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Pierson posted:Saw it and liked it. I'd definitely recommend it to others but I definitely wouldn't go see it again since the entire train and associated systems weren't even subtle about being absolutely Ayn Rand-brand libertarianism and that poo poo sets off a slow burning rage in me whenever I see it anywhere. It's not just Ayn Rand libertarianism, though: it is an analogy for the capitalist system itself. The "perpetual motion engine" - whose only purpose is to continue to turn itself - is a perfect mirror to capitalism's sustained cycle (the accumulation of profit for the purpose of the accumulation of profit, etc.), alongside it being sustained by literal slave labor hidden away from the rest of the world. It's why Curtis' decision to destroy the engine, rather than merely appropriating it for some "better use", is important. His radical act fundamentally redefines the world, opening up the space for a new society to emerge that isn't based on feeding human sacrifices to the engine of the train forever.
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Jul 6, 2014 02:41
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CloseFriend posted:I actually found the cult one of the most thematically fitting little touches. You know the old quote about religion and opiate of the masses. History has shown that if you really want to control a people, you make them feel like the status quo will get them into Heaven. All of the weird worship of the train seems totally insane, of course, but what other word would describe modern support for the capitalist system besides "cult"? The classroom scenes are exaggerations of the sort of things taught in modern schools: that anything outside of the current system will only bring death, that great entrepreneurs are the source of humanity's survival and success, etc. Vermain fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 07:22
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feedmyleg posted:Speaking of cuts, does anyone know exactly what Weinstein's cut of this would have changed? The Wikipedia article mentions cutting out about 20 minutes of the ending and adding a closing monologue, presumably in order to make it seemingly less dire and more palatable. I'd imagine it would be the equivalent of Scorsese being forced to add an ending scrawl to Taxi Driver that talks about Travis Bickle being charged with multiple counts of murder and being sent to a nice mental hospital where he was gradually able to overcome his PTSD and become a functioning citizen again.
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Jul 7, 2014 17:43
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paperfax posted:The one thing that surprised me was Curtis' reaction to the "disgusting" origins of their food. Wasn't it just insects? As far as I know, insects are considered the "food of the future" and are already an important source of protein in some parts of the world. If anything, that was a reasonable portrayal of what mass-produced food might be like someday. I guess the broader issue was that they were essentially being force fed some highly processed mystery food and it wasn't what he expected, but still, I don't think it's as bad as he made it out to be It's obviously an intended "gross out" for Western audiences. While there's plenty of reasons to support entomophagy, the specific issue here is that this is all that the poor are given while the really good, quality food is reserved purely for the upper class. There's been concerns over the real-world development of things like cricket flour specifically because it could be used to feed huge masses of people for incredibly cheap, thus allowing the more palatable food to continue to be shipped out of their reach. It's rather like the grubby rags of the poor versus the fine-tailored suits of the rich. You can survive in the rags, but those rags only compound upon life's miseries. Vermain fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Jul 7, 2014 |
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Jul 7, 2014 22:34
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The Walking Dad posted:The protagonist has the fervor of a born again Christian in some ways. He was formerly lost but now he is found. But although he has found compassion for those of his own class, he is zealous in his hatred of the other classes in a way that the others just aren't. He straight up calls the woman at the end a "Whore". Not a very Christian thing to do. Maybe by the end of the film we aren't supposed to be rooting for the protagonist anymore. It's not particularly un-Christian. Curtis, like Christ, braids his whip to drive the moneychangers out of the temple, and dies to ensure the arrival of the "kingdom of Heaven." The un-Christian ending would have been for him to quietly acquiesce to a life as Wilford's replacement ala The Last Temptation of Christ.
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Jul 8, 2014 06:39
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Frackie Robinson posted:I don't see how you can really call this a leftist movie when the whole end reveal is that the class struggle is essentially meaningless. The class struggle is to destroy the capitalist system, which is done successfully. The ending is metaphorical and represents a new beginning outside of that system, in a world of new possibilities.
