Accepted into the 2023 University of St Thomas Undergraduate Communication Research Conference, I had the pleasure of presenting this essay to a room of undergraduate students and communications professors from across the Midwest.
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Despite labels of “dark” and “violent” in the film’s description, Spanish director Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s The Platform attracted 56 million viewers in the first four weeks of its 2020 international Netflix release (Clark, 2020). Debuting at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the film won the 2019 People’s Choice Award for the Midnight Madness category, described by TIFF as “The wild side: screenings of the best in action, horror, shock and fantasy cinema” (Kuplowsky, 2019). After premiering at TIFF, The Platform succeeded domestically in Spain among other recent thriller films that have emerged out of a historical repression of such films within Spanish cinema. The Platform went on to be picked up by Netflix in 2019 and made available to their subscribers the following year (Kay, 2019).
In this analysis, I will examine how systems of unequal wealth distribution, allegorized by the prison structure central to the The Platform, beget three desire symptoms present in the film; desire for food, sexual relations, and racial control; within the context of Spanish history and Spanish film history. To provide further insight to the desires that arise from these inequitable systems, I utilize psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s scholarship on subconscious desire and drive.
Context
As mentioned, The Platform performed well in the Western cinema scene. Despite its blatant critiques of capitalism, the film originated in a European nation that was majorly cut off from anti-communist, pro-capitalist rhetoric of the globalizing 20th century. As a recent capitalist state, Spain’s less recent, but still relevant, history under a dictatorship shifts The Platform’s critique from one solely focused on capitalism to one centered around general class imbalance, a tenant of both capitalism and dictatorship rule. Spain’s atypical and repressed film history, however, may have lent itself to the far-reaching success of The Platform in 2019.
The early Franco regime, a dictatorship established after General Francisco Franco’s Nationalist victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, saw the value in utilizing cinema for nationalistic purposes, and thus maintained its edge in cinema through the production of propaganda films that were shown in theaters across the country (Martin-Márquez, 2005). In 1964, José Luis García Escudero, Spain’s General Director of Cinematography, established an order that allotted national funding towards the production of films aimed at legitimizing Spanish culture. Although still permissive to propaganda, Escudero ushered in the birth of what is known as the New Spanish Cinema (Camporesi & Meneses, 2018).
After Franco’s death and concurring end of his dictatorship in 1975, prominent Spanish directors aimed their works toward divisive topics in the nation in an attempt to acknowledge the challenges the collective state endured under Franco’s reign. When the nation transitioned to a socialist power in 1982, Spain’s cinema shifted into the “democratic cinema” of its neighbors by focusing on production value and themes of cohesion that were common in contemporary European film during the Cold War. To support international film competition, Spain transitioned its film department from the state to private interests and saw consolidated audio/visual powers emerge throughout the country, a common trend in global cinema in the late 20th century. Bleeding into the 2000s, the independent Atípica Films established a space wherein film concepts could be transformed into economically successful hits. Finding its sought-after success in thriller films, a genre that had been wildly repressed and unfavored during Franco’s dictatorship, the firm produced three critically-acclaimed thrillers under director Alberto Rodríguez: Grupo 7 (2012), El hombre de las mil caras (2016), and La isla mínima (2014), the latter of which succeeded globally under the English title Marshland (Camporesi & Meneses, 2018).
Born in 1975 in Bilbao, Spain, the director of The Platform, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, lived through the ‘cohesion’ genre phase of Spanish cinema in the 80s and 90s and undoubtedly intended to subvert the Spanish film narrative through his film career, producing a short comedy film in 2003, 913, and a short thriller film, La casa del lago, in 2011 before his first full-length film, The Platform, in 2019 (Rivera, 2019). Thriller and comedy genres were less than abundant in the history of Spanish film due to the politicization of Franco-era filmmaking, so Spanish auteurs like Rodríguez and Gaztelu-Urrutia have been able to capitalize on this generic void within Spanish audiences.
