Snowpiercer

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0:00:04.0 Landry Ayres: Welcome to Pop & Locke. I’m Landry Ayres.

0:00:06.3 Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.

0:00:12.4 Landry Ayres: Before Bong Joon-​ho’s ground-​breaking film Parasite was the darling of critics and the award season, the director already had at least one cult hit under his belt. A cold chronicle of civilization, crushed by climate change and community on the cusp class conflict. Here to discuss the 2014 film Snowpiercer are L.org’s own intellectual history editor, Paul Meany.

0:00:33.3 Paul Meany: Hello.

0:00:37.2 Landry Ayres: And senior fellow at the Cato Institute, Jason Kuznicki.

0:00:39.7 Jason Kuznicki: Hello.

0:00:40.8 Aaron Powell: Snowpiercer is one of those movies that has a message with a capital M. It’s very clear that they have something they’re trying to tell you and they’re trying to make those ideas in in an unsubtle way, but like Don’t Look Up, which we talked about on the show a couple of episodes ago, it feels like a movie where it’s a little bit confused itself about what its message is supposed to be, or at least the message the movie presents is somewhat different from maybe what the filmmakers intended. And so along those lines, I guess, I’m curious, is this a Marxist movie?

0:01:21.0 Jason Kuznicki: I would say that if you read it in light of present-​day society, you might come away with the Marxist message. Or if you’re a Marxist, you might say “Aha! This reinforces my world view.” But when I watched it, I ended up coming away with a very different message, it seemed like a pretty thorough going mishmash of different kinds of concerns and symbols relating to them. There is… Very early on in the film, a hint of the fear about chem trails, and there’s global warming, which they are trying to fight by putting a chemical in the atmosphere, but it backfires. So there are a lot of environmental themes, sort of. And then when we zoom in on the world of the train itself, we end up with a lot of symbols that are in fact, derived from very long time ago, a very long time ago in European political thought. The train is a hierarchical society, everyone is to have their place. They’re supposed to be only so many people, only so many animals, and a lot of this is harkening back to ancient political theory. In Plato’s ideal society, there were only to be so many people, there were only to be so many places, and each person was to have their place. So there’s a lot going on here.

0:03:00.5 Paul Meany: I think on top of that idea of everyone having their place, there’s something in medieval thought, that’s a very long name, but it’s called the organological metaphor and that’s the idea of making metaphors with the body. At one part, one of the characters… Tilda Swinton’s character, she says like, “You’re… ” She’s talking to people at the last cart, she’s saying, “You are the feet, I’m the head, and you wouldn’t put socks on your head and just like you wouldn’t put a hat on your feet.” And it’s that kind of argument that she always makes that there’s a chain of being, there’s an order to the world that’s been pre-​ordained and rebelling against it is not only pointless ’cause it won’t work out because it’s against your very nature. And there’s another part later on where the characters are talking about cutting off the water supply and she’s like, “Well, obviously, the water comes from the front, the water wouldn’t come from the bum of the train.” It’s like this constant metaphor throughout the film, the head and the feet, and just like there’s… There’s ancient and medieval political thinkers, they describe the peasants and the low people as the hands, ’cause they do all the work. And they describe the councils and the clergy they’re the head, ’cause they do all the thinking. At the very center of it all as the heart or the engine in this case, which is the leader.

0:04:03.8 Jason Kuznicki: Yes, yes, there’s a lot of symbolism from medieval Europe. The whole symbolism of the shoe in this movie is really, really important. Showing a shoe on top of someone’s head as a symbol of misrule is a really old medieval peasant political trope. We have a hint of it our own present-​day language in the familiar word “sabotage”. “Sabotage” comes from the “sabot”, which is a French peasant’s shoe. And performing sabotage of course is to wreck things like you would in a revolutionary riot. And that’s exactly what we see in part of the film.

