KINO KLUB 7: Snowpiercer (2013) Bong Joon-Ho

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But the situation may be quite different. Perhaps revolutions are not the train ride, but the human race grabbing for the emergency brake.

gagorder wrote:ja obožavam te postapokaliptične uprljane filmove. to je jedan razrađeni mikrokosmos, pametan, nostalgičan, kulturni pesimizam s tračkom nade na kraju, vizuelni spektakl, moja tilda je sjajna - autoritarka s jorkširskim akcentom i pokvarenim zubalom, kao neka vitka zorana mihajlović iz daleke sjebane budućnosti, tuče su super, onaj narkoman i njegova ćerka su film za sebe . iz vagona u vagon stvar se ubrzava, postaje sve luđa, sa ed harisom koji je Šahbaz, niko ga nije video svi o njemu pričaju, u normalno doba on je bio joke - predmet podsmeha koji se, u datim okolnostima, pretposlednji smeje. u godini u kojoj od SF i ostalog nemamo praktično NIŠTA , pljucnuti na snowpiercer je - pa, da vas čovek smesti u poslednji vagon

Anđe'o wrote:Znao sam da će ovaj topik da se pretvori u filozofiranje na osnovu stripa. Probudite me kad dođete do Lakana.

Anđe'o wrote:Prethodni post je bio pijano postovanje, naravno da nisam smoren od Wiliamovog pisanija. O filmu nemam ništa dobro da kažem, ali to je sasvim druga stvar.

gagorder wrote:kao i kod bilo kojeg drugog koreanca: uvek se nađe ljubitelj da kaže da postoji kulji, opskurniji, manje eksplicitan, a da je predmetni, kozavraga, loš.