Methods
While watching The Platform, I became drawn to the inclusion of several elements that seemed unnecessary to the overall plot. On rewatches, I mentally cataloged these scenes of cannibalism, sexual fantasy, and racial commentary and realized them as products, or symptoms, of the classist society that Gaztelu-Urrutia allegorizes in the film. This analysis will dive into the ideology of class hierarchy and how its structure, represented by the prison, causes various symptoms that arise via class oppression. These symptoms are presented in The Platform through the desire for food, the desire for sex, and the desire for racial control.
To analyze the use of desires in The Platform, I will be operating through the lens of Jacques Lacan’s scholarship on desire, drive, and objet a as summarized by Adrian Johnston in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2023). I’d also like to acknowledge that the following summary does not encompass the totality of Lacan’s scholarship on these topics, but this simplification sufficiently informs my analysis. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, Desire, which I will express as big-D “Desire” to differentiate it from colloquial desire, represents the insatiable search that cannot be satisfied except by objet a, an unreachable, subconscious want that would satisfy Desire indefinitely and eliminate all future Desire. Antithetical to Desire, Lacanian drive enjoys the search for objet a. Johnston states, “where [D]esire is frustrated, drive is gratified”; drive inspires movement towards objet a, despite the futility of the pursuit. The elusive nature of objet a lends itself to reconciliation by a “stand-in” desire, a psychological replacement for the unattainable objet a that still encourages, albeit psychologically unfulfilling, drive and Desire towards itself as if it were objet a. Unlike objet a, this stand-in can be reached, but because it is not objet a, the ultimate desire, there will still be dissatisfaction and desire for the actual, unattained objet a. This analysis will apply these Lacanian psychoanalysis concepts to highlight psychological urges and motives for characters inside the film whose contrivement has been inspired by real-world Spanish and imperialist attitudes.
Analysis
Psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek describes ideology through the lens of fantasy in his 2008 reprint of The Sublime Object of Ideology as “[consisting] in the very fact that the people ‘do not know what they are really doing’, that they have a false representation of the social reality to which they belong” (p. 27). Applying this definition to capitalism, as Žižek commonly has, as an enshrouding ideology reveals that capitalism, and for the purpose of this paper, all systems of unjust wealth distribution, operates through its participants, or prisoners, being unaware of its ultimate, inescapable immanence that favors wealth accumulation, stratifying classes within a society. In The Platform, this spectrum is blatantly expressed through a vertical prison building. Each floor, or cell, has two prisoners and a hole in the middle of the room. Through the day, a platform set with decadent foods descends through the holes of each cell to feed the prisoners. However, as the gourmet stone slab moves through the prison, the food gets eaten until only empty dishes remain. On lower levels, people receive no food for a month, after which everyone is randomly assigned to a new floor. In the prison, food represents wealth, survival, and affluence. People at the top of society, those on the higher floors, have access to wealth that can keep them alive, whereas the “poor” prisoners are condemned to acts of cannibalism and violence to survive. The random nature of the monthly floor assignments represents random class assignment at birth, and so those condemned to “poverty” within the prison are victims of the system’s inherent inequality, allegorical to the lack of class mobility within late-stage capitalism. And although The Platform seems to be most obviously critiquing capitalism, this unequal distribution of wealth and power can be present in other economies or political structures, such as dictatorships.
Under systems with unequal wealth distribution, people with wealth are able to dictate the fates and social norms for all of society. Because the upper classes do not make up the majority of the population, this leads to cultural dissonance in desires that are deemed acceptable across all classes. Due to the monthly class mobility in The Platform, characters, specifically Goreng, develop a double-consciousness, a term first used by William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (Pittman, 2016), between individual desires and those deemed appropriate by the ruling class. Although Du Bois’ original application of this term in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk applied to the two-sided nature of the internal black American identity under the white-imposed black identity (Pittman, 2016), this same duality of consciousness can be expressed through the desires that those in The Platform deem as acceptable at lower levels: cannibalism, sexual fantasy, and racial acceptance, but not at the higher, “wealthy” levels. In this way, the existence of these desires arises as symptoms of the unequal wealth distribution within the prison, an allegory for real-world capitalism, dictatorships, etc.
