The Working Class Goes Directly to Heaven, without Passing Go: Or, the Name of the Game Is Still Monopoly

Abstract

factory is a says a militant on the picketline in Elio Petri's La Classe Operaia Va in Paradiso (The Working Class Goes to Heaven), a film whose jarringly abrasive depiction of life in a factory reminds me a bit of Jonas Mekas's harrowing presentation of life in another sort of prison, a military one-The Brig. While full of humor-and therefore not nearly as unrelenting in its assault on the spectator as The Brig-The Working Class Goes to Heaven, like the Mekas film, effectively employs a dissonant orchestration of jerky hand-held camera movements, aggressive close-ups, a constant barrage of noise, and a histrionic acting style (full of violent hand gestures, sudden head jerks, and abrasive voices whose habitual mode of speech is the shouted expletive) in order to give the spectator a gut-level feel of the brutalizing system-in this case, industrial capitalismwhich, in a very real sense, imprisons the film's protagonists. And, in fact, Petri's factory-prison and Mekas's military-prison have much in common, for both impose their ironclad regimentation on human beings in the name of machine-like efficiency. And neither in the military nor in the factory are you allowed to question just where that machine-like efficiency leads. A machine, after all, doesn't ask questions. And if in the process of becoming as efficient as a machine, you become a little less human, well, as drill sergeants and shop foremen would say, tough shit! What is human nature anyway? Massa, the factory-worker (colorfully portrayed by veteran actor Gian-Maria Volonte) who is the chief protagonist of The Working Class Goes to Heaven, gives a bitter discourse on human nature in the film's first sequence. For him, man is thought of in crudely mechanical terms: You put in a little raw material called food; various machines in he body go to work on it; and the final product that comes out the other end is . . . shit! Man is a perfect little shit-factory. Pity there's no market for the stuff; we could all be capitalists. That's a cynical, dehumanizing attitude, to be sure; but, as the film brings home to us constantly, working conditions in a factory are overwhelmingly dehumanizing. And, as Petri emphasizes, the machine-patterns of factory life not only impose themselves on the worker physically -buffeting him relentlessly in the factory's frenetic rhythms and cadences of movement and noise-but also may impose themselves on him conceptually -channelling the worker's consciousness into very linear, mechanical models of thought which limit his ability to understand and transform his situation. In many ways, The Working Class Goes to Heaven is an extended analysis and dramatization of a situation which was only sketched, however pointedly and insightfully, by Godard in the assembly-line sequence of the Dziga Vertov Group's British Sounds. Exploring, like Godard, the effect of factory working conditions (particularly the constant barrage of machine-noise) on the consciousness of the worker, Petri has found a way to demonstrate dramatically-from the standpoint of the individual worker-what Godard suggested intellectually-through a provocative juxtaposition of various elements on the sound track. Already assailed by more than enough noise on the factory floor, the worker may simply tune out or even resent any attempt