JOHN WICK 2 - Not a Dick - reading through JARMUSCH'S GHOST DOG

To deconstruct John Wick 2 requires a number of screenings. The action is so fast, the scenes fly by, that you cannot contemplate any of it until it is over, so see it again is all you can do if you want to say anything intelligent about it. I am up to 6 times and I am still seeing something new each time that I missed.

For a detailed reading review of this film at RogerEbert : Angelica Jade Bastien 

Another beautiful reading of John Wick 2 by John Bloner echoes Jarmusch's Ghost Dog. I am indebted to him for nudging my memory on Jarmusch.

First they killed his dog,then stole his Mustang, then they bombed his house He's Back!
But not as a contract killer. John Wick is back in the  Symbolic Order of VENGEANCE.

1. The screenplay is brilliant.I believe it to be intuitive rather than consciously intentional. It is CAMP. It is more CAMP than CAMP, "WORSE" than CAMP as Nietzsche would say. HYPER-CAMP as Baudrillard might. The images also are SUPER-CAMP. More REAL than REAL as Deleuze suggests as our way out.The NOIR influences are deep and the slivery footnotes are perfect.

John Wick: "I'm not that guy anymore.
Santino:"You're always that guy, John"

Winston:There are only 2 rules:
Winston:All markers must be honored.
Winston:No business on Continental grounds.


And it is right here that we see the gold coins again. The first time is in Tarasov's garage in the boxes - they are closed though and we can't see except by thinking backwards - and beside stacks of paper money a dolly is pulling,then being loaded into the trunk of a vehicle.  Winston  is supervising their perfectly designed and executed imprint.
Paper money is used to buy gold bullion;gold bullion is stamped into gold coins of value.
We will see John Wick, Cassian pay SPECIAL OTHERS with these gold coins, a wave to Ayn Rand's John Galt whose followers pay with gold coins whenever they observe excellence in the decaying world.
In John Wick it has more sinister implications as Winston says, "Put them into circulation."

Gresham's Law: Bad money drives good money into hoarding.
People spend bad money and save - hide - good money.
A way to destroy the paper currency of a State making it worthless.
A way to take over the financial machine of the State.

Fishburne:Will someone please get this man a gun!
"Give this man a gun!  Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun
Or the recent Jane Got a Gun

Fishburne:Don't forget you owe me.
John Wick:You don't want me owing you.

I am especially fond of the use of the word ENJOY !
It's use in this film is PURE ZIZEKIAN

The SUPER-EGO command that you ENJOY!

Tarasov:ENJOY your retirement Mr. Wick.

Julius:ENJOY your stay here.

Julius:ENJOY yourself.

Tailor:Mr. Wick, Do ENJOY your party. 

Gianna:Are you ENJOYING the party Mr. Akoni

Gianna: GO. ENJOY  the festivities Mr. Akoni

Cassian:Are you working tonight? 
John Wick:Nods.

Cassian:Are you having a good night?

John Wick:Fraid so.

Shoot out begins.

Cassian:You killed my ward.Someone I was close to.
Cassian:An eye for an eye John. You know that.
 This is Sharia Law in the Symbolic Order of the Sacred

SHARIA LAW is popularly understood as adulterous women getting stoned to death. Sharia Law is Old Testament Law: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The opening sequence with Buster Keaton projected on the building wall was stolen by the director from student work at NYU by his own admission. He makes no mention of Orson Welles when discussing the mirror scenes. Maybe they have just become naturalized, institutionalized into hyper mirror shoot out scenes. 

This one is gorgeous.

2. The PLOT follows Jim Jarmusch's GHOST DOG.The SAMURAI warrior of mastery and integrity.

It is what I call a Love Letter to Jim Jarmusch's wondrous film with Forrest Whittaker. Included are a dog and pigeons on the roof and a lonely character. You can rent it for 2.99 on youtube so now would be an excellent time to see it.

Charon welcomes guests into the Continental and he arrives at Wick's burned property at the end to escort him back to Winston who meets him in the park.Charon is the dog who waits by the River Styx at the Gates of Hades. Cassian/Cassius is an enemy of Caesar. Julius is the Rome manager of the Continental where Winston rules. Winston is the main character of 1984. Ares is the God of War. John Wick's wife is Helen whose beauty and treachery began the Trojan War.It is possible to go on with this.

