The Hunger Problem: Why We're Living In The Platform

“There are three types of people:
Those at the top,
Those at the bottom,
And those that fall.”
(The Platform)

Since the coronavirus crisis, I’ve been thinking about how fiction reflects our current reality.

But, I think there’s also pop-culture that shows not only our reality but the difficultly of solving the world’s most complex problems.

That, for me, was the movie, The Platform.

The Platform is a Spanish Sci-Fi Horror-Thriller film, my fiancé and I heard about it from a few of his co-workers. The dubbed English-version ranked as one of the top 10 movies on Netflix for a couple of weeks.

3 Rules - What is The Platform?

In the same vein as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Snowpiercer, this movie is a social-commentary piece — an exploration of top-down economic disparity. The Platform’s main character, Gustavo, voluntarily decides to go into a vertical prison, a “Vertical Self-Management Center” as part of an experiment to write about for his book.

The tower prison has two cellmates per floor, and are fed by a platform that starts at the top, Floor 0, and descends to the bottom — what we later find out is Floor 333. The platform only stops on each floor for two minutes.

There are three rules in prison:

You can bring one item with you to the center. Gustavo brings the book, Don Quixote.
You can only eat while the platform is currently on your level. If you retain food from the platform, then the level will either heat up and burn or go cold and freeze you to death.
Once a month, residents are switched at random between its many floors.

The irony of the movie is that there is enough food on the platform to feed everyone. But those on the top levels overconsume. Leaving nothing for those at the bottom, causing fighting, murder, and cannabilism amongst the lower-level floors.

How is The Platform Like Our COVID Reality?

Capitalism vs. Communism

Capitalism

The first 75% of the movie explores the flaws of capitalism. The randomness and luck on where and who you born to — the floor you're randomly placed on — determines how well off you'll be.

When you're at the top, there is little regard for those that are less fortunate—every man for himself. I'll never forget this scene- but in the movie, this was shown through the only Black character, Gustavo's last cellmate, Beharat getting literally crapped on when he asked for help to get to a higher level floor by a resident on the level above them.

And, jaded and worn-down by the faulty system. Similar to Don Quixote, in the beginning, Goreng naively remains hopeful he could change people's minds on the higher floors to stop overconsuming. But over time, Goreng becomes part of the system— overconsuming, spitting on the remaining food before the platform descends, eating other residents, and stops trying all together to change how people behave in the tower.

Communism

In the last quarter, the director takes on communism. Through violence, Gustavo and Beharat go down with the platform and force residents on each level to take their fair share of food. This results in a massacre: Gustavo and Beharat killing or injuring almost everyone on the lower floors.

Showing the need to convince. Without violence.

Supermarket Hoarding

We're in a pandemic. And our first instincts were to grab as much toilet paper, paper products, canned foods, masks, and medicine as we could afford. I made two trips to the grocery store over three days and grabbed as much as I could for my family. I had already had masks from living in California (for the last Northern California wildfires when you actually could taste the smoke in San-Francisco proper). But it wasn't my first reaction to donate those masks to a hospital or someone else in need. Nor did I think twice about if I was grabbing too much food for two people in a one-bedroom apartment with not much storage.

Like many, I went straight to survival mode like the cellmates in the Platform.

The failure to convince others

I listened to a Bill Gates interview, and he said something that struck me, "Never in my lifetime have we had to change our behavior and have this drastic effect on the economy in order to save lives."

I live in Georgia, and many of us are not changing our behavior. We've lived so long in a decadent era. Although many families have already been suffering, our country had not asked us to sacrifice until now. And it seems like we refuse to accept that change. And our public officials are doing a poor job in convincing us otherwise.

I recently got a Twitter account (I know, it's a form of self-torture). Twitter is not real life, but it's a microcosm of our failure to convince others. Instead of it being a platform for exchanging ideas, masterfully persuading others from all walks of life. There's so much hatred and vitriol. The idea of "dunking" now means virtually humiliating someone instead of soaring above the rim to shoot the ball through the basket. It's an insult to basketball players everywhere.

The idea that we're so caught up in proving others wrong as opposed to persuading with facts and communication is why we can't get meaningful social and public policy done.

Gustavo and others throughout the movie failed to convince residents only to take their fair share of food on the platform. And we're now failing with convincing people to take proper health precautions in public. Our politicians are failing us in their inability to pass adequate legislation for workers and people affected by the crisis. And we have continued to fail in our daily interactions with people we disagree with.

The innocence of a new generation

I wrote about how young people are saviors in most sci-fi stories. One of the reasons I mention is their innocence. They're not jaded and worn down by the system, and thus, believe it can be changed — they see no reason for it not to. In the movie, there's a young girl on the last level. In their original plan, Gustavo and Beharat wanted to save and protect one piece of food, a panna cotta that would ascend to level 0 to officially end the experiment and show that they could create change within the system. However, after seeing the girl, they gave her the food. And put her on the platform to go to level 0.

If we were to see the real impact of children, the innocent being impacted, would we change? Do we have to wait for our young people to lead us to see that change? I think that's the question the movie leaves open to interpretation.

Political Allegory at Its Finest

As an aside, I worked a few years in the federal government (plus one year as a law student), and I've been thinking about whether I should forget that part of my life entirely or if I should figure out a way to bring it back full-circle. To figure out a way to put it in my writing somehow.

I think I have such a deep connection with this movie because I wished I could have created it. You rarely find something like that as an artist.

It was a gory, violent, disturbing take on our current political systems. And being in the coronavirus crisis only demonstrates the accuracy of the movie's themes.

Works Cited:

The Platform. Dir. Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia. Basque Films, 2020. Film.