Jon Bailes looks at the social stratification in the TV remake of Snowpiercer and the new Final Fantasy video game and sees an instruction manual for the Uber-rich
“Resistance is never futile”, says Ivan, one of the starving passengers living in the tail of a huge, perpetually mobile train that houses the last survivors of a manmade ice age.
The new TV adaptation of Snowpiercer again explores the class struggle between the wealthy citizens dwelling in luxury in the train’s front carriages and these oppressed stowaways plotting rebellion. Its depiction of an authoritarian regime and violent security forces feels pertinent right now. But then it did in 2013 when Bong Joon-ho filmed his take on the story, and when it was first published as a graphic novel in 1982.
Dystopian sci-fi has a long history of creating neat metaphors for social division by imagining worlds that physically segregate lived space. HG Wells’ The Time Machine split a distant future post-civilisation between surface-dwelling Eloi and underground Morlocks. The opulent industrialists in Fritz Lang’s silent movie Metropolis were served from beneath the earth by impoverished workers operating the machine. Similar images have been reworked in many ways since, especially in recent years.
Their backers are prophets of a secular Rapture, where the chosen ascend to a higher paradise, and the rest are left to burn and scrap in a hostile environment.
But these days the stark sci-fi allegories are starting to feel less like flights of fancy. The structural and technological organisation of existing societies, and some well-funded projects that aim to create new future forms of living, resemble the fictions all too closely. The reflective relationship between sci-fi and reality, in which sci-fi expands real or potential technologies to extreme conclusions is reversed.
For a global elite, the extreme visions appear not to function as warnings, but as inspiration to actively pursue dystopian outcomes.
Imperious Heights
The wealthiest class has been trying to socially distance itself in remote locations for years. Social geographer Stephen Graham’s 2017 book, Vertical, details exactly how, showing how societies are becoming increasingly stratified internally, by growing upwards. States and private companies own space and the skies, through satellites, drones and luxury helicopter travel. Impractical, super-tall skyscrapers in the Arab Emirates house fully air-conditioned ecosystems of work, leisure and residence, while the migrant workers who construct these monoliths live in ground-level squalor if they survive at all.
There’s a resemblance in what Graham describes to the social structure in The Hunger Games. The series of novels and films offer a condensed reflection of global trade, where a centre of consumerist excess sucks resources from various hard-bordered worker districts. But some nations themselves are increasingly developing the same dominant and tributary relations.
