How'd We Resolve A Platform Like This Here?

A couple of weeks ago, spurred by my attempts to keep up with Random Number Generator Horror Podcast Number Nine's weekly schedule, I carved out some time to watch "The Platform". I loved it. It's in no way scary - save in the ways it reminds us of our current political moment, for which the word "scary" is far too mild a descriptor - but it's certainly unsettling. That alone wouldn't earn it an essay, though. What really stuck with me here, and this will surprise you not one quantum, was the films subtly socialist message.

Spoilers below

For those who've seen the film, this may seem like an odd description. As a piece of work, we're absolutely in Garth Marenghi territory. I know writers who use subtext, and they're all condemned to die of starvation at the bottom of my Vertical Self-Management Centre. The thing is, though, the film's apparently obvious message is one of nihilism. Nothing works to make life better in "the Pit". Most plans to change that fact are foolish, a few are downright ugly, but all seem doomed.

It appears the film is totally unimpressed by, even sneering at, any efforts to improve society somewhat, given the realities of the lengths society will go to brutalise people past the point of understanding what improvement can mean. Once the film ends, though - once the whole meal is over - I think it's clear that something else is going on. This isn't a story about how trying to build solidarity in hell is pointless. It's about how it's really, really fucking hard. Especially when you're in it for the wrong reasons.

The problem with most films about building solidarity is that they're also building toward a revolution. Sometimes the revolution succeeds, sometimes it fails. Sometime, if it happens early enough, there's time for it to do both. These though are stories about the endpoint, or at least an endpoint, of the struggle. Stories about how the powerful overlords are brought low, or not. "The Platform", in contrast, has almost no interest in the ruling class whatsoever. We never see any actual member of the Administration, or at least, not one who actually wields power - it's not clear whether Imoguiri is technically a member of not. Either way, we see nothing of the world outside whatever structure houses the Pit, and very little of the higher levels, save Goreng's interview and a few wordless scenes looking at the chefs who create each day's food (including a savvy scene where a sous-chef is berated for getting a hair in the pudding by a man charged with ensuring only a quarter of the people below him will receive any food at all each day - the only thing more depressing than the banality of evil is getting upset when that banality is performed with insufficient professional pride).

So. How can we build class solidarity within a class deliberately and endlessly divided against itself? This is a 333-storey tall problem, literalised by the Pit's structure, but also referenced throughout the film through people's attitudes to race, religion, gender, and nationality. We see this right from the beginning of the film, and not just in the depths our protagonist Goreng sees stretching seemingly endlessly below him. Even more telling is the depths Goreng sees in Trimagasi, a man who despises everyone below him simply because they are below him, while simultaneously despising everyone above him for possessing precisely the same attitude. This is obvious doublethink, already incoherent even before we learn he's been catapulted apparently at random from level to level. Trimagasi knows the level he finds himself at is wholly arbitrary, and wholly temporary. And yet, so long as there's someone he can treat as worthless without consequence he's wholly unconcerned about whether the system which allows that sense of superiority makes the slightest bit of sense. This is Mudsill Theory: The Movie.

Trimagasi is clearly fascist, or at least fash-adjacent - he's racist, anti-intellectual, suspicious of any kind of empathy as "communism", so obsessed about no-one taking advantage that he treats "obvious" information as coin to be hoarded. This is a mindset which predates the deprivations of the Pit, too. We learn Trimagasi killed someone through a reckless, selfish tantrum, but that's he's wholly unrepentant, because the person he killed was an "illegal immigrant". If they'd not entered the country unsanctioned, Trimagasi argues, they would never have been able to be beneath the window through which he threw his television in the first place. Nor is he alone in his ugly, deluded thinking. At one point toward the end of the film, a character argues he has the right to take more than his share, a right conferred entirely by the relative position he happened to wake up. Perhaps worst of all is the couple who respond to a black man wanting to climb up to the level of privilege they have been entirely arbitrarily granted, and respond first with derision and abuse, and then by literally shitting in his face (muds and sills again, as well as the Marenghian approach to semiotics).