0:04:58.7 Landry Ayres: But there is simultaneously a very, very modern futurist take that goes on in this movie, that really smacks of capitalist realism to me, which of course has a lot of underpinnings in Marxist ideology, but is much more about looking forward. It seems it’s a little defeatist or fatalistic, and I was reading one article by this professor, Ed Market, who talked about how it’s a more depressive framing of creative destruction, that there is this necro-​capitalist system inherently built upon and engaging with and prompting death as the engine of this sort of Marxist idea, which in the end, you could say it’s a Marxist critique of capitalism, but it also is fatalistic in a way that it presents no alternatives. The only way to sort of disrupt this process and the system is to blow it up entirely. And even then are people that are the train babies as they’re referred to, that survive, they’re left in the freezing cold, which we have only seen as the most harsh environment that freezes people’s limbs off. They immediately come face-​to-​face with a fearsome predator, which is… I will say it is an interesting choice, and I heard that originally it was supposed to be like a deer. A much more sort of arboreal, summer time…

0:06:40.5 Landry Ayres: An image of hope and peace, but I think the sort of stand-​in for climate change, like using the polar bear, which is the symbol that we all think about saving the polar bears and what the future will become. It is an interesting sort of subversion of that idea to use it but in a predatory aspect.

0:07:02.3 Paul Meany: I think it’s because normally when you see polar bears, you’re like, “Well, there’s not many of those left,” and then when the guy was saying, “All the ice is gonna melt. It’s gonna be fine,” and the first thing you see out there is a polar bear. It’s like, “That guy was lying.” We’re doomed.

0:07:14.8 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, yeah. Life outside of the social order is gonna be nasty, brutish, and short, right?

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0:07:25.4 Jason Kuznicki: But I would have to ask, is this really a depiction of capitalism? Where’s the money? I don’t see anyone using money. I see no markets. I see no entrepreneurship. I see a rigid hierarchical order in which everyone is forced to stay exactly where they are. There’s no mobility whatsoever. This seems like it’s a command economy rather than a market economy.

0:07:52.2 Paul Meany: I think one of the ideas I think that I really latched on to is if this is supposed to be a Marxist film, then why is it criticizing the feudal order that Marx wasn’t really talking about it, that was already done, that part of history was completed, we’re on to overthrowing capitalism now through its contradictions. So why show the feudal background? And it was really confusing because one thing I think of a lot is the way the word “revolution” gets thrown around. It’s normally always a positive connotation. But most revolutions throughout history, it’s not really the people rising up like Les Mis. Do you hear the people sing? It’s normally a small elite cadre of people who enforce their will upon the rest of the world. That’s 90% of revolutions, they end with military dictatorships or a small cadre of people.

0:08:31.7 Paul Meany: And so I think a lot of the films about how conservative revolutions actually are… It’s so weird. We have a revolution, but it just so happens, the tallest, most built White guy and the train will be our savior. Because revolutions, they produce a certain kind of character that might be good for revolutions, but not good for what comes after. And I think a lot of the film is based around environmentalism, and I thought the train was so interesting because of the constant closed ecological system. And there’s a lot of environmentalists in the ’70s and ’80s who wanted a steady-​state economy where there was no more growth in the population, no more growth and production of resources, everything is kept to a stable sustainable limit. And it’s more of that vision than a vision of capitalism, really, because if it was capitalism, there’d be more cupholders, there’d be more things to buy. It would literally only be rich people. I know it’s trying to criticize capitalism, I just don’t really see it doing that all that much.

0:09:21.7 Jason Kuznicki: There’s a definite “meet the new boss” same as the old boss, kind of dynamic to this, which isn’t completely out of touch with how politics can actually work, with how dynastic successions have worked through many different societies. That the guy who overthrows the old king gets to be the new king and then his son gets to be king after that. This has happened before, and when you have a hierarchical society with everyone stuck in their places, and you go around making that your ideal, and then suddenly there’s a revolution, what’s the thing that you put up again after the revolution? It’s a new hierarchical society. You’re back where you started.

0:10:09.6 Aaron Powell: I do think that one of the ways that this is about capitalism, at least in the minds of a lot of people, and I was spending some time reading around discussions on Reddit about it, and other places, and they all seem very convinced that this is a movie about how bad capitalism is. And one person I found said that, “What makes this movie so powerful is it represents exactly what capitalism is.” And you said it’s lacking all the features of capitalism. It doesn’t seem to have any production. It doesn’t seem to have any trade. It doesn’t seem to have any workers except for a couple of people we come across, but most of the people are either just imprisoned basically in jail cells, doing nothing but eating food that’s given to them, or they’re partying, or hanging out, or knitting. But I think for a lot of people when they think of capitalism, they think the fundamental feature of capitalism is exploitation, that that’s what the system of capitalism is. It is the rich exploiting the poor. And a lot of crude Marxism takes that viewpoint, at least rhetorically. And that’s where I thought it was really interesting how many people talked about this as if it were a Marxist film, as if it were an anti-​capitalist film because you guys are definitely right.