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Jul 8, 2014 23:47
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It's not that violence solves everything, but that violence is sometimes both necessary and just to perform. Violence, like anything else, is a strategic choice with benefits and drawbacks. In this case, violence led to the destruction of the old system and the opening up of the possibility of a different, more just world, in exchange for the deaths of a great many people. Non-violence would have led, most likely, to mildly better conditions that are still sustained by a people-eating engine, and a system which, by its defined linearity, tends towards class separation. Which is the better option?
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Jul 9, 2014 04:47
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Throwdown posted:And that new beginning is hosed from the get go as it's a drug addicted young girl, a little kid and polar bears. The ending, like the emergence of Adam and Eve from the Garden, is metaphorical.
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Jul 10, 2014 04:43
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The train also runs on an engine that is literally physically impossible. The train is a metaphor. Trying to figure out the logistics of a metaphor is pointless.
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Jul 12, 2014 16:30
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wyoak posted:Society in the train isn't capitalist at all - there is no currency, economy, or other signifiers that we see. In the school car there are lessons dedicated to the deification of the train itself, the kids are learning to worship the state. The train is not the state - the train is the capitalist system made immanent. It embodies all of the negative aspects of the capitalist system (great class disparity, the suffering of the poorest, degeneracy into mindless hedonism, etc.). Its existence is for no other purpose than to "keep the engine turning" (that is, to keep itself alive via endless "circulation"), thus preserving the privilege of those who benefit from living in luxury on the train as opposed to striking out beyond the train in an attempt to make a better future. Most importantly, the train is truly global: it does not belong to any state, instead traveling the entire length of the world, just as capitalism today is "de-territorialized," existing outside of the concept of states. Vermain fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Jul 12, 2014 |
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Jul 12, 2014 21:14
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DNS posted:There's probably a valid case to be made that it's more about authoritarianism in general. A proper socialism is necessarily tied in with anti-authoritarianism, so I don't disagree that this is part of it. The facts of the train - the limited amount of space, the use of slave labor to maintain the cracking engine, etc. - means, however, that a less authoritarian "government" (some kind of democracy or whatnot) would still run into the same problems that the authoritarian form faced. It's a statement about the fact that the logic of capitalism is inexorable. You cannot get rid of its structural flaws, regardless of what type of government you have in power.
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Jul 12, 2014 21:29
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You don't show a symbol of survival in harsh and unforgiving conditions at the very end of the film for no reason.
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Jul 13, 2014 04:28
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General Battuta posted:Yeah, that was my read on it too - it really hates global capitalism, but it's not sure whether there's anything better, and it plays with the idea that maybe human extinction is the only hope for a better world. Pretty brutal. Yona and Timmy leaving the destroyed train is fairly clear Garden of Eden imagery. It's implicitly hopeful. There's two ways one can read the Genesis account of the Garden of Eden. The more traditional reading is to see it as the Fall of Man; of the exile from paradise, and the beginning of human misery. The other way, of course, is to see it as an escape. Humankind in the Garden was composed of two people, completely immortal, perpetually blinded to the Truth of good and evil. They were caught in an eternal stasis, a perfect equilibrium, with no death (and, thus, no joy or happiness). The serpent leads Eve to the Tree of Knowledge, which leads to her realizing the true nature of the world as an imperfect, flawed creation. It's only after leaving the Garden that the actual human experience (of pain and suffering, but also life and hope) begins. This is played up during the ending. Yona comes to see the "truth" of the world (its underlying misery - the knowledge of evil), which is what then guides Curtis to destroy the train, rather than attempting to maintain the equilibrium of the "Garden." Yona and Timmy, as Adam and Eve, leave the stagnant equilibrium in order to create a new, human world. Like the ending to A Canticle for Leibowitz, the second exile from Eden is painful, but necessary. It opens up the possibility of a new start for humankind buttressed by the knowledge of what came before, and how to avoid its past mistakes.