The tattoo on John Wick's back

fortis Fortuna adiuvat Fortune Favors the Brave - Pliny, Cicero.

And lest we forget The Boogeyman

Boogeyman is a 2005 New Zealand-American supernatural horror film, directed by Stephen T. Kay

In the 1940's we children were scared by our mothers about the Boogeyman. We feared he was under our beds at night or in the closet so we wanted the door shut.Strange it should resurface in recent times.

This film nods to mythology,film, art, The Vatican with its fabulous art collection in the scenes displaying the culture these assassins, thugs, high table gangsters display.

John Wick, the man, the myth, the legend

The Samurai with his Master, his rules, values, discipline, art, style and disciplined skill.The lonely life of the assassin who is to become the prey and hunted.
The scene with Lawrence on the roof with his pigeons a great salute to Jim Jarmusch, his independent probably lonely fight to make his own films in his own way to limited release.

The White Dove thrown to the sky and followed by the other multi colored pigeons, a visual metaphor of the white man as substitute target for the man of color.
Nice reversal.

Fishburne's last scene a mirror of Ghost Dog

Now the assassin is to be assassinated.

This is the MANUFACTURE of the FATWA !.  Khomeini in issuing the FATWA on Salmon Rushdie put the entire western civilized machine into scarlet alert with no way to defend against it, only to hide Rushdie in safe house after safe house for a few years, destroying his life. We saw a Foucauldian CUT in this ultimate surveillance and capture by the US STATE with SNOWDEN under The Obama. When the personal presidential plane of Evo Morales,the President of Bolivia, is forced down in Portugal because "it is reported" that Snowden is aboard and escaping - and no allies will permit it to land on their soil. We see international SHARIA LAW morphing into the ORDER OF PRODUCTION having left the SYMBOLIC ORDER OF THE FATWA. And this occurs at the end of John Wick 2 as in his hour of grace running to get away, he sees every eye turned toward him as a potential assassin against him. They are too numerous to count and all will want to kill him.

Enter Bob Fagles' modern classic translation of Homer's Odyssey. Odysseus has come home in disguise. Only his old dog Argus recognizes him and instantly dies, having waited 20 years for him - just living to see his Master again - another Ghost Dog. Odysseus faces the same impossible dilemma as John Wick at the end. He must kill all the suitors as Athena tells him to do, with her help. But his reply to her is in his words,

We had the same English teacher

"There's another worry," he tells her

"that haunts me even more,

What if I kill them -thanks to you and Zeus -

how do I run from their avengers?

Show me the way I ask you." - 20.43-45 - Fagles translation

This is what Sharia Law means. All your family and progeny will be annihilated. As justice is in the Order of Production, Sharia Law is in the Symbolic Order of the Sacred.

 Khomeini issued a FATWA on Salmon Rushdie for his portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad in his Satanic Verses.As Baudrillard said, "... there he sat in his small house, sitting on a blanket and paralyzed the entire western world into a state of fear. The West had no way to respond to this kind of power."

This is the power of the Symbolic Order.
As Baudrillard tells us: in referring to 9-11 as a GIFT in which the US has not been able to return the COUNTER-GIFT. So the US must suicide if it cannot. Seems like it is right now huh.

$1.98 for used one at Amazon as I write this.

Baudrillard sees the power of the terrorists as lying in the symbolism of slaughter – not merely the reality of death, but in a sacrifice that challenges the whole system. Where previously the old revolutionary sought to conduct a struggle between real forces in the context of ideology and politics, the new terrorist mounts a powerful symbolic challenge which, when combined with high-tech resources, constitutes an unprecedented assault on an over-sophisticated and vulnerable West. This new edition is up-dated with the essays ‘Hypotheses on Terrorism’ and ‘Violence of the Global’.

3. The reflecting mirror shoot out is an enhanced CGI from Orson Welles Lady From Shanghai. The superbly generous Orson would have been thrilled to see his very first experimental mirror shoot out taken to these extremes.

