A metallic, implacable din—not a soundtrack, but the very substance of the film. A syncopated rhythm of presses, gears, and sirens that dictates the tempo of life, of thought, even of sex. Elio Petri’s camera hurls us without preamble into the belly of the beast, the factory, and makes us breathe its oily fumes and feel the tremors in our very bones. Here, in this Dantean circle redesigned by mechanical engineering, reigns Ludovico “Lulù” Massa, a piece-rate worker who has so internalized the logic of production that he has become an appendage of the machinery himself. Gian Maria Volonté doesn't play him; he incarnates him, with a performance that is telluric, feral—a bundle of nerves and sweat that transforms acting into a physiological event. His Lulù is an Italian-style Stakhanovite, a negative idol for the colleagues who can’t keep his pace, a hero for the bosses who use him as a benchmark for productivity. He is the man-machine dreamed of by the Futurists, but stripped of all epic grandeur and reduced to pure, alienated efficiency.

Petri’s cinema, particularly his “trilogy of neurosis” (Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, this film, and Property Is No Longer a Theft), was never one for comforting theses. It is a cinema that dissects the social body with the precision of a surgeon and the grotesque imagination of a Hieronymus Bosch. "The Working Class Goes to Heaven" is not a film about the worker as a heroic figure of orthodox Marxism, but about the atomized individual, crushed by forces he neither comprehends nor controls. Lulù doesn't think, he acts. His horizon is the most elementary consumerism: the color television, the little hatchback, mechanical and unsatisfying sex with a partner who is, in turn, just another victim of the system. His only true erotic relationship is with the machine that dominates him eight hours a day—a rapport of love-hate, symbiosis, and submission.

The breaking point, the inciting incident that triggers his crisis, is almost a biblical contrappasso: the loss of a finger. A trifle in the grand scheme of production, but for Lulù, the mutilation is a symbolic castration. Deprived of his productive infallibility, the man-machine breaks down. The mechanism jams and, for the first time, Lulù is forced to stop, to look around. What he sees is a stratified hell. On one side, the institutional, pragmatic, and bureaucratized union, which treats his anger as a problem to be managed. On the other, the Maoist students, who scale the gates to bring a revolution made of abstract slogans and a theory that Lulù, immersed in the brutal concreteness of his work, cannot decipher. “The student doesn’t know the factory,” he mutters, and it’s one of the film’s most bitter truths. Petri stages the tragic disconnect between the suffering body of labor and the intellectual vanguards that would claim to represent it, turning Lulù into a pinball bouncing between opposing dogmatisms, unable to find a synthesis or a true class consciousness.

This film is an expressionist work disguised as political cinema. The factory is not depicted with documentary realism; it’s a mental landscape, the external projection of its workers’ fragmented psyches. The claustrophobic framing by Luigi Kuveiller, the distorted close-ups, the feverish editing by Ruggero Mastroianni, and the score by Ennio Morricone—which melds musique concrète, industrial sounds, and alienating chorales—all conspire to create a sensory experience that is all-consuming and oppressive. The viewer doesn't observe alienation; they endure it. It’s a work that has more in common with the bureaucratic labyrinth of Kafka’s The Trial or the descent into madness of a Dostoevsky character than with the shadowing neorealism of De Sica. Lulù is a man from underground who emerges into the light only to discover that the light is even more blinding and confusing than the darkness of his routine.

Shot in 1971, the film is a perfect seismograph of the tensions shaking Italy. The echo of the ‘Hot Autumn’ of ’69 was still deafening, and the air was saturated with ideologies, revolutionary hopes, and a latent violence that would soon explode into the Years of Lead. Petri had the courage, and the acumen, not to take sides, to show the chaos without offering easy solutions. For this, the film was attacked from all quarters: by the industrial confederation, which saw it as an incitement to revolt; by the unions and the Italian Communist Party, which accused it of representing the working class as a shapeless mass devoid of political consciousness; and by the extra-parliamentary groups themselves, who did not recognize themselves in the caricature of their young militants. The fact that such a complex and problematic work won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (shared with Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Affair, another masterpiece of civic cinema) testifies to its explosive power and its ability to capture the spirit of an era.

But the true stroke of genius, the keystone that elevates the film to a universal masterpiece, is its enigmatic and poignant finale. After being fired, rehired, after enduring protest, the asylum, and the return to the assembly line, Lulù finds himself exactly where he started. But something has changed. He tells his comrades about a dream, or perhaps a delirium: he and other workers tear down a wall, convinced they will find paradise. But behind the wall is only fog, and another wall. And then another. Heaven is not a destination, but a collective narrative, a fable told to survive hell. The final shot, with the workers miming their labor in a catatonic ballet while Lulù smiles, immersed in this shared hallucination, is of a poetic and terrible power. There is no victory, no liberation. For the working class, paradise is perhaps the ability to dream of escape together, even while remaining chained to the same machine. It is the most lucid and ruthless diagnosis of a condition that, mutatis mutandis, transcends its historical context to speak to us, even today, of our unquenchable capacity to build mythologies to endure the real.