Rethinking Aesthetics and the Ruins in Snowpiercer

The film Snowpiercer features an arc-like train running on a globe-spanning track carrying the last
fraction of humanity alive, after an attempt of geoengineering to curb global warming has
unintentionally frozen the entire planet turning everything that was left outside the train into remains of
damage and devastation. The train is an allegory for a system of the class hierarchy. Due to this
ecological disaster, the planet has been in this condition for seventeen years now, and anything alive is
on this self-sufficient train, everything outside is the stagnant scenery of ruins of the human world.

Degraded, lost, and ruinated objects are often under-theorized to appreciate their appeal to the senses.
"Ruins [are] objects that have lost their primary function due to violent destruction, attractiveness is
based on the disorder and "ugliness," but most of all, the viewer's emotional reaction." (HUSUKIC and
ZEJNILOVIC, 100). They are remnants of destruction and represent a combination of human-made forms
and organic nature. They carry a historical value by possessing information about the life and culture
from bygone times as well as an age-value rendered to them by the passage of time as they go on
bearing the marks of damage and wear. As Alois Riegl puts in his essay The Modern Cult of the
Monument," [the] advantage of age-value [of a ruin] contrasts sharply with [its] historical value, which
rests on a scientific basis and therefore is acquired only by means of reflection. Age-value manifests
itself immediately through visual perception and appeals directly." The ruins feature in the movie
Snowpiercer again and again as they mark much more than just being the evidence of destruction. Apart
from being leftovers of once intact human-made structures, they give rise to a variety of sentiments and
emotions on a personal level. The ruins, as I shall argue, evoke the ephemeral, mortality, and elicit the
sublime, thereby establishing them as a category of aesthetics, as we shall look at through their
emergence in Bong Joon Ho's sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer using the ideas mentioned above. The film
presents contrasting perspectives and definitions of these documents of past life and devastation and
how they become symbolic of life, thereby changing the way we understand this concept.

(Joon-Ho, 00:35:46) Fig.1(Joon-Ho, 00:36:05) Fig.2

Edmund Burke in his theory of the sublime said that "whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant
about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it
is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling" (Eliot, Part 1, Chapter 7).
Ruins, despite being the markers of devastation, act as a vehicle to create a romanticizing mood with all
their associations. Apart from commanding attention to what is visible, i.e., the damaged remains, they
also command attention for what is absent in them, precisely because it is absent. When the revolting
army is in the guard section, and they look out of the windows for the first time since boarding the train,
they are regaled by the sight of an overwhelmingly impressive vista of a frozen landscape extending until
eternity. As the train rushes past the long-frozen landscape, one can see overturned cars in place and
helicopters suspended wherever they crashed. (Fig.2). They stand with their eyes and mouths wide open
in amazement, as they marvel at the frozen earth outside (Fig.1). Surprisingly, these people look at the
sight of despair and mass destruction with awe as if it were the most beautiful sight they had seen when
it is just the leftovers of what the outside (of the train) world once was. The scenery evokes feelings of
danger and terror and elicits the sublime as Burke remarks, "terror is in all cases whatsoever, either
more openly or latently, the ruling principle of the sublime" (Eliot Part 2, Chapter 2). According to him,
the sublime comes with staggering beauty and an element that incites fear. These people are awestruck
by the spectacle outside the window, which is strikingly beautiful but also overwhelming at the same
time. This, then, complicates our understanding of beauty, which traditionally has positive and pleasant
connotations associated with it and our understanding of ruins, especially when we see it in the context
of Snowpiercer. The snowscape which these people are marveling at comes with a stark reality—that
they would not be alive to see it had they been left outside in that landscape seventeen years ago. The
train they live inside is what has supported their survival all these years, allowing them the chance to
live until this day, and yet the people from the tail section of the train show a yearning for the sight
outside, which is not just unattainable but also, in fact, ghastly. This ties back to Burke's notion of the
sublime that something extremely terrific can elicit the sublime merely because of its ability to invoke
fear. This combined work of architecture and nature is inspiring awe and reverence in these people,
giving rise to an emotional reaction. Their emotions are sweeping and transcend their reality as they
experience this wonder. Even their mission leader Curtis is mesmerized as he pulls himself back from his
trance, shaking his head and looking away to re-focus. He pokes and pulls at his army, saying, "Enough!
We did not come for this. Everyone focus! Keep moving" (00:36:28). The people tear themselves away
from the unfolding snowscape as they look forward. The sublimity invoked by the ruins occupies their
mind in such a way that they could not entertain anything else at the moment. Therefore, the ruins
evoke the ephemeral and elicit the sublime where we experience nature as fearful despite knowing
ourselves to be in a position of safety and hence, without fear. The feeling associated with the sublime
here is a feeling of pleasure in the superiority of reason. The sublime is ineffable and unable to express
or describe feelings adequately; they indulge in an aesthetic experience associated with the ruins. In this
scene these people experience the feeling of grandness and sublimity beyond comprehension, implying
that going outside closer to the sublime and having the liberty to live life on their terms means more to
them than staying alive at a place where they are thrown in a corner to rot and are treated like filthy
worms. The sense of beauty and marvel, originating from the ruins, provides them relief, which is
paradoxical since it is their environment inside the train, keeping them alive.

