"The Platform" Reviewed by Devon Balwit

                Netflix 


Those Above, Those Below, and Those Who Are Falling: A Review of The Platform, a Film by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia


No surprise that while sheltering in place to comply with social distancing, we’re all watching way too many movies. No surprise, either, that under such conditions, the Spanish movie, The Platform (El Hoyo, or The Hole, in the original Spanish), was one of the top ten movies many of us streamed on Netflix.

What could better speak to our current sense of cabin fever and impending disaster than a movie set in a tower of two-person cells, euphemistically called a “Vertical Self-Management Center.” We are never fully clear on the intention behind the VSMC. Some inmates seem to have been sent there as a punishment for crimes. Some choose to go as a test of character, a type of penance, or a sadomasochistic form of graduate research. 

Every month, inmates wake up on a different level, yet without rhyme or reason—in other words, one doesn’t go up a level if one has been good and down if one has been bad, or up or down in conjunction with the time one has spent in the VSMC. Inmates keep the same platform mate until the person dies. Given that the day’s food is lowered on a platform from Level 0 down who knows how far, the most likely outcome for those more than 51 levels down is that they will cannibalize their weaker partner or jump to their deaths. We’re told that those on the highest levels also jump as a result of having too much time to think.

One cannot go up by will alone, but inmates always free to jump, or to ride the food platform down to a lower level, which one character, Miharu, does repeatedly, supposedly looking for her lost child.

With few exceptions, those above do not pity those below. In fact, some go so far as to shit or piss on those below or sully the food arrayed on the platform before it lowers. Those below both envy and despise those on top.

All this sounds familiar, playing into our current moment, with the wealthy avoiding the pandemic by hiding out in their country homes, by having others shop for them, and by buying concierge medical care and stockpiling medical supplies, insuring they will not lack for masks and ventilators. Meanwhile, the have-nots look at Instagram influencers’ comfy pandemic stay-cations and reply with hashtags such as #guillotine2020 and #eattherich. 

In the VCSM, both those on upper and lower levels make excuses for their behavior. When the protagonist Goreng’s first cellmate, Trimagasi, spits on those below, Trimagasi shrugs and says those above him probably do the same. When he readies his blade to slice into Goreng, Trimagasi claims the responsibility for such violence doesn’t lie with him but with the 344 people above him who have left him nothing to eat.

Again, the viewer hears echoes of our world, where some claim to be hoarding food and medical supplies because the government has failed to provide adequately for us. The wealthy, (a.k.a. our own President) explain away their special treatment and outsized access to resources by saying “Life has always been like that.”

[Book, Knife, Dachshund]

Each inmate of the VSMC is allowed to bring along one object. Through the course of the movie we witness some of these: weapons, a kiddie pool, a spouse, a violin, a surfboard, piles of cash, a rope, a wheelchair. Trimagasi brings a self-sharpening knife—very handy when on levels that get little to no food. The main character, Goreng, brings a book--Don Quixote. His intake official, Imoguiri, brings her beloved dachshund, Rameses II. These choices serve as clues to people’s character and priorities; are they practical, loving, canny, artistic, violent, greedy? No one, Imoguiri tells Goreng, has ever before chosen a book. 

We are puzzled, for Don Quixote, while canonical, is a book Goreng has never read. Even his stated reasons for committing himself to six months in the platform seem strange: to quit smoking, finally to read Don Quixote, and to get an official degree at the end of his time in the VSMC. Had he brought his favorite book, or the book most likely to help him keep up his spirits, or that most likely to encourage him to new levels of self-sacrifice, we might have understood. However, before his time in the hole is done, he has read to himself from his book, read aloud from his book, and even tried to assuage his hunger by eating pages from it. 

Is Goreng defending the helpless and punishing the wicked like the knight errant, Don Quxote himself? Is Baharat his Sancho Panza? Is the point that the satirical nature of the great work underscores that of the movie as a whole? My fellow viewer, you decide.

[Mi Caracol]

Just as each inmate gets to bring one personal object, they also are asked their favorite dish, which subsequently appears amidst the feast lowered on the platform. Goreng chooses escargot. We see a terrarium full of snails up on Level 0, in the kitchen, slithering over one another, horns out, then watch as they are sliced and covered with herbed butter before their descent.

