the platform: netflixization, the global gothic, and its neoliberal death drive (or why reactionary ideology has been the only enjoyable one until now) One must begin situating The Platform (2019, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia) before analyzing it in detail. This placing or locating act is difficult and challenging, but I think it can be narrowed down to three terms that already have some currency: “netflixization,” “global Gothic” (or “neoliberal Gothic”), and the “pandemic” (this film was the top “tending film in Netflix” during March and April of 2020, precisely at the moemnt the pandemia spread globally). The goal is to determine if this film is celebratory or critical of neoliberalism, or something more complex, for the references of the film are allegorical but not subtle. The Platform’s allegorical complexity can be advanced in its connection to the coronavirus infection. The pandemic has become a horror show in real time: a competition for survival where late capitalism has tested any community and turned it against itself. However, since this horror show has become global, the collapse of the particular (the film The Platform) and the universal (the pandemic “show”) has important repercussions for the logic of netflixicized global Gothic films such as The Platform: the film allegorizes the spectatorial seclusion of the viewers, forced into a Gothic confinement similar to that of the 333 cells that compose the hole (original title of the film in Spanish, El hoyo), while the ever-increasing loss of jobs and decreasing economic activity hint at the ultimate Gothic horror of the film: we all will end up at the bottom of the hole in cell 333 with no subject that will bring us up back, after we step on the platform, to the surface. The ultimate irony of this netflixization is that the film could not have been shown in this other streaming platform, which is Netflix, at a better time: this company’s captive audience has increased exponentially during the lockdown imposed by many countries as a result of the covid-19 pandemic. In short, The Platform is already an allegory of the Netflix streaming platform. Yet, the thesis of this article is that netflixicized Gothic films such as The Platform point to the end of a form of ideology that authoritarian populisms, such as Trump or Bolsonaro’s, have made hegemonic in both the Global South and North. Before global Netflix hits such as The Platform and overnight non-American Oscar-winning films such as Parasite (2019, Bong Joon Ho), there was a very precise term in Spanish to refer to a similar phenomenon: overnight best-selling literature that came from new unknown authors in unexpected regions (meaning, not in Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico DC or Buenos Aires) was known as alfaguarización (Barrera Enderle 2008). Which meant that one of the biggest publishers of Spanish literature, Alfaguara, could turn an unknown novel by a new writer into an overnight global best seller. At a more global scale, the triumph of a Spanish writer like Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind, 2001), thanks to Planeta and Penguin Books USA, pointed to the same phenomenon—although there is no better term for this other more general development, except the generic “globalization.” Unlike the García Márquezes or Salman Rushdies of the 1960-1980s, this newer phenomena of overnight literary global success (alfaguarización or/and globalization), was not carried by the idea of the nation or of the region (Colombia, India, Latin America, South-East Asia…), but by non-geopolitical categories, such as fantasy or children (the Harry Potter phenomenon is an English-language version of this; the Bolaño phenomenon, in turn, would be a transitional case, half “new-Garcia-Marquez,” half “intellectual thriller-mystery”). Moreover, the phenomenon of alfaguarización/globalization would run against the norms that Pascale Casanova (2007), following Pierre Bourdiue, had delineated for modernist literature and for the global republic of letters. So, the first thing to emphasize when analyzing The Platform is the new global logic in which is inscribed and of which is a result. No other Basque text has ever had this type of global success and acclaim, not even the by-comparison modest novel published by Bernardo Atxaga: Obabakoak (it does not sell well globally). The first temptation, which I will not avoid for the time being, is to resort to a cheap nominalization, “netflixization,” which is a cheat or a bandage until we better understand this filmic-streaming version of alfaguarización. Keep also in mind that Netflix does not publish the real hard data on the reception of its films and shows, and so when claiming the global success of The Platform, we are walking on sociological eggshells. The film was released in 2019 in Spain, following the traditional channels, and even the Spanish academy of cinema awarded it a single Goya for special effects. The Platform has become itself, a global hit and allegory, in 2020 with Netflix (and the Spanish filmgoers will have to connect it with the all-time top Spanish box-office hit Spanish Affair, 2014, which did not create any global interest outside the Spanish state, unlike its nineteenth-century progenitor, Carmen). Although the critical literature on the genre is vast, it is clear, at least for me, that the most interesting forms of representing global capitalism and its neoliberal ideology come from a genre that I personally hate but whose importance I must acknowledge: the Gothic genre in its new global transmutation, which Linnie Blake and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet denominate “neoliberal Gothic” (2017). Although the territory, in which this new Gothic is inscribed, is more general (the horror genre) and it overlaps with sci-fi (specially with zombie and postapocalyptic films/tv shows such as The Walking Dead or The Matrix trilogy), fantasy (Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings….), neonoir (The Bourne Identity, Blade Runner 2049, Inception…) and reality shows (Survivor, The Apprentice…), the logic of the global Gothic seems to be the most provocative, the most thought-inducing, and, in the genuine sense of the term, the most intellectual these days; just think of the multicultural representation of the characters of The Platform (a transexual, several Sub-Saharan immigrants, a Middle-Eastern woman, a Basque retired man…), the references to Don Quijote, the religious references to the Jesus and the Virgin Mary, or the subtending debates on the nature of human interaction and individuals, which, at one point, seem to reference Rousseau, Hobbes, or Locke, etc. Parasite and The Platform are good examples of this global Gothic (sub)genre born at the intersection of a more general trend that could be called “the return of the global repressed” (which would stand ultimately for the repression of a non-class, the precariat, as defined by Guy Standing, 2011). In that sense, the global Gothic is defined by its emphasis on an involuntary claustrophobia, on an obsession with enclosed spaces such as mansions or jails (originally castles and monasteries in Gothic literature), and so it would be more accurate to say that the logic of the global Gothic is precisely claustrophilic. The issue of this new neoliberal Gothic, as it is also the case, more generally, for horror, is whether it is libidinally and ideologically progressive or reactionary. I am emphasizing its libidinal aspect, because it is the thrill provoked by the death drive of these films that makes this question so complicated and, for that reason, so challenging and compelling. Freud’s “return of the repressed” (now global and precarized in scope, hence my “global return of the repressed”) can be read both ways. And so, the question remains: is The Platform a reactionary or progressive film in its full deadly-libidinal and intellectual complexity? A tentative hypothesis that would require further elaboration would posit that films such as The Platform are already an allegory of the Netflix streaming platform and point to the end of a form of ideology that authoritarian populisms, such as Trump or Bolsonaro’s, have made hegemonic in both the Global South and North. What I call “the neoliberal death drive” would thus consist in the ideological maneuver to reduce any enjoyment to a claustrophobic setting and discourse that suppresses any other drive but that of death. Comments are closed.
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AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
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