To quote Théoden King, what can man do against such reckless hate. For starters, it depends on the man. The one we're given here is Goreng, middle class coded and wholly oblivious to what's actually going on. He's in the Pit voluntarily, both because it will help his academic career and because he thought it might be a good way to quit smoking. This is efficient character building, marking Goreng out almost immediately as an academic (or would-be academic) inserting himself into the lives of the less privileged as, well, as an academic exercise. He simultaneously wants to use the depredations of the Pit to further his own career, and demonstrates he has no real conception of what those depredations actually are. It's misery tourism, except even worse, because he's thinking about how he might use the trip to scout out real estate for a bar for expats. 

This isn't to say he's unconcerned about his fellow man. He genuinely wants to make things better, sure, but - again, real efficiency here - the item he's brought with him into the Pit is a copy of Don Quixote. I've no beef with Cervantes novel qua novel (though in fairness I've not read it), but if we're searching for the right mindset for the endless and unglamorous work of building toward hope, I'd argue we're unlikely to find it in someone clinging to a book that tells of the romance of the hopeless quest. 

 

Goreng isn't the only person put in the Pit with a questionable view of what organisation means. After he escapes Trimagasi, he finds himself paired with Imoguiri, a former employee of the undefined "Administration", and indeed the very person who interviewed Goreng after his application to the Pit. Like Goreng, Imoguiri is here by choice, though her previous role means she's come in with rather more idea of the situation than he did. Having been diagnosed with terminal cancer, she wants to make sure her final days have meaning, and her crusade of choice is helping the inhabitants of the Pit.

Insofar as she genuinely wants to reduce the number of people starving to death, Imoguiri is a level up from Trimagasi. We might even argue her complicity in the deaths of so many people might be forgivable - no ethical refusal to allow others consumption under capital. Certainly, this film's focus on the myriad ways in which people can fail themselves and others in their approach to building solidarity shouldn't be taken to mean only the wholly pure can aid the movement - claiming otherwise is just one more form of wrecking. Imoguiri is compromised and complicit, but she's trying to help.

But is the help helping? While Trimagasi is fascist, Imoguiri is more liberal in her outlook. Unquestionably this is a better thing to be, but straight away we run into problems. Imoguiri sneers at Goreng for being, as she sees it, one of those people who thinks the Administration is always at fault. This seems a stunning position to take in the midst of an ongoing outrage against humanity, but in truth it's exhaustingly familiar: an attack against the particulars of a leftist argument against authority deployed precisely to prevent the conversation lingering on all the ways in which those arguments are broadly undeniable. Trimagasi's politics required he hold two incompatible theories on society in his mind simultaneously; Imoguiri's demand she distract herself from holding any theory about society at all. 

Instead, Imoguiri focusses entirely on the actions of the individual. She recognises the Administration could send food down more than once a day, or give them more than a few moments to stuff their faces, or allow people to keep hold of food, or just feed people room by room like any other prison. But she also recognises there is theoretically the way that people could survive this insanely unjust and cruel system, if they altered their behaviour in precisely the right way. This isn't even true, of course, given the size of the platform and the size of the Pit's population, even the lowball version of that number Imoguiri insists upon. This is pointedly ignored, though, because she sees a way to improve the situation that requires nothing from her but to lecture people on how to better behave, and so devotes herself entirely to doing so. The Administration understands this impulse all too well, hence why they call the Pit a "vertical self-management centre", a term Imoguiri is all too happy to embrace. The problem is people choosing to take more than their fair share, and Imoguiri has arrived to explain that to them.

There's an arrogance here that's breathtaking. It never occurs to Imoguiri that anyone else may have recognised what she has, or thought of ways to enact the rationing she envisions. As far as she's concerned, the inhabitants of the Pit are just unthinking eating machines, ignorant creatures of impulse she will have to train to act in the right way. They're no different to the dog she's brought into the Pit; they exist only as an opportunity by which she can demonstrate her own personal virtue. She's convinced herself not just that there's One Weird Trick Capitalists Hate, but that she's the one who has stumbled upon it. The whole idea is as risible as her concept of "spontaneous solidarity". To return again to the film's central concern, there can be no short-cuts in the the long, difficult and often thankless work of building class solidarity.

