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.
Yet after seeing, reviewing, and praising Bong’s newest masterwork, Parasite,
I realized I should retrace my steps and see, thanks to Netflix, some of his
earlier works.
Our would-be hero, Curtis later admits, in deepest despair: “I know what
people taste like. I know that children taste best.”
The
conductor of this mad and narrow vision of the seven deadly sins (I saw the
Kurt Weill musical vision of those sins later that same day!), moreover, is a
practical being—as he perceives himself—using Darwin’s theories, a bit like the
Nazi’s used Eugenics, to justify his attempt to balance his train ride to Hell
from growing out of control. Sushi is eaten only twice a year to protect the
aquarium from being overfished. And 74% of the train’s current population must
be destroyed in order for the others to survive. This is a survival of the
fittest gone crazy.
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.
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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