In line with Lacanian psychoanalysis, I posit that the objet a, the ultimate and insatiable desire, of The Platform lies in the urge to escape the prison, and/or, as it represents, a systemically unjust society. As Žižek states, however, “when we are within ideology… when we think we escape it into our dreams… at that point we are within ideology” (Fiennes, 2012). In other words, there is no outside to systemic ideologies, making escape impossible, or at the very least, difficult, to achieve. Escape presents as the objet a in The Platform because within the movie, no one tries to physically escape the prison. Psychoanalytically, if escape is the objet a, and the prison is capitalism or another unequal society, the prisoners are physically unable to escape because there is, psychoanalysis would argue, literally no outside to the system in which they are subjugated. They can’t escape the prison or they would be reaching something that, by definition, is unreachable. Instead, they must settle for stand-in desires, even if they will not satisfy their underlying desire of escape, that still cultivate drive and meaning within their classist prison. These stand-in desires of food, sex, and racial control, described below, are tangible, and therefore replace the characters’ objet a within the film.
Cannibalism and Futile Redistribution
When Goreng first awakes in the prison, he finds himself on a level where he will have access to food. After questioning his cellmate, Trimagasi, about his survival at a level without food, he becomes repulsed at the thought of his roommate feeding on his former cellmate. This interaction reveals the first half of Goreng’s step into his food source double-consciousness within the prison; with access to traditional food, he finds the actions of lower-level prisoners repulsive and contrary to behavior he has defined as civil.
Outside of film, the villainization of cannibalism, regardless of the truth as to the extent of the act, contributed to the European conquest of indigenous groups across the world. In film, Baron et al. (2014) point out that cannibalism focuses less on the act of eating other humans and more on how cannibalistic acts by a group allow for this group to be “othered” by people of different cultures and backgrounds. This creation of an “other” serves as moral reasoning for violence toward the “other” by those in power. In The Platform, however, I argue that while employing cannibalism as a mechanism for the upper levels to psychologically distance themselves from the lower levels, it also focuses on the act itself to emphasize the desire, and frankly, the need to sustain themselves in the face of the system that doesn’t care if they live. Cannibalism as a way of eating completely contrasts the gourmet food presented at level 0 of the prison, but the movie compares these two food sources by putting them under the same roof and under the same system.
But what of cannibalism from the perspective of those at the bottom of the prison, at levels where they will not see a crumb of food for thirty days? Goreng, after having to eat the flesh of several people throughout the film, begins to come to terms with the fact that surviving at lower levels means eating whatever you can, despite his notion of “proper food” on upper levels. Even without access to food from the platform, humans still have a need to eat, regardless of what the upper levels promote as moral food sources. These restrictions on the definition of food are imposed by upper levels that have the privilege of defining “good” versus “bad” based on their ready access to “good” food, but for those without access to the platform food, the definition of “good” shifts to anything that can sustain their bodies and “bad” being starvation. Can you blame people for eating each other when they aren’t provided with resources to properly survive?
Disparities of what is deemed as socially “good” lead to continued class stratification as social classes strive to distance themselves from the “other”, even though everyone is still a prisoner, still trapped within the confines of forced divisiveness in class-oppressive systems. If food in the prison was equally distributed, i.e. if wealth was equally distributed in society, The Platform states that cannibalism would need not exist, and thus its existence appears as a symptom of systems that promote unequal wealth distribution.
Desire of Food Redistribution
The Platform follows Goreng’s struggle to comprehend the inequities of the prison, and this frustration culminates in him and his final cellmate, Baharat, riding the platform through the prison to equitably distribute the food to all the floors. For Goreng, his Desire lies in this struggle to reconcile the injustices he witnesses pertaining to food access, so he develops drive towards his stand-in objet a: food redistribution among the lower levels.
We know that this action is only a stand-in for Goreng’s true objet a, escape, because at the end of the film, he descends on the platform into a void under the prison that symbolizes his death. Redistributing food from top levels does not solve the systemic issue of a wealth hierarchy, so even though he satisfies his stand-in objet a, his death prevents him from ever fulfilling his actual objet a, escape. Though one could argue that death is a sort of escape, it still fails to satisfy the desire of class mobility in life, objet a, and thus traps Goreng in a state where he is permanently unable to escape the prison alive, resonating with the eternal impossibility of achieving any objet a.
