Author: Huang Xuetang
Compiler: Ye Weilin
Reprinting and compilation have been authorized by the original author
Spoiler Alert:
The end of the Snow Train comic and movie
There are complete spoilers in this article
Article source:
http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2014/10/snowpiercer-and-the-last-messiah/
Snow Country Train
Transperceneige
author:
[f] Rob / [de] Rocchet / [f] Legrand
Movies often consist of scenes of misinterpretations and ineffective communication. Flesh-and-blood real people and near-real actions can coax the audience to passively accept and turn the metaphor into reality.
If anyone thinks Bong Joon-ho's adaptation of Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette's comic strip Snow Train is good, it's probably because it's an action movie with a few milligrams of gray matter; that "brain" is mostly about concepts like class and inequality, but it all disappears in a bloody battle of bullets. In a sense, this compromise seems acceptable, after all, action movies are my favorite.
The film is based on a manga that is scattered (perhaps because it was originally created for the magazine (À suivre) (meaning (to be continued)), and the content is almost unknown, but with the Metal Roar style, full of European scum, and prostitutes. However, comics outperform movies in terms of ideological coherence and consistency.
The core setting is, of course, intact, using a metaphor for society by a self-sufficient train called the Snowbreaker (French transperceneige), although the train described by Lob and Rochette is too large to hold, deliberately creating absurdity from the start.
Both the film and the comics suggest that the extremely cold apocalypse that traps humanity in a mobile refugee camp is man-made. In addition, there are some details in the movie that can be found in the comic:
Greenhouse carriages built within the closed tin of the train resemble miniature wonderland;
The protagonist stands on a glass viewing frame to examine the all-metal train (simplified to a gunfight in the film);
Sentient meat balls are eaten by people to provide food for everyone.
Bong Joon-ho has sufficient funds to satisfy the audience's voyeuristic desire to self-substitute, and poverty is like a heavy cloud of sorrow that envelops the whole film. The many famines of the 20th century and other tragedies of all stripes have been hurriedly passed. In such an airtight society, people practiced the medieval (non)righteous way of atonement for their sins by amputating their limbs – which is not uncommon in Asian costume dramas.
These passages remind us that what governs, if not absolute monarchy, is oligarchy.
The progress bar is filled with Tilda Swinton's sensational bipolar performance, as well as a lot of rampage action and violent footage. In the end, it turns out that the entrenched social classes are nothing more than the result of the conspiracy of John Hurt and Ed Harris's characters, the religious leaders of the poorest and richest classes in the train, respectively.
Perhaps it is a conspiracy to reflect on the poor's false consciousness of their enslaved situation and the guilt of it. So the film adaptation became almost a blunt revolutionary appeal.
And this particular revolution had a good ending, with bombs detonating and trains derailed. Chris Evans' pilgrimage to the locomotive was successful, though he did not survive himself – eventually becoming a martyr, child defender, and savior. Survivors of the train crash — Adam, black man, and Eve of South Korea — looked at the uninhabitable winterscape and a polar bear that represented a sign of life. The world is saved; life will continue.[1]
Snow Train (2013)
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Chris Evans / Jamie Bell / Song Kanghao / Tilda Swinton / Ed Harris
Movie stills
Curiously, Lob and Rochette don't depict much of the depravity in the comics of the slums of the slums that are the last section of the long chain of human civilization. Most of them tell us through words that there are a lot of deaths, cannibalism, etc. The decadence of the aristocracy was entirely a representation of the middle class of Western Europe in the late 20th century. They are ourselves, and Tilda Swinton's exaggerated paper tiger bureaucracy doesn't feel far away.
From the beginning, proloff appears near the third-class carriage and tries to slip through the toilet window through the class level, but is caught and interrogated by soldiers (a meaningful escape). His female companion, Adeline, is more like a traditional sci-fi heroine before the rise of feminist activity (see Julia in 1984). She is a social activist from the third-class carriages, hoping to alleviate the suffering of the poor who are packed in the lower-class concentration camps. She represents innocence, is the object and conscience that arouses the reader's desire for protection, and she may also play a more important role than the little girl Yona in Bong Joon-ho's film that corresponds to her role.
Like the male protagonist in the film adaptation, Proloff also arrived at the front of the car after a series of tests. The hero and heroine find the president and confront him face to face. The president was monitoring the poor through closed-circuit television in his mobile mansion while yelling orders into his cronies in microphones. But there is no karma in this story, and in the end the president seems to be alive and well. Proloff let him go, without any attempt to correct social injustice or carry out deadly revenge. Proloff handed the gun to Adeline, who also turned around and refused.