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Jul 18, 2014 23:46
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Black Baby Goku posted:just a quick question, why the gently caress is every post just one big spoiler tag? Like why would anyone even click this thread and scroll through it to read anything? Pretty loving dumb. Apologies - I'm never sure how much people want spoilered or not. I tend to err on the side of caution, especially when posting exclusively about the ending. v  v
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Jul 19, 2014 05:36
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Tezcatlipoca posted:Are you suggesting that religion hasn't been used to do that exact thing? That's precisely the point. The perverted sign of the cross, rather than a remembrance and dedication to Christ's sacrifice, is used to demand that Christ sacrifice more.
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Jul 22, 2014 01:05
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K. Waste posted:Because the presence of an actual threat actually helps to fortify cultural identity. Namgoong and Yona are proof that there are disaffected members of the middle-class or elites, as do the Club Kids to a certain extent. It's just fascism: Everything within this system is perfect and unassailable, but there are those outsiders who need to be kept in their place and controlled. Wilford is also explicitly looking for a replacement who is dedicated and remorseless enough to keep the train running. Who better than a revolutionary leader? It's like a perverse version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
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Jul 24, 2014 00:11
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Naet posted:I understand what you're saying, but what system is Snowpiercer critiquing? It's not capitalism because capitalism doesn't exist on that train. Again: the train is the capitalist system made immanent - the "avatar" of capitalism, if you will. The perpetual motion engine sustained by slave labor is as clear of an analogy for capitalism that you can make in the context of a science fiction film.
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Jul 24, 2014 17:17
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Naet posted:I understand that reading, but capitalism is justified by ceaseless profits. Capitalism's existence is defined by its singular purpose: to perpetuate itself endlessly. The train represents this through a perpetual motion engine (remember: any other kind of mystical science-fiction engine could be used, so why an engine that spins itself?), which eventually keeps itself alive via human "parts." The critique of Snowpiercer is that a system which exists only to keep itself turning - without regard for human life and happiness - is not a good system, and must be destroyed. Snowpiercer doesn't intend to academically analyze the failure of capitalist production (the LTRPF, crisis theory, etc.), because it has already reached its conclusion: this system exists to keep itself alive, and gladly tolerates human misery in order to do so. Why allow it to keep existing? Naet posted:This isn't a valid criticism of capitalism because that choice is a false dichotomy perpetuated by capitalism. In that way, the movie is operating on the assumptions of capitalism: that the world requires inequality to operate. This is precisely why Curtis destroys the train: because it is impossible to create a world that is not sustained on misery within the capitalist system, represented here by the train. That's why there's the Garden of Eden imagery at the very end: it's a new world that's opened up because of the train's destruction. Again, taking them stepping outside the train in a literal way does not make sense given the highly allegorical nature of the rest of the work.
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Jul 24, 2014 19:45
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wyoak posted:You keep saying this but that description could be applied equally to any dominant power structure. The point of an economic system should be, in my view, to fulfill the needs of human beings and ensure their wellbeing. Capitalism performs this as a tertiary function. Its primary drive has always been to maintain the circulation of profit, thus keeping itself alive, with the fulfillment of human needs being incidental. You would find that I'm hardly a supporter of feudalism, either, for much the same reason. The reason my reading is predominantly anticapitalist instead of, say, antimonarchist is because the rest of the train is framed as being capitalist: it's a stateless, "global" entity (completely unlike feudalism) and it is founded, maintained and controlled by a wealthy businessman. Vermain fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 28, 2014 19:49
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Admirable Gusto posted:You could say that we're meant to interpret the train as a depiction of/allegory to today's capitalist society because it's what we all know, but I don't think that's directly supported in the text Again, my reading is based off of specific textual elements: the train's globalized, stateless nature; it being the brainchild and fiefdom of a private businessman; and, simply enough, that it's a train, one of the major icons of the Industrial Revolution. There's applicability to all stratified societies, but there's specific elements that make the film more particular to capitalism, rather than it being a generalized critique. This is, admittedly, not the most important point of the film. The message that a system which rests on underlying suffering cannot be salvaged, only destroyed and replaced is the key point, which itself does not rest on this being a specifically capitalist critique. Vermain fucked around with this message at 03:16 on Jul 29, 2014 |
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Jul 29, 2014 03:12
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Tezcatlipoca posted:If you don't believe the people in the back of the Train don't have analogs in our society I just don't know what to say to you. To expand on this point: One of the key features of capitalism (along with all previous economic systems) is that it creates an "excess" which becomes a mounting problem with regards to the stability of the system. One can see in the modern era, for example, cases where near-perpetual unemployment (and concomitant poverty) becomes normalized. People are simply no longer able to find work: they become "redundant" due to structural changes (death of the milkman, etc.) or the valorisation of labour (machine baristas), they don't have the skills training to take on something else, or they simply cannot find any sort of job that will take them as a consequence of economic downturns. Quite literally, these people are "useless" in the sense that capitalism does not have a place for them. They effectively lack a role in the economy (and, thus, in society) other than suffering and being scapegoated.
