Currently, I and my family are watching both The Sopranos and Ozark during our quarantine. After dinner on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Sunday we watch one episode of each show. That leaves Friday and Saturday, in which we watch movies. On Friday night we watched a movie that not only shook me to my core but forced me to reassess the structure of society, it was called “El Hoyo” or “The Platform” in English. A friend had recommended it to me and it was trending on Netflix so I thought why not, it was only an hour and a half. The premise of the movie is what was so meaningful to me. Without giving too much away, the movie takes place in a futuristic prison where each cell is on its own floor, and there are infinite floors. Once a day, a platform comes down filled with marvelous and luxurious food made by some of the top chefs in the world. The platform begins at floor one (the top floor) and for one minute the people on floor one can eat as much food as they can. Once that minute is up, the platform goes down to the next floor, and so on. This means that the people on the top floors get all the food they can desire, while those at the bottom floors, anywhere from 50 worse might not even get one grape or a chicken bone. After each month you are reassigned to a new floor, so if you were on floor 6 one month, the next you may be on 249, where there is no food and people either starve or resort to cannibalizing their cellmate. Why this intrigued me so much, is it is a clear metaphor for how society functions today. The wealthiest in the world and the upper class get the priority on whatever they want, and the lower class is resorted to their trash and often starvation. Later in the movie, someone proposes an idea for everyone to survive, the idea is if everyone just eats one portion, like maybe a slice of cake or one chicken wing, everyone would have enough and no one would be starving. This idea is loved by the people at the bottom floors, but the people at the top floors laugh at it as they want to eat their mouths full with as much as they possibly can since many just came up from the lower floor. This represents the idea of capitalism versus socialism and how the top 1% would never want to give up what they have and be equal with the lower classes, as the lower classes starve to death. This movie really got me thinking about the true effects of capitalism and how because of it people are dying and in the movie’s metaphor, killing and eating each other. While I by no means identify myself as a socialist, it makes me wonder what society would look like if everyone was even and the class system was eliminated. Would we be happier? Would world hunger and poverty end? These are the questions I took away from a movie, which just shows the power of cinema and how even an hour and a half Spanish movie with English subtitles on Netflix can make people reassess their values.
Comments
Post a Comment