Snowpiercer: A Socio-cosmic commentary?

Joon Ho’s runaway train is a societal allegory — but is there something more metaphysical amuck?

Perhaps with the arrival of the new “Snowpiercer” TV series, Film4 aired Bong Joon Ho’s original movie of the same name last week, which exactly like Joon Ho’s recently released “Parasite”, is typically considered a sociopolitical commentary. The passengers on board the Snowpiercer, a train which now careers across the snow-globe as the earth entered another ice-age on account of an over-shooting global-warming experiment, are the only human beings left surviving. Those at the front of the train represent those at the pinnacle of society throughout history, who indulge in luxury and debauchery while the downtrodden are enslaved within the lowest rung of the world — those at the tail end of the train. And as revolutions have rumbled up from the depths across human history, so Chris Evans in Snowpiercer, playing Curtis, leads such a revolt against the callous and entitled (dentured and indenturing) likes of Tilda Swinton.

However, the film could just as easily be read as an exploration not of class, but of cosmos. For instance, throughout the film the train’s engine (mostly by the ruling elite) is referenced in reverence using various epithets such as the “Great eternal engine”; it is venerated as sacrosanct, and in the train-cars converted to blindingly primary-coloured primary schools the children are happily indoctrinated into this ‘engine cult’. The grumble of the engine takes on religious overtones, and so becomes a metaphor for the core of the universe, the Source of all being accessed in the mystical state, sustaining and driving all matter and energy against the constant onslaught of entropy. The children are taught to announce that without the Great Eternal Engine, “we would all surely freeze and die!” — alluding to the surrounding walls of ice, but a nod too perhaps to the heat-death (or ‘big freeze’) toward which the universe is inevitably heading. The Snowpiercer engine is no normal engine, and can be equated to God in this case, as it is revealed to be a perpetual motion machine. A label one might just as readily ascribe to an immanent Divine Agent which sets all the universe into motion in the very first moments; fundamentally self-sustaining, deriving no driving force outwith it (“Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest”, as Rupert Sheldrake has said of modern science).

The train as a whole, then, can be thought of not only as strata and sub-strata of a divided society — but as the explicit, or unfolded universe at large. The tail-end, a realm of poor lighting and over-populated by the filth-smudged destitute, might be Hell. The front is the paradise of every need met in abundance inhabited by the chosen elect. Every train-car in between might have a range of cosmological significances — the car where we briefly see some hedonistic party thump away might be Earth, the sphere of desire as the Buddhists consider it, or yet another echelon of Heaven or Hell (depending on your style), while the carriage in which we see the revolting revolutionaries on their march toward the Front get massacred by the overlords’ army of axe-wielding minions is very likely a purgatorial realm; a ‘purification’. Only a handful, including our character-armoured ‘Christ’ Evans end up surviving the slaughter, taking them ever closer to their ardent goal, the Engine Room — thus echoing “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle” than to enter the Kingdom of God. Eventually, only One might attain this transcendent prize, as the rest are hacked up or held prisoner by the tribulations and illusions of life — exemplified in the Hero’s journey which predicates every protagonist’s story; Neo, Skywalker — Curtis. The Engine Room then is the abode of God, and who else to take the throne in this train-segment but Ed Harris, playing Wilford, whose company the train was built by and who mirrors this theological resonance emanating from the Eternal Engine.

Wilford, once Curtis finally achieves his destination, lectures him about the necessity of balance and order in the train, with such compelling turn-a-phrase that he has even Curtis, the embittered revolutionary against the supposedly corrupt and deranged Demiurgic powers, starting to believe in the shocking revelations. Before Curtis’ anarchistic antics, everything was exquisitely fine-tuned, everything rested in its rightful place, so that order could be maintained and the world could keep spinning — certainly a possible (albeit incendiary) sociological narrative, but I prefer to read it instead as redolent of the ‘goldy-locks’ principle of the cosmos wherein life was enabled due to its perfectly configured conditions, and the proclamations of balance a direct reflection of Taoist philosophy.

Wilford, in association with the Great Engine, can similarly be perceived as playing God, being an old man at the head of the ecological hierarchy as he is. Curtis is soon seen semi-prostrate, collapsed on his knees in a not so opaque religious stance in the very heart of the Eternal Engine itself — an awesome gyrating cylinder of spinning metal tubes drenched in sublime white light, certainly not unlike that reported in near-death experiences (except perhaps the overtly mechanical components, though this too is sometimes experienced e.g. https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1wilson_fde.html). The whole scenario is again a flashback to so many scenes in which the substructure of Reality is penetrated by some special individual who meets his maker, prototypically Neo’s encounter with the Architect in the “White Room” of mystical infame.

Wilford eventually whispers, in very Luciferian vane, in Curtis’ ear as he continues to kneel in despair, “When was the last time you were alone?”, which shuttled my mind back to experiences and contemplation of the perennial imperative of One Consciousness, the infinitely empty and complete Void in which you may realise yourself and world to synonymise as nothing and everything. The experience may be agonising — left all alone, and not least with your thoughts of guilt accrued in life (as was Curtis lamenting the pointless sacrifices of his friends) — or ecstatically divine in immersing oneself in the harmony of all things. Or indeed both (again, you may bathe in the numinous, but this may be eclipsed by the shame of not deserving such a thing, as it may have been for Curtis due to the evils he admitted to committing in the hellish tail section).

Wilford asks Curtis to succeed him as King of the train, supervisor over the Eternal Engine. The struggle Curtis has to deal with here is whether to accept Wilford’s professions as to truth of his Order edict, rendering him a True God — or reject them as deceptions designed to convince, determining Wilford as a False God. If the latter, Willy depicts more a Demiurge; a malign or insane godlike being in charge of the cosmological space, tempting Curtis to take his throne (gain the world), and accept the law of ‘necessary’ sacrifice (losing his soul). Ultimately, Curtis proves himself the Redeemer, by simultaneously redeeming himself with his 11th-hour self-sacrifice. This archetypal act leads to the salvation of a lonesome pair of Adam-and-Eve-esque survivors after he reduces the Snowpiercer to scattered shards of glowing metal across the ice — denoting the need to destroy the old facsimile of a world, to “create new heavens and a new earth” with “no more death’ or mourning…for the old order of things has passed away” (Isaiah 65:17).