The last shoot out scene takes place in rooms that are composed of an infinity of reflecting mirrors all colored by lights: blues, reds, golds just incredible CGI. But this almost final scene and the last big shoot out is a marvelous tribute to the great Orson Welles who first did reflecting mirrors in Citizen Kane and then a shoot out in Lady From Shanghai where Rita Hayworth gets shot dead and Orson's character leaves her to die for all her betrayals. It is magnificent.

At the end John Wick 2 is waving hello to Mel Gibson's Mad Max. A dead wife and a dog traveling with him into dystopia, 21st Century style.  Wick is in the "dystopia" of the Deterritorialized Corporate Global World of International Thuggery of the present. 

Keanu Reeves is once again the FLAT character.
And in John Wick 2 Reeves is the FLAT character who is the main character.

Keanu Reeves has been criticized for his acting talent NOT. Reeves always has his own persona in every part. Humphrey Bogart was/did the same. He is what E.M.Forster has called a FLAT CHARACTER. The ones around him change but he does not.
But actually John Wick 2 is not a character driven movie. None of them change. All are FLAT in Forster's description, but are drawn excessively. We see why Gianna's father chose her to sit at the High Table instead of her brother. We see why her brother was not chosen to inherit that place of authority.

A "flat" character does not mean a "boring" character. It's a technical term in literary theory popularized by the novelist E. M. Forster in his monograph on writing titled "Aspects of the Novel." According to Forster, a "flat" character is a kind of token: his or her psychology and values do not grow, change, evolve, or come to any kind of crisis during the course of the narrative because characters — like plot points — have functions within the story; it is simply not the function of a flat character to steal attention away from the main character(s) — the protagonist(s) and the antagonist(s) — by growing, changing, evolving, or reaching any sort of "crisis" within the story in which they must exercise his or her will, and come to a decision — or initiate an action — that would be surprising, i.e., a new pattern of behavior inconsistent with their previous pattern. "Flat" characters remain who they were throughout the entire course of the story, because they are there simply to provide a particular kind of obstacle (or point of affinity) for the main characters. They are part of the stock-in-trade of every playwright, screenwriter, short-story writer, and novelist. They are a particular kind of narrative tool. 

So Reeves as the FLAT character is among a stellar collection of FLAT characters who are not changing psychologically. Their character's change would have little to do with the plot- hence the end of interpretation The dead dog is a Ghost Dog and the one he has now has no name. He is a Ghost Dog also just following Wick like a shadow. 

He is always the Keanu we love to watch. He never changes. His vulnerability, presence, integrity and values are always there in the Inscription of His Body/Face and in the parts he plays. Reeves embraces the feminine in his maleness which is physically awesome without posing as macho. This is his undeniable erotic charisma and at 52 in John Wick 2, Reeves, an assassin, is a Samurai with a plot turn mapped over Ghost Dog updated to THE DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALIST MACHINE  which far surpasses Coppola's GODFATHER series in its world scope.

4. This movie moves in and out of the Symbolic Order and the Order of Production. As a contract assassin John Wick is a professional killer. He is paid for this. The opening scene obliterates  that as he enters the Symbolic Order of the Sacred.

Tarasov:It is not just a car.

It is John Wick's car.

Assistant:Why not just give it back?

Tarasov:He killed my nephew and my brother!

(And he knows John Wick is not yet finished with returning the COUNTER-GIFT.)

Tarasov:And over a car and a puppy!

Wick has received the GIFT of DEATH

And the COUNTER-GIFT must be returned.

It must be greater than the GIFT in the SYMBOLIC ORDER.

John Wick is not a Dick. Wick is not wicked. 

Lacanian word play in action!

HEARING WHAT IS NOT SPOKEN.

As Cassian says to John Wick in the Continental Bar after hearing about the Marker as the reason he kills Gianna

In response to Wick's explanation for his freedom,
John Wick:Am I?

Cassian: not at all

You killed my ward. Someone I was close to.

An eye for an eye John. You know that. 

