“In the whirlpool of modern life — The most difficult thing is to live alone”, declares an intertitle during the opening scene of Lonesome (1928), directed by Paul Fejos. And few understand urban loneliness better than the working-class New Yorker protagonists, Mary (Barbara Kent) and Jim (Glenn Tryton). Taking place during a single day in July, the film follows the pair — separately, and then together — as they wake up in their nearly identical boardinghouse rooms, rush off to the diner for a hurried breakfast, pile into the subway cheek by jowl, and clock in at eight o’clock sharp for their modern, repetitive jobs. He works as a machinist, operating a punch press; she is a telephone switchboard operator, connecting disembodied voices across the city, whose speakers show up as floating heads on screen. A roman numeral clock is imposed over these scenes, and the camera pans between their labors, as if the workplaces share a party wall. After work, a couple invite Jim on a river boat cruise, but he spots a pin affixed to the man’s lapel: “Two’s company. Three’s a crowd.” A pair of fawning couples likewise offer Mary a ride to Coney Island, but there is no space for the bachelorette, between their symmetrical canoodling, in the car. If the regimented clock rules over modern labor, heterosexual coupledom governs the social fabric of interwar New York. Jim and Mary go home, dejected, until the music from a live band, advertising tonight’s carnival, seeps into their respective rooms. “There’s nothing like the hurly-burly of a carnival to help recover from the stress of daily routine.”

At the beginning of Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud describes the ego as “sharply outlined and delimited” against the external world, but quickly caveats: “There is only one state of mind in which it fails to do this” — that state of mind is love. “At its height the state of being in love threatens to obliterate the boundaries between ego and object.” Lonesome has the expected scenes of urban anonymity — bustling traffic, faceless crowds, a disorienting rollercoaster that seems to be emblematic of topsy-turvy industrial life — but it also formally suggests that love is a way (perhaps the only way) for an individual to escape the increasingly impermeable walls of the self. Unlike sociologist George Simmel’s essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, which argues that “the participants in the metropolitan arena enforce a distance between each other that allows them to conduct their segmental and transitory affairs, and to preserve their unique inwardness”, Lonesome does not speculate as to the cause of urban social distance, only proffers a way for making the trap of modern life slightly more bearable: marriage.

One of the first “part-talkie” films, in which silent intertitles occasionally switch over to audible dialogue, Lonesome uses this new technology to craft an archipelago from the protagonists’ atomized island lives — a technology that only gets put into use after Jim and Mary silently meet amid a confetti-covered carnival crowd. They head to the nearby beach, where, amid hundreds of bathers in nearly identical swimwear, the soon-to-be lovers are suddenly thrust into an acoustic microcosm of their own, extracted from the immediate surroundings and spotlit against a black background: “You know you just can’t be happy in a hotel room. Especially when all your friends have homes and kiddies”, says Jim. Later, in a frenetic dance hall, the couple are once again lifted above the crowd, shown slow dancing alone against a color-tinted backdrop, a yellow crescent moon overhead. The problem of urban atomization hasn’t been solved; each individual’s cell, it turns out, has room for two.

The film’s climax drives home the theme. After getting separated at the carnival, knowing only each other's first names, Mary and Jim return to their sad rooms, dejected once again. They each put a record on the gramophone: Nick Lucas’ rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Always”, the song to which they danced. Suddenly, through the poorly soundproofed walls, Jim hears Mary’s speaker. He runs into the hall and throws open the door to the adjoining room. They have been neighbors all along. Eight years before Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Jim and Mary are offered a different fate than the Tramp and Ellen. Rather than escaping mechanized society, they couple off within its confines. Compared to the alternative — in a film that presents no other feasible alternatives to loneliness — the marriage plot looks pretty good.