Pullman and The Polar Express
Architecture of the Uncanny Valley
Something happens when we watch a movie — we slip into the story being told; we start to believe it’s true; we temporarily suspend ourselves for the purpose of immersion in the journey we are taken on. In animated movies, we know it’s unreal and can maintain a psychological sense of removal; in live-action films it's easy to place ourselves inside. But what about movies that tip on the scale just between, movies that bring us into the uncanny valley? This is the phenomenon that tends to elicit disgust due to animated characters' similarities to and simultaneous differences from reality. The Polar Express has become a culturally iconic example of the uncanny valley, not just with its characters, but with its buildings, too.
The Polar Express, which came to theaters in 2004, follows the adventure of a dozen children as they travel on a night train to the North Pole on Christmas Eve. This North Pole is unlike the version I’ve gleaned from other movies like The Santa Clause, Elf, and my own imagination: snowy, innovative, gentle, and fun, with toy workshops designed like creative laboratories. Instead, this North Pole is a factory, a mechanical assembly line. Outside, it looks like one too: brick buildings like dormitories line the empty, shoveled streets. The elves march en masse like hypnotized soldiers towards the citadel center. Despite the sound of trumpets and the soft glow of night, there is a sense of eeriness and foreboding; it is uncanny. The brick construction and layout of the North Pole are familiar, close to something we’ve seen in our own world. And in fact, we have. The architecture of the North Pole in The Polar Express is directly referenced from the model industrial town of Pullman, Illinois, the first model company-town in the United States and site of a massive worker’s strike in the late 19th century.
The Polar Express was first a children’s book written and illustrated by Chris Van Allsburg in 1985. His illustrations portrayed similar redbrick buildings and a clocktower as in the film, but they are ephemeral, washed in wonder. Instead of individual red bricks, we see the soft shapes of buildings, almost like toys themselves. There is a glow to the scene, a dream-like quality.
These original illustrations were further honed for the movie. Production designer Doug Chiang sites the Pullman company town on the South Side of Chicago as a precedent, driven by the notion that the North Pole is centered around “community experience.”
Built on a 4,000 acre area 13 miles south of downtown Chicago between 1880 and 1884, the model industrial town was conceived of by George M. Pullman, president of Pullman’s Palace Car Company. Pullman was one of the first of its kind: creating a total environment for company workers to live, eat, work, and essentially spend their lives. George Pullman believed that if people felt good about where they lived, they’d become more productive workers (building the railroad sleeping cars that would travel the entire U.S.) The goal of his community was to create the image of order, maintain efficiency of his factory system, attract skilled workers and maximize profit.
George Pullman contracted architect Solon S. Berman to design the entirety of the town. Like the North Pole in The Polar Express, there is consistency to the design, which totaled to 1,000 homes and public buildings. In his original design of the main building, which is almost perfectly copied in The Polar Express, the Pullman Company Administration Building exemplifies American Queen Anne style of architecture. This style contrasts colors and textures: exteriors of red brick with limestone trim, large windows and varying elevations that “weighted against each other to achieve a sense of repose without symmetry.” American Queen Anne historically uses wood construction, but the red brick, which was quarried on-site, makes it more utilitarian for factory buildings. The Italianate-style repeating arches and rounded doorways of the Pullman Market Hall are mirrored in the North Pole town square.
The choice to specifically reference this company town is significant because of its history in the labor movement. Although set up to be a utopian village, within 15 years, the vision collapsed. Pullman residents had little or no voice in the conduct of community affairs — they could not own property, had no say in its governing, and were under the strict paternalistic guardianship of George Pullman. Pullman called his workers “my children,” however, he did not treat them as such:
“None of the ‘superior’ or ‘scientific’ advantages of the model city will compensate for the restrictions on the freedom of the workmen, the denial of opportunities of ownership, the heedless and vexatious parade of authority, and the sense of injustice arising from the well-founded belief that the charges of the company for rent, heat, gas, water, etc. are excessive – if not extortionate… Pullman may appear all glitter and glow, all gladness and glory to the casual visitor, but there is the deep, dark background of discontent which it would be idle to deny.”
— The Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1888.
In the economic depression of 1893, Pullman workers received wage cuts of about 25% while the rent of company housing stayed the same. This, in part, contributed to the Pullman Strike — the first national strike in U.S. history which came to involve over 150,000 people in 27 states. After a two month boycott and violent federal involvement, the union was defeated and employees were compelled to return to work on the terms of the railroad companies. Pullman defended his company town until his death in 1897. In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the Pullman Company to sell all the land and buildings they owned outside of manufacturing purposes and were annexed to the city of Chicago.