 

Goreng recognises at least some of this; in particular, that solidarity doesn't spring into being ex nihilo because someone tells you how they think you can live better. He also recognises something else, though, which is that while those below them have no intention of listening to Imoguiri's plan, the idea itself has merit. A rationing approach of some kind would keep more people alive. Absent any better options he can see, Goreng commits to Imoguiri's plan, with one twist: rather than beg those below to sign up, he threatens them instead.

And it works, for an ultimately narrow and unsatisfactory definition of "works". The two people who previously refused to play ball have, when pushed at the barrel of an anus, picked that ball up, and started sulkily tossing it between each other. But this isn't solidarity. Obviously, this isn't solidarity. Goreng is right to say "change never happens spontaneously" (though it often happens far, far faster than people expect), but that's because change takes time, not because there needs to be some initial violent impetus. Goreng here is employing an almost Blanquist tactic, using the only bombs he has at his disposal.

And you just can't threaten people into doing the work. I'm not saying we'll never have to do anything we don't want to do post-revolution (and of course the definition of "we" here is one that needs unpacking). There's a reason Marx talked about the dictatorship of the proletariat. What I'm saying is that, when building a movement, recruiting through threat isn't just unwise. It's wholly counter to the entire process. "Care about your fellow human beings, OR ELSE" just isn't going to work. It might work in the moment, but it has no future. Worse, it poisons the future you claim to be nurturing.

We learn, wholly without surprise, that the plan to force multistorey rationing by using a broken telephone to threaten to shit in someone's ear has not caught on. Goreng awakes from the next round of gas to find himself on Level 202, with nothing to eat but the body of Imoguiri, who has taken her own life the moment she learns the Administration that had allowed hundreds of people to starve to death for no reason had also been lying to her.

The combined shock of waking up to a level no food will reach, and to Imoguiri's hanged corpse, leads to Goreng succumbing to madness, with him repeatedly seeing visions of both his former cellmates. In these delusions, the fascist and the liberal join forces to mock his approach as worthless. To some extent, this is just an expression of fishhook theory, but they're also not wholly wrong that he hasn't managed to achieve anything. Imoguiri in particular mocks him as a false Messiah, one no less convinced than she was that the secret to solving the Pit lay entirely within him, and yet has turned away from offering solidarity in favour of offering shit. Just one more supposed revolutionary who's all talk, who can't see any way to make common cause with those less fortunate, and so simply threatens them instead.

Goreng's response is to eat Don Quixote.  He must know this won't work as sustenance. He must know that sooner or later he must give in to "Trimagasi's" urgings to eat Imoguiri's dead and rotting body. First, though, he destroys, consumes, and (one assumes painfully) shits out his previous understanding of his politics as being a doomed romantic crusade; a literal quixotic quest. There are no orders to be given or melancholy glory to be won. There is only the work.

And so he starts to count. The meaning of the scratches he makes on the wall are not immediately apparent, save that there are far too many for him to be tracking his days in the depths. When next he awakes from the gas, he finds himself on Level 6.

We should bear in mind here that this is the beginning of Goreng's fifth month in the Pit, and he's found himself on a level where he can have his pick of food. No matter what level he ends up on next month, he should be able to survive to the end of his self-imposed sentence. On the admittedly shaky assumption that he'll be released as promised [1], Goreng could just give up here. He's technically tried to help make the Pit a better place; he's been below the literal bread line twice. He's done his part, and done his time.

That's not what he does, though. Because he's not just on Level 6. He's on the same level as Baharat.

It is difficult not to love Baharat. One can easily imagine an alternative draft of the film in which he is our protagonist. The man savvy enough to choose rope as his item, climbing from level to level, alternately making friends, overcoming prejudice, and learning from the other inmates. He falls at what he sees as (almost) the final hurdle, as the racist arseholes use their racist arseholes to rob him of his climbing equipment. Bereft of rope and hope, Baharat is ready to give up, until Goreng suggests an alternative plan. Not because he thinks he's smarter than Baharat, or better, or more in tune with human nature. He's just one guy floating an idea to another guy. What if they break the primary purpose of the Pit? They can't seize the means of production, not yet, but what if they do the next best thing, and seize just about everything that's been produced.

