Revolutionary Babies: In which I am persuaded not to see Snowpiercer

[sqbr]

As I encounter more reviews Snowpeircer has gone from "science fiction film I might enjoy" to "metaphorical film I might enjoy for the story" to "metaphorical film I won't enjoy the story of" to "metaphorical film I won't enjoy whose central metaphor will piss me off". I'm sure it's very good, and I admire the intent, but nope. I can see some people finding it cathartic, and that's cool for them. But I wouldn't, so the film has no appeal.

EDIT: I should add that I had already pretty much decided not to watch the movie anyway because it has lots of bad things happening to children which I find really upsetting.

This piece of meta intended to defend it was the final straw. Spoilers for the end, because it's the end that annoys me. tl;dr: implying that true revolution relies on the ~pure youth~ since everyone else is too tainted appeals to burned out old activists and optimistic young activists but is really annoying when you're the child of activists. And I think it betrays a real lack of imagination.


I'm talking about the movie as described in that review, the actual movie may be different (EDIT: most of the people in the comments who've seen it seem to think the actual movie is quite different indeed!). If you didn't read it: the train everyone lives on is a metaphor for capitalism. The revolutionary protagonist is shown himself to be complicit with the machine. In the end the train is detroyed and two young people leave the train to start afresh.

I have no problem with the idea of capitalism being inherently flawed and the only way to fix it being to "destroy the engine" and start over. I'm not sure I entirely agree, but it's a valid POV and certainly cathartic to see happen in fiction.

I totally agree that the older generation end ups indoctrinated by the society they live in even when they are doing their best to fight against it, and that the younger generation has a better shot of working past that conditioning. It's also true that activist groups, ideas and people often end up coopted by the system they're trying to change. Any attempt to fix things is going to end up having to fight against these activist groups, ideas and people even though they SHOULD be helping. Sometimes the groups, ideas and people are so tainted they do more harm than good. And soemtimes that means the ideas have to be thrown away, the groups disbanded, and the people disdained.

BUT. There is no starting entirely from scratch. Any new, better society is going to have to include SOME people from the old one. And pretty much all those people are to some extent going to complict with awful things, and going to believe some awful things deep down. You can draw a line and say that TOO MUCH complicity/awfulness means you don't get to join the new society, or at least don't get any power within it. But you also have to find some way to include everyone else. THAT'S THE HARD BIT. Throwing your hands in the air and saying "all the old people die! The young people can start over!" is cheating.

And to me it's part of the doctrine of dogmatic purity that screws up so much activism. Because if you think only Perfect Actvisists are good enough then (a) You'll have constant purges of your ranks (b)Everyone will pretend to be Perfect when they're not and get really defensive when their flaws are pointed out and (c) you'll be completely incapable of dealing with regular people eg the actual population your revolution is supposed to help. Because they usually aren't anything like a Perfect Activist at all. And if your revolution KILLS ALL THE REGULAR PEOPLE so that two Perfect Activists can survive and make a Perfect Society I...am not really down with your revolution.

This is less to do with the film and more a personal hot topic I am taking the excuse to rant about: children who are raised with Perfect Activist Values will still be people and that means they may avoid cetain bigotries etc but will still exhibit lazy thinking, hypocrisy, lack of self insight, selfishness, xenophobia etc. And NOT ALL OF THEM WILL BE PERFECT ACTIVISTS. So just plonking two of them down to start afresh and assuming they can make a ~perfect society~ hits buttons for me from watching my grandparents dissapointment in my mother, and my parents dissapointment in us kids for not being Perfect Activists and in some cases NOT ANY SORT OF ACTIVIST AT ALL OMG. Or they will be activists but a DIFFERENT KIND. (eg my dad is green left while I care more about sexuality and gender which he sees as a ~distraction~. Meanwhile my grandparents thought Religion was the Train Driving Everything and my mother is both very left wing and devoutly religious) But you get to avoid dealing with all that if you just destroy everything and stop the story there.

Some fiction off the top of my head which deals with similar ideas in ways I find less annoying:
Full Metal Alchemist
The Dispossessed (actually shows what an anarcho socialist utopia made of actual people might be like: flawed but still better than the alternative)
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds
The Matrix Trilogy...ish. They were pretty annoying too.

Comments

[aris_tgd]

I will say that when I watched it, the "older people sacrificing themselves so the younger could live" really didn't come across to me as the tainted symbols of the old regime having to die at all. (Though I imagine it'll be difficult to read it otherwise for anyone having read those reviews ahead of time.) I mean... if anything, to me the allegory read as, those who want to break the system have to take some of the brunt of the damage. And I don't believe the line in that review that Yona is some kind of untainted pure soul; her connection to her father feels way too stressed in the narrative for that for me. I mean, if nothing else, there's the drug connection; sure, it's his hallucinogenic escape from the reality of the train, but it's also implied that he got her hooked on the stuff.

I dunno, I enjoyed it, but I wasn't expecting something DEEP that would BLOW MY MIND, I expected an action/SF movie with a central narrative driven by other-than-USian obvious-narrative-choices.

If it's just gonna annoy you at this point, though, there was nothing so supremely amazing in it that I think it's worth watching through for.

[sqbr]

Yeah, I thought it was entirely possible the review was skewing things. This rant is about the movie they describe not necessarily the actual movie.

But I wasn't going to watch it anyway, since from all accounts it has exactly the sort of bad things happening to children I find really upsetting.

[aris_tgd]

Yeah, certainly not quibbling with your take on the review. Just wanted to throw in my two cents about the movie because I've been kind of puzzled by some of the back and forth on it. I think some people are REALLY INTO the metaphor and some people are REALLY ANNOYED by the lack of worldbuilding, and I didn't hit either of those poles, I dunno.

And yes, if child harm bothers you, then this is not the movie for you.

[sqbr]

nods I think it's one of those movies. Most of the reviews I've seen have been some variation on "Interesting ideas, muddled execution".

[tree]

I dunno, I enjoyed it, but I wasn't expecting something DEEP that would BLOW MY MIND, I expected an action/SF movie with a central narrative driven by other-than-USian obvious-narrative-choices.

same here. i definitely didn't get all the things from the film that the reviewer did. and there were too many aspects that just didn't make sense. even within allegory you have to have a coherent narrative.

[sqbr]

Yeah that reviewer is the only one I've seen who hasn't commented on how confused the narrative/metaphor/worldbuilding was.