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Oct 5, 2014 19:01
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MisterBibs posted:I think he meant in a more practical way. I was confused by that as well, since it really felt like a "Sure, he could've gotten the kid out just fine between the gears, but we needed something ~symbolic~ to happen" moment. I must reiterate: the entire film is a symbolic representation. Complaining about how the ending fails to provide a "practical" solution is utterly at-odds with the highly metaphorical nature of the rest of the work. The theme of sacrificing limbs (especially arms and hands, things mostly used for performing manual labour) for the betterment of others is repeated throughout the rest of the film from nearly the very start; it's not some weird thing they introduce at the very end.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:08
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I cannot possibly imagine why a human being who was talking in disgusted tones about his own inability to sacrifice his arm for the good of other people several minutes earlier in the film would, in a panic because of a whirlwind of emotions and the ensuing threat of the undead murder-man, stick his arm into the gear in a rash, redemptive action. Do you sincerely not understand the purpose of symbolism in the course of connecting a dramatic work, MisterBibs, or is this simple intellectual dishonesty? I am honestly completely aghast that someone could absolutely fail to understand its purpose so completely.
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Dec 22, 2014 03:25
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Like, okay, what is your objection, here? That he should have found some kind of metal bar to wedge into it? Do you believe, honestly and truthfully, that this creates a stronger dramatic impact than sacrificing his own arm, a theme that has been repeated constantly throughout this film up to that point? What is your reasoning for its increased impact on the strength of the film's message and the emotional payoff of Curtis' sacrifice?
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Dec 22, 2014 03:29
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MisterBibs posted:I guess we're at an impasse, because I can't imagine why a character who up until now has been seen as intelligent decides his best course of action to lift someone out of a space is to stick one of your kid-lifting appendages into a gear, when there's zero time pressure (the kid inside isn't about to die, his buddy is holding off the Enforcer Guy), hes knocked out the guy in charge, and there's a whole table worth of poo poo (not to mention a table) to cram into the space instead of his arm. It'd show that Harris picked the right guy to run the whole shebang. Did you watch the film? Recently, perhaps? Namgoong was shot in the side. He's an (at best) middle-aged drug addict. There is a gang of ravers with weapons immediately behind him. Saying that there's no time pressure is a complete and utter lie in contradiction of the stated facts of the film. There is no other way to put this.
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Dec 22, 2014 05:36
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Ravenfood posted:I thought it was revealed that Namgoong wasn't ever an addict. He'd been stealing the stuff to make a bomb since before he was imprisoned. No? It's kept ambiguous, but the fact that he only wakes up to the smell of kronol is a tad suspicious.
