Alienation on Screen: What Marx Saw in Parasite and Metropolis
Karl Marx's theory of alienation, traced through four films — Metropolis, Modern Times, Parasite, and Severance — and what it says about work today.
Material and economic conditions are the primary engine of history and the building of societies.
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That claim sits at the center of Karl Marx’s philosophy, and one of its most durable offshoots is the idea of alienation: the process by which a productive system severs the worker from his own labor, from the object his hands make, and finally from himself. Marx and Friedrich Engels described a worker who no longer recognizes his own life in the thing he produces — the object becomes foreign, even hostile, because someone else owns it, prices it, and profits from it. Cinema and television have returned to this idea again and again, less as economic argument than as felt experience, because alienation is easier to show than to define. Four works, made across nearly a century, trace the same wound from different angles.
Parasite (2019)
Bong Joon-ho stages class as architecture. The Kim family’s semi-basement apartment and the Park family’s hillside house aren’t just settings; they’re a diagram of who gets air, light, and space, and who doesn’t. The film’s stairways and floods do the theoretical work a lecture would otherwise have to do: descent is not a metaphor here so much as a fact of plumbing. What makes the film’s account of alienation so exact is that the poor and the rich barely register each other as full people — the Parks treat the Kims’ competence as a kind of furniture, useful and interchangeable, and the Kims, in turn, have to perform an entirely different self just to be let into that house at all.
Metropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang’s silent epic externalizes the same split into pure image: a glittering pleasure garden above, and beneath it, a subterranean city where laborers move in unison to keep a machine’s clock hands aligned. The workers are shown almost literally fused to the gears — bodies bent to a rhythm they didn’t choose and can’t stop. Lang’s exaggeration is the point: decades before Parasite’s staircases, he already understood that alienation needed a vertical city to be seen at all.
Severance
The show pushes the idea to its logical extreme by making the separation literal. The “innie” who exists only at work has no access to a life, a memory, or a self outside the office; the “outie” who goes home at night has no memory of what was done in his name all day. Severance doesn’t just dramatize a worker estranged from the product of his labor — it removes his access to his own labor as an experience at all, which is Marx’s idea carried to its most unsettling conclusion: a man who cannot even alienate himself, because there is no continuous self left to do the alienating.
Modern Times (1936)
Chaplin got there first, and did it as comedy. The Tramp’s body, twitching to the rhythm of the conveyor belt long after he’s stepped off it, is one of cinema’s clearest jokes about what repetitive, unowned labor does to a person — it doesn’t just take his time, it rewires his nervous system. The gag is funny because it’s true: the machine doesn’t need to enslave the worker with chains when it can simply retrain his hands.
Line these four up and a pattern appears that has nothing to do with genre or decade. Whether the estrangement is vertical, mechanical, corporate, or neurological, each film locates the same injury: a person doing work that no longer feels like an extension of himself. Marx thought this was the defining condition of industrial life. A century of movies keeps agreeing with him, if only because the diagnosis is so easy to recognize from the inside looking out.
The single image that made Chaplin’s point without a word of dialogue is the moment the Tramp is literally pulled through the machine’s gears, his body carried along the assembly line like one more component to be processed. It’s staged as slapstick, but the joke only lands because the metaphor is exact: a system that treats a worker’s motion as an input has no real mechanism for treating the rest of him as anything but scrap.
It’s fair to push back on how cleanly this maps onto work now. Plenty of people would say remote and freelance arrangements have loosened the vertical alienation Lang and Chaplin were picturing, more autonomy over hours, less of a foreman standing over the machine. The counterargument is that the estrangement just went underground: a gig driver or delivery worker is still paced by an app’s algorithm rather than a human boss, evaluated by metrics they can’t see or contest, and the absence of a visible factory floor doesn’t mean the rhythm-setting has stopped, only that it’s harder to point a camera at.
Marx’s actual target was never the assembly line specifically, it was any arrangement where the terms of your labor are set somewhere you can’t see or influence. Measured against that standard, the four works aren’t describing four different problems separated by a century of technology. They’re describing the same problem finding a new place to hide each time the last one got too visible to ignore.
