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An excerpt from Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, Rot

Deviant Matter delves into a vast archive that includes nineteenth-century medical and scientific writing; newspaper comic strips and early film; the Food and Drug Act of 1906; the literature of Martin Delany, Louisa May Alcott and Herman Melville; and twenty-first century queer minoritarian video, installation, and performance art. In this excerpt, Tompkins explores the representation of jelly in Snowpiercer.

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Early in the 2013 film Snowpiercer, we watch a small mass of people鈥攄irty, shabby, and imprisoned in a train car鈥攚aiting to be fed, being counted by armed guards. Part of the survivors of a failed global attempt to remedy global warming, the prisoners inhabit the rear carriage of a train that perpetually circles a frozen planet, waiting, it is implied, for the ice to thaw. There is much to be said about the apocalyptic imagery of the film鈥攊magery that is no longer merely symbolic but that sits rather close to the real of the current planetary crisis. But what I would like to pay attention to here is one of the tiniest and most evocative details of this whole, ravishing film: the food of the prisoners of the last train carriage. These prisoners, designated as the lowest rung of the hierarchy that has emerged on the train, eat blocks of gelatin.

Dark brown and gold, uniform in size and shape, the gelatin blocks shake and catch the light as the prisoners of the back carriage hold and eat them, while they walk in circles, carceral imagery that is in loose imitation of an exercise walk around a prison yard. The blocks are equally repulsive and mesmerizing. But it is not until slightly later in the film, when the prisoners finally break through to a forward carriage, that the fully abject implications of the gelatin blocks become apparent: for seventeen years, the members of the rear car have been eating pulverized and gelatinized cockroaches. The scene in which the cockroaches are revealed makes that fact haptically felt by having the protagonist, Curtis (Chris Evans), and the character called Painter (Clark Middleton) open up and look into the large vats in which the cockroaches are ground up. Painter first cries out in shock; when Curtis follows Painter up some stairs to look inside the vat, he grasps the edges, bends toward the insects, and peers into the vat. Recoiling almost immediately and turning away, he exhales and inhales quickly, covering his mouth with his hand and then with his fist, seeming to almost gag, to fight to hold back his vomit, to force himself not to exhibit his physiological response.

The sensory effect of Curtis鈥檚 view of the thousands of cockroaches roiling about in the vat is emphasized by a swell in the rock music that accompanies the scene plus the unexpected color pop鈥攖hat particular mix of cockroachy brown and warm gold鈥攊n a film that up until that point has been dominated by gray and blue tones as well as by the total absence of anything that resembles nature. The cockroaches are circulated and mashed by the rolling corkscrew gears; they are fervid, active, hot in color and film tone, technically quite an amazing display of CGI virtuosity. They flutter their wings and fly around and up out of the vat. What is inside the vat, I want to posit, is life: vital life, energized and roiling and active, the energy of a disposable species鈥攁vailable to be converted into pure sustenance for humans whose social value so clearly equals their own. In a world in which eating is devoid of aesthetic pleasure (indeed, one character upon receiving his protein bar wonders longingly about what steak must have smelled like while it was being cooked), we are beyond or below鈥攐r perhaps, in the terms of the train, at the rear鈥攐f the hierarchical relations that make possible a notion of taste as aesthetic discernment; instead, the cockroach bars fully anatomize the rear-car inhabitants鈥� status as human refuse. As in the plantation, the border camp, the prison, we are in the realm of survival, of zoe, or bare life itself.

Snowpiercer forces us to think about how the rendering of animal waste is a cultural practice within which the politics of trash鈥攁nd capitalism鈥檚 genius move to repurpose trash into more efficient and vertically integrated profit models鈥攋oins the question of the animal to the ordering of the species. This joining includes, as Foucault wrote, vis-脿-vis sexual deviance, the 鈥渟ub-species鈥� of humans so ordered. My argument here is that 厂苍辞飞辫颈别谤肠别谤鈥檚 use of gelatin as poor people鈥檚 food is not casual by any means, either historically or, as I will now discuss, aesthetically. While the nineteenth century saw the application of theories of thermodynamics to consumable materials in order to develop the notion of the calorie, early nineteenth-century scientists, including Claude Bernard and Liebig, experimented on themselves, on living animals, and on patients to try to understand how the human machine worked. In particular, they wanted to quantify the 鈥渘itrogenic,鈥� or nourishing, qualities of food; they sought, among other things, to determine how much gelatin could be mechanically extracted from underused animal flesh and bones with the specific aim of discovering whether gelatin could be used to feed the poor and the ill. The scientific history of both of these technologies can be traced further backward to the period after the Napoleonic Wars, when the French Academie Scientifique convened a Committee on the Status of Gelatin to study emergent food technologies鈥攏ewly separated as 鈥渟cience鈥� from their traditional social location as 鈥渃raft鈥濃�攕uch as the extraction of gelatin and bouillon from meat and bones. For over three decades, from 1803 to 1841, several incarnations of the committee studied various methods for extracting all possible nutritive value from meat and bones, ultimately concluding that gelatin could not sustain life as a cheap meat alternative. This work received a great deal of French state support, and the news of the gelatin commission鈥檚 work reached the United States through newspaper bulletins and scientific lectures.

Gelatin thus has a complex history tied both to waste management and to the management of the poor. Keeping this in mind, I now want to turn to the question of the gelatinous as a materiality that might also bring its correspondence with the material conditions of the poor, the enslaved, and the working class into sharper relief. More precisely, how might we think through political affect, particularly minoritarian political affect, in relation to the gelatinous?

Read more in Deviant Matter: Ferment, Intoxicants, Jelly, and Rot

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Kyla Wazana Tompkins is Professor and Chair of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo, and Professor of English at Pomona College. She is the author of Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century and managing editor of Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. She is the winner of numerous book awards; in 2023, she won a James Beard Award for her essay 鈥淥n Boba,鈥� published in the Los Angeles Review of Books.