The history of the Pullman Strike is intrinsically tied to the company-town’s architecture. The institution of the on-site live-work utopian idea, housed in the repeating brick buildings, ultimately led to the company town’s demise. Because workers were financially and socially incentivized to live on the Pullman campus, the intention of the architecture of their daily lives in turn led to their exploitation.
Curious then that the unsuccessful model town of Pullman is the inspiration for the North Pole in The Polar Express. But then again, the North Pole is the most well-known company town of all, where Christmas elves reside and work to make the toys that all expect for Christmas. (In addition, one cannot overlook the train as a central figure in both of these stories: the Pullman company manufactured train cars, just the kind that the kids take on their midnight visit.)
The origin of Santa’s workshop in the North Pole was a cultural creation, a slow evolution over several works of fiction in the 19th century. The Night Before Christmas (1823) and A Christmas Carol (1843) established the quaint image of a snowy Christmas and the jolly Santa we recognize today, and Thomas Nast’s political comics in Harper’s Weekly between 1863 and 1886 portray a jolly Santa Claus at his workshop in a snowy region, specifically labeled as the North Pole.
In the last century, Christmas has become the pagan holiday of capitalism: epitomized by holiday sales, gift-lists, long lines at the mall, and packages crowding doorsteps. The main objective of the North Pole, then, is to be the enormously-productive industrial capital for all of the toy-creation. Christmas elves have nowhere else to live — they are loyal to the North Pole for the company of Christmas for life — in fact, by birth, it may seem they have no other options at all (except Hermey the Elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) who wanted to be a dentist, and Buddy, of Elf (2003) who wasn’t actually even an elf, but a human raised by elves).
Similar to the way Pullman centered his company in the then-vacant landscape of South Chicago in the late 19th century, Santa, the ruler of the North Pole, put his workshop in a desolate, isolated location. The elves become subservient workers to Santa Claus, a seemingly a perfect model of the factory-company utopia in which workers ultimately serve the bottom line of the boss here: Santa Claus. Santa then becomes the paternalistic ruler of the North Pole, as Pullman was to his company town (although Santa is much more beloved, it’s the magic of Christmas). To restate the Tribune quote in the context of North Pole,
“Santa may appear all glitter and glow, all gladness and glory to the casual visitor, but there is the deep, dark background of discontent which it would be idle to deny.”
In The Polar Express, the elves are mean, little bald men that have New Jersey accents and seem angry with each other. The elf boss on the factory floor keeps his workers late into Christmas Eve night, directing them to make final choices on the naughty/nice list. When the group marches in a line to get to the town center, we see that the entire crowd of elves are white men, completely resembling one another. There is an eeriness to this crowd. They live to serve and show an overzealous display of joy when Santa finally enters the crowd. This is the paternalistic model at its finest — the workers are productive and the workers love the boss.
The ultimate meaning of the movie is about believing. More overtly, the protagonist sees and trusts how Santa is real, finally buying into the spirit of Christmas. But by relating the architecture to Pullman, the movie teaches its viewers that for the capitalist scum of Pullman and Santa Claus, the system requires people to believe in it. In order to benefit from these systems (as consumers, or children getting gifts on Christmas morning), one must buy into the idea that this model of profiteering works. The truth is, behind the pretty toys of Christmas or the perfectly constructed train car, someone, or a series of someones who made it, were almost certainly exploited in the process.
The physical architecture that connects Pullman and The Polar Express is stately, strong and eternal. It is dizzying in its multiplicity of form — providing both housing and workshops for its thousands of residents. Although Pullman has been defunct as a factory-town for over a century, the building’s bones remain and the interiors are currently being renovated for reuse. And for all we know, Santa is still up there in his workshop, eating cookies as his elves toil away at plastic toys, within the maze of their brick abodes. We get lost in the vision of the architecture and the utopia we want it to provide. We start to believe that it serves us, the consumers, and also its workers. It is enticing to be blind consumers like the innocent children who ride the Polar Express. Not only are they oblivious to this strangeness of this system, they’re a part of it. They are the prime consumers: young and eager, excited by Santa Claus, the bag of gifts, and the special spectacle they’re invited to see. They have no sense of responsibility, and are taken home to their cozy beds to sleep soundly the rest of the night, waking up to piles of presents below the tree.
The uncanny valley is successful in the sense that it tricks our brains into almost believing — into seeing what is right in front of us and wanting to trust it. The architecture of The Polar Express is a warning then as we tip towards the uncanny underbelly of this capitalist season. At whose expense do we believe?
Merry Christmas!