(Joon-Ho, 00:36:13) (Fig.3)

The ruins function as a combination of spatial and temporal desires that evoke nostalgia—a longing for
something far away and long ago. The ruins generate a social response to the visual quality of space,
marked by the passage of time, usually many years or even decades or centuries. As the train rushes
past, it passes through a frozen railway platform in the middle of a small town with heaps of corpses
frozen to death in the middle of their fierce struggle for life and survival, by getting onto the train (Fig.3).
The doomsday landscape is preserved in the exact state of its final moments as it flickers past. Although
more than seventeen years have passed and these buildings and ruins possess a historical value, what
matters and appeals to them is that they see them after so many years. The age value of the ruins
appeals immediately to their senses as they visually engage with the ruins. This image of the frozen
corpses still carrying the ability to arouse emotional responses by conveying the struggles and
helplessness of those people, preserved just as it was all these seventeen years is also a constant
reminder to the tail-endians, of the deadly havoc humans had wrecked upon themselves by exploiting
the planet and consistently interfering with the balance of nature. These ruins bring to mind climate
destruction rather than natural decay. This destruction, which has left scars on their unconscious, makes
the ruins, the carriers of their most profound memories. It brings along the trauma of an economic
catastrophe hiding in its wake, a nostalgia for a past which had potential and possibilities of a future.
The ruins are eerily reminiscent of traumatic events and evoke memories of loss and damage. The
aesthetic gets tangled with the non-aesthetic here, which makes it all the more intriguing. It is the
evidence of nature's supremacy and the destructive power of nature's wrath. Therefore the ruins in
these scenes are an object of beauty and yearning while simultaneously being evidence of destruction
and disaster. They are human artifacts but also nature. It is the first time these people are seeing the
light as they come out of the tail section for seventeen years. The ruins are visualized as a painting as
they create the illusion of still life, depicting inanimate subject matter. The windows act as the frame as
the scene portrays the stagnation and changelessness in the environment outside the train. It features
the ruins as dead. Furthermore, still, there is an empirical quality to these ruins that invokes one's
senses, and in that sense, they can be justly called Art, created by a fierce encounter of nature's wrath
with human skill. Art, therefore, comes out to be the only thing able to survive the ravages of time and a
climate change, making it all very uncanny. As Hetzler says

A ruin is not a work of Art in the usual sense. It is a new kind of excellence. It can be something
beautiful. It has a uniqueness that comes from the man who made what is being ruined, from the nature
that is ruining it, as well as from the viewer who perceives it and considers it to be beautiful. This "ruin
beauty" is distinct from other kinds of beauty, and the creativity of ruin is a very special kind of
creativity. (Hetzler, 108)

So ruins are a work of skill and creativity, touched intimately by nature and imbibed with the power to
invoke various emotions which distinctly place them in the category of Art, alongside painting, music,
and literature, etc. So it can be said that the memory of ruins is anthropomorphic.

(Joon-Ho, 1:06:15) (Fig.4)

(Joon-Ho, 1:06:19) (Fig.5)

The ruins do not merely carry an aesthetic appeal due to their overwhelming appearance or the
powerfully intense responses they elicit in the spectators. The stimulation of these responses might vary
from person to person, depending on their backgrounds and lifestyle. An interesting turn in the ruins'
narrative and their association with the sublime occurs when the concept of class comes in. In a scene
where the lead protagonist Curtis and his team are in the train car with kids being taught, a young girl
Ylfa comes forward and says, "Old World people were frigging morons who got turned into popsicles!"
(Joon-Ho, 01.09.45). These 'Old World People' are all those who could not board the train and had to be
the bearers of the destruction caused by the calamity of climate change, making them a part of the ruins
left behind. It is interesting to note here that the ruins associated with the arousal of highly intense
emotions of joy or grimness suddenly turn into humor and mockery, and something that is looked down
upon, as soon as the perspective switches from lower class to a higher class. These children of people
belonging to upper classes living in the front of the train are experiencing a life of luxury and
extravagance. Their life is comfortable enough to make them highly susceptible to agendas. They are not
only unconcerned about the world outside but in fact, despise it and are contemptive of all those who
were foolish enough not to have seen it coming, because their life at present is so much better than
what the outside world--no matter how beautiful-- has to offer to them.