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Dec 22, 2014 07:33
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There's a particular scene near the start where Curtis is talking to Gilliam in Gilliam's quarters, and Curtis makes the comment, "I'm not who [Edgar] thinks I am." Gilliam says, "Few of us ever are." He pointedly looks away from Curtis while saying this. There's a bunch of red flags that pop up all throughout the film that point towards him working with Wilford. This character reading also fits into the whole schema of the film's "revolutionary" theme. Gilliam is the aged peacemaker, a dude whose concern is only for others to survive (indicated by his willingness to chop off his own arm and leg to feed the tail). This desire, however, is constantly compromised as a consequence of the environment he lives in, where the tail section has no effective bargaining power - they've nothing to offer the front except for the occasional child and the rare "promotion" (like the violin player). His unwillingness to see more lives lost leads him to take the "least evil" path, coordinating with Wilford to let the population stabilize at the level Wilford wants in exchange for the rest of the tail section surviving. This, however, only prolongs the suffering of the tail section, allowing the existing class relations to remain in place, and there's no sign of it stopping. The tail section is basically doomed to suffer forever, unless there is a dramatic change. What changes in him, I think, is the presence of Curtis. The reason he tells him to cut Wilford's tongue out isn't because he's afraid of Wilford lying to him; he's afraid that he'll tell the truth about Gilliam's deceit. Curtis is the sort of once-in-a-lifetime leader that Gilliam realizes could very well help to change everything, and losing his respect is what Gilliam ends up fearing the most. It's why, despite his council about only taking the water car earlier on, he gives Curtis his blessing and tells him to go on after. Curtis has the strength and conviction to make the sort of sacrifices (like letting Edgar die to capture Mason) needed to see the revolution through. That doesn't seem like something that Gilliam could have ever done.
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Dec 22, 2014 23:36
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Curtis being a bit of a single-minded guy in terms of taking over the train is foreshadowed early on the film, though in a weird way. I only really noticed this on my third watch. Y'all remember Paul from the start of the film? The protein block guy? He's introduced doing a running leap up to a valve that he has to turn manually in order to make the protein block machine work, because the automatic parts have "gone extinct." When Curtis goes over to inspect the machine, he figures out the "dirty secret": that the protein blocks are cockroach goop. There's a CGI scene of them being gradually broken down into paste between huge grinders. Curtis is obviously disgusted by this: cockroaches, the lowest of the low, are what he's survived on for most of his life on the train. Move forwards to his confrontation with Wilford. What happens?  Namgoong tosses the angel-winged raver off the bridge, where he's promptly mulched down by the grinding machinery below. Wilford then attempts to seduce Curtis into taking his position by noting that "he can save [the other humans] from themselves," and he buys it, pushing Yona away when she comes running for the matches initially. Curtis really does, in this one moment, put himself as being "superior" to the humans behind him (emphasized by his position next to Wilford and his height in the scene). They've become the cockroaches. It's only the revelation of Timmy, and Wilford's comment about the parts "going extinct," that brings him back to the reality of the human suffering of the situation. The scenes end up as a mirror to eachother, with the events roughly happening in the opposite order. Even the lighting is basically the same, with the cold, sterile blue of the "outside" being contrasted with the warm, red-orange of the cockroach/human mulcher. For all of his humble talk, he really does want to be a leader and take charge. He does so whenever the opportunity arises. His shift comes only when he's willing to sacrifice himself for the lowest of the low - one of the "cockroaches." Vermain fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Dec 23, 2014 |
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Dec 23, 2014 06:29
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Hold on, look, okay - sorry, rabbis, but this just doesn't jive. How can there only be a single man and a single woman in this primordial garden? They can't be the direct descendents of humankind due to genetic bottlenecking. Oh, and this "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" thing? Well, you can't gain that knowledge from eating from a fruit! There's also definitely not a flaming cherubim by the Tigris and the Euphrates - we know this for a real solid fact. Sorry to point out so many obvious plot holes in your story, but it's become painfully obvious that you really didn't think this one out.
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Dec 29, 2014 00:38
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Could you please explain how the film "aggressively avoided giving anyone a reason to care about the characters," and what techniques Bong Joon-ho could have employed in order to generate audience sympathy? Start from the very beginning. What did the film do wrong in its opening half-hour, when the major characters are being introduced, and what would you change?
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Dec 29, 2014 19:46
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As well, as previously mentioned, it's a truly "stateless" system that nevertheless traverses the entire world, and also happens to be one of the key signifiers of industrialization and the spread of capitalism.
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Dec 29, 2014 20:48
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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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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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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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