0:11:24.1 Aaron Powell: It’s not… There is no capitalism, there’s no markets in this system, but even within that, it’s striking how I guess anti the fundamental message of Marxism it is as well. If we look at Bong Joon-​ho’s last film, Parasite, which has a similar vibe. A lot of people took it as a critique of capitalism as exploitation. This rich family is exploiting this poor family and the poor family rises up, but both of these films end with basically, the old order overthrown violently, but the new order dead upon arrival. Everyone on the train’s been killed. The whole family in Parasite has been… Is dead or imprisoned or back out on the street or locked in the bottom of the house. And so you don’t come away thinking that the people who rose up were the good guys in this.

0:12:22.6 Jason Kuznicki: Well, yeah. You don’t wanna put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak. And when your entire order has to stand or fall together, that makes it vulnerable to sudden collapse. And the way to protect against that is to have it be so that it’s not just one guy who is the only one who can run the show, and the only one who can provide your food, and the only one who can provide any form of social stability. Have lots of choices, have many different choices, and that way if one of them fails, you’ve got options to fall back on.

0:13:00.9 Paul Meany: What I thought was really weird was, is that this movie is supposed to be critiquing capitalism, which is all fair and good, but I find it so weird, the chemical was released in the environment that froze the entire planet, and there’s only one person with the foresight to have something to survive this, and it happened to be the Howard Roark Randian hero with the railway line. It’s kind of weirdly ironic but…

0:13:21.2 Aaron Powell: That was… I… Halfway through the movie I was like, “This movie is a sequel to Atlas Shrugged.”

0:13:25.4 Paul Meany: There you go.

0:13:26.2 Jason Kuznicki: It is, it’s sort of a response to Atlas Shrugged. And I really… I want to just kind of protest against the idea that the train even needs to move at all. You have this really powerful engine, I don’t know what its fuel is, but apparently they’ve got plenty of it ’cause they never worry about that. Why not just sit in one place? And then you could build buildings and stuff, and not have to travel, and not have to…

0:13:52.4 Paul Meany: I think the train is supposed to keep going. I think the engine, it continuously moves itself. If it stops moving it’s done. I feel like that’s kind of what the lore is pointing towards. I couldn’t exactly glean anything from it that’s like 100% the answer, but I think it has to constantly move.

0:14:08.2 Jason Kuznicki: Well, I don’t think there’s a technical… There’s not a technical reason for that, there’s no kind of…

0:14:11.9 Paul Meany: ‘Cause the plot says so.

0:14:13.1 Jason Kuznicki: Deep engineering reason for it. It’s a symbolic reason. They’re going around the world because it’s about going through the cycle of the year. And they have regular holidays that they observe, like the new year happens when they reach a certain bridge, and that’s their signal that the year has passed. And so, really what they’re doing is they’re moving through history together, sort of like a nation would do. And so it’s a symbolic thing, it’s not an engineering thing. And to say, “Well, why didn’t you just stop?” As I might have done, is not quite getting that point. The point is that they are moving through time, moving through history, well, trying to stay stasis… Stay in stasis all the time.

0:15:01.4 Paul Meany: Curtis, Chris Evans’ character at one point, he says, “If we control the engine, we control the world,” and it’s just like one tiny little line, but it shows you that he thinks this train is the entire world. And most of the characters, they actually don’t spend very much time looking outside of the train, ’cause the train is their entire universe. They can’t imagine the world outside, maybe they’ve never been there, or haven’t been there in years. So, everything in this train, super, super matters, there is nothing else. All of the conflict of humanity is focused on this one little place.

