At the apex of the tower, an enormous kitchen swarming with chefs prepares rich food that is beautifully presented on a hovering platform. Enough food is heaped on the platform to nourish all the inmates. The platform is lowered and stops at each level below the kitchen for about two minutes. Inmates can feast for that period of time, but they are not allowed to stockpile any food on their level. (If they attempt to save so much as a morsel from the food platform, the room heats up until they are burnt to cinders or, in the alternative, is chilled until the inmates are frozen to death.) After one month on a level, a soporific gas is introduced into the cell and the prisoners fall asleep. When they awake, they find that they have been transported to some other level in the tower -- there are only two options: to rise up toward the kitchen or to be dropped down lower in the tower toward whatever lies beneath it. Human beings are selfish and greedy -- the people near the top of the tower gorge themselves on the food and, even, sometimes destroy what they can't eat. The result is that when the platform descends to the 35th level, for instance, there is still plenty of food on it, but the victuals are in state of disarray, broken and mixed in a obscene mess. Below the hundredth level, the food is mostly gone and all that remains are plates and bowls. By the 150th level, all the plates and bowls are licked clean. By about 170, there is no trace of food remaining -- it has been consumed by the inmates above. Fortune rules the world. Every thirty days, the tower's population is moved either up or down, a sort of random re-shuffling of the inmates (although the cellmates, two to a cell remain together). If you are lucky, the re-shuffling lifts you nearer to the kitchen at the apex of the tower where you will be well-fed. If you are unlucky, you are dropped into the depths of the stacked cells where the platform arrives on your level either providing only a few crumbs or entirely devoid of any food at all. You can survive on lower levels by husbanding your energy -- a fast of 30 days isn't a death sentence. But if you start at 170 for instance and, then, after thirty days are elevated to only 165, you will now have to face another month without food. This is a death sentence or necessitates cannibalism, something that is common on levels below about 100.
The nightmarish aspect of the Vertical Self-Management Tower (VSMT) is that enough food is loaded onto the platform to provide equal portions sufficient to feed everyone in the system. But those on the top, despise the people below them and they often intentionally spoil the food to harm the people below. Of course, the people below hate those above and conspire to kill them.
Goreng, the protagonist of the Spanish film El Hoyo (The Platform), Netflix 2010, has voluntarily entered the VSMT on the promise that he will be granted an "accredited degree" after six months confinement. Goreng finds himself with a cellmate named Trimagasi, an older man with the face of a goblin. (He's in the Tower for punishment -- he pitched a TV from a high-rise window that killed an illegal immigrant: "I'm innocent," Trimagasi declares, with logic a bit like Donald Trump: "If the man hadn't illegally entered the country, he would not have been below me.") Each inmate is allowed to bring one item with him into the Tower; Goreng, an academic type has brought Don Quixote, a book he intends to read during his six month confinement. Trimagasi, much more practical, has brought a Samurai Max, a self-sharpening knife.
Goreng's first level is 37 -- the food is disgusting but plentiful enough. After 30 days, he re-awakes on 172. Trimagasi has awakened before him and tied Goreng to his bed. He intends to wait ten days and, then, begin eating Goreng alive, harvesting bits of his muscle tissue and cheeks to sustain life for the 30 days they will be trapped without food. He generously says that he doesn't intend to eat Goreng's genitals. A feral woman rides the platform up and down between levels. She's Japanese and says she is looking for her son. (This is an anomaly -- there aren't supposed to be any children in the Tower.) On the higher levels, the more energetic inmates seize and rape her; when they're tired of her, they beat her up and throw her back on the platform as it descends. Goreng has helped the woman at level 37, denouncing the inmates who were brutalizing her. When she reaches 172, she leaps off the platform and stabs Trimagasi to death, freeing Goreng who now has a stash of food -- the dead Trimagasi that he can eat for a few days to restore his strength. His next assignment is high in the Tower, at level 6. There he meets a woman from the Administration of the Tower who has entered the inferno voluntarily. She is dying of cancer. Her idea is persuade the inmates to eat only portions that she arranges for them on the platform since she knows that if everyone were to eat only his or her share, there would be enough for all. Those at the top should be given less than those deep in tower: to each according to his needs, seems to be her motto. The people above denounce her as some kind of "Communist". The people below simply ignore the rations that she sets out for them and gorge themselves on the platform. Goreng threatens to shit in the food and mix his excrement into the "every particle" -- this actually works and some of the lower levels are willing to eat only their share, at least for awhile. The woman, who is dying of cancer has brought with her a "wiener dog" that, of course, the feral Japanese lady eats. When she and