'everybody has a part to play'

so horsemouth watched snowpiercer round anthony's (it was that or the remake of battle for the planet of the apes) - if modern films are theme park rides then a film set on a train after the end of the world (by ice) hurtling on a loop round the world once every year should be a perfect set up. there is indeed the old soviet-era gag about russia as a train, under lenin .... this, under stalin... this, under andropov... steadily getting worse, how much longer can this train keep rolling, if indeed it hasn't been shunted into a siding and forgotten.

at the 'head' the engine are the decadent ruling class, at the tail the surplus people. or so it at first appears, but as tilda swinton. a representative of the head, says, 'everybody has a part to play'. every so often the heavies appear to take some children. there is a religion that sanctifies the social position of everybody on the train but during the rebellion an angel winged party-goer is thrown down into the grinding cogs of the engine. beneath the art deco surfaces are revealed... it is metropolis on wheels, modernism on a loop sliding back into myth, the driver needs reminding of the factories act.

here it is not the fact that the train must get somewhere at a particular time (12.10 to tuscon or whatever) but that the train has a structure - a head and a tail, social stratification by carriage/ by ticketing, that is the unity. the plot (of course) has more holes than a thing with a lot of holes, it shows its comic book origins carriage by carriage, set up by set up, in an excess of detail, it obeys the genre conventions (but it could just as well be a spaghetti western, or a horror film or a whodunnit). it's that czech special effects with korean/ western actors slumming it co-production (old boy, tilda swinton, ed harris).

it ends with a polar bear as a symbol of life outside the train.

there is the big fantasy takeover of both children's reading and the cinema - hunger games, the terminal girl of alien becomes the 'right-of-passage' girl it's girls because girls still read as darshavini pointed out, she'd watched one recently set in an underground silo that she felt worked better spatially. there are all these mainstream dystopia - but horsemouth is not clear what they are for. the real problem is when people don't have a part to play - when they really are, or will be, surplus to the needs of capitalism. can't capitalism retreat from being a world social system, what precisely does this mean.

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 today horsemouth is probably off to chateau bremen - then he's away to a gig (by one of grizzly bear), thursday, friday, he babysits his brother's kids (maybe monday too).