People power: music, film, books and more about the madness and wisdom of crowds
No one does it quite like Punchdrunk. In this immense, immersive company’s hands, a crowd is entirely malleable. With the audience anonymised by masks, we can be anything they want us to be. Its current production, The Burnt City, allows us to wander around the fall of Troy, bustled together and split apart as the evening goes on. The event is less about the story and more about the scenery and our exhilarating freedom to roam within it, being at once invisible and a central part of the performance. Inviting endless curiosity in its open-world settings, Punchdrunk has set the standard for how to manage a crowd. Kate
Film
The cinema was born out of the crowd: masses of people seeing a specific drama on a scale not imagined before. Charlie Chaplin was himself a beneficiary of the mass production of celebrity. In Modern Times, he is walking on the streets and notices a truck with a flag stuck to the planks of timber poking out of its back (a safety precaution to prevent collision). The flag falls off. Charlie picks it up and runs along behind, waving it, trying to attract the driver’s attention. Then a crowd of communist demonstrators turn the corner and happen to march up behind him, and to the cops it looks as if Charlie is the flag-waving rabble-rousing leader. He is arrested: his personal intentions were irrelevant in the wider stream of history. Charlie thought he was acting as an individual and got caught up in the crowd. Peter Bradshaw
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Book
There are plenty of wonderful crowd scenes in the novels of Charles Dickens, but in Barnaby Rudge he really lets loose, spending page after ragingand-roaring page describing the chaos of the anti-papist Gordon riots. Coincidentally, this novel was published in the same year (1841) as Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds and it also helped set the tone for future thinking about seething masses of humanity. The “outrages of the mob”, he writes,
are like those of a “mad monster”, “more terrible when roused” than the ocean, “more unreasonable … more cruel”. It is all frighteningly familiar, especially when Dickens shows us the demagogues and manipulators whose false accusations drive the crowds to a frenzied attack on pthe Houses of Parliament. It can feel as if he’s describing the era of Brexit and Trump as much as the events of 1780. Sam Jordison
Art
Three’s a crowd, they say. In Christ Mocked by Hieronymus Bosch, four bullying tormentors crowd a passive, helpless innocent. They swarm him as he ignores their japes and cruelties, get in his face, enclose him, in a claustrophobic image of other people as a mob of heartless monsters. You get the feeling this is how Bosch, consumed by visions of hell and fantasies of paradise, saw the neighbours who surrounded him in the Dutch town where he lived. To his vulnerable and isolated imagination, others look like an inhuman crowd. He anticipates the nightmare crowds of Munch and Poe in this medieval and yet uneasily modern painting.
Music
If HBO’s Euphoria has you believing that all Gen Z-ers love to party, Alessia Cara’s 2015 hit Here still stands up as an anthem for the antisocial. Under a slinky sample of Isaac Hayes’s Ike’s Rap II (also well known via Portishead’s Glory Box and Tricky’s Hell Is Round the Corner), it perfectly captures the feeling of drifting from room to room at an overcrowded house party, swerving drinks and inane conversation. “Some girl’s talking ’bout her haters / She ain’t got none.” Cara may not be impressed by what she sees, but there is a subtle fondness in how specifically she captures the rituals of teendom, letting the chaos wash over her as a rite of social passage.