A Marxist Look

"The Romans found out what a handful could do if it's the right handful."

That quote alone from On the Waterfront has can have a great deal of Marxist sentiment attached to it. It seems with any work, whether it be literary, film, art, etc. that I'm asked to look at from a Marxist's perspective I automatically look for social differences in any way. In the first scenes of The Bicycle Thieves we can see crowds of unemployed workers (or in the eyes of a Marxist, proletariats) waiting for work from the employment office. This scene in itself can show the disparities between those with work (the person assigning jobs/the person who Ricci reports to after he obtains his bicycle) and those who don't work, and how they make up the masses. In the same scene we witness one of the unemployed persons saying they're a bricklayer, they can do the job, to which he's told that "That's a different category." In the sense of making the "masses" faceless, this bureaucratic process of categorization certainly can be synonymous with capitalism (which Marxists love to target). The idea of being born into class seems to rear it's head a bit if we pay attention to Ricci's line of "I've bene cursed since the day I was born" where he feels that there's no escaping where his position in society is.

In On the Waterfront we see simliar working conditions, but this time we can pick up that it's due to (as well as reading the description on the video in youtube) corrupt union bosses, probably linked to organized crime. The opening scene to The Bicycle Thieves is reminiscent of the scene where the person picking people who get to work throws all of the tokens (or whatever they were) into the air and lets them fight amongst themselves for them to see who works. What both of these films seem to make me want to think of (in terms of Marxist perspective) is the idea of making the masses much less individualized. This can be linked to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", where he describes the transition of art from having an aura, to losing the aura due to the revolutions made in art with such mediums as photography and film (both silent and sound).

Firstly, it is described as a way that can bridge people to whatever the original piece might be. "...the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bend toward overcoing the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction." So while Benjamin (who ironically mentions Marx in the Preface) is discussing the loss of authenticity and "aura" of works of art, it can be used as an allegory to the loss of authenticity or the aura of proleteriats in increasing capitalist demand, which Benjamin also references: "The result was that one could expect it not only to exploit the proleteriat with increasing intensity, but ultimately to create conditions which would make it possible to abolish capitalism."

So, as we can see in the films, the masses which are commonly referred to as the proletariat seem to become less and less unique (despite our common thought and value of individualism in our own society) and more of just crowds of people, fighting, quarrelling, and claiming right to a certain thing (in the case of the movies, work).