[CAUTION: SPOILERS]
“Who will build the Ark?” Mike Davis asked in 2010, regarding the world’s strategy for coping with anthropogenic climate change.
In Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, the Noah’s Ark of the near future is actually a train, and is the only thing protecting humanity’s last survivors from an apocalyptic Ice Age. The end of the world in Bong‘s eco-dystopia is traced to a geoengineering project gone spectacularly wrong. The attempt to abate global warming with artificial cooling measures has plunged the planet into an inhospitable deep freeze. A belief in technology, progress and innovation is what precipitated the apocalypse in Snowpiercer, and has shaped humanity’s response to it, a narrative that echoes the PR rhetoric of today’s oil and gas companies. As CEO of Exxon Mobil, Rex Tillerson reassure us, climate change is “an engineering problem and it has engineering solutions,” so calm down and stop asking questions. Ed Harris, as the enigmatic “Wilford,” plays a figurehead for this kind of innovative, problem-solving capitalism, helming a nuclear reactor powered train in constant orbit of a pancontinental rail system – one loop for every year. Bong lifts the motif of a moving train wending its way through the hyperglobalized space of the world’s railway systems straight from the imagery of the Industrial Revolution, the perfect signifier of society’s cultish pursuit of growth, its cockroach-like resilience and endless adaptability. Every orbit is another reminder of the passengers’ exceptional luck and the pressing need for gratitude for being included in Wilford’s life-saving and groundbreaking mechanism.
Except the vast majority of the Snowpiercer’s inhabitants have little to be grateful for. A barbaric caste system relegates the proles to the claustrophobic rear of the train, resembling the squalid conditions and arbitrary violence of countless Auchwitz movies, while the 1% bask in steam rooms and sushi bars at the front. Bong reminds us that with the survival of humanity comes the survival of ideology, and in the microcosm of the Snowpiercer, it is stronger than ever. So fetishized is Wilford’s triumph of modernity, that his methods of oppression are caked in religious language, ventriloquized by the captivating Tilda Swinton chanelling a grotesque blend of Cruella Deville and Margaret Thatcher. “In the beginning…” prefixes a great deal of her ideological accouncements, carrying a religious sense of predestination, the belief that “eternal order is prescribed by the sacred engine,” and that the brutal inequality aboard the train is divinely begotten. But after 17 years of oppression and failed coups, a band of revolutionaries led by Chris Evans’ grizzled Curtis, whose heroism is world’s apart from that of his alter-ego Captain America, look organised enough to actually make it all the way to the front of the train. Because if “we control the engine, we control the world.”
In the preparatory notes to his essay “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin challenges Marx’s understanding of revolutions as “the locomotives of world history,”  or a sense of onward and upward struggle. Alternatively, he suggests that true revolution is in fact “the human race reaching for the emergency brake.” Trains move forward; they signify progress. If blood has to be shed, and child labour enforced to sustain the momentum of Wilford’s invention, then so be it. But when Curtis peels back the floorboards in the engine room to reveal little Timmy functioning as a human engine part, the Snowpiercer no longer appears as the protective shield between humanity and extinction, but a hulking, vampiric monstrosity that will do anything to fuel its forward movement. It is understandably kind of a punch to the gut therefore, that when the film reaches its climactic moment of confrontation between Curtis and Wilford, it transpires in a grand twist that this revolution, like all of its precedents, has been orchestrated by Wilford himself as a kind of Bakhtian safety valve, to stabilize population and reassert the normative power structure of the train. Dressed in the trappings of an archetypal evil genius, Wilford relays the entire plan to Curtis over steak and wine, draped in a silken robe, delivering a heart-sinking epigram of “the Great Curtis revolution”: “a blockbuster production with a devilishly unpredictable plot.” Here the extent of the film’s self-reflexivity finally reveals itself: Snowpiercer is in many ways a generic action movie, albeit a very well-made one, cast in the same mold as thousands its contemporaries. It is hypermodern; it has a full set of tropes and special effects, delivering edge-of-the-seat tension, entertaining fight scenes, tragedy, betrayal, and when the narrative ends, the world will go back to the way it was before, with the audience’s appetite for rebellion sated for the time being. Like the train itself, it is also a product of globalization, a platform where East and West meet in its disjointed aesthetic and the literal language barrier between the film’s American and Korean characters. If Snowpiercer had ended there in the engine room, with Curtis sacrificing his convictions for the greater good, accepting Wilford’s offer of personal promotion and turning his back on the coup, we would be back to square one and there would have been nothing unique about the events of the film thus far, despite the thrilling entertainment they provided. There would be little to separate Snowpiercer the movie from Snowpiercer the train, both hallmarks of modernity, carrying us on in a global project of bigger, better, wider horizons, but never really taking us anywhere new.
This is the movie that Snowpiercer could have been, but fortunately, Bong’s directional vision far surpasses that of many of his Hollywood peers, and the result is a breathtaking comment on the power of cinema to politicise and, ultimately, mobilise. In a searing evocation of Benjamin, Curtis does slam the emergency brake on the Snowpiercer, sacrificially jamming his arm into the engine to save Timmy and compromising Wilford’s entire business plan. With a helping hand from some explosives, the locomotive’s 17 year record of uninterrupted movement comes literally crashing to a halt as the train dramatically de-rails, boasting some stunning visuals as the Snowpiercer is obliterated by a cascading avalanche. It is these lasting images of catastrophe that testify to Bong’s directional bravery in turning Hollywood tropes into political interventions.
It is frustrating but unsurprising to think that Snowpiercer only made it to the silver screen by the skin of its teeth. Densely packed with Marxist philosophy and a melange of genres, the film flared up on The Weinstein Company’s radar, leading to heated negotiations in which Harvey Weinstein tried to impose 20 minute cuts and hammy voice-overs to coddle more easily confused audiences. In the style of his own parable, however, Bong‘s film has overcome its corporate suppressers, who, responding to his stubbornness, limited the distribution of Snowpiercer to only a handful of North American cinemas, and is already on its way to cult status. Little did Weinstein know, the movie he tried to streamline at best and censor at worst will become all the more iconic in independent cinema for the air of dissent and forbidenness that has marked its nascence.
In Snowpiercer, the answer to Davis’ question is already a given. “Solutions” to global crises invariably come from the top down, even though this usually means only patching up the symptoms of a wider, systemic problem. Snowpiercer is not so much about who will build the ark, but who will bring it crashing down and enable society to start from scratch. As Yona and Timmy, the film’s two paragons of youth and hope, step from the wreckage having miraculously survived, the glimpse of a polar bear in the distance falsifies the faith in the train held by its passengers as the only earthly sanctuary from certain death. Life, freedom and vitality can exist once more on earth, and as Bong proves, onscreen too.

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