Chicken Run & Marxism ~ University Essay
Ba2a Film Theory Essay
To what extent is ‘Chicken Run’ (2000) a successful critique of capitalism and allegory of Marxist Theory of Oppression?
“You know what the problem is? The fences aren't just round the farm. They're up here, in your heads.” (Chicken Run, Nick Park & Peter Lord, 2000)
This perception-shattering declaration from the revolutionary chicken, Ginger (Julia Sawalha), echoes Karl Marx’s (1844, p.30) concept of alienation, that “The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself” and through menial, forced labour a worker degrades mentally into, effectively, a tool, unable to recognise their own potential. This is one of the ways that ‘Chicken Run’ (2000) references and ultimately allegorises a proletariat struggle against an oppressive bourgeoisie, and in doing so critiques contemporary consumerist and capitalist society. However, while many elements of the text parallel core concepts of traditional Marxist ideology, the extent and the accuracy to which it does so is potentially undermined by an unrealistic depiction of the workers’ struggle, suggesting the film’s inability to avoid being anything more than a product of the same oppressive capitalist reality.
Though it may be that a U-rated (IMDB, 2019), children's film starring anthropomorphised chickens can be forgiven for its potentially unnuanced and simplified portrayal of complex ideologies, it is not to be forgotten that one of the greatest explorations and critiques of capitalism and communism, George Orwell's ‘Animal Farm’, tackles the subject through a similar microcosm. Inspired by the latter, we shall continue with the mindset that all art is equal, and can be judged accordingly.
In his book ‘The Animated Bestiary : Animals, Cartoons, and Culture’, Paul Wells (2009, pp.164-165) testifies for directors Nick Park and Peter Lord’s deliberate critical intention, commenting that their “satire is rooted in the politics of supply and demand within modern corporate culture” and “as much concerned by its ideas and its ethical stance as it is its jokes”. With established intent to comment on areas that Marxism covers, such as the ‘politics of supply’ which ties in to Marx’s description of the capital need “to create value and surplus-value” via “the means of production” (1867, c.10), it would mean that any comparisons noted between ‘Chicken Run’ and the concepts of traditional Marxism would be more than mere coincidence. If we revisit Marx’s aforementioned quote regarding the alienation of the worker, we can start to draw even closer links between a Marxist understanding of self-perception and the filmmakers intent.
Marx’s arguments about the alienation of the worker - firstly from “his product”, which in turn takes on a value of its own (separate from him) - suggest this degrades the worker, as what was once part of him is now controlled, making the capitalist controlling the product more dominant, while the worker actively degrades themselves by producing products they don’t have dominion over. This is a clear parallel not only to ‘Chicken Run’ but the egg industry overall, which is based on the principle that taking the eggs (the product) stimulates more to be laid (Blair, 2012), so giving the product value over the worker. The chickens have no control over the fruits of their labour, like Marx’s worker, and this ultimately leads to the worker having no personal need of or fulfilment from their work; they are instead coerced into being mechanic for someone else's benefit: “the worker's activity [is] not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self.” (Marx, 1844). The worker becomes alienated from themselves to the point that they can no longer freely understand or visualise their potential, creating a docile workforce (Graff, accessed 2019). This concept of self perception acting to oppress and sedate the worker is thematic in what Brian Sibley (2000, as quoted in Wells, 2009, p.164) noted as an apparent source of inspiration for the directors, the fable of “The Golden Eagle”, which chronicles an eagle’s egg that was mistaken for a chicken’s, and so the eagle grew up believing themselves to be a chicken. This belief was so solid that when it one day saw an eagle flying, it thought itself unable to fly and would not try to. This is a clear link between traditional Marxist concepts of the worker’s self-identity being part of their oppression, and the directors’ informed decision to include this as part of the chickens’ subjugation: “The fences ... They're up here, in your heads.”
However, a more neo-Marxist understanding of the contemporary society in which ‘Chicken Run’ was made and consumed, such as Savoj Zizek’s, would argue that this is too simplistic a view for more modern Marxist critical theory. It is not a case of reality being obscured by ideology, “but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself” claims Zizek (1989, p.33). More importantly, whereas Marx said “They don't know what they are doing, but they are nonetheless doing it” (1867, as quoted by Zizek, 2012), Zizek spans this to “I know very well what I am doing, but I'm still nonetheless doing it”. This more cynical view of ideology is at odds with Chicken Run’s approach that all one needs to be free from the mask of ideology is to become aware and understand that they were blinded; if only the eagle knew it was an eagle, if only the chickens believed they could fly. This is one way in which Chicken Run’s oversimplified view of ideological conditioning restricts its success as a contemporary commentary of the ways a capitalist society innately sedates the masses.
