majority of the rest of society would be better off sacrificed on the alter of revolution, than to go on under the current system (as if only two options are available). And it's getting celebrated with high marks by viewers and by critics. And quite frankly, this kind of baffles me. The director is giving a big middle finger to humanity, not in an illuminating way that reveals our flaws, but rather in a way that denies any value in our lives that might temper the effects of (presumably) ideological, and violent anarchistic revolution.

It's also more than a little hypocritical of the film, given that the train's inventor Willford is presented as a God-like entity who is completely willing to sacrifice the lives of others in preservation of capitalism/western thought (again, as the film presents them). But the film also isn't self-aware enough to realize that it ends up supporting the exact same thing, but for the sake of revolution; though it presents this as a good and worthy sacrifice.


So: for those who have seen the film or who didn't mind being spoiled above, how do you read/reconcile these aspects? Do you read the film's message less harshly, or altogether differently? When does what the author of an artist work is saying on the face of it, overshadow and overwhelm the artistic merit of the film in question? The film is very well made, I can't deny, in many artistic aspects and in its characterizations, writing and performances.


All told, my relatives and I would have preferred our first choice, another Chris Evans film "Winter Soldier", than this. We kind of laughed at the ending, not even realizing if the ending was the actual ending, for a few moments, but the more I gave it thought the more disturbing the implications became.

*edit* Added offtopic to the tags, because it's Friday, and I'm not certain there's enough political meat here as opposed to discussion of the film itself and criticism of that. Either way: Bases covered.

Comments

[garote]

What makes you think the filmmaker intends that outcome as the "desired" one?

He ends the film by deliberately pointing out that, with the train derailed, pretty much everyone is screwed.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Because the film presents the protagonists' actions as the correct one. He's flawed, but we're still meant to empathize with Evan's decision as the right one (even presented with his checkered past, we are never any less invested in him as the one we're following through the story, our anchor as it were). Heck, he does it in service to essentially save the symbol of third world child labor and by that becomes the preferred outcome to the alternatives he was presented with. The character knew what his actions were going to do, and he did them anyway.

[garote]

Yes, but it's clear that the protagonist is also a flawed individual, with an attitude and worldview that reflects his position on the train.

You believe that the director/writer intends to endorse a false dichotomy, between self-destructive revolution and brutal exploitation, because that's how the protagonist and the main antagonists view it. But I'm not so keen to make that leap of reasoning, because of the deliberately bleak ending. The creators could EASILY have inserted five seconds of additional footage showing, for example, the survivors repurposing the train as a power plant and establishing a shining egalitarian city, or trekking overland to a verdant valley just beyond the view of the train tracks, or at least hunting the wildlife and having a good meal. Anything that would show them as having a fighting chance. But they didn't. I think that's quite meaningful.

To me, that says, "you may all root for violent revolution, and you may see some really foul behavior from those in power that makes them deserve punishment, but if you actually derail the train, EVERYONE LOSES."

The real enemy - and the main point of the allegory, I think - is that a compartmentalized society is a doomed society.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I wish I could read it that way and I think I may have even subconsciously hoped that would be the end result, but I saw nothing in the text or subtext that would support that conclusion. It just requires too much gap-filling. Part of me thought the polar bear was a poorly constructed allegory for hope, seeing as everything else was allegorical in the film; an under-defined representation of the hope the drugged up mechanic character inferred from seeing the plane get slowly unburied from the snow bank they passed every year, a sign of life that wasn't supposed to exist. But weirdly enough, the film didn't seem committed to making a choice between ambiguously hopeful, or definitively nihilistic. Noncommittally ambiguous as it were. Ultimately, I have to go on what was presented to me rather than which requires me having to construct subtext instead deriving it.

(and oddly enough, if one reads the polar bear as non-allegorical, that all it represents is the two kids about to be eaten by an apex predator, then the end becomes atonally hysterical - a punchline gag for all the trouble and drama endured prior).

Seeing Devin Faraci's analysis of it kind of helped me settle on the the view above, right down to the intention of presenting Evan's decision as a difficult but "necessary" one. I wasn't the only one who read it that way, and this was from someone who was more sympathetic to the morality of that view than I was.