Now the assassin is to be assassinated as in Ghost Dog

We see the MANUFACTURE of the FATWA !.  Khomeini in issuing the FATWA on Salmon Rushdie put the entire western civilized machine into scarlet alert with no way to defend against it, only to hide Rushdie in safe house after safe house for a few years, destroying his life. We saw a Foucauldian CUT in this ultimate surveillance and capture by the US STATE with SNOWDEN under The Obama. The personal presidential plane of Evo Morales,the President of Bolivia, is forced down in Portugal because "it is reported" that Snowden is aboard and escaping - and no allies will permit it to land on their soil. We see international SHARIA LAW moving into the ORDER OF PRODUCTION having left the SYMBOLIC ORDER OF THE FATWA. And this occurs at the end of John Wick 2 as in his hour of grace to get away, he sees every eye turned toward him as a potential assassin against him. They are too numerous to count and all will want to kill him. His bounty is up to 14 million.

Lawrence Fishburne's final scene is holding the white dove on the rooftop and uplifting it to fly. Then all the varied colored ones fly up after her. It is quite beautiful and a metaphor for John Wick running away at the end to escape the International Assassins League coming after him at the end of the hour, He is the scapegoat to be annihilated after the 60 minutes period of grace given to him. The white man fleeing from the multi colored peoples of the world, saving the homeless and the darker skinned people in the subway tunnels.

This is the MANUFACTURED PRODUCTION OF THE FATWA. The computerized text message and the code of 11 -11-1 goes out and we see the code replicating down the SCREEN as all members are put on alert. No place in the world will be safe for him. Everyone will be after him and he can only know by his feeling, by a sixth sense of awareness, who is an assassin. It sets up the 3rd chapter of John Wick 3.

John Wick is not a Dick

I have only to mention TIME to begin another reading of this film. The women "secretaries" setting up "FATWAS", EXCOMMUNICATING members after Winston has pronounced EXCOMMUNICADO on John Wick taking  from him the protection and privileges of The CONTINENTAL. The dial telephones used for this. So they can't be recorded and archived like digital ones? The technological savvy in use, the emphasis on old ancient traditions of the church and its blessing of new high table coronations. I began to get unglued as to what century I was in, so beautifully integrated the ancient was with the incredible sophistication of weapons, weapon purchases, clothes, sculpture and paintings of exquisite curation. Gianna's Roman bath, her Roman preferred method of suicide. This is a complex movie and one that foreshadows an imminent future that perhaps is already here.

Reading Trumbo/Trump Through Hitler's Fascist Empire

Trumbo the man and the movie

This is a film well worth seeing. It is not great although it has great performances. It is a bio but not the typical Hollywood kind, so give it a pass on that. It is really about clarifying what happens when people get inflamed about persecuting others for not holding the same opinions and beliefs. Just a substitute for age old religious wars that nowadays are not so age old anymore.

The persecution of the Muslims - by those who know not the difference between Muslims and Islamists - is reminiscent of the early days of Hitler's storm troopers known as the Brownshirts who began by trashing the property of the Jews building up into Kristallnacht

Only it was Trumbo's swimming pool that got trashed by his next door neighbor

We have here Foucault's GRID of power/knowledge/capital/normality: how normality is enforced locally in the smallest of ways, tightening the grid, leaving less and less wiggle room every day. This is fascism at work, observing and surveilling you, making sure you conform and present the image of normality.

But it is the same mentality, the same cultural attributes of both fascist Germany and fascist US that leads to this persecution that intensifies into cold blooded killing. Trump is a "brownshirt leader" drumming up business for persecution the way Hitler did to get even more control of the government and the German people. Easy as pie. The same thing works over and over and over again because people never change within a system that promotes competition. That is, the now insidious DETERRITORIALIZED CORPORATE CAPITALISTIC SYSTEM.

Anselm Kiefer's Kristallnacht at the St.Louis Museum of Art

A truly beautiful work of art.

Today Muslim stores are having their windows smashed and their stores trashed. Are we still calling the US the land of the FREE! Nietzsche has told us to beware of whom we choose as enemies for we will become like them. We have. We are now full fledged fascists and Hitler has won his war.