Food, an icon of wealth within the prison, connects the prisoners as a vital need. Unwilling to accept the cannibalism required for survival at lower levels, Goreng aims to reform the food distribution throughout the prison, a futile Desire that does not address his true objet a. Trapped within these confines with no concept or possibility of escape, prisoners take actions they deem worthwhile to find meaning in their drive, whether or not their goals are futile or attainable.
Sexual Fantasy and Repression
As previously mentioned, the Spanish film industry cannot be separated from the Franco dictatorship and its social influence on Spanish culture, taboo, and desire. As such, this section is informed by Susan Martin-Márquez’s “Sex in the cinema: film-going practices and the construction of sexuality and ideology in Franco’s Spain” (2005), an article that illustrates how Franco-era restrictions influenced Spanish culture surrounding sex. Martin-Márquez’s interviewees, Spanish citizens who lived through the mid-20th century in urban Spain, reported that vindictive Spanish Catholicism led to sexual relations only being sanctified between married couples under Franco. Couples who displayed public affection could be subjected to police fines, public stoning, or sought out by sex-detecting dogs. Because of the public shame of unsanctioned sexual acts, cinemas, in their affordable, public accessibilities, became locales for sexual endeavors between people from all walks of life. Under the flicker of nationalistic films, young couples, adults, and even prostitution groups were known to take advantage of the dark, public-private spaces of the Spanish theater. Given the history of sex and Spanish cinema, The Platform includes seemingly unnecessary sexual scenes to acknowledge the sexual repression present during the Franco dictatorship.
In the film, no sexual acts take place physically, only within Goreng’s dreams and hallucinations. Goreng’s desire for sex cannot be realized materially within the prison, and so he must condemn it into a purely mental state.The illusory nature of these scenes play off of the quelled societal desire for sex during Franco’s reign; sex could only exist as an idea or fantastical concept within the mind. And so, within the film, we see this notion represented through mere imaginings of sexual intimacy, as was required during historical Spanish sexual repression.
Sexual desire as a symptom of unequal wealth distribution emerges from this parallel to Spanish history. As with food taboos being defined by those with wealth and power in a hierarchy, so, too, are other cultural taboos such as sex. The movie doesn’t need these sexual scenes to advance the plot, but in their existence they appeal to the film’s overarching theme of cultural imposition by a ruling class. Although this is modernly connoted with flaws of unequal wealth distribution under capitalism, Spain’s history of repression by ruling dictators demonstrates that this oppression can occur under any system that unequally balances its wealth and resources.
To dive further into sex as a tenant of the movie, I need to introduce another character in the film, Miharu. Upon admission to the prison, each prisoner can bring one outside object: Goreng brings Don Quixote, Trimigasi, a knife, and Miharu, her child. Feared in her pursuit, Miharu kills her roommate each month and then rides the platform down each level to look for the child, violently defending herself against men looking to sexually assault her. Goreng and Miharu interact a few times to rescue each other from other violent prisoners, and when Goreng’s hunger leads him to hallucinate, he imagines sexual scenes between the two of them. Miharu, the symbol of Goreng’s sexual fantasy, and her pursuit for her child highlight another Lacanian Desire sequence that again proves futile under the inescapable confines of the prison.
Sexual Intimacy as Desire
The inclusion of sex scenes within the film seem to be a nod to Spanish cultural oppression, but symbolically, the significance of Goreng fantasizing about Miharu represents his empathy towards her as someone else caught up in Lacanian Desire for a stand-in objet a. His empathy manifesting as an idealization of physical connection with her, these characters could be described as momentarily seeing past their stand-in objet a’s to their actual objet a’s via intense, one-on-one connections in dream-like states. The objet a, itself a product of subconscious longing, can only be realized within a subconscious state. Miharu and Goreng experience this simulated objet a release momentarily through the visual, sexual depiction of their subconscious. But, as dreams do, this emotional clarity to their real Desire melts away upon awakening; objet a cannot stand within the material, conscious world. As such, Goreng recommits to wealth redistribution and Miharu, her child.
