Alone in the Crowd

The films return, again and again, to the same image: a person adrift in a sea of people, separated from connection by a pane of glass they cannot break. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver makes the crowded, neon-lit city the very engine of Travis Bickle's isolation — "God's lonely man" rotting in the midst of millions; Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation finds two people lonely inside a luxury hotel in a foreign city, their connection precious precisely because it is so rare against the surrounding solitude; Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love presses two lonely neighbors close together and keeps them apart, the loneliness of longing in a crowded building. The setting is almost always social — the city, the hotel, the apartment block, the party — because the films understand that loneliness is sharpest where connection seems most available and is most withheld.

The cinema of loneliness has a distinct formal vocabulary, built to make isolation visible. The figure dwarfed by the urban frame; the separating glass and window; the long lens that compresses a person against an indifferent crowd; the silence and the held duration in which nothing connects; the voiceover that speaks only because there is no one to speak to. Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas opens on a man who has walked out of the desert having stopped speaking entirely, loneliness as a kind of disappearance; Spike Jonze's Her gives its lonely man an artificial intelligence to love because the human connections have all failed, the connected future revealed as the loneliest place yet. The films make solitude a visual and temporal experience — you feel the distance, the unbridgeable gap, the silence where a connection should be.

What makes loneliness such a durable and deepening subject is that it is the emotional signature of modern life itself. The conditions that define modernity — the city of strangers, the mobility that scatters families, the mediation of screens, the replacement of community by network — are precisely the conditions that produce loneliness, the experience of being more connected and more alone than humans have ever been. Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D. found it in a pensioner abandoned by a modernizing society sixty years before the smartphone; the films keep finding it because the loneliness keeps growing, the gap between connection's promise and its delivery widening with every new technology that was supposed to close it.

That is the cinema of loneliness's quiet, essential work: to make visible the most invisible of modern conditions, the ache that everyone feels and no one can quite show, the isolation that hides inside the crowd and the connection and the shared bed. These films do not offer to cure the loneliness — most of them are too honest for that — but they do something nearly as valuable: they witness it, render it, make it shareable for the length of a film, so that the loneliest experience becomes, in the dark of the cinema, briefly and paradoxically shared. To watch a great film about loneliness is to be, for two hours, less alone in it — which may be the deepest thing the movies can do.

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The line: Umberto D. → Taxi Driver → Paris, Texas → Wings of Desire → In the Mood for Love → Lost in Translation → Her

This line crosses:

• The Organism Made of Strangers — loneliness is the city's defining emotion, the isolation that hides inside proximity; the cinema of loneliness and the cinema of the city are the same diagnosis.
• The Cinema of the Near Miss — Wong Kar-wai's longing is loneliness in its most exquisite form, two people alone together, missing each other by minutes.

Read through: writing on alienation and modernity in film · critical work on the urban "lonely crowd" (after David Riesman).

A note on the argument: these films and their preoccupation with isolation are documented. The framing of loneliness as the specifically modern ache — sharpest in the crowd, the connected world as the loneliest place, the films' witness as a paradoxical sharing — is this essay's reading.