The industry of running away from itself... If you can see, this film is tougher than any modern exposé opens our eyes to us now. Through him, we are given the chance to identify the entire constantly multiplying garbage dump that burys us, and which in this film is almost absent, but there are only its very first small heaps.
A movie from 1960. From a poor, then industrial, area of England. From a time when the horror of human prisoners of existence was evident, when it had not yet been completely swamped by the deceptions of the planetary industry of illusions and forgetfulness. It was the last few years before the industry finally devoured people.
1960. The worker goes to the factory. A worker stands at the machine. The worker makes the details. Every day except Sunday. It's the same every day. Every day it doesn’t matter what or for what – for baby carriages, machine guns that will be sold to mercenaries in the former colonies, or for the same machines that will make the same parts.
Same moves for money. To eat and live another week. To cover the nudity. To pay the rent. It was like a hundred years ago.
As a hundred years before, it is good if the money remains on the “fashionable” so that it is easier to attract young females, and it is imperative that the money is left for oblivion – in the evening to muffle the muddy of life with beer, and on the night before the so-coveted weekend – to drink until you lose consciousness. Because if you don't, you won't survive this weekend, because if you don't, you're going to have to live all day in the horror of knowing that there's another week ahead of you. There's another one. And more. And more.
The horror of clear consciousness. A clear consciousness of the horror of the meaningless lives of your parents who have already lived the same life. The horror of a clear consciousness that you are going the same way and there is no other way.
And so can be born "self-consciousness" of the worker - someone who had the strength not to drown himself with alcohol at least for a while. Thus was born the proletariat in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — that amazing force in the history of mankind, which was able at least a few decades to force the existence of whole countries in the pursuit of self-consciousness — in the understanding of what is done and how, what and how man does, and not in the dense fumes of forgetting reason and the desires of the flesh.
The self-consciousness of the worker may be born and turn the world around, or may be suffocated, drowning in the most sucking swamp of substitution for humanity that ever existed before.
The film is good for the fact that it is so loud silence of all its inhabitants about their existence in prison. In the stone cages of cramped houses, in the stone streets of a petrified city, devouring everything and everyone around with its stones.
And a hundred and many more years before that, a human could be saved in two-handed tools (in the slave-workers who produce everything and produce the next order of life) only in very, very brief encounters with their fellows - in the experience of the warmth of sympathy and empathy - in the joy of being together.
The human was saved in the warmth of the family, in the warmth of coexistence with a friend (when it does not matter at all what you do together - you walk around the city, sit on the bank of the canal with sticks, kill time by playing paper cards - the main thing is all this together), in the warmth of love (even if love there is only a light, and the ball of forgetting lust rules).
And then the industry of illusion and forgetting began to take people more and more into circulation.
Workers – those who by the very experience of their daily functioning were constantly pregnant with the birth of self-awareness that it is impossible to live like this, that there are so many of us, that we are all there, that if we only talk as people and we all together, all at once can break this fucking order, that we were all caught in a squirrel wheel ... – the workers became more and more.
And this ever-increasing force could either conquer one powerful stream and make life quite, quite another, or it could flow in streams through many grooves, twist to someone else's advantage and forget itself in the eternal swamp.
The restless power of humanity always attracts parasites - effective managers who are ready to let everything to their advantage, to assert themselves over as many others as possible; they sense any man-made for which other people are ready to give themselves - their time and energy; they only exist by drawing out other people's time and energy and they very much need more and more effective tools for this.
Half a century before the film, humanity gave birth to cinema—a way of re-existing together—opening ourselves to us—a way that can reveal us both for the way up and a way of lulling us down into oblivion.
Before that, there were infrequent fairs, shelves, circuses, theaters – there too, you could waste the “excess” of your consciousness, but it was all very bad for a very weak initially man or under the influence of very large portions of intoxicating substances.
Things got more fun from the movies. Now, at least every evening you could hide in illusions - to forget yourself.
And by the middle of the twentieth century, everything became even more fun - television went to the people.
Only a few people could forget “individually” – diving into fiction – tabloid novels, daily newspapers with gossip from around the world – all this required an effort to harness their own fantasies with printed symbol systems. Now humanity has confidently grown into chairs and sofas - efforts to take into themselves seen by the eyes of other people's lives and live their lives as their own, for a person is not required - we are originally such - we were created to be together - of course, ideally involved in contact should be all the senses, but vision, as you know, "90%" is enough.
The father of the main character is already lucky - he has a TV box, other inhabitants of stone houses passionately dream about it. And it's not a joke. Everyone immediately knew it was a salvation. Salvation from oneself is to forget oneself. And others very quickly realized that this method perfectly twists the spiral of consumption of victims.
Let's look around. The ways of forgetting ourselves have grown to scales never before imaginable—they have now closed our horizons. . .