0:15:30.2 Landry Ayres: It’s interesting that you bring that up, Paul, because one thing that I’d noticed, particularly in the performances of these different characters, was the sense of movement and a visual language of the film. The only characters that really take a moment to look outside of the train and make use of the windows, except for the brief moment when the people from the tail see sunshine for the very first time, they sort of squint their eyes and look outside and are looking out of the windows for the first time, but then they immediately start charging forward to try and get towards the head. But only the two that have been locked away…

0:16:11.5 Paul Meany: Namgoong and Yona.

0:16:12.6 Landry Ayres: Yes, Yona. She’s the one who goes to the window, and he even carries her over at one point and is pointing out. And we learn later that they have plans that are much grander and they’re sort of… They’re really, I would say like kind of accelerationist people who are thinking like, “We have to just get rid of the train in order to make progress.” But they’re not worried about moving forward. They’re like, “We wanna go outside the train. We wanna think of extremely radical ideas and think of the train beyond this world where everyone else is moving only along this one axis.” And another thing that that brings up is, so often, and specifically, we use the language of hierarchies, we think of classes as they’re upwardly mobile, there’s lower classes and there’s higher class. It is baked into the metaphors that we use to describe class, and this film subverts that and sort of cants it at an angle, and you have it moving forward throughout time, which has its own roots in progression and regression on the linear axes.

0:17:27.2 Landry Ayres: But moving… It specifically moves from left to right. The head of the train is almost always positioned at the right of the frame, and the left side of the train is always the tail. We rarely flip that angle and move from right to left while moving towards the head, which is a very distinct and rigid choice for them to make in the cinematography of the film. And I was wondering if anyone else noticed that. And we briefly brought up the idea of revolutions necessitating a sort of air of conservatism, and moving from the left to the right seems to me like it might be attempting to signal or at least lament the fatalist way of viewing where you start with the idea of revolution and wanting to topple progress and re-​invent things and free people. Free people from their chains as it were. But they end up moving further to the right, as they move up the scales and sort of end up in power.

0:18:43.0 Jason Kuznicki: I think there is something to that, and there’s one scene in which the train is sort of going both ways because it executes in as much as a train can a hairpin turn, where the rear cars are visible from the front cars perpendicularly and vice versa. It goes through a big U-​shape, basically, on the track, and what happens there’s a shootout. They’re shooting at each other from across the way. Yeah, there’s definitely left-​right political symbolism, which is deeply ingrained in Western politics all the way back to the French Revolution, and I think they are making use of it, definitely.

0:19:28.1 Aaron Powell: Like the Matrix movies, this movie, the ultimate behind the scenes thing is we got this contained ecosystem and it gets out of whack eventually, and then what’s needed is the two sides to kind of come together and create something new that then allows it to exist for some period of time again until things get out of whack. And so we talked about whether this is Marxist, but now I’m wondering, is this movie Hegelian? In the sense that it’s a dialectic. We have a thesis and antithesis, and they have conflict and then they come together and blow it all up and have a synthesis, but then we end up with a new thesis, a new antithesis, and it just keeps going, is that the message of this? That this is… It’s taking a Hegelian view of historical dialecticism?

0:20:27.2 Jason Kuznicki: I’d say it is. And I’d say that Wilford in particular seems intent on it working out exactly that way. And he, late in the film, seems to make this sort of, the speech to Curtis, where he’s basically passing the torch to him and saying, “It’s your turn to take my place and be at the head of the train.” And obviously, that means that he’s inheriting all of the cruelty and all of the oppression that that brings with it, but also a new stability and potentially a new revolution down the line. History in this society seems to move only through conflict, which is very Hegelian indeed.

0:21:27.6 Paul Meany: And there’s also a sense in that the history creates a lot of the society, like you see the school for a brief time, and you kinda get a little mini history of the world. And you get to see that an awful lot of this movie, like history is ideology and even the guy who is running the train, Wilford, he eventually turns to Curtis and he’s saying, “There’ll be the story of Curtis’ great evolution.” You get the idea that it’s all just part of one, big, long story. The whole movie opens up with one character drawing pictures of what’s happening, so you kinda get this weird idea of the historian, that’s kinda like an artist. But also it’s who decides the rest of the fate of society, based on the stories they’ll tell, what it all looked like, there’ll be sacrifices here for some characters. I think it’s very interesting, the angle the movie kinda takes.