As a comic that fits the French tradition very well, perhaps it implicitly rejects the values of the famous French Revolution of 1789 – no killing riots, no guillotines, no terrorist tyranny, and of course no Purge-style Napoleonic Wars. The protagonist's name, Proloff, reads much like Russian or Slavic, and may be related to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which killed more people than the French Revolution. These connections are deliberately vague — the suffocating cramped carriages and desperate crowds cluttering in front of the carriages in the comics are reminiscent of the Nazi mass expulsion of Jews for mass murder; the shaved heads of the male and female protagonists resemble symbols of Nazi concentration camps and Gulag labor camps.
Proloff is characterized by not playing cards according to common sense and doing nothing at key moments. In fact, his only active act in the last few pages was to raise his gun and shoot the front window when he was trapped in the second car.
The front carriage had the main engine of the train, so both Adeline and he were in danger of freezing and dying suddenly. He immediately regretted this reckless act, for he suddenly realized that Adeline was not a nihilist like him who cared nothing.
So Adeline, the goddess of "Free Leading the People" in Lob's story, died, as did idealism and reason. The cold winter that envelops her is different from the friendly, habitable snow in Bong Joon-ho's movie, and it does not tolerate any life. Proloff subconsciously attempts suicide, but without success, he is rescued by Alec Forrester. Alec Forrester is the father of the (near) perpetual motion engine that drove the Snow Train, the last refuge that is revered as a sacred train by some idolatrous.
In the endless march, the train is the whole world, unconsciously gradually losing power -
The theory of cosmic freezing claims that the entire universe expands, depletes heat, and eventually dies out in dismal light.
Forrester, an old engineer, was weak and insane. Obsessed with the continuation of human populations and civilizations, he was far removed from his fellow human beings and wanted to be completely independent — a world-weary humanitarian. He may seem to be an eternal being of Xie Ding, but he is only a mortal flesh that cannot avoid death.
This is not to say that world-weary humanitarianism represents the highest ideal of our society, but it is indeed quite possibly the central driving force behind society (according to Lob). The engineer (the driving force) is portrayed absurdly – the little old man behind the curtain, the sick sorcerer of the Oz kingdom.
The inventor of the train is no longer necessary for the train. He hid in a corner with voyeurism to monitor the ants on the train, tirelessly speaking to a rumbling machine but never getting a response.
(Multiple) trains continue to travel, taking turns to stage occasional warm breeding acts and countless inhuman cases of cruelty, and there is no objective motive. The story content so far can be summarized like this. Anti-fertilism (antinatalism) seems to be the obvious solution, but it is bluntly rejected.
The only car-tail memories Proloff recounts to the interrogator at the beginning of the comic are a birthday present to a beloved, "quiet and kind" old man. The gift is an hour of solitude, which the old man uses to hang himself.
This may be the core motivation of the Snow Country Train. Proloff's entire journey to the front of the car (the upper echelons of society) was to commit suicide in a luxurious first-class carriage, dying alone with dignity.
As Varlam Shalamov wrote in Kolyma Tales, "Sometimes people need urgent action so as not to lose their will to die." ”
In this fable of life, the male protagonist is baptized in death in the second carriage before meeting the "gods". The tragedy of Proloff is that this little willfulness is not allowed. Similar to the ascetic meaning of max Ophul's Lola Montes ending, Lola jumps into a small bathtub and dies, but instead gets a dull, humiliating death and rebirth.
At the end of the comic, the plague of mysteries starts from the tail of the car to devour everything, the source is unknown, Proloff is probably the source of infection, and his nihilism destroys everyone everywhere he goes. Only by isolating Proloff from the crowd can he gain the incorruptible body of King Kong. He "lost his right to live in the universe" (Peter Zapffe), waiting for the end in solitude; not the "last savior",[2] but the last man to survive.
“...... He felt madness looming, and wanted to die before he lost the power to find death. But as death approached, he realized the nature of death and the next steps that the universe offered. His novel imagination builds a new prospect of horror behind the curtain of death. He found that even on the other shore, he could not find a sanctuary. Now he recognized the contours of his cosmic life: he was a helpless captive imprisoned in the universe, trapped in inexplicable possibilities. ”
— The Last Messiah
Peter Wessel Zapffe
Text source:
[1]http://www.vulture.com/2014/07/snowpiecer-movie-discussion.html
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Messiah
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