Nonetheless, the film does encode several other strong links with Marxist Theory. Essentially the entire premise and conflict in the film illustrates the fundamental concept of Marxism: the struggle between the means-of-production-owning ‘Bourgeoisie’ (typically factory, land and business owners) and the working masses of the ‘Proletariat’, who lack the access to the means of production, and only have their ability to produce to survive, making them exploitable (Ilegbinosa, 2012, p.3). The Tweedys epitomise the profit-hungry Bourgeoisie, bleeding their workforce dry. The enormous power disparity between humans and animals acts as a metaphor for how Marxists understand society to be, and where it is headed. Just as the ‘worker’ is degraded through alienation from his product back to his animal function, “what is human becomes animal” (Marx, 1844), the chicken's function is only to produce and thereby survive. Chicken Run brutally illustrates the fundamental dynamic between the profiting few and the working masses, fed only in exchange for eggs, and when they can produce no more, like Edwina, they are killed as they have no other value. This reflects the reality that Marx saw of the working class struggle, that of a paradigm the worker is forced to subscribe to or ultimately perish. As Ginger despairs: “So laying eggs all your life and then getting plucked, stuffed, and roasted is good enough for you, is it?” to which an indoctrinated Babs replies, “It's a livin’”. The idea that while a worker works so hard just to survive, he has no time, energy or resources to improve his situation is also reflected by the choice the chickens must make to sacrifice trying to escape or their work, when Babs forgets to lay eggs when they were busy trying to learn to fly).
Chicken Run goes further still, building upon the well-established allegorical relationship between a farmer and his exploited stock. Mrs Tweedy (Miranda Richardson) is the archetypal illustration that a capitalist is the capital personified (Marx, 1867, c.10). Her constant, all-encompassing mission to be “poor no longer” (Chicken Run, 2000), embodies the concept that “capital is dead labour”, and vampirically only lives by consuming labour, and the more it lives “the more labour it sucks”. Mrs Tweedy’s self-destructive lust for profit ultimately leads her to order: “Get the chickens… All of them.” The workers being fed directly to machines is the ultimate act of exploiting the masses to the point where they have not just been stripped of the objects they make, they are now only valuable as objects themselves. This imagery draws parallels to another allegorical Marxist text, Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’ (1927), as the main character Freder hallucinates about workers being fed into a machine he sees as the Canaanite God, Moloch (en.wikipedia.org, 2019). Again Chicken Run reflects these concepts and antecedent imagery with a more literal, plasticine simplicity.
As for machines, Marx called them “the weapon employed by the capitalist to quell the revolt of specialized labour.” (1847, p.262). The Chicken Pie Machine in the film not only allows Mrs Tweedy greater ability to exploit and consume from her oppressed workforce, but also creates greater hierarchal separation between Mrs Tweedy and her husband, who in her eyes is perhaps closer to the proletariat despite being a farmer, his ancestral generations of farmers regarded as “poor, worthless, nothing.” (Chicken Run, 2000). For the entire film she is focused on money, ‘capital’, and is fixated on whatever means to get it, while Mr Tweedy (Tony Haygarth) though still apparently being sided with the resource-holding elite, at least perceives the chickens as an intelligent force that must be confronted: “they're organised, I know it”. Mrs Tweedy responds to this with a total disregard for the chickens as anything more than tools; the only person she holds in lower regard being her husband, as “Apart from [him], they're the most stupid creatures on the planet”. This shows a nuanced and complex portrayal of what could be interpreted as different stages in the advancement of capitalism and autocracy by the bourgeoisie. While Mr Tweedy has power over the chickens, he fears them, to the extent he is constantly paranoid that “they're up to something”, whereas Mrs Tweedy's perception is much further along what Marx regarded as the process of alienation through commodity fetishism (Felluga, 2019), and regards them as even less than tools to be exploited. The separation only grows stronger between the Tweedys as, by purchasing the pie machine, Mrs Tweedy in effect seizes new means for production, monopolising the production of the farm away from the traditional egg farming.