0:22:07.0 Jason Kuznicki: It raises the question about Hegelian philosophy, how much of it is really responsive to history as it happens and how much of it is responsive to the fact that we as people have been telling ourselves stories like this for a really long time? And they’re the stories that we expect to hear, and who knows, maybe they’re deeply ingrained in our heads on some very low level, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we always have to have a society that proceeds through violent, largely pointless conflict, where we’re just fighting about who it is in charge of the very pinnacle of a hierarchical society, instead of pursuing a polycentric or a less hierarchical society, in which there was much more dynamism, much more movement and innovation.

0:23:03.2 Paul Meany: At first, I thought, oh my God. When you see the school, these children are so indoctrinated, but as the film goes on, I think you realize that nearly everyone’s indoctrinated, not in the same way. Like some people are indoctrinated to worship Wilford, but Curtis’ character, they can’t think outside of the train, they can’t think of a revolution beyond just the train. They never move outside of that whatsoever, and it’s always the main focus of everything. There’s no real alternative solution whatsoever. And so in this kinda zero-​sum game, where some people are on top, some people are at the bottom, they just wanna be on the top. Like when I was watching the movie, I was so confused, ’cause all the people from the back carts, they didn’t seem too offended by the higher carts’ lifestyles. They’re kinda like, “Oh well, I’d like to have that too one day.” Like there wasn’t really much anger over that. We’re supposed to be angry as the viewers, but I never really got the impression that the characters were too annoyed about it, they were just happy to be there, and then they’re like, “Oh, that’ll be us soon.”

0:23:57.1 Aaron Powell: In light of that, it’s kinda striking, this just occurred to me, that the only people who seemed to have a plan outside of the train, the only person who seems to have a plan outside of the train, granted it doesn’t go well, is the guy who built all of the gates and barriers keeping people inside the train. That he’s aware of the train as a confined space as opposed to the world, because he’s the one who confined it. But we’ve talked about the stasis, and we’ve talked about this issue of if this were really like an arch-​capitalist train, they would be running it very differently. They wouldn’t be having workers who could be working productively locked in the back. They would be innovating, changing, making things that are available and so on. And it does seem like… And we’ve also talked about the oddness of what they’re doing, like why do they keep going around and around in circles? It doesn’t seem necessary. Why are they on this train? It doesn’t seem necessary. How much this is ultimately almost about religion as a confinement, that they’re stuck in this ideological mindset and that the ideology… And we see this in our current world, we as libertarians are like, “Guys, just kind of drop some of the ideological blinders and leave people alone to do what they individually wanna do and everything will get better.”

0:25:29.2 Aaron Powell: But then you have your national conservatives or your far left people stuck in this ideological world view. That seems to be a real key component in this, is that if everyone could just drop this set of odd beliefs about the nature of the world, about their place in it, and about the purpose of all of these things they’re doing, then all of their lives would get radically better.

0:25:57.3 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, the locksmith, I’m going to butcher his name. Because I don’t speak Korean, and for that, I’m sorry, but Namgoong Minsoo, the guy who built the doors, he’s the only one who wants to move laterally rather than to the front of the train. He has this plan that he’s got all this explosive he’s saved up and he wants to blow up one of the side doors, so that they can leave. Which is very different from the revolutionary plan. Very, very different from what Curtis wants to do. And he was sort of the only one who really seemed like he had any chance of effectively taking on the system, effectively subverting it. As to religion, there’s a lot of religious language. The engine is sacred, we keep hearing, it’s sacred. It is so important that we have set it outside of society, and it’s like its own eternal thing that has to last forever, and it’s what gives us whatever claim on eternity that we may have as a society. That’s very similar to how a lot of nationalist ideologies place God in relation to their nation. Our nation is trying to be eternal and trying to live up to a mandate to do so from God. We derive our strength from God. Very, very similar.