I don't have a problem with ambiguous endings if ambiguity is clearly the point. Or dark endings, or even endings that can be read in a variety of ways, with the understanding that if reading an ending were a target, the cluster of different ways to read it are still fairly close knit. It's when you can't even tell if ambiguity was the point, or if the ways to read it become so scatter-shot and divergent, it becomes the film equivalent of the artist asking his patron "well what do you think it means"?

[garote]

I'm not sure how you can see "nothing in the text or subtext" to support the conclusion that everyone loses from derailing the train, when just about everyone is immediately slaughtered, and the remaining few are left destitute with no apparent hope for survival, after derailing the train!

Devin Faraci's analysis reminds me of the things critics said about Starship Troopers when that movie came out. Remember that one?

A lot - a whole lot - of critics claimed that they saw the "subtext" of the film as an endorsement of fascism. (Jingoism! Endless war! The state determines your position in society! No right to vote unless you "earn" it! Rah rah!)

Then when their noise died away the film acquired cult status as a rather ingenious looking-glass-style lampooning of fascism. The reason it took a while is because, to arrive at that conclusion (the one endorsed by the director and writer by the way) you have to consider the form - the shape - of the movie itself, not just the point of view of the characters in it.

For example, the main protagonist is a soldier named Rico, and from his point of view, kicking ass for his country to exterminate the evil aliens is The Best Thing Ever. This point of view is continuously reinforced throughout the film, mainly by the propaganda ads produced by his government. You could take that at face value ... but if you stand back and look at the big picture, you notice that there is absolutely no evidence that the aliens are the aggressors in the conflict. In fact, there is no evidence given that the aliens are even returning fire by lobbing asteroids at Earth, just government propaganda declaring it so. That observation recasts the film in a totally different light.

And I think Snowpiercer is a case of the same thing.

So much time is spent establishing the "upper classes" at the front of the train as vapid, wasteful, self-indulgent, two-faced, bigoted, and totally deserving of punishment. They don't seem to contribute anything towards the preservation or functioning of the train, and are concerned instead with indulging themselves and brutalizing the people in the back to drive down the population to a "sustainable" level. Their justifications rely on the supposedly grand plan of a benefactor who may as well be God, and those plans just happen to identify the people in the back as trash. The protagonist fights his way from the bottom of society on up, and is presented with all this along the way, to reinforce his outrage.

But if you accept the outrage, you unconsciously accept its foundation too: The upper classes aren't vital to the running of the train, they're only using their position close to the engine as leverage to exploit the others. To make it plain: The shape of the train itself, with all the power at one end, fosters a useless upper class. The protagonist isn't doing the "right" thing by killing them, let alone by killing everyone, but he does it anyway.

And so, the film succeeds in making its point: A compartmentalized society, with all the power at one end, contains the seeds of its own destruction. A useless upper class will form, they will abuse the lower class, the lower class will kill everyone seeking vengeance - or simply seeking escape - and who can blame them? Rinse, repeat, et cetera. Hey friends, let's not keep doing this, it sucks.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

That's a great analysis of the movie. I saw Snowpiecer, particularly near the end) as a sort of Oliver Twist set as a Sci-Fi movie, or maybe as a "The Titanic on Rails." I thought the movie was beautifully shot; and even the opening and end credit sequences were so elegant with the specially modified Telegrafico font. I didn't see the ending as so horrible; and my take was that the children lived. So when I was surprised when I came across this interview with the director Bong Joon-ho.

They have no memory of what it's like to be on the Earth. For them to procreate, it's going to take a little time. So, for me, it's a very hopeful ending ... But those two kids will spread the human race ... I don't really feel everyone must die. I hope there were other survivors who lived through the avalanche, I just didn't have the means to shoot that ... You realize later on that the kids are the ones keeping this engine going, and this machinery intact. The engine is itself is on its way to extinction along with cigarettes, and other goods. Extinction is a repeated word throughout the film. But outside the train, life is actually returning. It's nature that's eternal, and not the train or the engine, as you see with the polar bear at the end.

As the article in Vulture noted (http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/snowpiecer-movie-discussion.html). that doesn't stop the critics from their own readings of the movie and its conclusion:

Obviously, he’s the director, it’s his movie, and he’s the definitive source on what he meant by the ending. But that doesn't mean fans haven't gone wild speculating about the scene’s inherent ambiguity. In one Reddit discussion thread, a slew of dystopian naysayers claim that, unless there are survivors elsewhere that Bong Joon-ho decided not to show on film, Tim and Yona are dead meat. "A girl and a kid that lived in a sheltered environment their whole life and don't know how to hunt or gather in the snow ... I give them a couple of days, tops," writes HappyZavulon. Many suspect they’d simply get eaten by the very animal being used as a symbol of hope. Suggests emareperiod: "The polar bear eats humans. One of the top 3 human eaters on the planet. Vicious human eater. They are dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, DEAD."

