Abstract

Snowpiercer (2016), Bong Joon-ho’s first English-language film, portrays the risky side of transnationalism. What Bong brings to this film is the presumed biases and uncritical characteristics that are often laden in the habituated use of vocabularies by scholars of transnational cultures, such as displacement, disjuncture, and decentering. The migrants who seem to contribute to the formation of multiple discourses against Western globalization are actually moving inside the claustrophobic space dictated by the West. The train embodies two senses of spatial enclosure that are intertwined: 1) the circulatory, as the train runs in a constant loop, only capable of following the path prepared by Wilford; 2) the claustrophobic, as the tail-section people are detained in a small section of the train under the caste system. By configuring space both inside and outside the train as structurally bounded, Bong delineates a group of people in paradoxical modes of existence, that is, fixed nomads. Furthermore, in his movie, resistance from the multiethnic group can be easily transformed into another homogenous power. As an easy solution, Bong destroys the civilization that gave birth to all sorts of narratives and attempts to provide an apolitical vision by presenting a black Adam and Asian Eve to restart the civilization. The impractical ending and the sudden disappearance of the whites gives a lingering suspicion, turning the utopian space into another site for dystopian surveillance of the West. Yet a tinge of hope nevertheless remains outside the film where Bong himself becomes a parasite, not a tail.