The plan is simple: deny food to the people who ate at least somewhat well yesterday, so as to get rations to the (supposedly, by Goreng's calculations) four hundred people who ate nothing. It’s hard to believe that they’ll be able to feed so many just off of one table, but you can see the broader logic: keep shifting which X levels get food each day. Even if they can only feed 100, then everyone gets a meal every five days, and so six over a month where most would otherwise have had none.

It’s certainly hard to imagine a better plan (so long as we ignore the obvious point that, were it possible to survive on the platform as it ascended, people in the very lowest levels would already have tried to escape that way long ago – what do they have to lose?). Yes, it's superficially similar to Goreng's previous attempts to enforce rationing, but the differences matter. Firstly, Goreng is putting himself at risk in a way his previous approach did not. Secondly, he is descending alongside the platform. This is no longer a man using the tactics of the enemy from his position of comparative privilege. This is a man risking his life to defend a relief convoy. That's an action which sends a message, no doubt, but the message stems from the efforts to help, rather than the other way round.

The voyage through the first few levels is not pleasant. Some people flee in terror from our revolutionaries. Some try to sneak some food, or launch an attack. I don't think Baharat or Goreng are actively aiming to kill anyone, but more than one of the people they bludgeon with the bed slats they're using as weapons takes a hit it's difficult to imagine them coming back from. But what else are they going to do? You give up on trying to save people, or you carry out your threat of violence.  

And not everyone tries their luck. Some people get spooked today, but tomorrow they'll get food again. The growth of true solidarity under this approach seems unlikely, but it doesn't seem impossible. There is at least some small space carved out for it grow. If there's a criticism here, it's how quickly Goreng and Baharat give up on trying to explain their plan, and start simply bellowing at people to step away from the platform. The opportunity to persuade is abandoned; only the threat remains. The platform becomes a battlefield.

This is the opening message we're given by the mysterious, intense Senor Brambang. Brambang is a fascinating character, clearly the person in the Pit, at least among those we meet, who has the greatest understanding of revolutionary action – at one point he quotes one-time All-African People's Revolutionary Party leader Kwame Ture almost word for word. His suggestion that “manners come first” is initially risible – of course they’re standing in the food – but his point that they need to seek solidarity first and only use violence when it is denied is clearly a better strategy than the one they’ve slipped so quickly into using.

Brambang doesn’t stop there, though. He tells our two unusually violent aid workers that their plan is worthless unless they have some way to fashion it into a message to those above. Not to the Administration, who he dismisses as without conscience, but to those who prepare the food; fellow workers with whom solidarity may just be possible. Long odds, sure, but then this is all about long odds. We shouldn't see our quest as quixotic, or romantic, but neither should we be under any illusions about the difficulty inherent in the route we've chosen.

This where we reach the point the film has been heading to all along. What do we do in the face of that difficulty? How do we choose what to do, when doing anything at all seems so unlikely to work, and so utterly not unlikely to bring retribution down upon us almost immediately? Goreng and Baharat are obviously on borrowed time. Forget the gas-induced reset in four weeks, the instant people work out how they fashioned their weapons, the redistribution plan is deader than Goreng’s escargot. They need to do the most they possibly can in a single descent. 

Brambang has his own suggestion locked and loaded. Leave one piece of food untouched, as a symbol of resistance. Let those above be faced with incontrovertible proof that man is not an animal. If the descent into the Pit is a one-time deal, let that deal buy something that will last. They will only have their platform for a little while; they need to send the loudest message they can while they do.

Our protagonists seem to find this plausible. Their whole plan was to ensure the food stays untouched until they reached the people who really needed it. What's keeping one dessert back even longer? And yet things go wrong almost immediately, because they've stopped trying to persuade those they meet to go without food to keep others alive, and started trying to persuade people to revere a panna cotta that has been declared by persons unknown to be more important than the belly of the first person they have no other food they can offer. It doesn’t matter how much they mind their manners; the mere fact of the priorities they're displaying is entirely insulting enough.

