Hugo post Kaitlin Scott

There are several themes in Hugo that I would like to discuss. One of the most interesting is the man/ machine divide. There are several instances of this in the film.

The automaton has a human shape, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that it takes a heart shaped key to make him work again. The heart is not only a vital human organ, but it is one that symbolically we associated with human compassion and love.

The station inspector has a leg brace, so in essence, he is part machine. This leg brace even stands in the way of his humanity. When he attempts to speak to the flower girl, his brace locks and prevents him. The brace is in the way of his love. He mentions in this moment that the brace is from a war injury. He says, “It will never heal,” and he turns to walk away from her. She replies that her brother died at Verdun, which was one of the deadliest battles of the war.

I think this also speaks to the larger idea that the First World War turned people into meaningless cogs in a much larger war machine. The death tolls were incomprehensible. The trench fighting conditions were dehumanizing. We also see this later in the film when Georges is forced to sell his film prints so that they can be melted down into chemicals. This is the suppression of art in support of the machines. Those chemicals are used to make shoe heels, which I supposed are the human equivalent of mechanical parts. In describing the war and how it ended movies which were a window into the world of dreams, Georges says, “The war came, and youth and hope were at an end.”

However, that is not to say that the film thinks of machinery negatively. I think quite the opposite is true. Machines can be the genesis of dreams. Georges makes his own cameras. Hugo finds redemption and the memory of his biological father, as well as a new father figure in Georges, by fixing the automaton. The station agent with his new leg brace is able to dance with the flower girl and mentions: “I’m all man.” He never would have said this before. Machinery and humanity are intertwined rather than being in opposition to one another.

Hugo finds comfort in machines: “I’d imagine the whole world was one big machine. Machines never come with any extra parts. They always come with the exact amount they need. So if the entire world is one big machine, I couldn’t be an extra part. I’d have to be here for some reason. You have to be here for some reason too.” This is the exact opposite of the war turning everyone into meaningless cogs. In Hugo’s mind, machines give purpose. Later when he is running away from the station inspector, he pleads that this is his only opportunity to “have a job.” Hugo doesn’t seem to be speaking about employment but rather a purpose. Hugo wants nothing more than to be a part in some larger machine.

The automaton functions a parallel to Hugo. Hugo even dreams that he has mechanical parts like the automaton. We can read the automaton as having been fathered by both Hugo’s father and Georges. Georges even says, “I put my heart and soul into him.”  He later uses pieces of the automaton to make his first camera. Surely, he has put his heart and soul into his movies as well.

Machines can be a way to find humanity.  This is especially true of the movies. Even before we find out that Papa Georges is Melies, there are subtle film references. Hugo views the world from the faces of various clocks. He is not unlike a projectionist or even a director viewing the world from behind a camera lens.

Movies are not only dreams, but they become a kind of reality. After Isabelle and Hugo see Harold Lloyd in Safety Last!, he climbs across a clock face to escape the inspector. This movie dream has become an inspiration for reality. Hugo dreams of a train derailment after The Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat. Later he nearly is killed by a train. Georges is said to be the first person who understood that “films could show us our dreams.” At the screening in his honor, he says, “Come dream with me.”

Hugo was made in 2011, and I don’t know what specifically would have made the story appealing at that time. It has all of the interesting visuals of that time but without any of the depressing realism. One of the most striking things about Hugo is how clean poverty and deformity are. Hugo is an orphan living in a train station, and yet his life is full of wonder even before we learn his back story. The station inspector’s leg brace looks like an interesting piece of machinery rather than a cumbersome injury. The film likely speaks to the same reasons that the Victorians are interesting to us. It is recognizable but also distinctly foreign and fantasized.

From what I understand, the movie is fairly true to Melies’ life. He made more than 1500 hundred films, however, and he was not married to the same women during his film career and later in life.

Much of his old celluloid was burned down, and he did later receive some recognition during his lifetime. Martin Scorsese directed this film, and I can’t help but wonder if he doesn’t think of himself as having shown us the things of our dreams in his own movies.