0:27:34.8 Paul Meany: But when Curtis sees the cracks, that’s when he changes his mind. He was going to become the leader. He was gonna become the new Wilford, but once he looks down under the panels with Yona, he sees that there’s a child cranking like the inner mechanism of the machine. And Wilford eventually says, “Oh, yeah that part went extinct.” And you could just say Curtis is personally aggrieved by the suffering of a child, but it’s also like the illusion is shattering. It is not the sacred engine that you think it is. It is not special. It is really just a machine, and one day like every other machine, it’ll break down. I think that the circular part of the film feeds into a very, very niche theory, where there’s a very ancient historian called Polybius. He had this theory called anacyclosis, which was that humans, they’re originally anarchic, they live in the state of nature, nasty, brutish and short, but one person comes along, kinda becomes like their king, gathers them together. But then the next person, the son of the King, he’s not gonna be a very good King, ’cause he’d have to go over the harsh parts, so he would go tyrant. Then there’ll be the best people to overthrow him, and then they will become the new aristocracy. But their sons will come along and they won’t be great aristocrats, they’ll be oligarchs.

0:28:37.4 Paul Meany: So the people will overthrow them for freedom and equality. But then the next people come along, they don’t appreciate freedom and equality, and so it goes back to the anarchic state. And then this kind of cycle goes over and over and over again. And revolution again is one of those words that’s changed a lot, revolution urging men to return to first principles. And so, from Wilford’s perspective, the revolution is a good thing ’cause it returns to the first principles and gets everyone focused on the closed ecological environment that they live in. And so I think that in some ways, revolutions can actually make systems stronger and can limit our imaginations, ’cause we only think of seizing the reins of the state, not all the alternative ways we could subvert it or live against it. We only think of civil disobedience, we start thinking of storming buildings and stuff.

0:29:17.9 Landry Ayres: It’s interesting you bring up the sort of lineage of all of the people that will assume the roles of power and sort of take up the mantle of the person who’s keeping the engine. You’ve got Ed Harris as Wilford at the very, very beginning. I always love to see Ed Harris coming in just randomly. Did not know he was gonna be in this movie, loved seeing him there. And then we have Chris Evans. It’s Chris Evans, right? He’s the Chris that we have? Yeah, it’s Chris Evans. And he comes in, and then we think that he is this hero that is gonna be taking over the entire film. 90% of the movie is about him moving forward on the train, and we sort of see him give this… That he eventually reveals to the audience that he is not the person that we always thought he was as this sort of hero of his people. That in reality, he is as reflective of the sort of nasty-​ness of this system that they’ve created on the train as anyone else, and he was responsible for attempting to steal and eat a baby from a woman and murdering her in the process. And there’s sort of a twist there. But then Yano comes in, and she is the one that in this supernatural, clairvoyant manner is able to sense somehow that there was a child underneath this tile that she is able to reveal and show to him and sort of reveal the truth to him in what ends up in a sort of dual way being an apocalyptic way of showing it to him.

0:30:58.1 Landry Ayres: It not only prompts the end of the world, but it is a revealing to him of what is going on underneath. And I think the choice of Chris Evans, Captain America, one of the few… Well, not few, but one of the prominent White American actors that we have in this film that is really amazing in its transnational cast. It’s a wonderful production and is, I think, an effective example of a global cinema industry that is actually one of the coolest parts of the film for me, and one of the things that does not get as much credit for as it should, and as other films of Bong Joon-​ho has done, like Parasite and Okja moving forward.

0:31:49.8 Landry Ayres: But he, Chris Evans, is not the one that actually ends up saving anybody. It is people from other parts of the world; it is a Black child and a Korean woman who actually end up saving the film. And I think this is an interesting choice that I like, that subverts the… It is not the typical White savior narrative in that, but he is the White savior character that we get throughout the history of… Or throughout the plot of the film.

0:32:25.0 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, Curtis is a… He’s got a real, kind of Luke Skywalker similarity, that he’s got both good and evil within him, and he has to wrestle with those, and he has to confront, not his literal father, but the person who’s sort of a father figure to everyone. And the message of this father figure is, “Join me and rule the world.” And Curtis ends up rejecting that, but he does not have, like you said, any kind of a path forward, he does not have… Once he reaches the front of the train, he’s got nowhere else to go, and it’s Yona who saves everybody, sort of. Kills most of them, but in so far as anybody is saved, it’s because of her, yeah.

