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Miltank posted:Snowpiercer obviously doesn't have to correlate 1:1 with any sort of real world or logical situation to be a provocative movie. The train represents a society that is fundamentally flawed to the extent that's its destruction is more just than its continuation. It is a zombie movie where the lifeless husk is humanity itself. Maybe WE are the real cannibals.
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Mar 27, 2015 15:28
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Best Giraffe posted:So you're saying that the system has little in common with capitalism, but the whole A Modest Proposal reference is a point in favor of it in fact doing that. So let's think about how it connects to A Modest Proposal; obviously there is the baby eating, and the dehumanizing system that rounds people up like cattle, and counts them off so they can dispose of the 'excess', and so on. It also differs, somewhat, in that you have the desperate dregs of society eating children themselves, rather than selling them to the rich, so maybe that's worth pursuing. But films are art, and art is really just supposed to make you think about these things. So does Snowpiercer make you think about these things? Does it raise questions, interesting parallels with our actual world, and does it do so in a way that grips you and holds you into the fictional reality of the movie? If it does, then it has succeeded, and if it didn't, well, then maybe you didn't "get it", or maybe it's just not to your taste, or whatever. But I think that the movie supports this much discussion is proof enough that it succeeds as an allegorical work. I mean, plenty of people got some really interesting readings out of it! Yes, I'm saying it botches the allegory. And it doesn't really connect to A Modest Proposal except on a very superficial level. There's the baby eating, yes. But that goes away once the system intervenes, through the Illuminati plot and the introduction of protein blocks. After that, neither the rich nor the poor eat babies. In fact, only the Sacred Engine eats children, like a god that demands human sacrifice. And as for A Modest Proposal, it goes without saying that Swift obviously wasn't satirizing the practice of cannibalism in 18th century Ireland. So how exactly does Snowpiercer connect to A Modest Proposal? And how is that connection in any way relevant today? Or, if it didn't, maybe that is because it failed. In what way does it raise questions or interesting parallels with our actual world? To me it looks like a garbled mess of underdeveloped ideas. The train is essentially a theocracy, and its society a rigid caste system where your position is preordained. To the tail inhabitants, it is a system of Orwellian totalitarianism (reduced to clichés and revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature). But the train is also an "ecosystem" that must be carefully regulated. To that end, there is a preposterous Illuminati plot to cull the lower castes periodically through phony insurrections (similar to The Matrix Reloaded). I honestly can't see what there is to "get" here, it's just a mess.
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Mar 27, 2015 17:08
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You just described capitalism.
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Mar 27, 2015 17:43
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I enjoyed Snowpiercer as a revolutionary fairy tale, but I have to admit it's a little weird to make a movie about capitalism and then characterize it as a static system that doesn't grow and whose survival depends on maintaining equilibrium, rather than constant expansion.
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Mar 27, 2015 17:59
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I enjoyed Snowpiercer as a revolutionary fairy tale, but I have to admit it's a little weird to make a movie about capitalism and then characterize it as a static system that doesn't grow and whose survival depends on maintaining equilibrium, rather than constant expansion. Has capitalism proven to be able to maintain a constant expansion though? Because our system seems to always run just fine without 5-10% of our population, while industrial and manufacturing jobs continue to be outsourced to other countries. I live in Pennsylvania and I can't tell you how many former steel manufacturing and coal mining towns I've passed through where the word "expansion" probably hasn't been used to describe anything there for decades. Our infrastructure is decaying and we barely have the means or even the motivation to repair, say, the thousands of bridges in our country that have been deemed unsafe for use. Speaking of the 5.5% unemployed (aka useless back of the train-ers), they're statistically more likely to be targeted by police based solely upon where they're located geographically and as such, more likely to have felonies. When you have a felony on your record, not only does it become exponentially more difficult to find a job, in a system that honestly doesn't need your labor, but in a lot of states you lose your right to vote. So you essentially have no influence on your community; socially, politically, legally or economically. I don't know about you but this, drawn to a logical extreme, is beginning to sound a lot like the plot of snowpiercer to me. But that's just my interpretation.
