The turn of the century seemed filled with so much promise. A new age overflowing with possibility and
hopes of the “American Dream”. It is
with this sentiment that we begin The
Crowd; a story of the quintessential all-American boy, literally born on
the 4th of July in 1900 small-town America. His father optimistically states: “I’m going
to give him every opportunity.” And from
this point, he ingrains the notion of believing that you deserve more; that, in
the mere moments of his birth and through his childhood, this boy is capable of
greatness. But, as we see from Marx, we
cannot look from heaven down and see the creation of man in thought and dream
alone. (In fact each time our protagonist,
John, attempts to merely dream of success or doodle about his dreams, nothing
happens and he gets further ground down.)
Instead man is a product of his circumstances, indeed of the products he
creates. He further clarifies, “we do
not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated,
thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the
basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological
reflexes and echoes of this life-process.” (154) Although the idealism of the turn of the
century seemed enough for this small town boy on the road to great things, it is
apparent that reality and necessity got in the way of those not fully-visualized
dreams.
When questioned by the neighborhood boys about what he wants
to be when he grows up, there is no clear response as to an occupation from
John. Instead he relies on his father’s
notion that he is going to be great. His
path, however, is turned upside down when his father suddenly dies. It is with this first moment that King Vidor’s
visual genius and symbolic style emerges.
As the ambulance pulls up at the house, a massive crowd of neighbors
appears, pushing their way into house, but still respectful. They let the family, and specifically the boy
John, emerge on the stairs, separating himself from the crowd while still being
a part of the community. This first
image highlights what Simmel was discussing in his paper on sociology. He realizes that there is a distinct difference
in the feel and attitude of a small, rural town versus the big metropolis; a
concept Vidor builds upon beautifully.
The contrast in the close up, asymmetrical shots in the small town to
the stark precision of the metropolis is daunting. His long sweeps of a huge building in which
he zeros in on just one of many windows, and inside, just one of many desks,
and just one worker, of so many. At the
age of twenty-one, John sets out to prove himself in a world that he is not
quite ready for. The title card further
reflects that, calling him: “One of the 7 million that believed New York
depended on him.” The realization is
evident; you must be good to beat the crowd.
But it is not enough to just have a dream. As Simmel further illustrates, in the
metropolis, there is a distinct loss of individuality, and our boy with a dream
becomes a number, working on an impersonal time schedule in a world run by
arithmetic, where quantity has replaced quality and as Simmel suggests, the “money
economy dominates the metropolis” (412)
But our protagonist doesn’t seem to fit within this world. In the bathroom sequence, he doesn’t follow
the protocol of all facing the same way and talking about the same stuff. He seems to be the lone individual, trying to
exert his uniqueness into the world; a world that demands precision and
product. John, however, isn’t focused on
work, but rather on his dream. At first
he references study, but allows the pressures and pleasures of the world to
distract him from even that pursuit. He
and Mary make fun of the lower class (the proletariat), a foreshadowing of what
they are to become. John does, however
fall under the spell of advertisement, commercialism, and urbanization,
realizing from an ad that he will be happy with a wife and house – yet again,
the American Dream. He soon, becomes disenchanted
and disinterested in family life at Christmas with Mary’s family. His in-laws are concerned with his lack of
money and status. Unappreciative of his
tricks, they question the supposed raise he was supposed to be getting. And with this, we see that Marx is correct in
his thought that production and ownership determine status, even within the
family unit.
Marx suggests that reality shapes the mind, and creates a false
consciousness for the oppressed. The
producer is disconnected from the product in this unjust division of labor, and
people like John, who sit all day at a desk, tallying numbers, never get to
touch or see the outcome of those numbers.
The product becomes this intangible and distanced thing and provides no
pleasure, warmth (thank you Simmel) or actuality. So the worker must become focused on
essentials first, the needs or social productive forces. Marx states that “As individuals express
their life, so they are. What they are,
therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and
with how they produce. The nature of
individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their
production.” (150) And John’s aren’t
good. He is continually looked over for promotion
because he won’t play the game like Bert and cozy up to the bosses. He is waiting for his “big break” and thinks
someone should notice his genius in slogan writing. As Simmel suggests, our protagonist is
focused on his specialization. In a world
where one has to keep up, to be incomparable or irreplaceable and have a confidant
and definite sense of self, he surmises that this urban world has lied to
him. Blaming his wife for their house
falling apart, he states that “Marriage isn’t a wonderful word, it’s a sentence.” And though Simmel infers that urban life
allows for individuality, it also, according The Crowd, stifles it.