Matters improve once they get below level 50, and they can start handing out food. There’s no need o mention the symbolic pudding when there’s so much else to eat. Different people respond in different ways to the rationing, as one might expect. Some are grateful for the unexpected meal, while others try to demand more. One brief scene shows a man taking time to pass food to his companion, who is too weak to reach the platform himself. It’s almost the first moment of unalloyed hope - of genuine solidarity - in the entire film, and so it’s inevitably and rapidly followed by someone promising to cut the food out of the belly of his invalid companion the very instant Goreng and Baharat have left.

But the mission continues. People are being fed. The panna cotta remains inviolate. They still have the message they plan to send. And then Goreng finds Miharu, a woman who saved his life when Trimagasi was psyching himself to eat him, and who has been searching for months for a daughter Imoguiri swore couldn't be in the Pit at all. When the platform reaches her, she’s in the final seconds of her life, fighting against a man determined to murder her.

Without a moment's hesitation, Goreng jumps from the platform to try to help.

We can assume this impulse would horrify Sr. Brambang. Goreng is abandoning the message; forgetting the cause in favour of giving in to his instincts. If he dies trying to save someone - someone already stabbed multiple times before he's even left the platform - how will the people above ever learn what the revolutionaries have accomplished?

But Brambang has it all backwards. Symbols are important. Statements are important. We need a platform from which to speak, but we also need to know what to say when we're up there. But once a symbol becomes more important than the people it supposedly represents, it becomes useless, and worse than useless. The message must serve the people, and never the other way round. Goreng is wholly right to risk the whole mission to try and save Miharu. He is given a choice between a message of solidarity and performing solidarity in the most powerful way: by try to save a life. Not to seem virtuous, or as an excuse to exercise power, or as part of someone’s idea of what a political movement should look like from the outside. Not as a way to send a message. Because helping people is the goal; the means and the end; the entire fucking point.

And Goreng, in the end, realises this. His instinctive need to rush to help Miharu earns both him and Baharat the wounds that will kill them, but the panna cotta survives intact. The film recognises the importance it not be accidentally or carelessly destroyed; it has to be via a deliberate act. It's here that the platform, and the viewer, reach the very bottom floor of the Pit, to find a young girl, lonely, scared, and starving. Goreng has already acted on instinct, and acted correctly, but now he has the chance to reflect. Send the message, or feed a child.

In the end, it isn’t a choice at all. Goreng gives the child the dessert. Later, in a dream, Baharat reverse-engineers his decision for him – “The child is the message”. And there’s a sense in which this is true. A young girl, starving alone at the bottom of a monument to human cruelty and pain, someone the Administration is adamant would never find themselves in the Pit? Helping her escape would indeed send some sort of message about who is inside the Pit, and who is outside it.

That’s not what really matters here, though. Not fundamentally. The child isn’t the message. The child is a child. Lost, terrified, waiting for a mother that never found her. What message, what symbol, could be more important than trying to save her life? We don’t help those who need it because it might lead to solidarity, we build solidarity as a by-product of helping those who need it. That’s the work. That’s the means and the end. You figure out who needs help, and you start helping.

The Pit is designed to make us forget that. So is almost everything else. It feels like the Trimigasis are everywhere now, egged on by the Imoguiris, who see themselves as wholly different but ultimately share the same belief that everyone below them is the problem. I claim no special insight in how to rise above them, except that it will happen atop the structures we help each other build. What matters from our time on the platform is not what we say, but what we do. We need it not for the casting of stones or the broadcasting of lectures, but from which we can extend our hands, and help others up.

We are not the message, but the message does, ultimately, come out of who we are, and who we are to each other.

[1] One presumes that some people do leave the Pit, otherwise Goreng's decision to enter seems less an unwise expression of his privilege, and more like the action of an obvious idiot. On the other hand, clearly no-one on the outside is letting people know what's going on within. Perhaps people only leave after agreeing to sign an NDA?