brave new world
by
Douglas Messerli
Bong
Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson (screenplay, based on a story by Bong Joon-ho and
the graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand,
and Jean-Marc Rochette), Bong Joon-ho (director) Snowpiercer / 2013
When
Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer first appeared in theaters in 2013, I
couldn’t even imagine wanting to see it. I am not a big fan of sci-fi films,
and the dystopian elements of it troubled me. Perhaps I’d simply read (and
written) too many dystopian fictions. One of the earliest works I published on
Sun & Moon Press was Len Jenkin’s brilliant dystopian work, New
Jerusalem, and later his fiction N Judah, which also has dystopian
elements. My own Letters from Hanusse (written under the pseudonym of
Joshua Haigh) is a kind of dystopian satire of sorts.
Moreover, I’m not a fan of violent warfare
films, particularly when they occur on a train bound to nowhere simply circling
a frozen world. Besides, hadn’t I already seen just such a film in John
Frankenheimer’s 1964 movie, The Train, in which another train speeding
through an ideological frozen universe, ends up with corpses and major art
works strewn over the tracks. Just as in Bong’s movie, life outside of the
train meant certain death?
Finally, I simply don’t enjoy graphic
novels, one of which, Le Transperceneige, was the source of Bong’s work.
This, I determined, was simply not my fare.
I’m
glad I did, for if, in some senses, this movie is an absolute mish-mash of
genres and ideas, it’s certainly a brilliant one, filled with amazing images
(who might imagine a single long train filled with scenes that might echo the Nazi
victims of the Holocaust; dark, axe-bearing soldiers that callup Star Wars and
the immense armies of the Tolkien films at the very same moment; drugged-out
security guards locked away in metal drawers; as well as wonderous aquarium dioramas;
a Chi-Chi sushi bar; hair-dressing salons; wild orphic dance scenes; a
classroom presentation wherein young students are being indoctrinated into the
worship of their own version of a Fuhrer, wrapped around the mad conductor’s
determination to plow through an icy world destroyed by a fatal over-reaction
to global warming?) as well as deeper ideas, reiterating Bong’s most recent
send-up of class differentiations, with a souffle of cannibalism,
homosexuality, bisexuality, maybe even pedophilia, and certainly child
enslavement. As the mad Minister Mason (the wonderful Tilda Swinton) declares, “Wilford
(Ed Harris) just loves children!”
Our would-be hero, Curtis later admits,
in deepest despair: “I know what people taste like. I know that children taste
best.”
If the language of those last two
paragraphs seems rather clotted with visual and ideological descriptions, it
can only begin to capture the feeling of the hot-house atmosphere of Bong’s creation.
It also appears that the sacrificing Gilliam
may have been among them, but as the revolution comes its terrifying
conclusion, Curtis finally forcing his way to the head of the locomotive to
have a lunch with the aging and remarkably affable Wilford—Gilliam, now dead,
after having warned his young charge that he should never talk with Wilford,
but simply and immediately cut out his tongue—almost convinces the young hero
to take over his role as conductor of this horrific traveling beast of a
machine.
Curtis is almost convinced, but in the
process discovers that Gilliam has also betrayed him, a man having sacrificed
so much of his own life still plotting with Wilford to allow Curtis entry into director’s
seat. It is almost as if Bong, who often works collaboratively, is admitting
his own character to take over the very film he is making.
Yet when Yona shows Curtis a secret
passageway where we witness Tanya’s children being used to help keep the train
moving through child labor, Curtis realizes that he must help them escape, kill
Wilford and allow the Snowpiercer vehicle to derail. In short, he denies his
role as hero, himself, like Gilliam, giving up a limb in the process. This is a
film where bodies are gradually chopped into pieces, minds lost into impossible
memories. For the elders a kind of before and after that can again be grafted
together, and for the young simply a world of mindless obedience to how things
are.
The true hero of Bong’s film is not its
macho leaders, but the young, previously drug-ridden Eskimo-conceived Yona, who
takes the two newly-released children into the icy cold, while perceiving through
their now squinting bright eyes a polar bear, that life may finally have
returned to the frozen earth.
Whether or not they will survive, we
cannot truly know. But like Shakespeare’s innocent Miranda—and one must recall
that Yona was born on the train and has never been before out of it— she declares
in her own manner, as she trudges through the deep snow—“O brave new world!”
If nothing else she had broken the ice
in a way that the train passengers, bound by the railroad tracks which defined
its truly limited path across the continents, might never previously have
imagined.
In Snowpiercer Bong has given us
a great dystopian fable for all ages.
Los
Angeles, February 17, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (February 2020).
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