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Mar 28, 2015 05:13
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I just watched close encounters of the third kind and the little hand thing they do reminded me of the hand thing they do in this movie. I felt the urge to make some kind of connection due to the main character's violent rejection of american society (which could be read as rejection of capitalism) but then his consumption into this big... thingie that gave him the "answers" that he sought.
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Jun 8, 2015 07:47
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Was this posted yet? These are for sale now: https://www.exoprotein.com/products  
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Sep 8, 2015 19:36
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I find it interesting that so many people can have different views of the message and politics of this movie. I read into a very Bakunin notion, "If you took the most ardent revolutionary [Curtis], vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar[Wilfred] himself." Its not enough to seize power from Wilfred on behalf of the tail-enders, If Curtis had replaced Wilfred as conductor he would have had to face the same problems of overpopulation and the engine wearing out. For people to be truly free they couldn't just place one of their own at the head of the train, the train (and all that it represents) had to be destroyed. At the same time the reviewer from Slate thinks its a conservative, cautionary tale about the unpredictable dangers of revolution. He basically asks himself if Wilfred was better than the snow. And this South Korean Randian maintains its a pro-Objectivist film and haughtily hand waves away any commentator that brings up the anti-capitalist allegory. I'd think you'd have to be up the tail end of you're ideology to get that reading, but is the process he used to reach his conclusion any different than the way I reached mine?
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Sep 9, 2015 01:21
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Anyone else feel really underwhelmed by the reveal of what was being done with the children? Seemed kind of par for the course with the lovely life the rear passengers already dealt with on a daily basis. I was expecting some real Lovecraftian creepy poo poo or something I don't know.
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Sep 9, 2015 09:25
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I was expecting the mythic Wilford to be a computer 
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Sep 9, 2015 11:43
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I enjoyed Snowpiercer as a revolutionary fairy tale, but I have to admit it's a little weird to make a movie about capitalism and then characterize it as a static system that doesn't grow and whose survival depends on maintaining equilibrium, rather than constant expansion. It's a post-2008 capitalism, where the rate of profit has still failed to recover and the world continues to hang under an economic malaise of its own making. The engine is only sustained through the oppression of dissent, the illusion of growth (the train never arrives anywhere; it's perpetually in transit, like someone on a treadmill), and the heightened exploitation of the weakest. Landrobot posted:Was this posted yet? These are for sale now: I mentioned it before, but there ain't nothing wrong with entomophagy. What's troubling about it is when it gets used as a solution to "solve world hunger" or the like. It posits that the problem is one of production (we currently produce enough calories on the Earth to give every person living on it the daily recommended American level of calories and then some) rather than one of distribution.
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Sep 9, 2015 19:41
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Basically, that Randian guy's objections fall apart almost immediately with his whole schtick of 'capitalism is predicated on the belief in the individual will and social mobility, blah blah blah,' as if the principles of an economic system have anything to do with satirizing how it functions in non-theoretical terms. The author is confusing political theory and artistic metaphor. From such a reductive critical perspective, for instance, one should basically just ignore the preponderance of feudal imagery in animated movies and teen romances, under the pretense that the former incontrovertibly undermines the latter's commentary on modern youth and desires. It's the exact opposite way around: Contemporary fantasies problematize the stringency of such historical imagery and allusions.
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Sep 9, 2015 20:11
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Vermain posted:It's a post-2008 capitalism, where the rate of profit has still failed to recover and the world continues to hang under an economic malaise of its own making. The engine is only sustained through the oppression of dissent, the illusion of growth (the train never arrives anywhere; it's perpetually in transit, like someone on a treadmill), and the heightened exploitation of the weakest. Or, put another way, the system does require growth to sustain itself, and with nowhere to grow available to it the train slowly but surely starts to fall apart. This puts the lie to what Mason and Wilford said about balance - the train isn't a self-sustaining system.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:16
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:Anyone else feel really underwhelmed by the reveal of what was being done with the children? Seemed kind of par for the course with the lovely life the rear passengers already dealt with on a daily basis. I was expecting some real Lovecraftian creepy poo poo or something I don't know. It's more subtle than Lovecraft, man literally becoming a machine, lacks the visuals, but nearly Chronenberg in feel and tone. Like, I found the one kid just mindlessly walking into the engine pretty unsettling.
