Metropolis (1926)

There has never been a film like Metropolis, which was lensed nearly one hundred years ago, and which has an enduring power that verges on the supernatural. You may think I exaggerate; I do not. I first saw the film in a dream, as a child, before I EVER SAW A SINGLE FRAME OF IT.

One night as I lie in bed, I had a disturbing dream. A collection of cadaverous men, an explosive disaster, scores of men being fed to a metal demonic face. A man reaching out from the wall. I saw his backside disappear through a tall double door.

I had no idea why I should see such a thing in my dream. It was only later, at a family get-together, an uncle brought a VHS tape for another of my uncles, who he knew to be an enthusiast for items from the 1920s (which considering it was 1988, was then not many decades past). Watching it, I realized the scenes I was watching from the old silent film that he had taped on a local Chicago public access station, were scenes from my dream. Not just the scenarios either, mind you, but THE EXACT IMAGES. It was then I knew Metropolis was a film I would be seeing in my life many, many times.

And that prediction has certainly come true.

I love Giorgio Moroder's version best, because the score is wonderful and perfect, and compliments the film (at least in my mind) perfectly. People complain the film "makes no sense", and that it has been butchered beyond what Lang would have recognized as HIS film. (The story is actually from the novel by Thea von Harbou.) It marks an era for me, the 1980s, and also the era of the Great Silents. But it is more than that.

Between the Hands and the Mind

The world of Metropolis is one divided, like that of Wells' Time Machine, into a surface world of beauty and a dark, machine-besotted inferno of toiling drudgery and Hell. Here, the surface dwellers are arrogant, bourgeois, idlers, committed to living out their privilege in "Gardens of Earthly Delight", with bare-chested courtesans; racing in Olympic tournaments, and drinking "Soma" at Yoshiwara's, a bar that would have made Alex and the Droogs rather proud.

Below, workers that look like concentration death camp internees (that would come a decade or more later to Europe), toil half their miserable, filthy lives away in darkness, at machines that keep the "Sons of Privilege" living in a city where the electric current has automated everything into the High Technology of 1927 (what they assumed the future could be). The dictator of this gleaming cityscape is Joh Fredersohn. His disillusioned son is Freder. Freder goes underground, to the City of the Workers, and changes places with a worker (Number 11811), experiencing the cruel slavery of being born into the worker caste and toiling to near exhaustion.

Finally, his shift ends, and he trudges with the other workers to a meeting with a strange, virginal, saint-like young woman named "Maria." Her stage is decorated with crucifixes, and she relates the story of the Tower of Babel (this is visualized). There is no doubt she is a sort of messiah to these hopeless slaves, but she encourages them to wait and not rebel. There is "one coming" who will right the injustice of their lives, she promises.

(She's a female John the Baptist, in a sense.)

Joh Freder, and his wizard/inventor and madman Rotwang, oversee Maria and her sermonette and devise a plan. Rotwang has constructed a human-like robot (sitting prominently beneath the inverted pentagram), whom he claims he can give a totally life-like human image.

Thus Joh Frederson realizes he can use a "Fake Maria" to mislead the workers into harmless subservience once more. Rotwang does this, in a laboaratory scene of electricity and glowing test tubes and great glass bulbs full of smouldering chemicals that is the father of the birth of every creature in every science fiction horror film, down through the ages.

The Evil Maria Robot premiers at Yoshiwara's, doing an erotic dance that would make Salome envious and convinces a horde of wealthy, tuxedoed cabaret goers to literally fight over her. She leads a procession through the streets, an infernal witch, gesticulating madly, one sleepy, evil, malignant eye closing, feline-like, in a sly suggestion of evil, while Freder, who has just discovered her, is as confused as everyone else. Seeing her with his father, he thinks she has changed sides, and it leads him to have a mental breakdown. (The scenes where the "Seven Deadly Sins" come to life is quite a cinematic landmark.)

Maria the Robot convinces the workers that it is, in point of fact, time to rebel, and they proceed to destroy the machines. Unfortunately, for unspecified reasons, this will flood the underground city, and KILL all the workers, drowning their children. The true Maria escapes from her captivity at Rotwang's and rejoins Freder, where they rush underground in time to pull a lever and save the city, and all the children in it. There is no missing how much of a human angel Maria actually is; she is willing to die herself to save these children.

(In the beginning of the film, she appears, coming through one of the famous tall double doors, with a horde of filthy workers' children, interrupting Freder's dalliance in the "Garden of Earthly Delights" with a bare-chested playmate. "Look," says her title card, "children, these are your brothers and sisters!" (It is hard to believe Hitler wanted to use Lang as director of his propaganda film division, firstly because he was Jewish, but also since, even though Hitler reportedly liked the film, it can hardly be seen as having a subtext that isn't informed by Marxist socialism. At any rate, Lang escaped Germany, while his wife, von Harbou, became a National Socialist.)

The Evil Robot Maria is literally burned at the stake. There is a finale wherein Freder faces Rotwang on top of the roofs of the houses, but the true point of the film seems to be reconciliation between the classes,: the wealthy, "Sons of Leisure" as exemplified by Joh Frederson, the Dictator, and the workers, with his son Freder, the "Mediator" ensuring a new era of reforms and humanity between the two factions, both of which, in reality, seem to need each other.

We realize we may have spoiled the film for some, but this is less of a review than an essay on a film whose message and impact have been incalculable over the near century since it has been released. Of course, there is much more to see in the many versions of the film than what can be discussed here, and there is the very real subtext of transformation, of the idle rich man's son coming to a realization that the world he knows or thinks he knows is built on a tissue of lies: that it exists at the expense and suffering of toiling masses that are hidden away, underground, so as not to inconvenience the "sons of the chosen few."

He quickly is roused by the injustice of this, by experiencing the toil and sweat and darkness of the Workers' City for himself, and then is enraptured by the sermon of the virginal Maria, who seems to have descended from above, the message not being able to be made any clearer by this: the cause of justice for the oppressed is a Holy Calling, an endeavor commanded of us by God--or is there a much more cynical subtext? Is religion, subtly, being mocked, as a "pacifier" of the oppressed? It is when the Workers listen to the Robot Maria that they threaten their own annihilation. Is this a warning against the sort of demagoguery that leads to revolutions, to death, and, ultimately, disaster? The Germans would soon learn about that, but the final message of reconciliation is ambiguous. Does reconciliation mean better living conditions for the Workers? Equal rights?

"Between the hands and the mind, there must be a mediator. And that must be the heart."

This is the final message of the film, and, according to Lang and Harbou, it ultimately, "serves no party or purpose (cause)." Hence it is, they claim, not propaganda. You can interpret it only as a call to humanity, compassion on the part of the privileged to the toiling, starving masses who prop them up. But, then, that IS propaganda, although subtle.

Still a cinematic tour-de-force, still a visually stunning piece, still a cinematic work that transcends the very definition of same to become something quite else. Metropolis is the quintessential film of the Weimar Era, a film whose images have become so iconic they have entered the wellstream of human thought at the level of the psychic. And I should know.

Fritz Lang dreamed the future. And so did I.

Metropolis can be viewed on YouTube