This is the message of Trumbo. His treatment at the hands of the justice system was so much more benign in the 1950's than it would or is the rule today. So sad. Fascism becomes institutionalized as it becomes natural. That's the way it works. That is its danger. Our world is stolen from us in homeopathic doses. THE PERFECT CRIME. No body, no criminal, no crime scene, no justice, no punishment, nada.

Very short and readable. 

REVIEW:Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - A Reading Through ZIZEK

They are not interchangeable - The Players

Darren at them0vieblog.com in Dublin is my go to person for blockbusters.

He seems to have seen them all multiple times, loves them but critiques them wonderfully and integrates them with each other. 

He truly loves them.

But the real deep readings come from UnemployedNegativity
http://www.unemployednegativity.com/2014/07/war-has-already-begun-on-dawn-of-planet.html

I never used to watch them, I have no history with them, but I have started to go based on what Darren says. I recommend him for anyone. And do take your children.I now see why Jean Baudrillard used to go to multiplexes when in the US instead of independent art films. It is far more interesting to see what Hollywood wants the young - testosterone parade - to be injected with. We watch the Invisible Real from Hollywood's POV.

Not intending to see this film I hit it on my last night at the discount theater The Palace in Springfield MO. What a surprise for me. I loved every minute of it.

I am assuming you know the plot if you are reading this. The asshole breaks trust between Caesar and Malcolm when he pulls out a gun that was supposed to have been confiscated. On the surface this looks like what starts everything and in a way it does. But there is always someone who breaks the trust so count on it as a cliche. Reading a little deeper we are introduced to the betrayal of the Native Americans by the White Man. There always was a White Man then who had integrity, became trusted by the Native Americans, negotiated the treaty that led to the betrayal he had never intended. In other words he was the "trusty" that fronted for the duplicitous generals, leaders, et al who had other intentions. We see this in govt today. At the moment this "trusty" is Elizabeth Warren. She is being watched to see if she breaks the faith. (Clue: she already has by supporting the recent increase in war in the Middle East.Women cannot appear soft on war if they want to win elections.)

And so war begins between the apes and men, then conflict among the apes themselves and rivalry and conflict among the humans. And so it begins. 

And as this war plot unfolds we see the same-old, same-old story.

Here it is in a 2 minute video:

127,000 have watched it it's that good.

What comes through in this movie when watching through Zizek eyes is the Zizekian INVISIBLE REAL.

The men want power to continue the lifestyle they used to have before the viral disease decimated the population. The apes have acclimated to the world that exists now. Men want to create the same simulacrum all over again, based on capitalism.

With Keri Russell's medical knowledge and the power of anti-biotics, saving Caesar's mate, we see the marvelous benefits medical knowledge has brought. No one has nay doubt about this in the movie or now with us. Capitalism brings many benefits. 

It is the Trojan Horse.

It also brings weapons and the military and war. And never have I seen this so clearly imaged, so simple to see, in a movie before. I know it from reading Zizek of course, but to see it concretely is thrilling for me. 

Power/Knowledge is a relation

The two cannot be separated and each needs the other.Because it is a relation you cannot reify it, nounize it, give, take, trade, etc whatever. It seeps through the interstices of the Foucauldian Grid and is irreversible. It is a relation that metastasizes.

This is what makes it so difficult to challenge the ideology of capitalism.

And this is what we see happening in the movie. Caesar cannot resist. Humans have taught apes sign language - which they use with subtitles throughout the film - and words are a gift without compare for him.
Koba who has learned signing from other apes after being released from the torture of experimentation, distrusts them all.
He mistakes humans for The system of power/knowledge that has not yet intersected with capitalism in the movie.

The system will grow stronger as power/knowledge feed each other. Humans will grow stronger and then the apes will lose, -  just as the Native Americans did -  so they must war now. Humans will want more and more and more. The power/knowledge relation will be cumulative, progressive, linear, unending. And isn't this what we are living today. It cannot be fixed although most people still think it can. We can slow it, have revolutions that then incorporate the revolt making it stronger. This is the meaning of Snowpiercer.
This is what unemployednegativity describes in his review of  Bong Joon-ho's
SNOWPIERCER

What Unemployed Negativity says is that no one inside the train can imagine life outside the train in the ice-age out there. And we in our world now cannot imagine our way out of it. Only one person on the train knows about snow.