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Sep 9, 2015 22:55
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Hand Knit posted:Or, put another way, the system does require growth to sustain itself, and with nowhere to grow available to it the train slowly but surely starts to fall apart. This puts the lie to what Mason and Wilford said about balance - the train isn't a self-sustaining system. Exactly. Remember, this thing takes place against the backdrop of a terrific ecological disaster (which was itself a consequence of unchecked capitalist development). Naomi Klein isn't the first to talk about it, but the concept of the "ecological limits of growth" is now well into the popular consciousness. The train shows capitalism butting up firmly against its contradictions and constraints. wyoming posted:Like, I found the one kid just mindlessly walking into the engine pretty unsettling. It's even more unsettling when you realize that the color tones used are nearly the same for that reveal, the scene where the cockroaches are getting mulched, and the scene where the angel raver is crushed between the spinning gears. If you want some real Lovecraft poo poo, it's the train itself, mercilessly devouring everything in its path and enslaving the humans aboard it to keep itself alive like a perverse alien god. The scene where Chris Evans is kneeling in front of the engine core is just missing a pipe organ; it's a genuflection. Vermain fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Sep 10, 2015 |
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Sep 10, 2015 17:12
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Yeah that engine scene reminds me a lot of the Moloch scene from Metropolis.
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Sep 10, 2015 18:49
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I stand by my position that Snowpiercer is way better than Metropolis. (Well, not the Giorgio Moroder one.)
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Sep 10, 2015 19:16
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K. Waste posted:I stand by my position that Snowpiercer is way better than Metropolis. (Well, not the Giorgio Moroder one.) As yeah, the old Notable Bad Movie is better than Notable Good Movie argument, that'll get people thinking.
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Sep 11, 2015 01:06
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Bip Roberts posted:As yeah, the old Notable Bad Movie is better than Notable Good Movie argument, that'll get people thinking. Socrates I ain't.
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Sep 11, 2015 01:26
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Even Fritz Lang eventually admitted that, thematically speaking, Metropolis is nonsense. I'm not gonna get into the argument of how much weight to give that in judging it as a film, just throwing it out there.
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Sep 11, 2015 23:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Even Fritz Lang eventually admitted that, thematically speaking, Metropolis is nonsense. To be fair, it was easy to get caught up in the fever dream of social democracy (which Metropolis' ending is in clear support of) in the pre-WWII world. I wrote a (breathtakingly dull) post about the National Film Board of Canada back in the day under John Grierson, and it had the same sort of heady optimism during the 1930s and 1940s: dozens and dozens of documentary films that expounded upon the synergistic role that the capitalist and the worker play in the economy, and how a sort of "new dawn" of cooperation was just over the horizon. The 1970s hadn't yet come along to run roughshod over the fantasy of a capitalism that was sustainably aligned with the needs of both the workers and the capitalists.
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Sep 13, 2015 16:57
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Also, a good half of that vision of the future belongs to then-wife and frequent collaborator Thea von Harbou, who everyone forgets when discussing Lang's pre-WWII epics. She also wrote Die Nibelungen (basically Germany's Birth of a Nation), Spies, and the story for Woman in the Moon. Unlike Lang, who was almost immediately disillusioned and threatened by Nazism (seeing as he was Jewish on his converted-mother's side), von Harbou stayed the new regime and even went on to direct her two only features under it. Ironically, while there's some evidence that their 1933 divorce had anything to do with their respective political sympathies, it was probably more due to years of mutual infidelity. This culminated in Lang catching von Harbou in bed with an Indian journalist, who she later married in secret. She had joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1932, but later claimed that she was only interested in helping other Indian immigrants like her lover-turned-husband from escaping the Holocaust.
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Sep 13, 2015 17:44
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Were Indians even threatened by the holocaust at all? I know Hitler absolutely adored Britain and wanted to base German colonization of Eastern-Europe on British colonialism in India. He was disdainful of the Indian independence movement and during appeasement he reportedly told Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary of Britain, that the only sensible solution to the turmoil in India would be to shoot Gandhi and then shoot anyone who protested this and anyone that protested that until everyone who didn't know their place as a subservient lesser race was dead. But there were also Indian SS divisions and I don't think there were enough Indians in Germany for the state to pay them much mind.
