"In this hell, on this planet, full of hospitals, asylums, cemeteries, factories, barracks and buses, the brain slowly leaves us. It goes on strike.”
Lulù Massa (Gian Maria Volonté ) might tell himself he’s at the psychiatric ward to meet an old coworker. But he’s really there to measure himself against Militina (Salvo Randone), to compare his fraying sanity with an officially sanctioned mental health patient. The conversation, though, doesn’t go to plan, with Militina calmly batting away whatever convictions he’s still left with. “Would you like to know what we produced at the factory?” the older man asks. “This I know,” Lulù says—but he can’t come up with much more than “I make pieces.” Their conversation ends with Militina getting up to leave as though he’s the visitor and Lulù the patient. As he walks away, he mutters “Strike, strike, strike…”
The Lulù we meet at the start of The Working Class Goes to Heaven is the last person to go on strike. He’s an assembly line machinist who’s been working in the same factory since he was 15. Sixteen years later, he remains an enthusiastic cog in the machine. His work offers him a measure of control that he lacks in other aspects of life. His wife left him for another man, taking their son with her. He lives with a hairdresser, Lidia (Mariangela Melato), and her young son in a cramped apartment. He can’t perform sexually with her, so he transfers his lust to his work. “One piece, one ass,” he chants as he ruts away at his machine.
Elio Petri’s film released in 1971, during the “years of lead”, a time of great social and political upheaval in Italy, with the militant left and workers movements brutally suppressed by the state. Lulù’s workplace reflects the larger turmoil: students demand worker rights just beyond the factory gates, union members agitate inside, everyone’s on edge. Lulù is contemptuous of both the unions and strikers until, one day, his hand is caught in the machine and he loses a finger.
When Lulù returns to work, he’s a prize catch for the different agitating factions, and a ticking bomb. Every incident brings him closer to the edge—a quality control officer’s needling during work, a psychiatric test on the factory premises, a dust-up with a student leader as he leaves. It comes to a boil during a meeting of the workers. To the irritation of the union pushing for better conditions, Lulù aligns with the strikers. “I am a machine,” he sputters, addressing the gathering. “I am a pulley, I am a bolt, a screw, I am a drive belt, I am a pump. But for me, the pump is broken, and there’s no way to fix it.”
Volonté, already at half-boil when the film begins, drives himself into overwhelming furies as the moment of insurrection nears. This was a subject close to his heart. In 1971, he was arrested along with striking workers. He was a member of the Italian Communist Party, which created frequent roadblocks for his career (it would’ve been considerably tougher had he not become an international star playing the villain in the first two Dollars movies by Sergio Leone). Petri too was a former Party member; on a more personal level, his father was a metalworker. In a 1971 interview, he offers a humanist, Marxist view of cinema. “People, during the time they spend working, are alienated from themselves… Their consciousness, their lives, are given to someone else… In cinema, what are people looking for? They are looking for a kind of compensation for the lives that are taken from them.”
The Working Class Goes to Heaven, which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival along with Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair, is deeply sympathetic to blue-collar workers stuck in capitalist production hell, Yet, it’s hardly a straightforward Marxist tract about the persecution of the common man. Lulù is a useful idiot, first for the management, then for the unions, and eventually he finds himself estranged from everyone. He’s a loudmouth and a brute towards the women in his life, yet also has moments of tenderness and insight. The “left” is a patchwork of competing interests—the ones who push hardest for militant reactions are upper-class students, with little skin in the game, while the working-class union members know the workers can’t afford to go on strike. The film feels like the inside of a machine, with Luigi Kuveiller’s camera up among the pistons and levers and effusions, and Ennio Morricone’s score filled with mechanical clinks and whirrs.
As I was watching the film earlier the week, the protests at Jantar Mantar in Delhi were nearing boiling point. There’s a world of difference between the Italy of the film and the India of today, but some things don’t change. Organic protests are messy and unpredictable, whether it’s for worker rights or education. We’ve seen this over the past few months with the rise of Cockroach Janta Party, then with Sonam Wangchuk’s fast. There’s been scepticism at every step and heated debate between parties who are ostensibly on the same side, yet it’s triggered a grassroots protest on a scale not seen in Delhi since Shaheen Bagh and CAA-NRC protests. “It’s others who decide when you’ve gone mad,” Militina tells Lulù . But the decision to get mad belongs to you alone, and it feels like a lot of people exercised that right this week.
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