Like Goreng, Miharu faces the same challenges of a false objet a. Within this hierarchical system, Miharu’s drive for her child justifies, to her, the savagery of murdering her cellmates and those that attempt to assault her. The physicality of her drive dominates her underlying, yearning Desire to locate her child, her stand-in objet a, in the face of what she subconsciously desires for herself and the child: complete escape from the prison.
We know that searching for her child is the stand-in objet a for Miharu because she can achieve it: towards the end of the film, Goreng and Baharat, a character discussed in the next section, discover the child on the final floor of the prison. Unfortunately, Miharu had been killed only a few floors above, so she never actually satisfies this stand-in, although she could have. But, assuming the two of them were able to reunite, Miharu would have remaining aspirations about protecting her child. Simply reuniting does not protect them from the horrors or hunger of the prison, they are both still trapped, still subjected to the rules and taboos of the prison. As such, ultimate protection of her child requires freedom from the prison itself, the objet a of the film. With no notion or possibility of escape, she must settle on locating the child and physically protecting them. Like with Goreng, Miharu’s tragic role in the film demonstrates that no item or action can stand in for the objet a. Miharu must instead commit her time in the prison to cultivating meaning and drive behind her attainable, albeit ultimately unfulfilling, stand-in desire.
Racial Legacy in Modern Spanish Film
From the Spanish occupation by the Moors to recent increases in non-native-born people in Western Europe, Spain’s nationalist history, amplified by the Franco dictatorship, lends itself to nationwide, xenophobic attitudes. Although Spanish sociologists have claimed that Spain has removed institutionalized racism, it still persists through reframing tactics, such as persecution based on immigration status instead of race, specifically (Ballesteros, 2005).
Seemingly a nudge to these subtle racist attitudes, The Platform doesn’t employ any blatantly racist acts, but rather it acknowledges race through passing comments. Trimagasi blames an immigrant, that he killed, for his incrimination, saying “Tell me, was that guy’s death my fault? He shouldn’t even have been there” (Gaztelu-Urrutia, 2019, 01:04:08), hinting at the fact that if the man hadn’t immigrated, he wouldn’t have been there to kill. As Ballesteros states in his 2005 article “Screening African Immigration to Spain”, “The category of immigration is now used as a substitute for the old notion of race”. He states that racism has been equated to the notion of “otherness”, and in this way, it has modernized itself into a series of less obvious, but still racist, worldviews that have leached into Spanish cinema. Additionally, Baharat, a muscular and sexually appealing black man, is chastised for not speaking “proper” Spanish. His appearance and poor speaking are common tropes in the way that masculine black bodies are portrayed in Spanish films (Ballesteros, 2007).
We can connect race to social class and power by recognizing that, historically and globally, people of a different race than those of the ruling class have been subjected to lower statuses in society via laws and prejudice that restricted their access to resources. Trimagasi’s hostility towards immigrants and Baharat’s condemnation for merely existing reveal the desire for racial control, even within this prison environment. By weaponizing their words to belittle immigrants and non-white people, characters are reinforcing the stratification between the deemed “superior” race, those in power, and everyone else, the other. In The Platform, under the monthly random level assignment, we actually see a subversion of the common link of race to class standing: Baharat, a black prisoner, finds himself on level 6 above countless non-black prisoners. As we’ve seen, however, this subversion does not make the movie anti-racist, but rather it highlights how, institutionally, racism might be a thing of the past, but microaggressions and subtle attitudes keep racism alive within classist societies. As a symptom of classism, the desire to control race ties back to the fear of “others” mentioned in the section on cannibalism; people of unknown cultures are painted as unsafe or threatening, and so those in power believe it to be in their best interest to distance themselves via money and manufactured wealth classes.