Goreng are transferred to a level below 150, she hangs herself so that Goreng can eat her corpse. On the lower levels, when Goreng awakes, he hears the eerie sound of people above and below screaming in horror that they are now in the lower depths where there will be no food. Goreng survives and is assigned a higher level, with adequate food. Now his cellmate is an African who has a rope. He is trying to scale upward toward the kitchen. But when he throws the rope up to the next level, the people there don't want a Black man with them and so they literally shit in his face and throw the rope into the pit. Goreng and the Black man, then, mount a rebellion -- their idea is that armed with weapons made from their metal beds, they will ride the platform down, violently preventing the inmates from eating more than their fair share -- the idea is that on each level they will defend the platform with their iron staves and throw to the inmates only enough food to maintain life. The problem is that this strategy becomes increasingly violent the deeper the platform descends as the inmates become more and more desperately hungry. Ultimately, each level is just a brutal battle with the inmates at that place and many people are killed in the fighting. Goreng has estimated that there are 250 levels in this inferno, but it turns out that the levels descend to 333. The African believes that he can foment a rebellion in the chefs in the kitchen (whom we have seen to be bullied and also viciously exploited). His idea is that if he can send one particularly tasty dish untouched up to the kitchen, the cooks will revolt. (And so he decides to protect a Panna Cota under a glass bell.) On the bottom level, both the African and Goreng are badly wounded from their fights with the other inmates above. But they find a Japanese girl miraculously hiding under a bed at the bottom of the tower. Both men are dying. They sacrifice the pastry to the hungry child. The platform drops below the bottom into a huge black void. By this time, Goreng is hallucinating the two opposing principles that he has encountered in the Tower: Trimagasi is present beside him and argues for selfishness; the woman from the administration who hanged herself so Goreng could eat her body is also present as a ghost and she argues for self-sacrifice and cooperation. As Goreng lays dying, the platform rockets up to the kitchen bearing the child. The African says: "the message doesn't need a bearer. The child is the message"
The Platform is an astounding film, only about an hour and a half long, but an allegory that can be read on many levels. The Hobbesian world of the tower is entered voluntarily -- people want to be in the tower in the hope that they can earn something that they need. The tower is obviously the Capitalist system in which greed prevails and each is motivated by self-interest. (The allegory founders on the notion of surplus -- the tower is designed so that no one can achieve a meaningful surplus. But this is not a defect in the film -- the best allegories are blurred in places, don't exactly fit. Nothing is more deadening than a one-for-one correlation of events with ideas. I read Swift's Gulliver's Travels without much concern for the elaborately conceived allegory; obviously, the sheer physicality of the tale outwits and exceeds the allegory, indeed, creates its own surplus of meanings. Similarly, the gross physicality of The Platform with its images of decaying bodies used as food (at one point, someone says they will slit open the bellies of those who have gorged themselves from the platform to eat the food inside them) is Swiftian, nauseating, but plausible in a horrible sort of way). The remedy for Capitalism is a form of Communism, as one of the upper level inmates derisively says -- but this is revealed to be an equally brutal form of suppression. As the platform sinks into the depths, the guardians of food (Goreng and the African) have to defend the rations allotted to each level with increasing ferocity -- and, in the end, every lower level turns into a gory battlefield.
Beyond the economic allegory, there is a broader dimension to the imagery. The Tower is aplace ruled by the Bitch-Goddess Fortuna, as Roberto Calasso tells us, the last and most tyrannical of the Olympian Gods. Merit means nothing. The deck is shuffled randomly so that some live and others die. The only way out of this hell is to send a message of defiance to the gods facilating this inferno. The film's ending seems to me to be mystical, probably also theological. In the final scene, we see Goreng and the ghost Trimasio staggering off into the darkness below the Tower -- it is hard not to think of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and his squire, Sancho Panza, crossing the desolate plains of La Mancha.
The Platform is an odd and unsettling mixture of torture-porn and philosophical inquiry. It's like Plato's cave somehow materialized into a real place in the real world with real people entrapped in a vast and monstrous metaphor. Most people will find this austere and horrifying film too bitter and savage to enjoy. (Although some of it is oddly comical -- one of the inmates has chosen a surf-board as the object he is allowed to keep; at one point, the film channels Bunuel and we see two inmates on one of the bottommost levels inexplicably squatting naked in a children's swimming pool.) But once seen, the film can't be unseen and viewers who persist to the end will have far more questions than answers, the mark of a successful and powerful film.
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