0:33:14.6 Aaron Powell: What do we make then of that ending? Because the way the movie presents it, the way it’s shot, and the music, and the fade out on white, and so on, makes it feel like the movie thinks it’s a hopeful ending? The train has been stopped, the engine’s been overthrown, the two survivors make it out, but it is a relentlessly grim ending. All of the people that they fought this battle through, the however many cars to save, with the exception of two have been killed, and killed by the people who were attempting to save them. The train which may or may not be their only… It certainly is their only source of food in this snowy wasteland, I’ve watched enough episodes of Survivor Man to know that there’s not a lot of food out there when you’re trying to survive in the snow, that’s gone. And we’re not quite sure how cold it gets, but we know it gets at least cold enough that it froze a guy’s arm off in seven minutes. And there’s the polar bear, which might be this sign of nature recovering, but it might also be a sign that they are about to get eaten.

0:34:29.3 Aaron Powell: And so it’s hard to imagine that they are going to have much success after the fade to credits, unless… The only thing that I saw someone suggest, but I’m not sure I buy this, is the fact that there is the polar bear is a sign that things have lived outside the train. And if things have lived outside the train, then there’s probably people who have lived outside the train, and so that this wasn’t the last two humans, but that seems like a stretch.

0:35:00.6 Jason Kuznicki: Well, that’s really speculative. Yeah, there are other science fiction stories I can think of where there’s a seeming end of the world, and then it turns out that there’s a small nucleus of humanity that survives. And as they are expanding they find other humans who also survived, that happens in Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, for example. I hope I’m not giving away too much there. But the fact is, in the film they don’t actually find any other humans, they just see a polar bear. It’s really ambiguous to me whether humanity survives or not, given what they have at the end and what we can see on the screen.

0:35:50.4 Paul Meany: I was just so confused, it was supposed to be like a good ending. But then you could see some of it… It doesn’t just stop the train, some of the cars fly off into the abyss, people must have died in such a gruesome way, and I’m supposed be happy about it. And then the only people left are a 17-​year-​old and a child, I’m not exactly hopeful. So I get that the ending had all this important symbolic meaning, and it was interesting, but I’d just be so mad if everyone had died, so two people could go off and freeze in the snow 30 minutes later.

0:36:18.0 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, it’s not a very hopeful ending, I don’t think. It’s possible they survive, but who even knows?

0:36:26.8 Landry Ayres: Also, they got really mad about eating bugs. And granted, if people are talking about eating steaks for years, and then they’re feeding you mashed up insects just in little bars, I would be angry too. But I was thinking back on it, and to me, it kind of was akin to the… You’re getting ideas throughout the whole movie about this sort of possible cannibalistic or blood sacrifice of children, looming threat of what the front of the train does to these children that have gone missing the whole time, but it’s playing on this sort of, Soylent Green, we’re eating our own fear. And I didn’t get that until the end, but looking back at all these moments throughout the first part of the film, I thought maybe that they were trying to, sort of, amp up that fear, that before they show actually what’s in the grinder with all of the bugs, what they’re doing is they’re opening it up and you’re seeing their reaction. And you’re expecting it to be the children that are being fed to these people, but they save that and they sort of subvert the scare until later on when it seems like it might be even more heart-​wrenching that they’re putting these children to work and making them suffer long-​term, rather than killing them outright.

0:37:54.0 Paul Meany: When I actually watched this movie with my dad and brother, my dad pointed out that they were measuring how long the kids arms were. And he was like, “Oh, they’re probably using them for their machines.” And I was like, “Oh yeah.” ‘Cause they had to get small people into the machines, he was, “Yeah, they used to do that during the Industrial Revolution.” I was like, “Oh.” So that’s how I kind of figured that one out early on, luckily. But I feel like every sci-​fi movie has to have slime with aliens or some sort of goopy food that doesn’t look nice. You can never have, in the future, nice-​looking food or anything. It always has to be blocks of jelly that you really grimly eat.

0:38:28.2 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, and they’re made of grounded bugs. The question I have is, where’s all the plant-​based food?

[chuckle]

0:38:36.7 Jason Kuznicki: It takes an awful lot of plants to make a steak. They’ve gotta be growing them somewhere, right? What’s going on? If you try to add up all the different questions that arise about how they get their food, how they get their fuel, all that, it makes no sense at all. It really does not. It’s… It’s got almost a… A mythical quality to it because it’s so detached from how actual resource and energy flows would have to work to do the things that they were doing, to stay on that train and to survive in the way that they do, they would need to make frequent stops somewhere with a normal climate. It just doesn’t work.