Desire for Racial Control
The application of Lacan to racial control among a class system can be best highlighted in this film by examining general racist attitudes of peripheral characters in the light of Spanish and Western conquest. The overall construct of racial discrimination exists due to decades of non-white exploitation and conquest by European powerhouses, and when prisoners are admitted to the prison, along with their one permitted item, they bring their outside, socially constructed mindsets, too. Had they only ever lived in the prison devoid of Spanish imperialism, race would not exist because there is no context to link skin color with wealth distribution; the level assignments are random each month. For prisoners within The Platform, racial prejudice serves as a way for people to justify their sub-par conditions by weaponizing a social construct, race, to reframe their situation on top of someone of a “less valid” race. Within a hierarchical system, people are conditioned to spectral superiority and inferiority: “I want to be the people above me, and I don’t want to be the people below me”. As such, they look for ways to create an “other” that they can mentally position below them in status, and skin color, as a physical trait, acts as a quick, visual imposition of superiority.
Because the prisoners don’t have the power to physically change their level within the prison, they search for other ways to justify their individual superiority, such as race. This Desire to be above other people is their stand-in objet a. As a stand-in, the mental justification for racism can be achieved, but because the concept of race is socially constructed via conquest, exploitation, and cultural suppression, I don’t believe it to be the natural order of human interaction. A surplus of wealth among the ruling class allows for continued class oppression through weaponry, technology, and knowledge. With more equitably distributed resources, one group does not have the means to dominate another, and there is no “otherization”. And thus, what the prisoners really long for, their true objet a, is freedom from a class system that teaches them that their societal worth is based merely on the color of their skin.
Conclusion
The Platform allegorizes unequal wealth distribution and three symptoms that arise from systems that concentrate wealth among the ruling class. These symptoms become controlled by those with access to wealth, depicted as food in the film, and thus result in artificial desires that can only be quenched by escape from the prison itself. As a Spanish film, the film not only critiques unequal wealth distribution under modern, late-stage capitalism, but it also criticizes dictatorship and imperialism, systems central to Spanish history and culture. Applying Lacanian psychoanalysis of The Platform outside of the film leads to a potentially grim conclusion. If, through the film, humanity’s objet a is to escape class imbalance of late-stage capitalism, Lacan retorts this to be impossible outside of the subconscious. As such, any actions taken to reconfigure capitalism are always unfulfilling and meaningless stand-ins for true capitalist release. This reading, too, fits within Slavoj Žižek’s previously quoted notion as to the immanence of ideology; we cannot escape it because it encapsulates all that we are, produce, and think.
Reframing Lacanian Desire to highlight the power of stand-in objet a’s, however, leaves us with a more reassuring application of the film’s psychoanalysis. Redistribution, sexual desire, and racial control each act as stand-ins that cultivate drive in the West, but we cannot imagine a reality outside of capitalism, and so we seek realities within its confines that provide quantifiable drives wherein we can find meaning. These stand-ins act, to us, as if they are real objet a’s, and so our Desires for these feigned objet a’s cultivate real, and meaningful, drive, regardless of the abstract futility of stand-ins to ever quell our ultimate subconscious desire. Goreng’s success in redistributing food may not have liberated the prisoners, but he sought to feed and validate those who were victims of an unjust system, and, to him, this was enough.
Although psychoanalysis as a discipline has only recently been utilized as a form of rhetorical analysis, scholars like Christian Lundberg in his book Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric have worked to reframe traditional Lacanian scholarship from the individual to the public through rhetorical applications, such as using Lacanian interpolation as a way for the audience to see themselves represented in film (Lundberg, 2018). And so, psychoanalysis provides a useful lens in rhetorical analysis of film because, as expressed by Lundberg, we identify with characters we see depicted on screen and can therefore be persuaded and influenced on an individual, and Lacanian, level. Future studies of this topic could include a more comprehensive relation of Spanish political history to the film in terms of the Moorish occupation, “otherization”, or racial attitudes towards other prejudiced groups like the Jewish people or Romanis. Additionally, analyzing the effectiveness of the “revolution” that Goreng and Baharat undertake from a social movement under capitalism perspective could lead to valuable insights as to how revolutions are portrayed in Spanish film.
References
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