Review: The Machinist (a film by Brad Anderson, 2004)

The two layers of story within the 2004 noir psychological drama The Machinist include 1) the industrial, technology driven setting and 2) the inner workings of the subconscious and conscious mind. Of course, there's more, but for this essay I'd like to focus on those two layers alone to draw out some of the film's striking commentary.

Trevor Reznik, the narrative's main character, is introduced as a very ill looking, gaunt, and troubled man who is overworked and mentally foggy. He works in a factory filled with steel and iron, wheels and gears, drills, hammers, and nails... very little light... and a lot of loud mechanical sounds... all of which do nothing to help his deteriorating mental or physical condition. While Trevor seems to just barely keep things in order at home, paying the bills just on time and attempting to read books such as Dostoyevsky's The Idiot and other works by Franz Kafka, something continuously irks him. He sees a man named Ivan at work... a man that no one else sees. He is unable to sleep. The only two people who mean anything to him are two women, a call girl named Stevie and a waitress named Maria. He goes back and forth between them trying to find meaning, solace, and comfort in his dreary, gloomy, and frail existence.

The industrial world portrayed in this film is harsh, misogynistic, brute, and uncompromising. When Trevor accidentally slices off his co-worker's arm by falling asleep while working a machine, everyone around him continues to work save for the man whose arm is ruined and a few other people. The situation is remedied quickly, the man forgives Trevor, and work continues as usual. All displays of Trevor's psychological trauma do nothing to motivate the co-workers to help him or find him help. All it does is make his workplace hostile towards him, pushing Trevor to the edge of sanity. Why doesn't anyone push the brakes on small-talk and the rest of the daily grind to intervene in Trevor's situation? Why doesn't anyone care? The film doesn't answer this question for the audience. That world *just is* it seems, and nothing and no one attempts to shake its foundation. And that's when Trevor cracks.

Trevor begins to find post-it notes all around his home with the hang-man game written on them... the first two words he discovers while figuring out the game are MOTHER and MILLER.

Mother... what could it mean? Perhaps in reference to the two women in Trevor's life, Stevie and Maria, part of the "game" is figuring out what role they fill. Stevie, the call girl, deeply cares about Trevor and yet can't seem to figure out that there is something extremely wrong with him. She mentions his thinning body almost as a joke and when his psychological issues come up (such as in the scene when Trevor cannot recognize his own face in a photograph) she can't seem to bring herself to do anything but scream and call him a psycho. Maybe she is just as troubled as he, unable to grasp what's wrong with him because she hasn't even been able to "see" and reflect on herself and her own sad life. But still, in tender moments, she cares deeply about him and showers him with kisses, hugs, and a care all her own.

Then there's Maria, a kind waitress who serves Trevor his coffee and pie at a local diner. They banter and make jokes, and one day the Maria mentions Mother's Day and her son. Trevor join them on a trip to a carnival and in an unlucky ride called Route 666 (filled with haunted house-like imagery as well as some horrifying slap-stick sexual scenes with puppets) Maria's son begins to seizure. Yet, all is forgiven and the two, Maria and Trevor, maintain their friendly relationship which soon grows a bit romantic.

The clocks keep ticking, time goes on. Strange things continue to happen to Trevor, including odd appearances of Ivan, the man no one else believes exists. He hangs over Trevor's consciousness like a dark storm threatening to take away his sanity for good. His menacing, sardonic smile mocks Trevor's every move.

Trevor begins to think people are messing with him, that some strange game is being played on him, that everyone's in on a joke he doesn't understand. When his own arm gets stuck within a gear at work he begins to believe someone did it out of revenge, spite, vengeance. But no real proof of that occurs.

What are these gears and wrenches that keep on going until the actual body gets pinched between them? Are gears and wrenches like the searching mind, the mind that continues to think and ruminate and think some more before finding itself within an actual physical body which it must care for? For that appears to be what the film is trying to get at... that the mind cannot escape the physical body, no matter how hard it tries.

The film divulges, at the end, what the matter actually is... in a flashback scene Trevor is shown as the driver of a car that accidentally kills Maria's son and where Trevor cannot bring himself to stop. In short, he is the perpetuator of a hit and run accident. And thus the final word of the hangman game is KILLER. With Ivan acting as conscience (known by this point in the story to be some kind of devilish guardian of Trevor's past self before the accident), Trevor turns himself in to police, finally able to get much needed sleep only in the confines of his prison cell.

The final questions The Machinist leaves us with might be obvious to some: can anyone escape guilt? Is guilt itself a feeling that rests in the conscious mind or rather something bodily, resting in a place like the gut, the heart, the nerves? Are the mind and body so different? The psychological questions are considerable as well: what happens to our conscious selves when we attempt to deny Reality, the Facts, the Actuality of events and the world we live in? If the breaking down of the mind begins to produce chimeras (like Ivan) can they be anything but a symbol of that which we tried to deny? Coming full circle within Trevor's story declares that no, in this case they are one and the same.