None of the humans in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes can imagine a different way of life than the one they used to know.They cannot create a different world.As one character says, "They are stronger than us because they don't need power."

So they will go to war for the ideology of the capitalism they used to know when it had intersected with power/knowledge/capital in the Foucauldian Grid.

This is the ZIZEKIAN INVISIBLE REAL, the system Koba only senses, displacing his feelings and awareness on the humans themselves. And this is what we ourselves are also doing. We cannot see the Invisible Real because it is invisible. The humans cannot see it and the apes cannot see it and this invisibility is what drives war through history. Our differences with the Middle East are the same as they were with the Native Americans. Our way of life will devour all before it including ourselves. And the toys of capitalism are so fun, we want to keep them to play with.Just as those on the train with privilege enjoy them.

It will be Caesar that understands there are differences in humans as well as apes, that neither can be stereotyped. But this reasoning will do him no good.As Simon Critchley has lectured at GCAS, in times of heightened violence, reason is useless, which he traces from classical times. An important concept to understand.

When violence is aroused, reason disappears, dissolves, gets trampled on, is of no use whatsoever. (Think going to war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, if they ever were.)Malcolm and Caesar cannot influence the mobs on either side.Violence will triumph.

As long as we see our differences in terms of us and them, we will have war.This is binary thinking. We must change the way we think. Only then will we be able to see all the different kinds of snow because then we will have the language that allows us to think differently, perceive differently, and talk differently with each other.

This is what Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir were after.

Moving to Slavoj Zizek's reading in his The Year of Living Dangerously (p.101) He refers to Jameson's  reading of The Wire:

The Wire is a whodunit in which the culprit is the social totality, the whole system, not an individual criminal (or group of criminals). But how are we to represent (or, rather, render) in art the totality of contemporary capitalism? In other words, is not totality always the ultimate culprit? What is so specific about contemporary tragedy? The point is that the Real of the capitalist system is abstract, the abstract virtual movement of Capital - here we should mobilize the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: reality masks the Real. 

I think this is at the core of the wild pouring of emotion over the dolphin slaughter at Taiji Cove in Japan. The reality of it is so excessive, so much horror for us to watch, that the Lacanian REAL is masked. The REAL is Capitalism which abstractly demands Taiji Cove exist. 

Murder of Dolphins in Taiji Cove
We cannot see the Real because we are so emotionally wrought by reality. In this way it is not addressed, nor confronted.
A
stealth poison pill

REVIEW Snowpiercer: A Reading Through Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

From Unemployed Negativity

In reading this review from Unemployed Negativity more resonances emerged. I love his reading BTW. I am reading the film Snowpiercer through Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a sort of different reading.

In the early 1960's I attended Objectivist Lectures in Philadelphia given by Barbara Branden. (1960-1962) and sometimes Rand herself came to the Q and A time after the lecture. I never asked one question in two years. I didn't because I had read her fiction and newly published non-fiction (For the New Intellectual and The Objectivist Newsletter) and any question that was asked I already knew what my answer would be and waited to see what Barbara Branden, Nathaniel Branden, Leonard Peikoff, Alan Greenspan, et al and even Ayn Rand herself would reply.The questions were most often stupid and were posed because, well, IDK why........maybe just so they could stand up and ask her a question?

So while Barbara and Nathaniel were cool and poised, Rand would begin to show irritation, frustration (me too) and would sometimes get angry or at least emotional.

Ayn Rand testifying at HUAC-House UnAmerican Activities Committee

In Mason's speech to the people in the "tail" she perseverates by repeating
So be it.
It is so.
over and over again
When Rand was stressed at a Q&A session being the flyswatter that Nietzsche said he wasn't going to be:
("I am not a flyswatter!")
Rand would say with finality:
A Is A!

Inversion of the quote is Nietzschean trope and Rand started with Nietzsche when she was 16 memorizing him

So when Tilda Swinton gives her over the top speech as Mason in Snowpiercer, my immediate association was not Thatcher but Rand in all her outrageousness. Her hair, her facial expressions, all exaggerated of course. Much like the teacher in the classroom car is all Reese Witherspoon in her 1999 movie Election, so much so that I thought young Reese was in the movie for a second.

