Funnily enough, the first time I saw Snowpiercer was on a US Blu-ray that I bought from amazon.com, either too impatient to wait for its Australian release (in retrospect, the wait time between the two is somehow shorter than I remembered) or too taken up by the idea that it could be imported that I didn’t stop to think that, including shipping, it would come to the same price. Of course, this purchase further complicates the multicultural, transnational production that Snowpiercer is.

With its source material French; the body of its crew South Korean; primary shooting taking place in the Czech Republic; its special effects produced by a German-formed company; and a cast ranging from the most American of Americans, to a handful of South Korean talents, to big and bold British stars, Snowpiercer is a puzzle box of cultural diversity. Where one national influence ends and another starts is surely near impossible to distinguish, a hailstorm of ethnicities culminating in a damn fine global blockbuster.

Brandon Taylor writes in “The Ideological Train to Globalization” that “Snowpiercer is utterly saturated with the cultural residue of American cinema”, and argues that Bong uses these American blockbuster tropes to subvert, rather than emulate, the filmic language of Hollywood in the creation of a “transnational film vocabulary” (2016). The film is, in turn, a hybrid of Korean and American styles; neither one nor the other, but operating somewhere in a “transnational discourse” that makes it “culturally illegible” to both Korean and American audiences (2016); an open identity.

Typically, transnational film productions are achieved for reasons mostly capital, taking advantage of a lucrative element and sending it widespread. As with the first Hong Kong/US co-production, Robert Clouse’s Enter The Dragon (1973) exploited America’s newfound fascination with kung-fu, the fluent body of Bruce Lee. This would continue with the erratic work of (our beloved) John Woo being accepted and ultimately replicated in the Hollywood mainstream.

Snowpiercer of course differs from these kinds of productions—the US not the dominant force in capitalising on the film’s many profitable elements. Ironically, a creative conflict between Bong and Harvey Weinstein (curse his name) unfolded, resulting in a botched release that saw the distribution rights for the film eventually handled to Radius-TWC, a division of The Weinstein Company that specialise in niche and independent films. Under their control, Snowpiercer received the wide release that it deserved, surely a welcome addition to the pockets of the TWC higher-ups.

The film’s fluidity—its cultural illegibility—then relies on the conventions of the American blockbuster to “apprehend and signify meaning” for transnational audiences (2016). Its structure, character archetypes, pacing, plotting and all the rest rely on the conventions of the dominant mode of blockbuster that have continued to permeate the world for years on end. Where it gets interesting is explored towards the end of Taylor’s paper; has the American blockbuster “manifested its own demise by creating a shared filmic language that is transferable to a global discourse”? Or does it have another trick up its sleeve?

References

Taylor, Brandon. (2016) The Ideological Train to Globalization: Bong Joon-ho’s The Host and Snowpiercer. Cineaction; 2016; 98; ProQuest