Directed by Fritz Lang
Written by Thea von Harbou
Photographed by Karl Freund and Gunther Rittau
Production Designed by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht
Music by Gottfried Huppertz
Starring
Alfred Abel
Brigitte Helm
Gustav Frohlich
Rudolf Klein-Rogge
…
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven . . .
-Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” from a January 1959 audio recording of the Big Table Reading at the Shaw Festival, Chicago.
I’ll deal with it later,
I’ll deal with it later,
I’ll deal with it later,
LATER IS NOW.
-Devo, “Later Is Now,” from the album Something For Everybody(2010)
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
Metropolis is a seductive city-state of the retro-future, full of neon lights and skyscrapers and all-night parties full of ritzy people in tuxedos and fancy gowns and ornate costumes. It exists upon the backs of the Workers who live deep underground, cruelly apart from the giddy debaucheries in the heights. The Workers maintain the machines that keep Metropolis bright and hopping ‘round the clock. They all wear the same dark, drab jumpsuits and caps, and their lives are regulated according to the ruthless elite demands for uninterrupted electricity, gas, and running water. The Workers are dehumanized-as far as I can tell, they’re basically living components of the overall Metropolis Machine. At some point in the evolution of this magnificent city, advanced automation was circumvented by simply plugging people into the gaps in the system and worrying about the moral consequences later.
A cackling mad scientist named Rotwang has invented a Machine Man-a robot-which could take the place of the humans serving as Workers, and thereby bring on a hypermodern Age of Universal Leisure-no more need for a segment of the population to be condemned to soul-killing labor. Everybody can join the orgies in the skies!
Ah, but as I mentioned, Rotwang is a nutjob, and he’s only invented the one Machine-Man-who has a very alluring feminine form-and there are some pervy implications that the brilliant roboticist may have assembled this construct to satisfy his own appetites. Moreover, Rotwang’s techniques may be so idiosyncratic, so handy-craftsy-so alchemical, even-that his Machine-Man may not be scalable to the needs of the overall Metropolis System. Something about the way this city-state society is constructed prevents them from going for miniaturization or finding a way out of the necessity for jamming the human form into the chaos gears of the Great Moloch Machine . . . or maybe we’re just in the realm of flaky, overheated German Expressionism? Hard to tell.
Even deeper underground, in the catacombs beneath the Workers’ City, there’s an old Christian church where a woman named Maria advocates for justice and equality, but not through political means. Maria isn’t even preaching from some version of a social justice gospel after the manner of, say, Dr. Martin Luther King. Maria speaks of a “Mediator” that must necessarily join the “Head” and the “Hands.” So, the Head is an allegory for the ruling business elites and their cold, economic calculations. The Hands represent the hyperspecialized lot of the dehumanized, roboticized Workers. And this Mediator . . . that’s the Heart? The Heart being some transcendent moral principle of compassion, of justice, of equality? Is the Mediator some kind of a Jesus type person? Is this the “vanishing mediator” that super-hacker kid from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex was talking about?
Maria leads her meetings in a church-looking chamber deep underground with lots of crosses on the walls, but her words are not explicitly Christian. Maria and the Workers seem to be waiting for a messiah, or maybe this is a “Second Coming” type of deal? If this all takes place in the future, perhaps this is a future mutation of Christian belief. I prefer to interpret Maria’s sermons as a new thing that happens to take place in a disused place of worship, and thus with the implication that Christianity is something belonging to the dead past, and all this talk of a Mediator is a new kind of religion or ideology.
And wouldn’t you know it . . . there’s a Mediator waiting in the wings! A pasty-faced elite young man-who conveniently happens to be the son of the ruthless businessman who rules over the Metropolis System with a cold heart-begins to deconstruct his privilege and decides to journey down into the depths of the Workers’ City and beholds in horror the Heart Machine the dehumanized laborers sacrifice their freedom to maintain. The Mediator-to-Be has a vision of the monster-god Moloch-a deity of avarice-superimposed upon the Heart Machine.
And our Mediator-to-Be sees the Workers being systematically marched into a flaming hellmouth in a sequence that seems to be an eerie prophecy of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis. This becomes even more disturbing when you realize how many loyal Nazis participated in the making of this movie, including screenwriter Thea von Harbou, although her partner, director Fritz Lang, famously fled Germany for America and a renewed filmmaking career in Hollywood.
The discontent of the Workers cannot be contained by flowery sermons of future deliverance. The Mediator-to-Be is prone to visionary freakouts wherein he sees the mythical underpinnings of the scientific present. Some of the best scenes involve immaculately art-directed hallucinations of the Grim Reaper and the Seven Deadly Sins and wild dance parties led by a corrupted Maria gleefully bumping and grinding her way through a Whore-of-Babylon inspired burlesque routine. When the workers go berserk and trash the Moloch Machine they join hands and line dance in the ruins of their techno-demonic oppressor. Logic and nuance get trampled beneath goofy German Expressionist melodrama amidst exquisite sets of varying scales and fabulous costumes. Although Good Maria has the right ideas about social justice, Corrupt Maria is way more fun. Intellect is overtaken by spectacle, and it’s hard not to enjoy the madness.
This is such a confusing movie. Is it science fiction? Is it a faith-based film? Is it camp? Can it be all these things at once? I tend to think it can be all these things at the same time. I’m okay with that. Just think of it as a precursor to all those dopey Roland Emmerich blockbuster flicks of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. No, it doesn’t make much sense, but there’s a lot of it, and it looks amazing. Watching Metropolis I see so many things of latter-day pop culture: Blade Runner, robot uprisings, music videos by Madonna, and movies such as Tim Burton’s Batman and Batman Returns where the lavish art direction and production designs more than make up for unlikely characterizations and flake-o plot logic.
Fritz Lang went on to better things as a filmmaker, but the manic energy of Metropolis is, much like perverted Rotwang’s Machine-Man, just not something that can or should be mass-produced. It’s a glorious, doomed aberration and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
