Not All are Aboard: Decolonizing Exodus in Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer

This article interprets Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) as a political allegory. First, we compare Bong’s film to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), two contemporaneous films about ecological crises. We argue that Snowpiercer exposes the limits of technocratic environmentalisms that obscure the links between ecological degradation, capitalist development, and colonial domination. Second, we put Bong’s film into conversation with autonomist Marxist and postcolonial accounts of social domination and transformation. We argue that Snowpiercer is about whether or not contemporary political economy has rendered the emancipatory strategies of recent centuries obsolete. Framed this way, the film proposes that global order is still capitalist and colonialist, but that Left projects must surpass state socialism and anti-colonial nationalism. What we call Bong’s “decolonial exodus” is the demand for a real alternative to both the ideology that there is no alternative to the existing order and the pseudo-alternative of authoritarian populism.     

The breakdown of newspeak

Many attempts have been made to create Newspeaks. But in light of what is now known about such attempts, it is clear that not even the most successful of them has come anywhere near to realization of Orwell's projection. Rather than these Newspeaks becoming increasingly fine‐tuned, comprehensive instruments of totalitarian control, as suggested in 1984, quite an opposite development has taken place. The peoples upon whom Newspeaks have been imposed have learned to live with and manipulate these artificial languages, and their effectiveness has declined rather than increased over time. The present paper explores this degeneration of Newspeak, examining some of the assumptions about language, man, and society underlying Orwell's picture of the future. It makes explicit the theory of totalitarian control based on language that is implicit in 1984 and then shows that several fundamental assumptions of this theory are patently Utopian while others are highly implausible. Apart from its rich insights into the dynamics of totalitarianism, even the Utopian elements of 1984 help us to understand better the limitations of as well as the possibilities for totalitarian control in contemporary society by placing in relief the conditions that would have to be met for such control actually to be realized. Setting forth these conditions makes clear why these conditions could never be met in reality.