0:39:19.6 Landry Ayres: Also, the train is… Is shockingly short. They go from… Like they said, Chris Evans goes from tail to head, and we see I don’t know how many. What, 7-10 cars max? And the only things that can fit underneath the train are children, because there are tiny moving parts. There are no cows. They have to be doing some sort of plant-​based food, but not using it to maintain livestock, I’m assuming.

0:39:46.2 Jason Kuznicki: But also there’s sushi and there’s all sorts of alcoholic beverages and it’s… It’s… We’re supposed to take it in not as any kind of political economy, but as sort of a fantasy.

0:40:02.8 Landry Ayres: Right, right.

0:40:03.8 Aaron Powell: But then that brings up, again, the assumption by a lot of people that this is a movie about capitalism and a metaphor for how capitalism works, because it’s… It’s a film… If that’s the case, it’s a film that would have benefited from reading I, Pencil, or something else about how resources get turned into things, and how much stuff it takes to make things, and why it wouldn’t make any sense to have a bunch of people locked up at the back of the train who you’re just feeding bugs to when they could be contributing in a productive way to… I mean if you’re the evil capitalist, the very least you should have these people like tilling the soil in one of the trains or something, like it just… It just fundamentally doesn’t make sense as a metaphor for capitalism, and that’s why it’s so interesting how many people seem to see it as a metaphor for capitalism. And I think it’s an indicator of just how little idea a lot of people have about like how a market economy functions and where things come from.

0:41:13.4 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, in so far as there are plant-​based foods, there’s not nearly enough, not to feed animals or whatever, and… What’s the first one you see? Orange trees. Orange trees, which were the 17th and 18th century absolute monarch’s favorite kind of plant. If you go to Versailles today, you can see the Orangerie, where the King’s orange trees were kept in the Winter. And there’s another one at Hampton Court, which is the same idea, but there’s not like rice or wheat or corn, there’s no… There’s no kind of staple foods there.

0:42:01.6 Landry Ayres: Yeah, it seems to be a film, like Aaron was saying, not about what capitalism is, but what capitalism is seen as. And you could maybe make the argument of what people have been making excuses and calling capitalism in so much as we don’t always have a pure market-​based economy, even in countries where we have made a lot of progress in implementing market-​based reforms in that way. There is still a certain degree of violence enacted by people in power that functions in a state manner, which then influences and sucks up and stops market-​based benefits from actually being beneficial to all people. So it is about not what capitalism… It is not a critique of capitalism in its true form, but how capitalism has failed to be enacted in its most ideal sense, you could argue, which then becomes in the meaning-​making rather than the… That break between the connotative and denotative functions of capitalism in society.

0:43:32.0 Jason Kuznicki: Yeah, yeah, to the extent that this fails as a… A critique of capitalism. I would say that it fails in taking capitalism for a static system. Capitalism is not static, it’s constantly changing. It is dynamic, and when you hear Mason talking about how important it is that everything should stay in its place and there’s a hierarchy and everything must remain exactly the same, that’s… That’s a bad thing. That’s the thing that we should be mistrustful of. Societies that aim at stasis become fragile, and then they break. But that’s not what capitalism aims at. Capitalism is dynamic. It makes room for entrepreneurs. Say a better critique of capitalism, if you wanted to make a critique of capitalism, would be that it brings chaos, that it brings new unexpected things that disrupt society. A lot of episodes of Black Mirror are like that. They… They work much better to my way of thinking as critiques of capitalism bringing something awful that we didn’t think about, and now we all have to suffer in the consequences of it. I don’t personally think that’s what capitalism tends to do, but yes, it does bring changes.

[music]

0:45:01.0 Landry Ayres: Thanks for listening. As always, the best way to get more Pop & Locke content is to follow us on Twitter. You can find us at the handle @PopnLockePod, that’s P-O-P, the letter N, L-O-C-K-E with an e like the philosopher, P-O-D. Make sure to follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen, and please rate and review us, if you like the show. We look forward to unravelling your favorite show or movie next time. Pop & Locke is a project of lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org. It is produced by me, Landry Ayres, and is co-​hosted by myself and our Director and Editor, Aaron Ross Powell. To learn more, visit us on the web at lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org.