I Love It When A Plan Comes Together: A site for Film/Media Studies students

The Machinist is Brad Anderson's follow-up to the well-received Session 9 (2001). Session 9 is a story of psychological angst disguised as a ghost story; likewise, The Machinist is a story of guilt, obsession and emotional trauma disguised as something approaching a science-fiction film (complete with 1950s-style theremin-based music on the soundtrack).

In the film, Christian Bale plays Trevor Reznik, a machine-operator who hasn't slept for a year. Reznik suffers from insomnia and, when he begins to encounter a mysterious colleague named Ivan (John Sharian) and causes an accident in which his workmate Miller (Michael Ironside) loses his arm, Reznik begins to suspect that there is a conspiracy to drive him insane. Whether Reznik's paranoia has any basis or not, it causes him to distance himself from his work colleagues.

Reznik sees the prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) regularly. But he also becomes involved with Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), a coffee-shop waitress who has a small son named Nicholas (Matthew Romero). For Reznik, Marie and Nicholas remind him of his own relationship with his mother. Trying to ingratiate himself into family life, Reznik's efforts are to a large extent unsuccessful, and in the process he also alienates Stevie.

At the end of the movie, it is revealed that a year earlier, Reznik killed Marie's son in a hit-and-run accident, and his insomnia is a consequence of his repression of his guilt for Nicholas' death. Much of the film (Ivan; Reznik's encounters with Marie) have been part of Reznik's fantasy. The closing scenes see Reznik imprisoned for the death of Nicholas and finally finding sleep in the release of his repressed guilt.

The coverage of Christian Bale's weight loss (over 60 pounds) for the role of Trevor Reznik has overshadowed discussion of the film's themes. If the film has a central weakness, it is that these themes are not explored in a satisfactory amount of depth: the film's themes hinge on Reznik's guilt at the death of Nicholas. However, because this guilt is not revealed until the closing scenes of the movie, until the final reel the film's themes remain ambiguous, buried under the filmmakers' obsession with exploring Reznik's paranoia.

Much like the 'ghost story' in Session 9, the extent to which Reznik's paranoia has any foundation is ultimately an insignificant non-question, a classic piece of misdirection: whether Reznik's paranoia is 'fantasy' or 'reality' really has no significance next to the issue of his guilt. However, in Session 9 Anderson managed to pull off this misdirection successfully, without detracting from the 'real' issues at the heart of the film—Gordon's guilt at the murder of his family and the question of what causes violence ('I live in the weak and wounded'). But in Session 9 Anderson didn't allow the film's 'ghost story' to take as much hold of the narrative as he allows Reznik's paranoia to dominate The Machinist. Consequently, Anderson's attempt to misdirect his audience in The Machinist is less successful: whereas in Session 9, Gordon's guilt was seamlessly intertwined with the investigation of the 'ghost story' and the final revelation had a natural and seamless connection with what had gone before, in The Machinist Reznik's paranoia is not an integral part of the film's exploration of its central character's guilt. Consequently, in The Machinist the final revelation comes out of left-field, leaving the viewer feeling a little cheated. Ultimately, the film's ambiguity will alienate as many viewers as it will win over, but in hindsight the issues that the film confronts gain added significance.

The film is built on a series of repeated gestures or motifs, suggesting that the filmmakers are trying to convey either a sense of routine or a pattern of circularity to events. These repeated gestures (for example, the line 'If you were any thinner, you wouldn't exist') are sometimes acknowledged by Reznik, who puts them down as deja vu. Key among these repeated motifs is Reznik's insistent hand-washing, accompanied by his gazing at his own reflection. These gestures tie into the film's central theme of guilt: we first see Reznik washing his hands after dumping Ivan's body in the opening sequence, and at another point he repeats the same gesture after sex. Throughout the film, it is apparent that Reznik seeks cleansing, a washing away of his sins.

The film's other main preoccupation seems to be with depicting the alienation at the heart of industry and urban life: a telling low-angle shot in the opening sequence shows Reznik dwarfed by huge industrial chimney stacks, and during the scenes set in his workplace, Reznik is frequently filmed through machinery, suggesting a sense of entrapment in the routine day-to-day grind of existence. All of the characters are trapped within their lives and, to a large extent, their obsessions: each of the central characters (Reznik, Stevie, Miller, Marie) find their horizons limited—they all live in a prison of sorts.

Reznik's encounters with Marie and her son (whose death Reznik is responsible for) are played against the scenes depicting Reznik's isolation (in his apartment; at work) and scenes in which Reznik seems to deliberately alienate people who are trying to connect with him—for example, his outbursts in the latter half of the film directed at both Miller and Stevie. So throughout the film, there's an odd juxtaposition of Reznik's attempt to 'connect' with an idealised vision of family life (whose destruction he is responsible for) and his inability to 'connect' with people in his daily life.

In this context, there's also something extraordinarily poignant about Reznik's obsession with family life: he's a rogue male whose guilt about inadvertently destroying a family dominates every day of his life, no matter how much he has tried to suppress it; and he's a man who is unable to settle down, restless in his obsessive quest for something he can never attain. It's hard not to see this as symbolic, as representing something much larger: the central obsessions of modern masculinity—a guilt over its inability to find a place in the 'modern family' and an insecurity over the roles men play in society.


Ultimately, this is a film about how a man has created a prison for his mind. This prison has been created through his sense of guilt, but in the film it's inextricable connected to the landscape that Reznik inhabits—a cold, soulless industrial-urban complex. The prison, then, is the prison of modern life, built for us by our own insecurities and obsessions, and regulated by our conflicting desires for both belonging and self-destruction. The Machinist is a film about our failure to connect with other human beings, the self-imposed isolation many of us experience; it's a film that reminds us of the modernist author E. M. Forster's observation that in life, we struggle to 'only connect': '[o]nly connect! [....] Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, And human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die'.