Urban Alienation

[MikeKardec]

There is a strange genre in fiction and art and maybe other areas, which I have never known the name of, or even if it has a name. My take on it is vague but I find it very intriguing.

Think classic Edward Hopper or George Tooker (do a google search if you don't know him!). Much of the work of Cornell Woolrich. Touches of the stranger Alfred Hitchcock movies. Some of Ray Bradbury. Fritz Leiber's The Sinful Ones ... where if someone acted in a manner far enough from the expected norm he became invisible to society and could move about unseen. There are resonances of expressionism. There are a lot of reflections of that mid century New York/London, everyone rides the subway to the big office and must dress the same and goes home to their box of an apartment at runs their dinner through the deflavorizing machine before dinner, sort of life.

The movie Dark City very consciously messes around in whatever this genre is. The first season of Mad Men does too ... especially the pilot.

I wish I had a better vocabulary in order to discuss it a bit better. I know there are a good deal more references I just can't think of them at the moment.

 

[Nobert]

I'd say the theme, at any rate, of urban alienation, goes back at least to the early 20th (late 19th?) century when people began flocking to the cities in significant numbers. I was looking for a drawing by John Sloan to illustrate my point (couldn't find it on the Goog), in which a young working girl stands alone in her tiny rented room, looking at a fancy dress that her modest salary must have been able to get her. Will she wear it someplace? Does she have any place to go, or someone to go with? We don't know. This was drawn during one of the first waves of young, single women entering the urban workforce as stenogs and such.

It also intertwines with another motif I see, going back further, the evils and temptations of city life. In Theckeray's The Virginians the heir to an American tobacco plantation goes to England and meets his aristocratic but impoverished relatives, then quickly gets sucked in to a life of all-night gambling sprees. Oliver Twist gets roped into Fagin's gang almost as soon as he sets foot in London, and W.C. Field's The Fatal Glass of Beer is a burlesque of the same basic story.

 

[herringbonekid]

it's basically the moment when the human being looks around themselves and sees the collective fantasy that we're sharing / have been sold, crumble away, and 'reality' intervenes in a moment of awareness (which is usually disturbing).

aside from Hopper, painters who have mined this territory include Walter Sickert (who's interior paintings pre-date yet bare much similarity to Hopper's), Raphael Soyer, and most of the German 'new objectivity' school... Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad.

in fiction: Sartre's 'Nausea', and more recently the work of Raymond Carver, and 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster.

most of it is from the 30s (i.e. a modern, urban form of alienation) but has its roots in Freud's 'The Uncanny' and the writings of the romantic / gothic authors: Hoffman, Poe, Shelley.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Not sure what you are driving at. Are you talking about the traditional artists' belittlement of the conventional?

 

[MikeKardec]

Not sure what you are driving at. Are you talking about the traditional artists' belittlement of the conventional?

I think if I really knew what I was driving at I wouldn't be asking. I thought I was seeing the edge of a theme or a pattern ... or a genre. I'm most interested in it in fiction but there really seemed to be a powerful expression of the same thing in art too.

Maybe a sense that cities had grown too big to be communities ... but really more that we were creating some sort of a new, un-worldly space in cities, where you could almost find yourself outside all of reality just by not fitting in. There are some suggestions up above I'm going to have to look into carefully. I might include Kafka too. I'm guessing that a lot of it started in post WWI Germany, the society went through so many changes and none of them were based on things I'd deem positive. Maybe it created a lot of people who woke up to find themselves outsiders.

It's great to have people weigh in with some stuff I hadn't thought of. Would the movie Charade fit this pattern ... I may have it confused with something else, something darker. I remember Charade being kind of funny.

 

[Stanley Doble]

I'm going with boredom or depression. Am I warm?

 

[sheeplady]

I think if you are looking at an early movie about the homogenization of humanity, the drudgery of work, and the tastelessness of life, one needs to look at Metropolis.

It has many similar elements which have been previously mentioned.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Or "The Crowd," which is the definitive American movie realization of this theme. Director King Vidor was heavily influenced by German Expressionism in general and Murnau in particular.