But, as all life has its ups and downs, so too does John’s. Problems with essentials and needs are swept
under the table with the news that a baby is on the way. Here again we can use Simmel to compare the
difference in the metropolis and the rural community. In contrast to the small town doctor who
comes to the house to deliver John for his parents, John waits at work to hear
the news. Vidor’s uniformity of all the
husbands waiting in the hall, all the wives sharing the same huge and
impersonal room, lined with beds, the anxiety of the cold hospital where an
apprehensive husband searches for a doctor and then for his wife sheds
brilliant light on the inevitable assumption that the individual has to be
outside of the norm to matter. As Simmel
states: “The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of
things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and
value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of
the purely objective life.” (422)
The symbol of the crowd appears again and again throughout
the film. From the crowded hospital to
the crowded beach where he can’t play his ukulele, to the crowd of people
surrounding John’s family’s latest tragedy, we learn that “Crowds laughs with
you always but will cry with you for only a day.” And in this world of mass culture (the sheep
mindset), “the world can’t stop ‘cause your baby’s sick.” In contrast to the crowd at the first when
John’s father died, this crowd of strangers won’t even let a father get through
to his daughter who has been struck by a vehicle. Vidor’s direction seems to show that we don’t
know how big the crowd is or the opposition till we get in the middle of it. But, unable to live in his grief, John
returns to work and to, as Marx puts it, a place where “man’s own deed becomes
an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled
by him.” (160) Still thinking that all
he needs is an opportunity, he spirals downward till he nearly commits suicide
in front of his son. This disillusionment
demonstrated Simmel’s notion that “self-preservation of certain personalities
is brought at the price of devaluating the whole objective world, a devaluation
which in the end unavoidably drags one’s own personality down into a feeling of
the same worthlessness.” (415)
John finds that Marx, again, is correct in realizing that “life
involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and
many other things.” (156) His son gives
him to courage to find and fight for those bare essentials for his family to
survive. He joins the throngs of men fighting
their way for work – yet again an extraordinary crowd scene shot by Vidor that
makes even the audiences feel tussled and claustrophobic. As a desperate John gets a job juggling with
a sign, the very thing he and Mary mocked not so many years before, Simmel’s
belief that “money becomes the most frightful leveler” (414) echoes in John’s
face. We further see the wisdom of Marx
in John’s need to keep his family together.
And though Simmel talks about how “One must meet the difficulty of
asserting his own personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life,”
(420) in order to survive, it seems that John must concede to the flow of the
superstructure, from which there is no escape, just acceptance.
King Vidor clearly struggled with the anxieties accompanying
the impersonal metropolis. Even the
cover of the film shows a lone man, facing away from the crowd, pushing against
them. His storytelling in The Crowd discusses the effect of the
individual versus the mass culture; and increase in standardization, urbanization,
and materiality. His aesthetic response
to it is truly informative. And I wonder
if even Leavis, who showed contempt for some film, would be impressed. Worried about the “cheap emotional appeals”
of cinematic recreation and the far reaching consequences of broadcasting films,
Leavis concluded that high culture was getting lost, and that Americanization
and standardization was ridding the world of culture. Perhaps, then, he would be pleased with King
Vidor and his insistence (in a time when producers only wanted happy endings) in
creating a realistic, almost foreboding conclusion to the film – a film the studio
didn’t want to make in the first place. But
King Vidor was insistent, he thought the story needed to be shared and by
novices, the everyman. Marx has stated
that “It is only possible to achieve real liberation in the real world and by
employing real means.” (169) In essence,
one must work and his work must be valued by another. And in that final shot, the community
laughing together, as we pull away from the individual to the uniformity of the
mass, and the music strikes a dissident chord, one wonders if it is all worth
it?
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