A great train speeds through icy wastes, ferrying the last remnants of humanity through an apocalyptic ice age. The train is self-sustaining, implacable, and safe. It is the Eternal Engine.
And Curtis wants to tear it all down.
Snowpiercer, a 2013 film by Bong Joon-ho, is not necessarily a pleasant movie to watch, but I think that’s perhaps the point. Bong, along with co-writer Kelly Masterson, create a dark, utterly alien version of humanity whose cramped compartments and violence-filled passageways are initially unrecognizable. But after two hours of staring through the frost-rimmed windows of the Snowpiercer, the distorted reflection of our own world is unmistakable.
==================SPOILERS AHEAD======================
Snowpiercer begins at a point that most films spend an hour building to — Curtis (played by Chris Evans) is on the cusp of a daring plan to rise above his station. He is a member of the “tail” of Snowpiercer, a slummy class of citizens who are routinely abused by first-class soldiers and bourgeois citizens from further up the train.
Curtis, along with his mentor Gilliam and the rest of the tail, hatch a plot to take over the engine room of Snowpiercer, thereby seizing an unbeatable bargaining chip to secure greater well-being. Curtis dreams with his friend Edgar (Jamie Bell) that they will feast on steak, as opposed to the Jell-O-like protein cubes they are presently fed. Others, like Tanya (Octavia Spencer), join the quest to reunite with their children, who were forcibly taken by upper-class soldiers to meet an unknown fate.
As might be expected, the plan goes off beautifully — for about two car-lengths. Curtis’s initial objective is to free a hacker from the prison car, a man named Namgoong who is willing to work in exchange for Kronole, a hallucinogenic/flammable/addictive byproduct of the Engine. Namgoong adroitly slices open door after door, aided by his daughter and fellow addict Yona.
After this initial success, Curtis’s crew meets violent resistance from masked axemen and tommy-gun-toting teachers who whittle down the revolutionaries in a series of distinctly gauche fight scenes. When one watches a rated-R action movie, one tends to expect glorious slow-motion whirling and blossoms of blood pirouetting with Synder-esque gravitas — but the violence of Snowpiercer is instead communicated through poor lighting and organic squelching noises, made all the more disturbing by a near-total lack of music.
In one such battle-scene, Curtis is given a chance to capture a high-ranking hostage, but just before his target is in reach, he turns to see Edgar, his best friend, in a chokehold with a knife to his neck. Curtis can save Edgar if he turns back, but Curtis decides to let Edgar perish and capture the hostage instead.
The film does not dwell on this moral decision, instead sending Curtis hurtling through car after car, until he, Yona, and Namgoong are the only remaining revolutionaries. (The hostage Curtis took is dead, killed in cold blood by Curtis as retaliation for Gilliam’s murder.)
The trio finally pass through the upper-class cars nearest the Engine. These cars are decadent, with alcohol and Kronole aplenty; these passengers are well-dressed and clean, and they stare openly at the filthy tail passengers as they pass. Yona and Namgoong quite naturally take the opportunity to procure liberal amounts of Kronole and furs from any passenger too high to protest.
And then comes the showdown. Curtis is invited, alone, into the inner sanctum of the Eternal Engine, to discuss his future with the caretaker of the Engine, an elderly and reclusive mechanical genius named Wilford.
It is at this moment that the real story of Snowpiercer begins. The rest is mere context, 1.5 hours of film whose purpose is not to entertain, but to obtain narrative and emotional buy-in for the single conversation Curtis has with Wilford. And the conversation pays this investment off in full, with interest.
Wilford reveals to Curtis that the revolt was Wilford’s idea, a collaboration with Curtis’s mentor Gilliam to foment an unsuccessful revolution. The reason, Wilford tells Curtis, is twofold: the death keeps the train’s population below carrying capacity (especially in the poor tail sections), and the fear of violence keeps the first-class passengers docile and obedient. Everyone in their proper place, in the proper proportions, just like the delicately tuned Eternal Engine that propels them and keeps them alive. If the “proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror” do not exist, Wilford says, “we need to invent them”.
And before the shock fades from Curtis’s face, Wilford makes an offer: “I want you to take my station”. As curator of the Eternal Engine, Wilford says, Curtis can save humanity from themselves, keeping the Engine humming and ensuring order on the train.