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I think if that's the case, then it represents a failure to be able to communicate that intent either because of technical limitations or otherwise.

Because as noted, the polar bear meant almost nothing to me. I have no pre-concieved social or implied (through the narrative) meaning to get that it meant anything besides what it literally was (unlike so much of the rest of the film which seemed to make it almost too obvious what its allegorical parallels were), so in my head, I popped up an imaginary thought balloon over the bears' head that said "Oooh! Dinner!" because my natural reaction to seeing an apex predator in the presence of human beings is "danger".

I can see how others might want to read all kinds of things into the ending as delivered (and indeed even here, there seems to be rather large range of interpretations), but if the ending was meant to communicate something other than ambiguity, as the director seems to indicate a specific reading was intended, then I can't say in honesty that it achieves that. And I can't really say that there's enough there to discredit anyone's reading of it, even though the meanings being read into it are as seen, almost mutually exclusive (hope vs. nihilism).

It is a slick, well produced film, I will give it that much. It kept me invested to find out where it was going all the way to the end.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

either because of technical limitations or otherwise.

Yep, he pretty much said that in the interview: I don't really feel everyone must die. I hope there were other survivors who lived through the avalanche, I just didn't have the means to shoot that.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

I don't think the film actually gives you the kind of distance to appreciate it at such an analytical level where that idea you are positing it meant is allowed to rise above the way we feel about the characters themselves. We're simply too close to Evan's character and his group for too long, and are too wrapped up in their struggle to be allowed much room to not think of him as being the one who must make the right choice in the end. As in most films, the movie is inviting us to align ourselves to him, to see ourselves as him, flawed as he is.

Chris Nolan who has often been criticized as being clinical in his approach to his characters, but his approach does allow the ideas in his film to rise to the top and his films do work as intellectual pop entertainment, like this wants to be. And given that allegory is more about the idea than getting attached to individual characters, I think that approach would have communicated more readily the ideas you found so easy to access, but to more people.

I don't know that even a majority of the people who did favorably view the film actually share the intellectual idea you're ascribing to it. It is an interesting reading and one that would have improved the film had the film been crafted in such a way as to bring that point and make the characters serve it instead of supersede it.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Did you at least eventually see Winter Soldier? Cause that was one hell of a movie.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Yep! One of my three favorites of all the Marvel releases so far.

Personal preference from last year goes to Guardians for me though. I am partial to 'disparate outcasts/criminals band together, make good' plotline, and the humor, action and emotion were balanced pitch perfect. I can have that on in the background on infinite loop. The soundtrack helps a lot too.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The concept of killing off the bulk of humanity to me is always an interesting topic of debate because people automatically likewise assume the far smaller surviving population will be able to recreate the infrastructure the wealthiest minority subset of the largest one takes for granted. In reality it won't be that way at all, and it'd be more like the aftermath of the 1490s-1600s plagues in the Americas, but that reality is immaterial to the would be judge, juries, and executioners. Who also invariably tend to assume they will be among the people who survive, of course of course.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

Well that's the core conceit of all revolutionaries is it not? That if you can knock down the walls without down bringing the roof, or that you yourself will not end up on the block after you endorse the chopping of heads.

[korean-guy-01.livejournal.com]

I own the film and like it very much. You failed to bring up a critical point, though. The Earth became encrusted in ice because some intelligent humans thought they had a solution to global warming.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

Not quite convinced on the critical nature of that point. It's the catalyst that provides the explanation for the overriding scenario, but it never factors again into anything narratively or thematically beyond the introduction. They didn't seem to be trying to say anything with that being the mechanism by which things came to be the way they were at the outset.

You could have changed the explanation to nuclear winter caused by meteor strike, and it wouldn't have meaningfully changed anything that struck at the core of the story itself.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Nice write up.

I felt the derailment was the inevitable outcome of a systemic flaw, and the protagonist was just an object in that flawed system.

Should Mookie have thrown the trash can through the pizza joints window?