Calculating Deaths, Dystopic Futures: Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer

From climate apocalypses to techno-dystopias, many film genres offer novel insights into social theories about our potentially violent futures. Analysing Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer (2013), this article argues that the film does more than raise ethical questions about the quantitative management of life and death; it explores what happens when the violence of statistics is pushed to its extreme. Through visualising extreme hierarchies of violence within a dystopian society confined to a continuously moving train, Bong’s dystopian outlook depicts a world-system in which a specific percentage of the population must die to sustain the life of the rest. Although a division between worthy and expendable life already exists in our reality, Bong’s forward-looking glance provides an interesting provocation for social theorists concerned with the possible violence of even more statistically-orientated futures, while also showing how this violence will always contain numerical gaps where alternative worlds beyond quantification can emerge.