The Fate of the Individual in the Machine Age: Film and Modernity in The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and Hugo (2011)

The Fate of the Individual in the Machine Age: Film and Modernity in The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and Hugo (2011)

In this article, I argue that Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) and its adaptation, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011), ponder upon how one can retain one’s autonomy in a modern world increasingly associated with mechanization and standardization. Hugo Cabret and Hugo follow a typical bildung structure, charting the orphan Hugo’s incorporation into society via self-determination and effort. Both novel and film adaptation suggest that the tension between individual versus machine—or rather, a technological society that treats people as interchangeable parts, or cogs in a vast social machine—is not simply represented but also (re)produced by the film medium itself. That is, Hugo Cabret and Hugo illustrate how the antinomy between individual and machinic society in the modern age is replicated in the medium-specificity of film, i.e. the tension between filmic spectacle and film narrative.