Since the 2016 election of Trump—but particularly in the magnificent shitshow that marks life in 2020 America—engaging with dystopian fiction has been an endeavor I’ve avoided precisely because current American society already feels tremendously, relentlessly dystopic. Nonetheless, Bong Joon Ho’s 2013 Snowpiercer is a film that speaks uncomfortably to many of the crises that currently face us: the impending climate disaster, the increasing class stratification as a result of late-stage capitalism, isolationist political policies and xenophobia, and the rise of fascist, self-mythologizing ideologies.

In Foucault’s mapping out of what marks the heterotopia, he argues that it is a counter for or a dark reflection of the utopic: a world within a world that offers a “contestation of the space in which we live” (4). The heterotopia, which he divides into the subcategories of crisis heterotopias and a heterotopia of deviation, is capable of “juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (6). There is a contradictory incompatibleness in the heterotopia. They are both isolated and penetrable, and they “have a function in relation to all the space that remains” that either crafts an illusion that exposes the real or else creates a real space that is an ideal alternative to our “messy, ill-constructed, and jumbled” world (7, 8). 

Snowpiercer, then, could be considered a study in heterotopography—a place (train) within a place (the frozen world), that has discrete places within it (the separate cars) which function either to maintain the social order, perform maintenance on the mythology of the train, or to cloak its inhabitants from the violence that arises out of that maintenance. It contains illusory utopian cars (the front) that contrast the rear as well as the rear of the train that seeks to expose the way “human life is partitioned” (8). Inside the train that functions as the last of the known world, we see what Brionny Doyle describes as the “end of history and as revelation for an elect at the expense of a concealed and excluded majority” that marks postapocalyptic fiction, an imaginary formed by “both the capitalist and apocalyptic remainder” (101). Ho’s film, like the other postapocalyptic texts Doyle cites, focuses not on the disaster but the aftermath, and is part of a particular subgenera of postapocalypse films that “explore the disintegration of the human in a post apocalyptic space and posit emergent and imperfect possibilities for humanly coded ways of understanding the world” while also expressing our contemporary anxieties about capitalism, ecology, and identity (104). Both Doyle and Snowpiercer ask how we remain human after catastrophic social collapse and reflect on the effect of possible difficult choices. The postapocalyptic, she argues, “is a space for offering up imagined tactics without awarding salvationist judgements” (111)—which makes the post apocalyptic itself its own kind of heterotopia.

Works Cited

Doyle, Brionny. “The Postapocalyptic Imagination.” Thesis Eleven, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 99-113.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” 1967. Architecture/ Monument/ Continuity, translated by Jay Miskowjec, October 1984, pp. 1-9.

Ho, Bong Joon, director. Snowpiercer. Performances by Chris Evans, Kang-Ho Song, Tilda Swinton, and Ed Harris, Opus Pictures, 2013.