Dodes'ka-den

"Somewhere between the sacred silence and sleep

Disorder, disorder, disorder"

 

System of a Down - Toxicity

 

 

A movie about a retarded kid running in circles.

Before I revenon to our pirate shiip, mentioning trains à propos Snowpiercer reminded myself of a more interesting take on the same themes. While Dodes'ka-den is not technically a postapocalyptic story, its restricted bidonville setting with its breakdown in social norms certainly fits the bill. It also bookends its series of down-and-out slum trash vignettes with the same symbol of industrial society trampling its unqualifiable human resources a.k.a. trains, or in this case a trolley... or rather an adolescent retard making choo-choo noises.

As such, it illustrates the difference between a true classic and a well executed summer blockbuster. For all its stylish set design and camera work, Snowpiercer's a popcorn flick, its comic book characters and plot tailored to the tastes of our brains' primitive common ground. From the inherent sainthood of "salt of the earth" poverty to glorifying emotion above reason, to the plucky upstarts wresting power away from those with alien mannerisms, to the unjustifiably happy ending placing sympathetic characters above objective good.

Dodes'ka-den also portrays industrial decay and anomie circumscribed by fantastic (which is to say, fantasized) engines of industry, but it avoids canonizing its urban poor as Dickensian martyrs. They're a mixed bag, as you'd expect to find in any barrel of monkeys: the thieves and bums, drunks, lunatics, slatterns, drudges, the cowards and the cripples, the selfless or luckless, the shortsighted, the impotent and the innocent. It's a mash-up of human failings and stillborn hopes wallowing in our species' farcical comedic glory, laughing the pain away, civilization's ambulant dross deferring existential despair by one more filthy, ragged day at a time. Though partial to thundering conclusions myself, I'll admit this movie works better with no denouement; life just drags on, piles on, fills in over the land's brim, scrap by scrap, yard by yard, hard betide every schmoe's woe while vile denial idles dull repose purpose.

Trenchantly, it places train sounds in the mouth of the retarded everyman. In addition to the more obvious hopes of inclusion by those society discards by the wayside, it has the added effect (intended or not by either the movie's crew or Shugoro Yamamoto the original author) of emphasizing that it is the microcephalic commoners driving market demand for trolleys, that in their delusional hopes for mansions in the sky, these human dross are the very society which has excluded them.