Epicurus once said, “The time when most of you should withdraw into yourself is when you forced to be in a crowd.” Being is a crowd is not easy. Whether by choice or force the crowd levees an influence on the individual that many have marked detrimental. The crowd has been documented by several modern philosophers, theorists, and historians. Georg Simmell says in The Metropolis and Mental Life that “The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture and technique of life.” In Mass Civilization and Minority Culture F. R. Leavis says that this “machine” of modernity , the metropolis of Simmell, eschews the finer things (where he would likely argue that we find our humanity) in the name of greater efficiency, better salesmanship, more mass production and standardization. He states that this modern media machine has a greater effect on the mind than reasoned thought. Neither of these are far from Marx. He observes that any society must first satisfy the needs of its people. Then, as they satisfy those needs, they are led to more needs separate from the original needs. As those needs expand one must make more relations to meet those needs. This expanding web of relations eventually becomes the metropolis of Simmell which produces the media machine of Leavis. Ultimately, humans suffer at the hands of the crowd. They attempt to make an identity unique from the crowd but are subsumed in the “needs” of consumption. Their relations become based upon the desire to fulfill those “needs” (perhaps in homage to the Oncler, we should call them thneeds.) It is in this conflict of the desire for uniqueness in the metropolis and the debasement of human relations based on thneeds that one can view The Crowd.
King Vidor’s The Crowd portrays in remarkable fashion the power of the metropolis to subsume the individual in consumption. The First example is in the portrayal of birth. At the on-set, we witness the birth of our protagonist. The location is a small town (Simmell calls this the rural, I will call it Smallville in contrast to Metropolis.) The birth is attended in a upper bedroom by a Doctor a nurse and the father and mother. The father’s presence is indicative of the life in Smallville. The birth of a child is a intimate family affair based on love and hope for the future. Immediately after birth the child is presented to the father who proudly proclaims his son’s uniqueness. It is a time of joy and interconnectedness.
This is contrasted later in the film to the birth of the protagonist’s first son. Instead of being attended in their home by a small cohort of relations and professionals, the birth occurs in a veritable factory. The father is kept out and the women are in a ward of hundreds, a crowd of mothers. The natural occurrence of birth is replaced by the thneed of hospitalization which leads to the loss of individuality. Birth is a product to be fabricated and purchased and the producers are alienated from their work.
The next is seen in the death of the second child. The family has won $500 and our protagonist has purchased happiness in the form of gifts for the children. They call out the window for the children to come see the new toys. The two dash across the street with the younger falling behind. She is struck by a passing motorist. The parents horrified by the events run to her side. She is mortally wounded (there appears to be tire tracks across her midsection). The following scene shows them waiting around her hoping for a miracle. The father, clearly buried in guilt, tries to maintain the calm of the room for the benefit of the dying girl. Suddenly, there is a ruckus outside and the father rushes out to calm the crowd. Desperately he runs into a policeman, who, instead of showing empathy for the man, chastises him. He tells him that the world can’t stop just because his kid is sick. The crowd has spoken and the man returns to his home to see his daughter dead on the bed. This almost seems a punishment for a parents attempting to replace their relationship with their children with thneeds.
The final example of the film is the final scene. After losing his job (and countless others) due to the guilt that he feels, our protagonist is left by his wife who is fed up with his dreams of uniqueness and his failure. He has in an effort to save his family taken a job as a clown advertising for a restaurant. He shows her tickets to a show and pleads with her to come with him, with their remaining son, for a celebration. She concedes and they are shown in the auditorium laughing at the show with a packed house. It is clear that they are reconciled and the camera pulls away and they disappear into the crowd of laughing people. The final shot is a bird’s-eye of the audience with the music shifting dramatically to a minor chord indicating that this is no happy ending. This shot represents the theme of the whole piece. The metropolis destroys relationships and individuality. The family wants to remain whole, but to due so they must participate in the thneed of mass entertainment and lose their individual consciousness to the crowd.
The Crowd clearly illustrates the idea of the damage that urbanization and industrialization have perpetrated on our society and individuality. As the people of metropolis succumb to the blasé and sever their ties with others they seek to slake their thirst for uniqueness in consumption of mass media and products of the machine. But this uniqueness is a sham. For in that very process of consumption, they are being consumed by the crowd. They are left with our protagonist and his family laughing and eating and kissing, all self-medicating, as they disappear into that mass culture, the crowd.
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