The Organism Made of Strangers

The camera and the metropolis grew up together at the turn of the twentieth century, two new ways of experiencing a world too big and too fast for the older forms to hold. From the start cinema was drawn to the city as a subject worthy of awe and dread. Fritz Lang's Metropolis made it a literal machine, the city as a single apparatus that devours its workers; F.W. Murnau's Sunrise set the corrupting electric city against the innocent country; the "city symphony" tradition, which Godfrey Reggio inherited for Koyaanisqatsi, filmed the metropolis as pure rhythm, flow, and pattern, a vast organism pulsing with a life larger than any individual. The city was the image of modernity itself — overwhelming, mechanical, sublime, the place where the old human scale broke down.

By mid-century the city had become, above all, a place of loneliness — the great paradox the movies kept returning to: that you can be most alone surrounded by millions. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver made New York a hellish wilderness of neon and steam in which one man rots in total isolation; John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy found the same desolation; Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success made Manhattan a glittering moral sewer. The city as organism turns out to be an organism made of strangers — proximity without connection, density without community, a million lit windows behind each of which someone is alone. This is the modern condition the genre keeps diagnosing: that the place built to bring people together is the place they are most isolated.

And then the city becomes a way to film a people and a politics, the streets as the stage of who belongs and who does not. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing compresses a whole society's racial tensions into one block on one hot day, the city as a pressure cooker of difference; Woody Allen's Manhattan romances the city as a personal mythology; Ridley Scott's Blade Runner projects it forward into a rain-soaked, polyglot, vertical dystopia that became the default image of the future. The city, in these films, is not a backdrop but an argument — about who the modern world is for, about how the many can or cannot live together, about what kind of life the metropolis makes possible and what kind it forecloses.

That is why the city is one of cinema's deepest and most permanent subjects: it is the form modern human life actually takes, and so to film the city is to film us. Every era projects its sense of modern existence onto the metropolis — the machine age its fear of the apparatus, the post-war age its loneliness, our age its inequality and its dread of the future — and the city obliges, endlessly reconfigurable, always available as the image of whatever we currently feel about living together in numbers too large to comprehend. The city is the organism made of strangers, and the movies are the medium that grew up inside it, which is why they keep going back: to ask, through the streets and the towers and the lit windows, what it is to be one small life among millions, and whether that is a wonder or a wound.

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The line: Sunrise → Metropolis → The Naked City → Sweet Smell of Success → Midnight Cowboy → Taxi Driver → Do the Right Thing → Blade Runner

This line crosses:

• The Engineer of the Trap — Lang's Metropolis is the city as a single devouring machine, the founding image of the metropolis as a system that grinds the human down.
• The Camera That Takes a Side — Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing turns the city block into a political stage, the streets as the place where a society's divisions come to a head.

Read through: writing on the "city symphony" and urban cinema · David B. Clarke (ed.), The Cinematic City.

A note on the argument: the city's recurring role across these films is documented record. The framing of how a film imagines the city as how it imagines modern life — machine, loneliness, political stage — and the city as "an organism made of strangers" is this essay's reading.