Upon arriving in New York City, John Sims reveals a certain
amount of naiveté, his innocence reflected in his white suit and hat. Aware of the difficulties that many face when
trying to make it there, he claims to
have what it takes to get to the top. “You’ve
gotta be good in that town if you wanna beat the crowd,” he says to a fellow
newcomer, his meritocratic beliefs unwavering.
In an early scene, John goes on a double date with his friend Bert, and
the two social climbers and their dates ride in a carriage, literally perched
above the crowd walking on the street.
With pity, John points to a street performer and wonders what could have
gone wrong in the man’s life. I bet his
father thought he would be the president someday, he says to his date, Mary. Ever the idealist, John tries to will his way
into success. His attitude and
determination will keep him out of the crowd, those who are all “in the same
rut.”
As the
story progresses, his dogged insistence that things will work out becomes less
believable. He claims to have “real
prospects” to his disapproving in-laws; he continually speaks of a time in the
future when he will get his “big job”; he also promises that the birth of his
and Mary’s first child has had a positive effect on his attitude, saying, “I’ll
be somebody now…I promise.” John
experiences some success, especially when he wins a $500 prize for the Sleight-o-Hand copy he writes. Ultimately, though, the deterministic quality
of the city beats him down, and through a tragic sequence of events he becomes
a part of the crowd. In a humiliating
reversal, he takes the same street-performing/advertising job that he mocks
earlier in the film; at this point he must realize even the lowliest of the
crowd is not in his or her current state for lack of dreaming big. After all, John’s father dreamed that his son
would accomplish big things.
Like the
German idealists who preceded Marx, John’s worldview first “descends from
heaven to earth.” In other words, he
believes that an idea instigates action. It is only after he experiences life in a
modern urban setting, though, that he becomes aware of the external forces that
affect one’s thoughts, dreams, and overall outcome. “Life is not determined by consciousness, but
consciousness by life,” stated Marx.
John surely would have agreed with this statement after the death of his
young daughter and his successive career failures. His consciousness is most notably affected by
his life circumstances when he walks with his son on a bridge. Letting his son walk ahead, John climbs over the
fence and considers throwing himself into an oncoming train, hardly the actions
of the young go-getter at the beginning of the film. “The nature of individuals…depends on the
material conditions determining their production;” his suicide attempt comes
after not only the death of his daughter but also after he has quit several
increasingly demeaning jobs. The Crowd argues that man is subject to
his environment; strengthening its ties to Marx and the idea that circumstances
determine consciousness is its dehumanizing portrayal of urbanization.
Simmel
opens “The Metropolis and Mental Life” stating, “The deepest problems of modern
life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and
individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of
historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” John certainly struggles to claim
individuality in his working conditions.
Determined to set himself apart, to be one of the good ones, he toils at his desk, one of hundreds perfectly aligned
in a warehouse-like room in the pre-cubicle 1920s.
Despite earning an $8 raise after years of
service, his aspirations lead him away from his company, where things are going
more slowly than he has hoped, to dreams of riches in a career of
advertising. He claims his first copy was
stolen, but his second idea, the aforementioned Sleight-o-Hand, brings him more happiness than anything else in his
story. The joy he and Mary experience is
fleeting, though, when a truck hits their daughter, right as they celebrate
their new possessions bought with the prize money.
Another
negative aspect of urbanization is evident following the death of John’s
daughter. Deeply affected by her death,
John is shocked at the response of others, whom seem to have moved on. One man tells him, “The world can’t stop
because your baby is sick.” The narrator
later states, “The crowd laughs with you for months, but will only cry for a
day.” Simmel explains this indifference
in the following manner: “The essence of the blasé attitude consists in the
bluntness of discrimination. This does
not mean that the objects are not perceived…but rather that the meaning and
differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced
as insubstantial.” John obviously cares
about his daughter, but to others she is just another girl killed in an
accident, an all-too-common occurrence in a city of more than a million people.
As a form
of self-preservation, the urban dweller must perceive others in a detached
fashion in order to meet his needs.
Simmel explains, “This mental attitude of metropolitans toward one
another we may designate, from a formal point of view, as reserve.” He continues, “If so many inner reactions
were responses to the continuous external contacts with innumerable people as
are those in the small town, where one knows almost everybody one meets and
where one has a positive relation to almost everyone, one would be completely
atomized internally and come to an unimaginable psychic state.” After years living in the city, John’s
reserve is so engrained that he cannot imagine someone else as a regular person
with problems like his. Desperate for
work, he rushes into a line of other men who are equally desperate to
earn. He justifies his aggression by
saying he has a family to feed, to which another man replies, we all have families.
Considering
the discouraging tone of The Crowd,
the film ends, interestingly, on a happy note.
The family, at least, is smiling, as father, mother, and son laugh with
others at a vaudevillian act. John,
still jobless, purchases the tickets not knowing his in-laws are helping his
wife and son pack their belongings so they can get away from him. As a last-ditch effort to win them back, he
pulls out the recently purchased tickets and invites them to the show. The family’s enjoyment can hardly be
interpreted as triumph, though; rather, they, like the rest of the crowd
laughing in the audience, have accepted their fate as subjects to the
often-cruel city.
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