ABSTRACT
This chapter carries out close readings of two Rants that depict in detail life lived miserably under the thumb of a neoliberal and neoconservative authority. The first work is Joon-ho Bong’s film, Snowpiercer (2013). This grisly, highly imaginative, and allegorical speculative satire is examined as a thoroughgoing condemnation of capitalist socioeconomic formation. Bong’s central metaphor is that of capitalism as an end-of-history, stasis-making mechanism of pyramidal hierarchy and oppression embodied in the form of a bizarre super-train. The second work studied is Margaret Atwood’s The MaddAddam Trilogy. These three bestselling novels—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2009), MaddAddam (2013)—depict the profit-taking dystopia of neoliberal corporatism safeguarded by the militaristic and self-righteous mindset of neoconservatism. These Rants by Bong and Atwood present viewers and readers with unforgiving and apocalyptic visions of the near-future.