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Sep 13, 2015 18:44
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At any rate, von Harbou's marriage to an Indian was certainly not kosher (lol). Via wiki:quote:Though many claim she had significant Nazi sympathies, von Harbou claimed she only joined the Nazi Party to help Indian immigrants in Germany like her husband. "Her direct work on behalf of the government consisted, she claimed, entirely of volunteer welding, making hearing aids, and emergency medical care. In fact, she received a medal of merit for saving people in two air raids". So, outside her commendations, we really only have von Harbou's word, which, like many filmmakers who became complicit in the propaganda machine, should probably be taken with a considerable amount of salt. edit: I should note that, after WWII, Lang continued to respect and admire von Harbou and her literary work until her death, including co-writing/directing two adaptations of her novels in 1959 and 1960 respectively. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 19:27
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When you watch what actually happens on screen the story may as well have been written by Ayn Rand. It's a veneer of social allegory that relies on magic technology and ultimately asserts that poors are leeches on the system. The allegory only works if the working class are the ones actually keeping the train running. Oh no! The food we're being given (that keeps us alive and that we've done nothing to earn) is bug protein not nice protein! This upsets us for some reason.
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Sep 14, 2015 19:27
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Vitamin P posted:The allegory only works if the working class are the ones actually keeping the train running. Well I mean
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Sep 14, 2015 19:54
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Vitamin P posted:When you watch what actually happens on screen the story may as well have been written by Ayn Rand. It's a veneer of social allegory that relies on magic technology and ultimately asserts that poors are leeches on the system. That doesn't make any sense. The untouchables of Wilford's ecosystem aren't engaged in a parasitic relationship with it. They are literally given just barely enough so that a population he already pre-calculates can survive, from which he can abduct them at any time for any arbitrary reason. It's possible to speculate that the police (most likely) and the revelers at the front of the train are preserved by the same system, but the only examples of social surgery we see with regards to the latter are political dissidents who are either imprisoned or kept pacified with constant propaganda, the threat of execution by either the police state or the radicalized poor, and drugs/alcohol. Even when Wilford reveals that the revolution was a con orchestrated by himself in collaboration with Gilliam, it's made clear that this revolt was not supposed to progress beyond the reclamation of the vessels water, that Wilford's 'conversion' of Curtis, as with Gilliam, was to be forged regardless. Instead of 'watching what actually happens on screen,' you're taking Curtis's disgust at being fed bug protein bricks and running with it like he's this thankless friend of the family, like he just doesn't get how cozy he has it, even though we see people without limbs in prisoner-of-war camp-like conditions, being kidnapped and mutilated by the police, and engaged in endophagy. And like most superficial readings of the film, you point up a contradiction that doesn't exist: These characters represent the proletariat, but they don't keep the train running, therefore the allegory doesn't work. Obviously the answer to this is that they don't represent the proletariat because they only have superficial involvement in 'running the train.' Their lot is decided for them by an obsequious demagogue clinging to the social hierarchy of a 'frozen' world, going around and around indefinitely, who literally only keeps them barely alive just in case he needs to exploit them. Wilford literally maintains privilege so that everyone doesn't have to 'suffer equally.' He makes a tacit decision that the suffering of the many is worth the privilege of a few, and that those who suffer should merely content themselves with being kept alive. The poor aren't leeches on the system. They are created by the unequal and disproportionate amassing of resources and the systematic, violent enforcement of ideology.
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Sep 14, 2015 20:10
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Vitamin P posted:When you watch what actually happens on screen the story may as well have been written by Ayn Rand. It's a veneer of social allegory that relies on magic technology and ultimately asserts that poors are leeches on the system. Working class kids under like 3 feet do in this case.
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Sep 14, 2015 23:37
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Gropiemon posted:Working class kids under like 3 feet do in this case. Similarly, "The Ones That Walk Away from Omelas" is not about 'the proletariat,' but is still nonetheless a good allegory for oppression that is worth your while despite relying on "magic technology."
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Sep 15, 2015 00:12
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