A Huge Metaphor

Sometimes a great movie will wake you up so many details right after you consume it for a while.

Train to Busan (2016) is such a clever trap: you, following the Seok-Woo, our kind vampire fund manager who’s just busy manipulating the stock of a weird biotech corporation, were trapped in a doomed high speed fast bullet train from Seoul to Busan. The disease is from nowhere, the only thing you know is people running like hell, and piled-up corpses biting live ones in front of you. No matter how many passengers were turned into zombies, your only survival goal is tiny and humble: keep your daughter safe arriving Busan to meet her mother.

The whole catastrophe is a projection: because you were limited in the certain narrow view of surviving the zombies on the train, the outside world suggested from the movie poster is a visual trap… your brain can only bricolage to imagine partially with the doomed passengers. Psychologically speaking, the effect is just like the voyeuring subject peeping from the Rear Window (1954).

It’s a clever way to say something by not saying out loud its proper name. In the process of psychological projection, anything you gain is from what you originally have (in the brain). The social critiques of Train to Busan is limited to the minimal dose and left a great space for audience to “grow”. As MiamiHerald puts it,

“Train to Busan” can be read as a commentary of the social and economic disparities in South Korea, a metaphor for the respiratory syndrome that afflicted the country in 2015 and a reflection of the culture’s ingrained customs and mores (unlike the living, these zombies are rude and insolent; they howl with rage and anger at their condition).

….This brisk, exciting and scary picture tells us that when the apocalypse comes, we’ll all be fighting on the same side. Too bad it takes a catastrophe to make us realize that.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/movies-news-reviews/article93667637.html#storylink=cpy

From a Taiwanese movie watcher’s perspective, the social connotation is so mild and light-weighted and make all the film smooth and entertaining. I doubt rare people could recall about the MERS respiratory syndrome, where we are known for suffered from collective amnesia. In the speed of bullet train, the director has made a tremendous achievement to rest all the questing minds. Like Cho’s famous Kung-Fu Hustle (2004) quote: “All the kung-fus of the world, only the fastest wins.”

Even so when I found out the tiny clues, I am very excited: the mobile phone usage in escaping the cabin 9–13 zombies. My discovery is: anyone who lose their mobile phone MUST DIE. The sacrifice and terminated of cellphone represented its owner’s fate. Of course the director not exaggerating it… the tiny clue only connects slightly to hint your unconscious. I am appreciating the Director’s art craft shaping the cognition in such slight ways.

For a fellow white-collar quasi-vampire Asian to watch this zombie-on-a-bullet-train film, I shared the sorrow for the projection of despair society where seeing fund manager as accepted vampire. Taiwan is not there yet, but will we (who are we?) soon wake up and realize from a series of bank scandals and government inabilities? If we were set to be trapped on a bullet train, I would be finding tapes wrapping up the arm and fists, collecting as many Samsung Note 7 as possible…. before the next tunnel approaching too.