Marian Quigley further emphasises the importance of presentations of machinery and their connotations as a reflection of the creators encoding views on capitalism and an increasingly advanced industrial age; The Pie machine’s “automated sleekness … symbolizing entrapment and, ultimately, death” (Quigley, 2007, p.37), denotes the authors negative perspective on an increasingly efficient means of production in today's society, and Mrs Tweedy’s fate of becoming stuffed in the machine and causing it to blow up her farm is a commentary on how the greed of the bourgeoisie will be their downfall, just as Marx prophesied the “communist revolution” (Marx & Engels, 1848). While the rough crudely-made, plane produced by the workers is a symbol of “freedom”, their coming together to throw off the metaphorical ‘chains’ of flightlessness. In this area the text is successful in relating the Marxist understanding of class struggle, as well as echoing its sentiments through commentary on capitalist society.
The most obvious connection the film makes on the topic of the dulling and misguiding of the masses is with chicken feed. This can be seen as the literal consumption of short term pleasures by the chickens, in a similar way that Marx declared religion to be “the opium of the people” (1843). This is most prominent in the scene where during a roll call, instead of killing Babs for her lack of eggs, she is measured and deemed the target size for the other chickens to be fattened up to. Though this is not the normal order of things, the moment grain is placed before them the chickens enter a feeding frenzy, forgetting any idea that anything might be out of the ordinary. It is also interesting in this scene that while she is being measured, Babs appears to pray, suggesting the notion that these chickens recognise religion to some degree, which arguably makes the reference in this scene to the chickens being distracted and sedated from their worsening situation more poignant.
Only Ginger is suspicious and speaks up about it, yet she is quickly stopped from trying to inform everyone by Rocky. Throughout this section of the film, Rocky is misleading the rest of the chickens into believing he’s teaching them to fly. Considering Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural Hegemony, “that consent to the rule of the dominant group is achieved by the spread of ideologies” by social institutions such as the Church, schools and media (Cole, 2017), these make up what Marx described as the ‘superstructure’ which is conditioned and sustained by the ‘base’ (the means of production, employers and employees) and in turn the ‘base’ is moulded by the superstructure (ipfs.io, 2019) - these two realms maintain each other and the socio-economic status quo of a society. With this in mind, we can view Rocky (Mel Gibson) as a personification of the media, in particular the ideologically saturated media of America. Rocky embodies the allure of mass media, hailing from the circus, a prime example of mass entertainment, which by the turn of the 20th century was ‘established and popular form of family entertainment” that spread to reach not just the masses but was even enjoyed by royalty (NFCA, 2019), and effecting a charming American, (Hollywood) star persona to which most of the hens quickly fall victim, swooning over the ‘lone free-ranger’. In the hope that his knowledge on flying can set them free, Rocky is immediately accepted as a figure of authority and listened to largely without question, much like modern media or even religion. In classical Marxism, the mass media is a “means of production”: it serves to normalise and promote the ideology of those who control it, establishing this as the dominant ideology despite it benefiting the few not the many (Chandler, 2014). Gramsci developed his concept of hegemony to explain why the revolution that Marx predicted inevitably never happened, and that ideology perpetuated and bred into the masses by institutions was a major factor in the proletariats inability to rise up (Cole, 2017). In ‘Chicken Run’, Rocky’s continued promulgation of the belief, amongst the hens, that he can fly, a credential bestowed by the circus poster which promotes him as “The Flying Rooster”, can be seen as a parallel to how media-fed ideology represses revolution. As he misleads them, Rocky distracts them from planning legitimate means of escape by reinforcing the fallacy they can fly. This innate belief comes from information supplied to them by the human, ‘bourgeois’, media propaganda that is the circus poster; and regardless of Rocky’s selfish rather than malicious intent, he is still a mouthpiece for this ideology. Even his opening speech before beginning ‘flying’ training - ‘We have to work as a team… which means you do everything I tell you” (Chicken Run, 2000), is suspiciously reminiscent of the oxymoronic propaganda of the pigs in ‘Animal Farm’ that, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” (Orwell, 1945). It is only when Rocky leaves that real progress is made towards the revolution, and when he does come back he does so a changed chicken, this time casting aside his previous self-preservational motives for the good of the chickens. Assuming still that Rocky represents mass media culture, the circus being able to be enjoyed and consumed by various classes, another comparison can be drawn with the concepts of higher and lower arts. “Taste is a deeply ideological category: it functions as a marker of ‘class’“ (Storey, 2009), which, if the chickens are consuming this more mass-market, imported American content, strengthens the decoding that they are a representation of the working class. Further comparisons to the separation between the chickens and the elitist farmers can be drawn from their music ‘tastes’ in the film. In one scene, the chickens are shown to be dancing to Jazz/popular music broadcast via a radio, which is so easily consumable to them they start dancing almost involuntarily - “Whats Happening?” (Bunty, Chicken Run, 2000). In contrast, during a rare glimpse inside the Tweedys’ home, they are listening to ‘Ave Maria’, a more classical opera, a higher class, elitist form of media due to the money often required to consume it, reflecting their role as representations of the upper, controlling class.