Trimagasi, without knowing this, refers to Goreng as his caracol, his snail, a creature both tender and vulnerable, only putatively protected by its shell. We watch as Goreng puts out his feelers, trying to get a sense for this new reality in which he finds himself. Month two, when he awakens with Trimagasi in level 172, Goreng has been tied to his cot in preparation for when Trimagasi starts to slice off bits of him, mouthful by mouthful, for food. Goreng is told that, like a snail, first he must be purified for some days before his flesh can be eaten. Even after his death, returning as a ghost or an inner voice, Trimagasi still addresses Goreng as “Mi Caracol,” an endearment from the elder and the more experienced or battle-hardened inmate to the younger and greener.

[Take just what you need for yourself]

Just what are the inmates to learn from their time in the VSMC? Or is it an experiment from which others, administrators or social scientists, are learning? Is it a test of survival of the fittest, of the most brutal and ruthless? Is it a chance for mercy and compassion to “spontaneously generate” from within as the ex-official Imoguiri suggests? How can one convince those starving on the lowest levels and those terrified of being next to starve on the upper levels to take just what they need to survive that day? No one knows, after all, how many levels there are. The hole could descend eternally and infernally. Does any dare risk giving up food in the hand for the abstract possibility of saving his/her unseen peers all the way down?

We watch Goreng wrestle with his scruples. At first, on level 48, he is too disgusted to eat the picked-over food on the platform. Eventually, he becomes hungry enough to do so, even to the point of stuffing himself to vomiting. On level 172, he eats human flesh to survive. On level 32, he watches Imoguiri try to persuade those below her to eat what they need from two plates she has prepared for them and then to prepare two plates for those on the next level down. When her logical pleas fail to move those below, Goreng threatens to shit in their food if they fail to follow Imoguiri’s suggestion. This seems to work. Eventually, Goreng decides to ensure that something to eat reaches all the way to the last level of the hole, which he mistakenly believes to be 250, and he persuades his next cellmate, Baharat, to descend with him as an armed guardian of the food platform. 

[The Panna Cotta is the message]

What ideal would be powerful enough to hold a starving, fear-craved person to high moral standards? What would comfort one guilty of cannibalism? What would assuage one wrestling with his own self-protective selfishness? What would sustain people sitting in a cell with one other person, a sink, a toilet, a bed, and one object for thirty days running?

Some characters offer cold economic theory. Others offer the Christian eucharist. Others offer the cynical might makes right. Others say nothing—slashing, strangling, or biting first. 

Goreng and Baharat, upon the suggestion of Baharat’s mentor, whom they briefly encounter during their descent, decide to send a message to the overlords, whoever they are. They decide to preserve one perfect dish untouched. This is a plate of artfully decorated Panna Cotta, which they hope will indicate, by its mere presence on the otherwise denuded platform, that they will not allow themselves to become soulless brutes. No matter the mayhem they encounter, no matter their hunger, they will not allow the perfect panna cotta to be eaten. They hope that this message will somehow “break the machine” of the VSMC.

But even the best principles get broken. After a brutal and bloody descent, on one of the lowest levels yet, 333, they run across the child that Miharu has been trying to locate. Untouched, the little girl cowers, hungry, under the bed. They offer her their long-guarded panna cotta to eat. 

With the sacred panna cotta gone, the girl herself becomes the message. 

[The message needs no bearer]

The last thing the living Goreng does is offer to accompany the girl on the platform back to the top. His ex-cellmate, the red-lit, dream/ghost Trimagasi, says: “The message needs no bearer.” The message is complete and sufficient in and of itself. Goreng, his battle done, must stay behind. The girl rises, spot-lit, with a whoosh, leaving Goreng to die, we assume, of slow starvation at the very bottom level of the pit. 

[The end]

What is dream and what is reality? The last thing we see is Trimagasi slapping Goreng on the back as they walk out of the cell into the darkness. Trimagasi has regained the fleshly tones he had when he was alive. Has he been resurrected? Does no one really die here? Or, much darker and more probable, is Goreng hallucinating such an ending as he starves? 

I leave you to decide. 

​

Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and two collections out or forthcoming: How the Blessed Travel (Maverick Duck Press); Forms Most Marvelous (dancing girl press); In Front of the Elements (Grey Borders Books), Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders Books); The Bow Must Bear the Brunt (Red Flag Poetry); We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/ Complicated (with the Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic), and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can be found here and in Cordite, The Cincinnati Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, Red Earth Review, The Fourth River, The Free State Review, Rattle, Posit, and more.

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