Another instance where that proves this is when the Revolutionary crew consisting of Tanya, Andrew,
Grey, Namgoong, Yona, and Curtis are at the small sushi bar attached to the aquarium. As Tanya and
Andrew relish the sushi and Grey tries to peel the fish from the rice, Namgoong skillfully uses chopsticks
as Yona sits clueless, having seen sushi for the first time (Joon-Ho, 1:06:10). All of them sit and devour
the sushi while watching the frozen and snowy landscape of a port city unfold outside (Fig 4.). None of
them seems surprised or awestruck at the sight of huge vessels toppled into the frozen sea (Fig.5). There
faces, as seen in Fig.4, are almost expressionless and unconcerned about what lies outside. The ruins
here did not evoke intense emotional responses here because these people had already had an
encounter with them. Therefore, the sublime matters only as long as it are better and more superior, as
long as it is something that cannot be matched. The moment the life in the train feels sufficing, the same
object of fascination and marvel turns to an object of mockery stripped off its evocative powers. It
establishes the element of unattainability and incomprehension essential to the invoking of the sublime,
especially the one originating from the ruins. When the observer finds themselves at a better place, the
object of sublimity loses its value.

Instead of being unstable entities, ruins also have the potential to become drivers of a continuum. The
film fastens up to the conclusion as Namgoong says he has noticed a change in the dead environment
outside. The scene in the movie where Namgoong is talking to Curtis sitting right outside the closed gate
to the engine, Namgoong says that each year when the train passes over the Yekaterina Bridge he looks
down the bottom of the gorge, at a jetliner stuck upside down of which only the tail fin was visible a
decade ago. However, as time passes, each year, one can see more and more of the plane's body, which
means that the ice is slowly melting (Joon-Ho, 01.34.30). The jetliner, which is part of the ruins left
behind of the once-human world, becomes a ray of hope. The melting snow indicates that the planet is
healing itself, and life may slowly originate again, outside the train. The ruins here provide guidance and
direction to Namgoong's desires. Although remains of the past, they become the medium for him to
look forward to the future. It is at this point when the "still" picture of the ruins starts to show
movement, even if invisible. It is not just a picture anymore but a real-world with a possibility of
changes. The ruins come alive. It is a paradox that the ruins--the evidence of death and destruction--
also become the mascot of life. Furthermore, the "eternal" engine of the rattling ark, supposedly meant
to last forever, turns to ruins by the end of the movie, lying helpless like an earthworm, overpowered by
the avalanche. This is where the cycle, both literally-of the train- and metaphorically is broken.

The visualization of these ruins might potentially come at the cost of their revolution - which progresses
only through horizontal movement along the train. The ruins and their terrible beauty battles for
attention with what the tail-enders consider is the motion of morality itself - from back to front. Since
the ruins are outside the train, they are, by definition, external to this motion of morality; they lie
outside the backward to forward movement of the revolution. The sight of the ruins hinders the
direction of their revolution as they fight for the attention of these people through their terror and
beauty Even though the protesters think that this motion is central to them destroying the order of
things, the film's conclusion shows us that the ruins outside are the way out of this order. In the final
scenes, when Curtis, the military leader of the lower class, has easily declared the successor, he realizes
that he was only perpetuating the hierarchy by trying to reverse it.

On the other hand, Namgoong and his daughter Yona belong to the middle class, who make a plan to
slip out into the world, which is considered dead by all others. They continue to collect chronoles
throughout the film, which is a kind of highly inflammable industrial waste. They collect it to create an
atomic bomb out of it, set up on a gate of the train car, to blow it open and step outside. Namgoong is
repeatedly concerned about what is present outside the train. He not only protects her daughter from
the violence and hierarchy inside the train but also often instructs her to look outside of the windows.
He educates her to look at and recognize the "ruins'', inspiring her to place her confidence in the outside
world. In the end, she goes ahead to actualize her father's desires believing the ruins to be something
more than the remnants of destruction as something liveable. This moment is a symbolic merging of
past and future-- where the father's desires and essence passed on to her represent the past and Yona's
stepping outside and engaging with the ruins symbolizes the future.

Ruins, therefore, have an exceptional nature, i.e., they can be unique aesthetic objects. In this film,
there is a sensory engagement of people with their outside environment (which comprises ruins)
concerning the traumatic events and shifting realities imposed in them by climate change. Not only do
they arouse sensory, emotional values, or serve as artifacts of the traumatic past, they are also objects
of creativity and beauty. It prompts us to think about the notions of beauty and ruins as terms which are
more subjective than otherwise such that we assign them to things and objects based on where we
stand with regards to these objects, for instance, beauty being something one admires and yearns for,
but only from a distance.

Similarly, the sublime lies in things unattainable, or in that which once was but no longer exists, to
experience this in the real sense. The indulgence of the human brain and the role of human imagination
are crucial elements in experiencing the sublime or categorization of things in the categories of beauty,
ruins or aesthetics, etc., for if the object of fascination were easily obtainable and comprehensible with
no confusions and no gaps to fill up with imagination, it would destroy the whole experience. Hetzler
rightly says in his essay, "We might call the aesthetics of ruins the aesthetics of sublimity par excellence"
(Hetzler,105)