I'm old. This image, I often thought of when I was young. This image is even more cruel than I thought when I was younger. I used to like to read, I liked to watch drama, and I liked to watch movies. I never imagined that a person's hobbies would slowly grow older, dull and dry with age.
It seems that last week, or possibly last week, one of my students came to see me. He gave me a book, Sun City, Campanella's masterpiece. I've read this book, and it should have been thirty years ago, and it could have been forty years ago. It doesn't matter. The book was later torn off by a mischievous student, folded into a paper airplane, and flew out of the window and landed in a muddy puddle. The mischievous student was him. At that time, he was also a teenager, and I had long dark hair.
He recommended to me a Korean movie, Snow Country, and said I must like it. Because, like Sun City, the theme is "utopia". I usually rarely watch movies, my eyes are spent, and I stay focused for a long time, and I will be tired. It used to take only two days to read a 200,000-word novel, but now, the bedside book "The Sins of Father Amaro", a month later, has just read a third.
The day after he left, the third day, I watched the movie. I originally thought I was going to read it in several paragraphs, but in fact, there was no rest in the middle. The film not only chooses a direction with a considerable height of thought, the spiritual lineage of the film is noble, far from being comparable to other idle commercial films, but also has remarkable points in techniques such as narrative symbolism and metaphor.
The spiritual lineage of the movie "Snow Train" begins with the "utopian dystopian" tradition.
The so-called utopian idea, in a word: fantasize about a beautiful future world. For example, More's "Utopia", Jesus' Heavenly Kingdom, Plato's "Republic", Augustine's "City of God", Shakyamuni's Elysium, etc., also includes the "Datong" conception in the Chinese Confucian classic "Li Ji Yun". What they all have in common is that they all depict a fictional society or a future society, very beautiful, happy life, abundant material, equal for all, free of oppression, like a paradise.
The "Utopia" trilogy of literary works is Thomas More's "Utopia", Campanella's "Sun City", and Andrea's "Christchurch". Before the seventeenth century, utopias were generally placed in geographically distant lands. Later, with the discovery of European seafaring expeditions, people became so familiar with the world that this useful design disappeared. When utopian socialism gradually declined, leaving only theoretical research value, a "dystopian tradition" emerged.
The so-called dystopian tradition is also a simple sentence: worrying about a bad future world. Readers are familiar with the "dystopian trilogy", namely Zamyatin's "Us" and George Orwell's "1984", as well as Huxley's "Brave New World".
In "Snow Train", the rich and elegant but empty and boring life scenes in the first-class carriages are exactly what is described in the novel "Brave New World". The totalitarian ruler Villefort on the train is the big brother in 1984. The drugs used by rebels (revolutionaries) to bribe security guards are also the "instigators" in Brave New World. As for the rear carriage where the middle and lower classes of the train are located, it is dirty and dilapidated, and the apocalyptic and bleak shooting style is in line with the film "Blade Runner".
The rebels, or revolutionary leaders, in Snow Train, fought valiantly to finally reach the carriage of the supreme ruler, Villefort. There, he had a rather lengthy conversation with Villefort, who told the revolutionary leaders a shocking secret: Every rebellion in the history of the train, including the one that now looked like it was about to be won, was carefully designed in advance to maintain the ecological balance on the train. Because the train could not accommodate too many people, some people had to die in the rebellion and its repression.
Malthus once proposed a "population theory", which held that the means of subsistence were arithmetic and had a geometric progression. The former always lags behind the latter, so it advocates limiting the population to ensure ecological balance and prolong the process of human survival. The dialogue at the end of "Snow Train" deconstructs the revolutionary essence that laid the groundwork for more than an hour, and also deconstructs the justice of this revolution. From the beginning, these revolutionaries were guinea pigs, pawns, toyed with by the big men. This film actually illustrates a truth: morality cannot appeal to reason.
I once read a literary work, the novel Antelope and the Buzzard by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. In the futuristic world of the novel, literature and art are treated with unprecedented contempt, and only bioengineering becomes the pride of heaven. All diseases have been eliminated, but drug companies have developed and secretly spread the virus in order to keep people buying drugs, and if anyone tries to expose this conspiracy, what awaits him is death. Eventually the virus broke out all over the world at the same time, all of humanity died in just a few days, and human civilization suddenly came to a standstill and paralysis.
In such "dystopian" fantasy works, the futuristic world has roughly four themes:
First, the catastrophe of resources; second, the earth-shattering catastrophe; third, high degree of authoritarianism; fourth, technology is out of control or abused.
"Snow Train" is that in response to the so-called global warming, human beings try to use artificial technology to cool the earth when they lose control, causing the earth to become a cold hell, and human beings finally only have the space left by the train to survive. This train, which never stops, carries the remnants of human civilization. The remnants of civilization are bound to be in a state of resource depletion or on the verge of exhaustion. This is the state of life of the people at the bottom of the rear of this train.
"Snow Country Train" is a science fiction work that talks about the future. And when it comes to the story of the future, regardless of its artistic or philosophical quality, and the various prophecies it makes, it must first have a possible appearance, which can arouse everyone's interest. In the film, the magical "train", the "train" that never stops, why it never stops running, can only be explained as a metaphor.
What did the Snow Country train rely on to build and run? There is no doubt that it relies on previous science and technology. The train in the film, driven by a "perpetual motion machine", is a symbol of science and technology.
This seemingly "ridiculous" setting of the train, which runs automatically, circles the earth once a year, has no purpose, has no stops, and no one can get off, is actually used as a metaphor for contemporary science and technology that cannot be stopped, and has been developing rapidly and unnecessarily, and no one can stop it or slow down.
If the "Snow Country Train" is a metaphor for contemporary science and technology, then the subversion and destruction of the train at the end of the film is a metaphor for the unsustainability of today's modernization that relies too much on science and technology.
At the end of the film, can the lonely little girl and the little boy survive? Will the two of them be able to re-establish human civilization from the icy ruins? It seems hopeless, and people can only pray for a miracle.