Despite these many ties to Marxist theory and concepts supporting ‘Chicken Runs’ allegorical nature, ultimately it does not deliver on Marx’s vision of a proletariat revolution. Marx saw the rising up of the working classes and communism as inevitable, as there would come a point when the economic exploitation of the workers grew too much (Cole, 2017). With Ginger’s rebellion-rousing: “Attack!”, we do see the chickens successfully revolt, using physical violence to overthrow their oppressor, and while the chickens do achieve their goal, attacking the Tweedy's, destroying the farm and escaping, this is where the narrative diverges from completing its allegory of the success of the working class as imagined by Marx, who saw communism as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx, 1844), with the masses seizing control of the ‘means of production’ that have been used to exploit them for generations. Alas, the chickens do not seize the means of production. Though they may steal Mr Tweedy's tools to help facilitate their escape and live happily-ever-after in an avian utopia, this is not in line with our understanding of the parallels and where a Marxist reading might thus far have suggested they should be heading. If we recognise the Tweedy’s farm as a representation of the capitalist system that we are currently enslaved to, the chickens do not fulfil the prophetic overhaul to achieve a socialist society, but rather escape from the system altogether. This isn't an option recognised by Marxism, the worker no matter how hard he may try can not outrun the system that oppresses him, only when they unite can they displace and seize back the means of production from the bourgeoisie. Ginger’s talk of a “better place” and “cool, green grass” is reminiscent of Animal Farm’s Moses’ “Sugarcandy Mountain” (Orwell, 1945) heavenly propaganda, yet in this text it’s shown to be more than just idealistic dreaming. The chickens do not take control of the farm, they flee to a utopian “chiken sanctuary” (Chicken Run, 2000), which with the etymology of ‘utopia’ in mind (“ou-topos meaning 'no place' or 'nowhere'”), further condemns this ending as simplistic and naively idealistic through a Marxist lens: You can not escape capitalism, only overcome it.
Ultimately, perhaps this is to be expected from a film that is part of an intrinsically profit-based, elitist capitalist industry, itself with a budget of $45,000,000. Despite the producers best attempts to distance themselves from invasive corporate influence, avoiding collaboration with the likes of Disney in an attempt to retain more creative control (Quigley, 2007), it seems they were not fully able to escape the ideological influences from contemporary society. Just as Gramsci’s ‘intellectuals’ see themselves as observing society, they themselves are actually key proponents in reinforcing hegemonic ideology. To further judge whether this text can be seen as Marxist we have to consider Brecht’s apophthegm that “Lenin did not just say different things from Bismarck, he also said them differently.” (as quoted by Fairfax, 2017), and how successful Marxist texts must adapt to separate themselves from bourgeois cinema. Alas, ‘Chickens Run’s emphasis on homage - obvious inspirations being ‘The Great Escape’ (1963) and Stalag 17 (1953) - and over-simplified binary representation of good vs bad, to appeal to its target audience, mean that, though essentially well-intended, and with some strongly portrayed parallels to Marxist theory, “Chicken Run” cannot fully evade its innately capitalist roots to show a true fulfillment of the proletariat struggle against the bourgeoisie. With the parallels and representations we have identified in mind, It would seem that Mr Tweedy was right, that no matter how hard one tries: “No chicken escapes from Tweedy’s farm.”
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