Headscratchers / The Platform

• Why don't people just request gigantic portions as their favorite dish? It's clear from the shots we see of the kitchen that there's more than enough ingredients to fill that platform a hundred times over, and it doesn't seem like the people running the facility are the type to callously deny you a large portion if that's what you request.
  • Because they don’t understand what they’re getting into.
  • Besides, that would simply mean more food for the upper cells. The problem is that they're unwilling to share, not that they don't have enough. The mere act of denying food to the belowers generates a power rush.

• It seems that when people end up on a floor without food they tend to suicide - shouldn't we see more examples of them just riding the platform down to try to murder and cannibalize those below them?
  • We never see a kinda-low floor, every time Goreng winds up on the lower levels it's something insane like 171. And his final journey down the platform shows that people at those extremely low levels have all killed themselves/starved to death early in the month.

• Why don't people in the lowest floor just jump on the platform like Mali at the end? seems like the first thing you'd think of, given you are pretty much guaranteed to die either way at that point.
  • For me that’s further evidence the ending is a hallucination. Plus we should have seen shattered post-suicide bodies on the final floor, and we would have seen SOMEBODY try riding back up after 5 months if it were possible. But it’s not, which is why the ending where Goreng sends back a piece of food makes more sense.
  • What's to say they don't? They'd either be sent back down or be killed. Mali was different because as far as the people working for the administration were concerned, there were no kids. That was the message they wanted to get out.

• Would they have really let Goreng go after 6 months? If they let people out of the Hole, shouldn't those people tell the rest of the world (including Floor 0) how terrible it is in there and how misguided the management is?
  • Considering what perfectionists the kitchen staff is, completely disconnected from the reality of the pain they're putting people through, they likely would have. It's entirely possible people who get out are ignored due to propaganda making the facility not seem that bad, paid off to keep quiet about how truly awful it is (the fact that you can volunteer to enter it definitely makes it seem like there's an idea that you get a substantial benefit for making it through the experience), or the psychological and physical stress of being tortured like that causes people to rationalize that they truly learn a lesson about being grateful for what they have on the outside and it was worth the pain (a la John Kramer's mindset in Saw).
  • Or that no one cares. Consider how little is being done to feed starving people or reform prisons in real life.

• Working up on the above question, wouldn't survivors from the prison start filling lawsuits against the place? While the location where the Hole exists is ambiguous, it's implied to take place in the director's home country of Spain given that the majority of the prisoners are white and in the original dub, the vast majority of them are spanish-speaking people, and Goring's Don Quixote book is quite popular in it's home country, and there's no way in hell the Spanish government would allow a place such as the Hole to exist out in the open without protests breaking out against it. Even if the government is lying to the people about the true nature of the Hole and nobody is allowed out of it after 6 or more months, sooner or latter the families of those who volunteered would find it suspicious that the person wasn't released after the time has passed and would either investigate or outright get the police in the case.

• So... is there any in-universe explanation given for Miharu's killing of Ramses II and inmates who weren't attacking her beyond she being Ax-Crazy and for personal kicks?]
  • Most likely because Miharu had seen how deep The Hole goes into, knows that there are not enough food for everyone, and then there's this ridiculous preachy woman who takes food to feed her dog while actively throwing people into The Hole for two and half decades.

• What's holding up the platform? There doesn't seem to be anything attached to it. Electromagnets, maybe?