The Politics of an Ending: Snowpiercer’s Explosion of Social Allegory

Stephen Poland
Aug 22, 2017 · 5 min read
“By blowing off the door, Snowpiercer blows open and derails the narrative in which it was imprisoned for two hours.”

We’re not really accustomed to thinking about how something works being political, especially when it comes to narrative. Issues adressed in a story and the stance the story takes on those issues are recognizably political, but it’s rare that we think of the narrative structure of a movie as itself having a politics. In Bong Joon-ho’s movie Snowpiercer, the way the story is told seems to rise up out of an already existing politics, so the basic movement of the narrative from the back of the train to the front appears to be a kind of pre-given expression of the film’s basic political drive. But what if this very narrative structure is no longer tenable, and Snowpiercer is here to tell us our politics are broken?

The train in Snowpiercer works beautifully to focus the journey as a sheerly linear advance. There are no detours, no uncertainties about which way to go, no off-road wilderness adventures, and no retreats into the contented confines of home. It is a unidirectional journey of the hero through a spatialization of class. And the fact that there can be no meddling from the outside–no outside destination where police and loved ones await the inevitable arrival of the narrative vehicle to provide final resolution–not only provides a nice little political commentary on climate change, but seals in the world of the movie all the more hermetically, allowing it to focus its energy (almost) entirely on the world within he confines of the train. Like many great horror films, there is no escape: the enemy, fear, anxiety, and confusion must all be confronted and conquered.

What’s more, and has to a large extent driven the positive reviews of Snowpiercer, this stripped-down, simple plot allows for the movie to flesh out details of the literally compartmentalized train society in highly stylized ways that at times barely seem connected to the plot of the film. From the catfish during the fight scene to the New Year’s countdown to the scene at the sushi bar (my favorite), the movie uses seemingly non-purposive moments that unexpectedly pause or slow the movement of the heroes from the back to the front and allow for certain kind of detours of imagination and enjoyment. The revelation in the food production car that protein bars are made by crushing insects certainly adds to our disgust for the conditions the trains rear-enders are subjected to, but it also calls to mind the industrial production of Soylent Green. The manic classroom car shows us the ideological system of social reproduction for the children of the front-end, who, like the chronol-using ravers they will likely become, are blissfully unaware that any rear-to-front narrative motion is possible.

Does all of this do more than provide a foil for Curtis and his fellow rebels from the rear-end of the train? Does it do anything besides showing us what has to be either overthrown or escaped from? Certainly, there is more than enough allegorical fodder for immediate critical application to our own social order, industrial food production, education, and entertainment systems. And it is very tempting to make the immediate allegorical leap to a set of political questions about whether it is “more revolutionary to want to take control of the society that’s oppressed you, or to try and escape from that system altogether.” But it seems to me that there is an intermediate step easily cast aside in the face of such a magnificently immediate and simple dichotomy, and that is addressing the question of Snowpiercer’s take on its own narrative–its view of itself, if you will.

To jump straight to my conclusion, what Snowpiercer’s ending tells us is that the allegory is wrong. The train is not simply the social allegory, but a way of posing the allegory to begin with — a narrative structure. Once Curtis and the others reach the front of the train, the energy driving the tightly confined plot turns in on itself and struggles to find somewhere to go. The end of the film is, frankly, a mess, but it is somewhat exciting to watch the movie flail about in search of some kind of resolution that doesn’t simply succumb to the false dichotomies and pseudo-satisfying happy endings we’ve all seen time and time again. All of this is, of course, dramatized in Curtis’ encounter with Wilford, but the desperation is visible even before we see what’s behind the Wizard’s curtain. Snowpiercer is a movie at war with its own narrative, and its awareness that it does not want to go to the place that it inevitably has to bubbles up in ridiculous delay tactics, like Curtis’ story of cannibalism that pushes into the realm of unintentional comedy when he emotionally declares his shame about knowing that “babies taste the best.” (The same could be said of the stale suggestion of Wilford’s pedophilia.)

In proposing to blow open the door of the train, Nam points out, “Everyone thinks it’s a wall. But it’s a fucking door. Open it and get us out of here.” As easy as it is to jump right to the logical allegorical application to the total corruption of the system and the impossibility of reform (let alone revolution) from within the confines of its structural logic, treating the train as a narrative structure raises multiple questions. Why was it necessary to wait until this end point to propose this solution? Couldn’t Nam have blown open the side of the train at any other point before so many had been killed and injured? And how could he, who had been locked away in the prison car, have noticed the melting snow at Yekaterina Bridge every New Year? The answer can only be narrative: the movie had to start to look for a way out once it was face-to-face with the inevitably unsatisfying closure of Curtis becoming Dorothy or Charlie Bucket. By blowing off the door, Snowpiercer blows open and derails the narrative in which it was imprisoned for two hours. With nowhere else to go, it reverts to a back-to-nature romanticism of which we need not make much.

The point is that the allegory itself leads nowhere, at least to nothing desirable. It is well past time for the Left to get to work crafting and championing new and different narrative structures if it is to have any success in the ideological battlefield. Narratives channel and generate desires that are absolutely crucial to how we imagine the world and our roles within it, and are therefore also key to what Peter Frase at Jacobin calls “the possibility of a realm of freedom beyond the train’s implacable world of necessity.“ But by understanding the train simply as a “world of necessity” allegorically displaying our own, we confine ourselves to a narrative apparatus of necessity that itself does not allow for the revolutionary forces of desire and creativity capital has come to monopolize with dire consequences for both humans and ecosystems. The time has come for us to recognize that what we thought were narrative walls are actually doors for us to blow open, possibly including the very notion of the Left.


Originally published at frederickpoland.tumblr.com.

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Stephen Poland

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New Haven based primate. Culture, politics, organizing, media, animals, assemblages, empire, extraction, stories, language, earthlings, rebellion. He, him, his.

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