In Snowpiercer, the last survivors of humanity live on a train in perpetual motion through a frozen world. And the train is a brutal hierarchy: in the tail, the poor crammed into misery; in the engine, the rich in luxury, protected by an order that presents itself as sacred and immutable. Curtis leads the revolt of those at the back, who advance car by car toward the engine. His rebellion is, for the train's system, the greatest of crimes; for the oppressed, the only possible justice. For radical criminology, Curtis is class struggle turned into perfect allegory.
// The theoryOrder as frozen injustice
The radical criminology of Taylor, Walton and Young analyzes crime within the class structure and holds that the «order» the law protects is, often, a crystallized injustice. The train of Snowpiercer is that idea in its purest state: its «order» —each in their own car, those at the back serving those in front— presents itself as a natural, almost religious law («keep your place»), when it is pure class domination. Within that framework, Curtis's crime (breaking the order, advancing toward the engine) is not a moral deviation: it is politics, the only form of resistance available to those the system keeps at the bottom. The theory generalizes it: when a social order is unjust and closed enough, the transgression of its rules stops being mere criminality and becomes the only possible voice of those who have no other.
The order that needs those in the tail
The central revelation of Snowpiercer is the most uncomfortable for any system: the train's order needs the misery of the tail to function —the balance of the machine depends on some living crammed together so that others may live in luxury, and even the periodic revolts are calculated as a valve to «adjust the population»—. Radical criminology makes exactly this denunciation: that inequality is not a flaw in the system, but its condition of functioning, and that the law which punishes those below exists to maintain that structure. Curtis discovers that even his rebellion was foreseen, integrated into the logic of the train. It is the theory's most bitter lesson: the system not only produces its criminals, but sometimes needs their rebellion as part of its own equilibrium —and true liberation demands not winning the revolt, but breaking the entire train—.
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// The subjectThe leader who bears the guilt
Curtis is no clean hero: he drags along a terrible past he is ashamed of (the first days in the tail, when desperation led to cannibalism and he came close to the worst). That guilt humanizes him and complicates the epic reading: he is not an immaculate savior, but a man broken by what extreme misery made him do. Radical criminology, properly understood, does not need pure heroes —it is enough for it to show that the brutality of Curtis and his people was produced by an order that reduced them to that desperation—. His violence does not fall from the sky nor spring from his evil: it is the response to a system that first dehumanized them. That does not erase the acts, but it shifts the question from «why are those in the tail so violent?» to «what order drove them there?».
Curtis Everett
// The fault lineNeither "every revolt is pure" nor "the order must be respected"
The fault line with Curtis is the romanticization of revolution: seeing it as a clean epic of liberators against oppressors. The film itself refutes this with brutal honesty —the revolt leaves a trail of dead, some of them innocent, and its leader carries horrors of his own—. Mature radical criminology does not idealize revolutionary violence: it explains why it arises, without pretending it is bloodless or infallible. The opposite fault line is the ideology of order: «altering the established order is always a crime that must be repressed». That is exactly the voice of the train —«keep your place»—, the one that sanctifies injustice by calling it order. Between romanticizing the revolt and sanctifying the order, the theory asks for the hard thing: to recognize that an order can be so unjust that its transgression is legitimate, without thereby sanctifying everything done in the name of rebellion.
That the ending of Snowpiercer is not to seize the engine —perpetuating the train with other masters— but to derail the entire train is the theory's most radical thesis: sometimes justice does not consist in those at the tail reaching the engine, but in destroying the structure that divided the train into engine and tail.
Inequality as a system, not a flaw
Curtis matters because his allegory makes visible what radical criminology most wants us to see: that extreme inequality is not an accident the system regrets, but, often, its way of functioning. As long as we treat poverty and the crime it generates as isolated flaws to be managed —more police in the tail, more programs for «those at the back»—, we will not touch the structure that produces both. The theory, with the train of Snowpiercer, suggests that certain injustices cannot be reformed from within because the system needs them, and that truly confronting them demands questioning the entire structure, not merely redistributing the seats within it. It is not a naive call to violence —the film shows its atrocious cost—, but a demand to look at the order itself: to ask not only how to reduce the crime of the tail, but why there is a tail, and who benefits from its existence.
Three key takeaways
- Curtis takes radical criminology to pure allegory: on the train of Snowpiercer, the revolt of the poor in the tail against the rich in the engine is a crime to the system and the only possible justice for the oppressed.
- His key revelation: the train's order needs the misery of the tail to function —inequality is not a flaw in the system, it is its condition—. Even the revolt was foreseen as an adjustment valve.
- Neither "every revolt is pure" (it leaves dead behind and its leader carries horrors: the theory explains, it does not idealize) nor "the order must be respected" (that is the voice of the train that sanctifies injustice). Justice was not to seize the engine, but to break the entire train.
Sources · further reading
- Taylor, I., Walton, P. & Young, J. (1973). The New Criminology. Routledge.
- Reiman, J. (1979). The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison. Wiley.
- Lob, J. & Rochette, J.-M. (1982). Le Transperceneige. Casterman.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Curtis Everett?
Curtis Everett («Curtis») es un villano de Rompenieves, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. In the tail of the train, misery; in the engine, luxury.
¿Por qué Curtis Everett se convierte en villano?
Curtis and radical criminology: class struggle turned into allegory. A revolt of the poor at the back of the train against an iron order where "disturbing the order" is the only road to justice.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Curtis Everett?
El caso de Curtis Everett se analiza desde la Criminología Radical / Nueva Criminología. Radical criminology (Taylor, Walton and Young) analyzes crime within the framework of class struggle. Curtis, from Snowpiercer, takes it to pure allegory: on a train where the poor crammed into the tail rebel against the rich in the engine, "disturbing the order" is the only road to justice. Revolt as a crime to the system and as the only possible politics for the oppressed.
