群众

The interwoven play

Basically the story is about an ordinary, fallen myth of “everyday failure”—a mix of family melodrama and romantic comedy. Surprisingly, though, there exists a dialectical parallelism against the closing-in narration of continuity of the former, which shows the iconography or spectacle of modern capital and ever-growing population. Some of the sequences remind me of Man with a Movie Camera. The insertion of such sequences refers to the dynamic and automation of modernity: the clock, the train, the skyscrapers and the crowd rushing endlessly…a machinery world that works independently of humanity.

The hero and heroine are paradoxically staged as “one of the crowd”, and the desire of whom is at all times linked to exterior material. For example, John’s longing & fantasy of “home” is explicitly stimulated and mediated by an advertisement that he notices on the train (Plus the fact that he works in advertising business); similarly, his appreciation for his wife Mary’s beauty is “scoped” by a camera lens (After taking a picture of her he “realizes” that “You are the most beautiful girl in all the worlds.”). It seems that the drive toward living a life no longer emits from the inside of the characters (as in romantic literature); instead, the reason they are living is that they are MADE to live, by something from the outside.

the advertisement on the train

The staircase

Another fine example of the melodramatic use of staircase:

(1) As the mediation of hierarchical order of paternity. It’s a high-angle long shot from the top of the staircase when John’s father died. Young little John walks up the staircase, pauses, toward his mission to become “the man of the family”, which he found constantly incapable to suit later years in the modern capital.

young John on the staircase

(2) As the mise-en-scène of sexuality and the suture of male-gaze. When the two girls on date climb up the staircase to the top of the sightseeing bus in low-angle shots, cut in the reverse close-up of the man’s expression—twice—an intentional appealing to the viewer’s sensation.

Playing with the staircase, “going up” embodies the POV of the “high-hat”—not only the deceiving ideology of the American Dream, moreover, universally, the kite-flying ideal of “progress” that promises each individual her/his value while the numerator of the masses less and less counts in a society of individualization. The young John’s condescending mockery of “the sandwich man” only predicts his own future, and, ironically, it is his descending from the illusion of “the top” that saved his marriage -- for a while.

Man and woman

Is it as usual a typical American story that told by men, leans on men and weeps for men? — even if it’s about their incompetence. Viewing a story based on a particular historical epoch, let us be aware that men and women who were “liberated” by modern capitalism into labour force for big corporations, to some extent, are equally free and equally trapped.

What impressed me about female desire in this film is the honeymoon sequence on the train. A parallel comes into being in terms of the representation of sexuality. It gets very detailed coloring the atmosphere of the “first night”, not just from the perspective of the husband. The wife as a sexual subject is truly THERE, which is rare in later classic Hollywood narrative, even though conveyed in a gendered touch.

Also, the women’s condition is clear. She works all the time and gets no credit while he sits around bragging about his “ship coming in”. However, what gives this film a certain egalitarianist perspective is that the woman has no burden of fame and false pride and has always her side of family to retreat to. That makes her easier to be happy, while the man, always chasing, never manages to fit in the world, nor sees his ship come in.

The indication of something bigger — the organization of modern society — takes charge of the fate of the man and woman in the family melodrama and romantic comedy. Looking from a hyper-distance provided by the consciousness of modern photography, the man and the woman are equally sad, as one of the crowd.