Snowpiercer and American Politics
Note: If you haven’t seen the movie or read the graphic novel yet and want to, don’t read this post. I’ll be referring to key plot points and spoilers about the story in order to make my argument.
The Snowpiercer plot revolves around a fight between the classes. There are those who live in the tail of the train in utter destitution, who unknowingly subsist on a diet of bugs, and often see their children taken away from them (among other atrocities). Then there are those who live in the lap of luxury — enjoying fine dining, spa visits, and nightclubs — who are either blissfully unaware of the Tailies’ plight or don’t care.
Curtis becomes the leader of the Tailies’ rebellion at the start of this story. He and his cohort fight to get to the front of the train in the hope of changing things. While most of the Tailies that join him perish along the way, Curtis eventually makes it to the front of the train where he meets Wilford for the first time.
Wilford is the insanely wealthy man who developed the forever-in-motion train that saved the Snowpiercer’s residents from the ice age outside. With Curtis in his private chambers, Wilford reveals to him what’s actually going on:
This is not the first rebellion to come out of the tail. Though it is the first to get this far.
Gilliam, the elder and defacto leader of the Tailies, wasn’t who Curtis and the Tailies believed him to be. While he made a major bodily sacrifice for the group at one point, he was collaborating with Wilford all long.
It was his job to keep the Tailies subdued and compliant for a time, while simultaneously whispering in their ears about a much-needed rebellion. When the time was right, he riled up the tail’s denizens, anointed a new leader (that being Curtis), and gave them the push they needed to revolt.
He didn’t do this to help the Tailies gain more rights or freedoms within the train though. The true impetus for the rebellion gets revealed by Minister Mason after she’s taken hostage by Curtis and his gang.
When asked why sushi is only served a couple times a year, she explains that it’s not a matter of abundance:
“Oh, enough is not the criterion. Balance. You see, this aquarium is a closed ecological system. And, um, the number of individual units must be very closely, precisely controlled. In order to maintain the proper sustainable balance.”
This is ultimately why Gilliam inspires the rebellion and hands the torch to Curtis. So that they may cull the herd.
Because the train has no room to grow, and the world outside is supposedly uninhabitable, population growth has to be strictly controlled. Of course, they’re not going to ask the privileged in the front of the train to cut back on their excesses, consumption, or even their contribution to population growth. It must come from the tail.
And, so, the rebellion provided the perfect excuse to bring balance to the closed ecosystem of the train.
While population control was the most obvious reason that Gilliam and Wilford set this revolution in motion, there were other benefits to be reaped.
For starters, they expected the insurrection to fail. And after punishing the Tailies with a wave of executions, this would bring about a mass shift in their mindset — from one of hope and purpose to one of fear and submission.
The Tailies would have no choice but to crawl back to the end of the train and take whatever scraps were handed to them and to follow any orders they were given. As they submitted once again to the powers that control the train, their minds would turn to other matters to distract themselves. Like falling in love and making babies — some of whom the train would literally need to fuel its fire.
Curtis would have been sent back to the tail to replace Gilliam as their leader. And he would’ve picked up where he had left off — stirring the pot with anger and resentment until the time came for another round of rebellion/population control.
Another reason there needed to be such a public rebellion instead of just a private mass execution was to give the elites in the front of the train more reason to hate the Tailies.
For the most part, the elites don’t think much about the Tailies. So long as their resources and luxuries are preserved, what happens in the back of the train is of no concern to them.
That said, if an insurrection were to be attempted, Wilford could use this event to call attention to the violent, diseased, and unsophisticated masses who want to take everything away from them. There would be no empathetic response. The elites would cheer on as their punishment (i.e. extermination). Some would even go so far as to try and remove the Tailies too — just as the teacher attempts to do in front of a classroom full of students.
While we aren’t living in an ice age or trapped on a train together, I do worry that what played out in Snowpiercer is what’s playing out behind the scenes in American politics. Or maybe even something broader on the global stage.
Those of us who are awake and see what’s going on have done a fairly good job of finding one another and banding together. It’s all we can do to try and stay sane. But in terms of leadership, I just don’t know.
I have never trusted politicians. It’s one of the main reasons why I avoided reading the news for years and why I could never vote along party lines in our elections. Something just didn’t seem right. One day you’d feel like you knew exactly who you voted for to preserve your freedoms and rights… And then the next, you weren’t so sure.
So when I see Trump still heralding vaccines as safe and effective…
Or Ted Cruz calling the January 6 Capitol protest a “terrorist attack”…
I wonder if we’re all being duped.
Each of these examples might be single incidents in a long line of otherwise sound judgment from these politicians. But are they really? Or are we simply getting a small glance at who our leaders really are — and seeing that they’re no different than Snowpiercer’s Gilliam?
To be clear, I don’t believe that Gilliam was an unapologetically evil man who had no qualms about sacrificing people for the supposed greater good. That said, what he did was wrong and the same goes for any politician — on the left, middle, or right of our political stage — that’s operating in a similar fashion.
I do believe there are many politicians playing a similar game within the U.S. as well as around the world. They are manipulating our emotions and influencing our actions for outcomes that benefit them, the political opponents they claim to be against, as well as the privileged elite that fund their bankrolls. All the while, they tell us they’re on our side
It’s time to put aside excuses for the politicians we like. If they betray our trust, then they do not serve us and we need to hold them accountable. Better yet, we need to take matters into our own hands and change the game. It’ll require a huge wake up call for the majority of Americans who are currently asleep. I don’t have much optimism that that will happen, but you never know. Something might finally break their spirit and lift the veil from their eyes.
I feel like it’s on us— the people on the ground whose contributions to society are what actually power this country — to change how this story plays out.
The first thing to do is stop putting so much faith and power into politicians if we don’t truly know who is fighting for us.
The second is to stop trusting the mainstream media. As a writer, it hurts me to say that since I always believed that journalists were the ones who would give us the truth when no one else would.
Lastly, we need to stop feeding into class division, fighting amongst ourselves, other-ing our fellow citizens, sickening childrens’ minds, trading in our freedoms for fear, and waiting on our respective leaders to tell us what to do.
If we can’t do this, then this country is fucked.