Movies | Society
‘The Platform’ and How Low Can You Go?
An analysis of the film’s purpose and the people shown in it
The Platform is a film about struggle, our nearsightedness, and our drive to survive.
It’s a story about humans and the lengths they can go to for their selfish desires. But it is also about how there is always someone who tries to save the day, even if their attempts are clumsy and feeble. They still try.
The Platform’s Purpose
The movie’s name is as self-explanatory as it can get. The film is about a platform — which is stacked up with delicious foods — that moves from the top to the bottom in a vertical prison called ‘The Hole’. It’s sole purpose is to take food down to all of the levels.
The Hole has so many levels, if you try to guess how many floors there are, you’d be proven wrong in the next scene.
So, we’ve covered the platform and the levels, and the food. What’s left? Oh yeah. We haven’t covered the people in this prison. They’re not all criminals, like our protagonist — Goreng. He was promised some kind of a diploma and he agreed to be sent to the hole of his own accord.
Each floor has two people and they have their basic things there. They’ve got a sink, a toilet, and a bed. What they don’t have is food, and that’s where the platform comes into work, and it strips down the humanity of these people and has them play a survival game.
The People’s Purpose
Humans are enigmatic and complex. You might think you understand someone but you can never truly know them or find out what they’re all about.
People in The Platform aren’t any different. Our protagonist, Goreng, wants to be a hero. This is apparent from the book he brings into the Hole — Don Quixote — and how he tries to help a woman — Miharu — who’s trying to find her daughter in the vertical prison.
Goreng is not the protagonist we want, but he’s the one we get. He’s as flawed and terrible as the other people in that hellhole of a prison. But maybe my dislike for him came from knowing that he’s not perfect. He represents us — the ordinary people. He got into the Hole quite foolishly, thinking he could tolerate the situation there, but he was wrong. He then tried to help Miharu, who he barely knew, because he was attracted to her. Then he tried to stage a somewhat coup by hijacking the platform with Baharat (another inmate from another level in the Hole).
The Platform shows people at their ugliest, and that’s when they are driven by hunger and survival. Their nearsightedness stops them from fathoming anything beyond their need to survive.
In this context, many of the characters we come across are flawed. Baharat seems to be a pacifist at first as he tries to be nice to the people on the floor above his, but they actually shit on him. Miharu is just minding her own business by travelling to other floors on the platform so she can find her daughter, but this always seems to get her in trouble. Goreng is just Goreng, a clumsy man trying to be a hero, but he ends up doing more bad than good.
These characters are all evil, in one way or another, which is to say that we — real people — are just as evil as each other as well. We just have better ways of hiding our wickedness. We just need a single bad day to bring out our true intentions, and for the people in the Hole — everyday is a bad day.
The Film’s Purpose
There are many movies which strive with the gore that they depict but not many like the Platform. Goreng’s floormate is a cannibal who later slices off pieces of Goreng’s skin to feast upon when they get stuck on an extremely low level. Yes, shiver in disgust.
But we are not here to relive that horrible imagery. We are here to discuss the film’s purpose: Miharu’s child.
Baharat and Goreng’s takeover of the platform and their idea of sending a dish perfectly untouched back to level 0 turns out to be a bust. Because (late spoiler alert) most of the characters are dead by then. Goreng’s floormate, Miharu, Baharat, and the list goes on. There are just too many floors to cover and Goreng’s little coup has gone terribly wrong. It is also one of the reasons why Baharat dies. So, there’s that.
And while Goreng is disappointed in his mission failing and his partner dying, he also manages to reach the last floor — level 333 — of the Hole. That’s how low we can go for now. And would you look at that. There’s Miharu’s kid hiding under a bed.
Now, there are many interpretations to the next scenes of the film, but my personal opinion about it is that the Hole is like our real world. Hear me out. The food is put on the platform by professional chefs. Great effort is put into making this food and presenting it on plates. And then it’s lowered down on the platform.
From the first floors, people are able to eat properly and easily, and then things start becoming darker as the platform descends further down.
This can be seen as a typical pyramid scheme where the people at the top are not as aware of the struggles of the people at the bottom. Though, each month, people on each floor get switched up — it still depicts real life and how people with money may fall and new people with money may rise. It’s a game.
And in this game, there is no room for children because these people playing it are not the nurturing and empathic types. So, when Goreng sees Miharu’s child— it’s all the message he needs to know that she is the message.
Children are the most affected by the problems of our real world. It has got to the point that some governments are paying people to have children. But why would someone want to bring a child to a world so unstable when they themselves can barely survive.
What the platform does so perfectly in its imperfect little hole is send a message to level 0. Well, mostly to us. And the message is clear: it’s that our survival is not by us surviving. Our survival — as humans — is by having our next generation survive us.
That’s not to say that we all should have more children. Of course not. Better to have none than to have more and not be able to instill sensibility and empathy in them. It is to say that we should see our children as individuals and teach them as much as we can about the world we live in, while still teaching them to hold onto their humanity.
The Platform’s purpose was clear by the end of the film, and it was quite unexpected.
It’s the survival of the weakest. And when our weak are able to survive — only then will we be able to survive in the grand scheme of things.
Thank you for reading this opinionated piece on the film The Platform (2019). I hope you enjoyed!
