The Platform: A Poignant Metaphor For Our Current Reality
While watching The Platform (Spanish: El Hoyo), I felt disgusted and angry at its violent images and perverse message. Within that anger was a realization that it’s poignant metaphor of a vertical prison was directed at the rampant capitalistic system that creates wealth inequality with the false remedy that wealth will eventually “trickle-down.” It was specially relevant to watch as COVID and the quarantine continues to loom over us in my many parts of the world. COVID has impacted society in disproportionate ways by forcing essential workers to risk their health while the rest of us stay home. The virus has also made it clear that vulnerable populations are being impacted heavily, showing a wealth gap that has larger implications during a global pandemic. The challenges facing undocumented workers, people of color, and those living in low income neighborhoods have been exasperated by this pandemic, showing how fragile our economic system was in the first place.
Directed by Galder Gaztelu-urrutia, this Spanish science-fiction thriller, has a mood of distrust from the onset, heightened by the camera angles and close-ups. It may have reminded some of Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 dystopian cult classic, Cube. Though seeing the savagery of The Platform makes the torture rooms in the Cube, child’s play. The scenes are elevated by the cold and manic score, as if there is a ticking clock hungry for flesh. The music gives one the sensation that someone has a knife not far from your throat, paralleling the minimalist backdrop of high industrial ceilings and vast corridors.
At the onset, the protagonist Goreng, is surrounded by austere gray walls without any windows or doors, but armed with a book. There is a curious rectangular opening on the middle of the floor. He is cellmate, Trimagasi, an elderly man, informs him about the platform that comes down daily to bring food. He tells Goreng about the prison, letting on that he has been inside many years. The clever old man explains that there are people above and below, and each level takes a turn eating from the platform as it descends. Goreng notices the number on the wall: 48. “We’re eating the leftovers from the people above,” Trimagasi tells him. To most of Goreng’s questions, Trimagasi begins with the word, “obvious,” stating it 26 times throughout the film, perhaps wanting to claim ownership. Stating it so emphatically, is a way to let Goreng and the audience know there is something obvious about human behavior when placed in these types of environments.
Every inmate is allowed to bring their most prized possession into the prison or Vertical Self-Management Center. In a way these items reveal their fears and desires. Trimagasi’s object is a self-sharpening knife, called the Samurai Plus. Originally, he bought a regular knife that needed to be sharpened, but upon watching a new Ad for that same brand, he discovers a newer version, the Samurai Plus. He grows angry at the thought of having an outdated version, and throws his TV over the window, killing an illegal immigrant, but does not feel any remorse about this random violent crime. “You killed a man,” states Goreng, to imply that having an illegal status does not take away from the crime. Trimagasi blames the man for having appeared below his window and not the inability to curve his rage.
On the other side is Goreng, who reveals that he volunteered to spend six months in the Vertical Self-Management Center in exchange for a diploma. He carries a book, Don Quijote by Miguel Cervantes, which is about a man trying to be the hero of his own story. Like Don Quixote, Goreng is a middle-aged man who has strong ideals and wants to defend the vulnerable. The book concentrates on specific frames per chapters, along with flashbacks of its protagonist. Similar to the book, each level of The Platform symbolizes a new chapter in Goreng’s awakening and the exploration of social activism.
Trimagasi serves as a constant reminder that humans inevitably submit to madness in moments of hunger and survival. He has accepted this reality and has learned to survive by using cruelty to feel superior to those on the lower levels. Goreng aspires to higher ideals and does not find comfort in the type of apathy and cruelness Trimagasi is preaching. Goreng feels too disgusted to eat at first, expressing the injustice of the vertically stacked prison. He yells at the people above and below to illicit some reaction, but they have already accepted the status quo. As the days proceed, Goreng begins to eat, taking small bites until he becomes accustomed to a routine: eating from the platform, talking to Trimagasi, and reading Don Quixote out loud at the end of the day. Despite loathing the system, Goreng is trapped, and is forced to cope, because his survival depends on it.
When Goreng finds himself in level 33 with Imoguiri and her dachshund dog, he realizes she is the administrator who interviewed him. She voluntarily entered the vertical prison, so as to find a cure for cancer. Imoguiri tries to convince the prisoners in the levels above and below to only take what they need. She puts food aside for the people in the lower levels, but her attempts at altruism are futile. Goreng feels for her, since he too wanted to help in the beginning, but finds her methods naive. “If everyone ate only what they needed everyone would have enough,” Imoguiri says. She mentions the need for “spontaneous solidarity,” in order for change to occur in the prison system. Goreng tells the prisoners below to ration, otherwise he will shit on their food, which makes the prisoners react. “Better than your spontaneous solidarity,” he tells Imoguiri. “Changes don’t happen spontaneously,” He says.
For radical change to occur, direct action needs to happen that convinces or forces people to mobilize. As a government employee, Imoguiri wanted to change the system from the inside, but she was just one more bureaucrat. It’s a farce to think that a system can only change from the inside; it requires the people from those communities to demand change. Though she worked with the Vertical Self-Management Center Administration for 25 years, they never informed her that the prison went beyond 200 levels. Nor did they inform her that inmates were starving and often resorting to cannibalism.
The film also demonstrates that immigrants fare out the worst in these situations. They often suffer in silence and are ignored by the system, often stigmatized by government employees, who are suppose to be helping them. When Goreng brings up the lost child, it’s clear Imoguiri is unaware and makes a hateful comment against Miharu, an immigrant from Indonesia and the mother of the child. This shows that Imoguiri has no solidarity to the plight of another women. Miharu and her child are mute and receive no help from any of the inmates or the prison system.
The film depicts different parts of a social and economic struggle: the activists, the orator, the leader, the wise teacher, vulnerable communities, the middle class, bureaucrats, and the rich. In a recent interview the director, Galder Gaztelu-urrutia mentioned that more than anything the film shows, “Social self criticism, limits of our own empathy and how hard it is to be a good person.” We have to continually work on being a better person, as we create a more equitable society, instead of being governed solely by scarcity and fear. The lack of solidarity that we witness in times of crisis is often just a lack of imagination and empathy. Living in a capitalistic system wires us to abide by the principle of hard labor that leads to rewards, at the expense of our well-being. Our existence is based on how much money we accumulate, not on how much we improve society.
