A moment of flux – a chase, a capture, a wrong turning – and we’re somewhere new: a spacious interior, grey walls, fluorescent lights. Metal is poured, automated arms solder, as raw material progresses, step by step, towards commodification. No time to dwell though, as we’re soon hurled into the meshes of this elaborate mechanism. Now every streamlined section becomes an existential threat as sparks fly, bolts are welded, and ovens are heated. Duck, dodge; another close shave. The belt rolls on, the panic building as that final black box looms – the point of no return. Then a flurry, a conflagration and all’s quiet. Pause.

Rolling out comes a neatly packaged product. But wait… Some movement? Surely not!? The individual has escaped the jaws of the machine! We let out a sigh of relief. Cut to next scene…

So goes a scene repeated across cinema: from the milk bottling plant scene in The Borrowers (1998) and the pie machine sequence in Chicken Run (2001) to the car factory scene in Spielberg’s slick sci-fi Minority Report (2002). A scene which I’m naming Peril on the Production Line (POTPL). To clarify, POTPLs are not about factory workers, nor are they that broader ‘chamber of horrors’ narrative where characters proceed through a Dantean series of levels either to escape (Squid Game) or reach some mythical centre (Heart of Darkness). No, what’s important about the POTPL is that it exists apart from the primary plot. It’s this seeming arbitrariness, this baroque superfluity, that makes these scenes ripe for (over?) analysis. So, hop on, mind the belt-sander and gravy gun, as we dismantle the POTPL and travel towards its inner workings.

Perhaps the most obvious reason for these scenes’ existence is simply their dramatic appeal. In contrast to Marvel-esque action scenes where spatial and temporal geography are too often lost in a blur of increasingly elaborate, yet increasingly bland, CGI, POTPLs strip back an action sequence to Aristotelian principles where escalating action is contained in one place and plays out in close to real time, allowing us to focus in on and care about the characters on screen.

And yet, these scenes seem to be communicating more than simple thrills; indeed, they all seem to be dramatising the same theme: that of the plucky individual resisting systems of standardisation and rationalisation. Whether it’s a family of marginal peoples protecting their way of life from property development (The Borrowers); a police chief finding himself a victim of an infallible pre-crime detection mechanism (Minority Report); or the chickens fleeing the conversion of a family egg business into an automated pie factory (Chicken Run), all three find their central conflicts come to the fore on the factory floor as the characters are literally caught in a mechanism that’s trying to erase them.

The plight of the individual against totalitarising systems is of course a staple of cinema and literature of the twentieth century – from 1984 and The Trial to The Catcher in the Rye and The Graduate. It was summarised by Albert Finney in the British 1957 film Saturday Night, Sunday Morning where the young bicycle factory worker broods to himself:

“Don’t let the bastards grind you down [...] I’d like to see anybody try to grind me down. That’d be the day”

In 1982, this sentiment found its metaphor in the famous scene in Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall, where a marching procession of school children are shown being led through and ground out of a meat factory. POTPLs continue this visualisation, but heighten the drama as characters are depicted actively resisting and (eventually) succeeding over the pull of the factory and all it represents.

Such resistance is particularly apt in the case of Chicken Run made by the Bristol-based Aardman Animations whose films often champion the organic and the inefficient over malfunctioning and (sometimes) malevolent machines. Such thematic preoccupations can be seen mirrored in Aardman’s dogged embrace of the hands-on medium of stop-motion animation. This is a painstaking method of animation where models are moved manually one frame at a time (the first 24-minute Wallace and Gromit taking its creator Nick Park an incredible six years to complete). As Michael Frierson explains in Clay Animation, this kind of animation was largely pushed aside in the early twentieth century by 2D cel animation which was better suited to efficient “assembly-line production methods”. Furthermore, Aardman’s tales of idiosyncratic individuals surviving mechanised threats – from cyber-dogs to bronze age mining – can be seen as allegories of the studio’s own successful resistance against more ‘modern’, ‘rational’ modes of creation.

And so, POTPLs can be read as a grand staging of that twentieth-century fear of the individual – whether that be a frenetic Tom Cruise or a particularly expressive piece of plasticine – being homogenised by systems of social conformity. But does this cosmological conflict still ring true in the twenty-first century? On one level, the individual seems to have triumphed with culture and advertising permanently impelling us to ‘dance to our own tune’, ‘be our best selves’, become beautiful and empowered. Meanwhile, the decline of those overarching social institutions – the school, unions, the health service, even the neighbourhood – has opened up space for the individual to emerge as the most important social unit.

And yet, we’d do well to be sceptical about just how liberated this twenty-first century individual is, especially when the ripping away of social institutions and the atomisation of social life has left people more exposed and vulnerable to the pressures of the market. As the essayist Jia Tolentino explores in her dispatch from the frontline of late capitalism, Trick Mirror, the typical ‘successful’ woman in America today is now ultimately one who has learned to reproduce the lessons of the marketplace in every fibre of her being:

“Old requirements, instead of being overthrown, are rebranded. Beauty work is labelled “self-care” to make it sound progressive […] instead of being counselled by mid-century magazines to spend time and money trying to be more radiant for our husbands, we can now counsel one another to do all the same things but for ourselves.”

In this world, individuals no longer need to be compelled by hostile external forces – embodied by the schoolmaster, the foreman, the priest – to conform to oppressive, patriarchal, structures. Instead, individuals now conform voluntarily, even enthusiastically, as they try to navigate a market-driven world where their bodies, assets and credentials are permanently ranked and compared on social media. In such a climate, the market’s wants eventually becomes indistinguishable from one’s own: it’s important (if not mandatory) to try and be your ‘best self ’, but obviously that best self includes having a high-powered job, going to the gym in your spare time and keeping up with fashions. It’s unthinkable that your best self might include being fat, unemployed, and wearing the same t-shirt every day.

It ultimately seems that individuals today are more constrained, their bodies more disciplined, their time more accounted for, than the days when ‘the man’ was trying to control these things. Such nostalgic times at least had moments when, in leisure, the individual was released from the pressures of work and conformity. These moments of respite were also the times when alternative political futures could be imagined and people could come together to try and change the status quo. In contrast, there’s no such conceptual space when leisure time is time for ‘self-improvement’, socialising is reconceived as networking, and prospective partners are ranked on dating apps like stock options; when our entire lives move with unreflexive, mechanical precision in pursuit of attaining what Tolentino calls that “high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence” which we've internalised as our own ‘authentic’ dream.

So, it would seem that the POTPL scene perhaps doesn’t quite have the relevance today that it might have once had. Indeed, in revisiting these films, their worlds feel quaintly nostalgic; the Art-Deco-infused, 1950s stylings of The Borrowers; the family-farm business of Chicken Run; even the future world of Minority Report feels distinctly like an old film noir or Hitchcockian ‘man on the run’ film. They seem to play to the tensions of a different time, a time when the individual was at risk of being subsumed by a modernising world. Now, in a world where the individual is held above all else, the challenge is to find a new scene/myth/trope that shows that this idealised self might just be a trick mirror; a scene that shows that ‘dancing to your own tune’ might mean dancing straight back into the jaws of the factory after all.

Fred Warren is a writer and filmmaker. He spent university immersed in the field of post-humanities, though some think he should have spent more time thinking about post-uni life than post-human life.