And less you think these train cars are too too.....

The New Japan Cruise Train

WOW

Another car on Japanese train

Here is a clip of Tilda Swinton as Mason. A man's arm is being attached to a "sleeve" to plug into its gasket in the train to have the arm held out to the way below arctic freezing temperature outside to demonstrate to the "tail" section the danger in revolting and stepping outside the safety of the train. Mason gives her speech and she is quite mad and wonderful.

http://youtu.be/_47ph6EvQPU

Tilda Swinton as Mason in Snowpiercer.

The Sacred Motor is the "sacred" motor Dagny finds at the defunct Twentieth Century Motor Company, where Galt was working and designed it. It is an engine of the future and it is in need of serious repair which Dagny gives to - I forget - to fix. Dagny has plans to put this engine into her locomotives of Taggert Transcontinental. Dagny's engine will ride the rails made of Reardon Metal a metaphorical image irresistible to someone who thinks Lacanian. The engine in Atlas is patterned after Nicola Tesla's engine built for Westinghouse when he was inspiring Edison who stole all his ideas. It was an engine that had no fuel needs, just evidently air, that car accelerated in a few seconds. It was scrapped, its existence hidden, a secret. After all Standard Oil of New Jersey was a powerful corporation at that time. An eternal engine like that would not have been welcomed by the players of the game. Anyway it is gone and we just imagine and guess about it and some try to reinvent it in their garages.

So here it is in all its magic glory in Snowpiercer. A train that circles the earth once each year, like a sort of ground satellite. The Eternal Sacred Engine is everlasting, irreversible, just like Capitalism. It continually goes. The social structure inside the train is confinement of classes. The beggars of the earth are in the "tail" - nice symbolism here - and the Sacred Engine is at the front with its designer who is now getting old. He is wearing out.

The point that Unemployed Negativity brings out is Zizekian thinking. So I urge you to read it. The humans inside the train are confined within the Foucauldian Grid of power/knowledge. Resistance is possible and revolutions do happen but do not overthrow the system. The system devours them like Pac-Man (Marcuse) and is strengthened by them. (Vija Kinski will tell Eric Packer the same thing in DeLillo's Cosmopolis.) Baudrillard will challenge Foucault in his book

telling Foucault to go to the edge of the abyss and continue the pressure until it all implodes into the chasm. Until it commits suicide. 

And this is Snowpiercer, as well as Atlas Shrugged

What Unemployed Negativity says is that no one inside the train can imagine life outside the train in the ice-age out there. And we in our world now cannot imagine our way out of it. Only one person on the train knows about snow. A nice wave to that wonderful novel

Smilla's Sense of Snow

Just in case you never knew this book it is a marvel

The Asian drug addict Kang-ho Song in a wonderful performance has observed that the snow is melting. That they can exist outside the train. 

He wants to create an explosion

that will avalanche the mountains of snow. Curtis now the Curtis Revolution of 18 (years 

they have been on the train) gives in on continuation when Trainbaby shows him what is 

under a hatchlock. He sees what he will have to continue doing and he cannot.

He agrees to the explosion, gives her the match, and these last few 

huddle together waiting for the detonation.

Then when Trainbaby 

Curtis and Trainbaby born on the train 17 years ago

who knows nothing about what is in the world or how people lived, she is the

tabula rasa, she and the rescued child dress warmly and go outside. Her footsteps

 sink but she does not. Nothing is there but mountains of snow until she sees a white 

movement far off.

 It turns and we see a polar bear. Is the bear out hunting for food? She has no weapons,

 no place to go for shelter as the train was burning inside. She and the child are the only 

survivors. That wonderful moment as she pushes her hood off her head bared to the air.

A helpless human. 

A return to the beginning. Eternal Return - Nietzsche

The last frame is the polar bear looking at us.

This is a gorgeous film made by a visionary auteur director Bong Joon-ho

Chris Evans
Tilda Swinton
Jamie Bell
Ed Harris
John Hurt
Alison Pill
Octavia Spencer

Arturo the Polar Bear in Arizona Zoo. - Help Rescue him