Curtis weeps, all but convinced. However, Yona and Namgoong burst into the inner sanctum to shatter the illusion of tranquility — while Curtis was talking to Wilford, the two hackers created a bomb from the flammable Kronole they’d stolen, fending off attacks in the meanwhile. They believe that the Kronole bomb will explode with such force and energy that, as it destroys the Eternal Engine, it will also catalyze the melting of Earth.
At first Curtis believes their plot insane, but Yona intervenes — she snatches a silver fork from Wilford’s steak-laden table and uses it to prize a piece of floor paneling up. A human eye peeks out from under the panel, partially obscured by whirring gears, hunched between actuating pistons — it is Tim, the five-year-old son of Tanya, the child who was abducted in the first minutes of the film. Tim moves his arms back and forth, oiling gears and cams, ceaselessly and repeatedly.
Tim was abducted, Wilford reveals, to maintain the role that a now-extinct Engine part once performed. In fact, the reason the Engine needs the tail section at all is to supply a steady stream of 5-year-olds, the only passengers small enough to fit between the cogs of the Engine. “Everyone has their own pre-ordained position,” he tells Curtis by way of explanation.
It is then that Curtis snaps. He knocks Wilford down. He thrusts his own hand into the moving machinery to arrest the gears’ movement, hauling Tim out of his nook and into the cabin. Yona moves to help Curtis, but instead he shoves a matchbook into her hand so that she can light the fuse of the Kronole bomb. Curtis has rejected his place in the Engine.
Yona lights the fuse. Namgoong makes a final desperate stand against the Engine’s soldiers, shielding Yona and Tim with his body. Curtis wrenches his arm from the Engine, severing it.
The Engine explodes.
The final scene of Snowpiercer is Yona and Tim, walking laden with furs into a bright snowfield. They lift their eyes to the horizon, making sudden eye contact with a polar bear making its regal way across the hills…
============
Snowpiercer is admittedly a mediocre action film, but it is an exceptional allegorical story. The Engine can be compellingly interpreted as capitalism itself, a system which benefits the powerful and exploits the needy. And the actions of the tail passengers may spell a path out of this system of nested exploitations.
Thomas Piketty and others have shown that wealth tends to concentrate in the hands of very few people, much like Wilford and the upper-class passengers lived in unmitigated luxury. This wealth is also self-perpetuating, with so much interest generated by capital that it inevitably acquires more capital. However, the way that the wealthy retain their political power is through “dividing and conquering”, fomenting strife along racial lines and other physical markers so that class strata are largely ignored. And, most of all, the wealthy sponsor and disseminate a philosophy which valorizes their actions!
This is the system of the Eternal Engine of Snowpiercer. Note some eerie parallels — the Engine is “Eternal” by name, but its parts in fact are sourced from the suffering of the powerless, children forced to labor in the bowels of the engine, and the tail-section parents who bear those children only to have them destroyed in this way. The Engine is inherently entwined with the idea of “proper proportion,” but this idea itself is philosophical, not scientific or self-evident.
There is one further analogy that may not be intended by Bong and Masterson, but which I find to be the most profound. Perhaps the most famous quote of Karl Marx is that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” but this is not the full quotation. Marx’s real words were that “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The religion of Marx is any belief system which urgently seeks human flourishing. In other words, religion at its best is one of the primary tools to reverse the oppressions of wealth and power.
Just so, Snowpiercer‘s Kronole is the tool which Yona uses to liberate Tim and the rest of the train. It is literally an opiate, and among the upper classes of the train it is used merely as a narcotic. But Yona and Namgoong use Kronole as fuel, literally and figuratively, to break down socioeconomic barriers between train cars, and eventually they use it to bring down the entire corrupt system. Kronole is the alternative belief system which claims that a flourishing world exists just outside the doors of the Eternal Engine. This method is not without cost, of course — Curtis was lost in the explosion that claims the Engine, and his arm was severed in the attempt to free Tim. But this method, full of self-sacrifice and struggle and compassion for the Other, is the only final solution for the Engine’s oppression.
Capitalism is a narrow train speeding along the wasteland it created. It is self-sufficient, and its proponents would call it Eternal. It narcotizes the poor, exploiting their pain even as their existence threatens the wealthy into submission. The keepers of this engine would have us believe this is the only habitable refuge for humanity, but the world outside waits, green shoots lurking just beneath a dusting of snow. All that is needed is a spark of opiate to catalyze the reaction.