Paper short abstract:

The paper addresses the 2013 film, Snowpiercer. An imaginary of a capitalist order in a frozen post-climate change world, the film explores the control of time, the disciplining of space, and the destructive power of rebellion. It is also about alternative planetary futures after capitalism.

Paper long abstract:

A massive climatic event leaves the last of humanity endlessly circulating a frozen planet of ice on a high-speed train. Inside, the remnants of humanity are divided into the wealthy and the poor. The post-apocalyptic precariat, consigned to the back of the train and dependent on the distribution of a dubious food source, rise up against the masters who control the front of the train and eventually destroy the train and all the passengers except two. This paper argues that Snowpiercer, well received by left-leaning cultural critics, is at once about the failure to control and temper the effects of global warming and climate change and about the failure of capitalism to provide meaning alternatives to our current planetary predicament. But it is also a powerful, image-driven, affective, and visually evocative imaginary of life after the eco-apocalypse, about the meanings of life and death in the era of the Anthropocene, about what kinds of world can be imagined and created in the aftermath of almost total human destruction. This paper reads this film against an emergent archive of recent texts that attempt to offer alternative materialist readings of the conflicted temporalities and spatial imaginings of the Anthropocene present. I engage questions of how we live in multiple capitalist worlds today and the conditions that must be created to remake the world, and imagine alternative planetary future.