Emily has done a great job of reviewing Snowpiercer and providing some links to get us ready. I thought I’d do the same by sharing links to two “think pieces” on the movie — some heavy reading, actually. I’m not avoiding spoilers, so look away if that sort of thing bothers you.
A Snowpiercer Thinkpiece, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously, But For Very Serious Reasons
Snowpiercer is a truly chilling dystopia, then, because its world is fully self-contained, and sufficient. But the most insane thing about it is that it makes sense. And it crystallizes something firghtening about the psychic geography of late capitalism, a technologically-enhanced state of affairs in which the function of the oppressed masses is less and less to work and be exploited than to be excluded and to suffer. The first world, the movie might seem to argue, works less to provide its citizens with pleasure than to shape their desire by constructing others through their pain, lack, and death. Instead of giving Texans a health care system, for example, late capitalism gives them the illegal immigrant, to hate, to fear, and to dis-identify with. Prisons do more and more of the system-maintaining work that was once done by schools and hospitals: instead of giving us something to want, they give us something to fear, hate, and kill. And so, we eat ourselves.
Capitalism’s genius is its ability to co-opt every attempt at resistance; every revolution is engineered within the system, with the permission of the system, according to terms defined by the system. Which is why the exploitative conditions of capitalism–its visceral and mundane horrors–have persisted for so very long: they seem to be driven by a “sacred engine” which will run perfectly forever.
