The Importance Of Elmer

In his escape, Elmer is representative of a different kind of attitude towards the industrialisation of America. His is the side of hope and possibility – he has the freedom to leave the suffocating surveillance of the small town in a way that was not afforded so easily to the generations before him. He will become one of the many, a dot in the masses that are seen so disparagingly in Manhattan Transfer. Yet, the kind of surveillance Elmer is running away from continues to exist in the cities. Individualism may be erased, as we have seen demonstrated by Manhatta, but the paranoia surrounding surveillance and observation persists: journalists will still hunt for stories and the ever-present ‘they’ will be watching from on high, from towers and
Unlike Elmer, George’s departure from Winesburg is fuelled by ambition to succeed rather than a desire to blend in, and his parting is slower, less dramatic. Where Elmer escaped filled with rage at the village and everything it represented, George leaves with a kind of nostalgia for the place he grew up, a place he truly loves but cannot afford him the level of success in journalism he
Both Manhattan Transfer and Manhatta present a sweeping overview of an industrialised city, with growing commerce, skyscrapers piercing the skyline, and accessible and relatively quick mass transportation allowing the population to expand incredibly fast. The two differ in their approaches to the human residents of the city – Manhatta amalgamates the people of New York into a singular entity, just one more cog in the machine of the city, while Manhattan Transfer places much more significance on the individual, and on the individual’s response to industrialisation. The narrative voice of Manhattan Transfer, along with the voices of the characters, seem to overall be suspicious of the advancing city and all of its technology, its pillars to commercialism. Manhatta is far more celebratory of these facets of progress, focusing its own mechanical eye upon steamboats, ferries, cranes, towering windows, and columns of smoke, but almost entirely erasing the both the effect and the perspectives of the individual. The dichotomy between these two pieces is almost certainly in part an effect of their respective mediums; novels are concerned with humans, with the inner thoughts and feelings of, in this case, a large set of individuals living through a period of transition, while film, especially silent film, can step back from the micro level of the novel and examine the same place at essentially the same time in