Metropolis: Does Improvements in Technology

Metropolis: Does improvements in technology better our lives or do they divide us as a species?

How the film "Metropolis" deals with some of the most important issues of modernity

In modernity, who controls the future -- humans or machines? According to the film "Metropolis," technology simply reinforces the social divisions of capitalism and further reinforces the privileges of the leisure class. Given the ubiquity of computers in our work and personal lives today, the concern about how technology may imprison us in the future may seem uniquely germane late 20th and early 21st century. However, these anxieties also plagued the early 20th century, as manifest in Fritz Lang's 1927 silent magnum opus.

In "Metropolis" the entire society is divided between two classes, between that of the workers and that of a kind of neo-capitalist leisure class who lives off of the labor of the workers. Both classes, however, are dependant upon machines for their sustenance. The leisured class requires the workers to toil below the depths of the surface of society, while the only thing the workers know is misery and endless labor, shackled to such machines. Their entire existence is governed around work and the rhythms and regulatory mechanisms of machines, not their bodies or individuated needs. Only one worker seems individuated in her persona, the firebrand activist Maria.

The questioning of this arrangement is provoked by a transgression of boundaries. In the film, the "upper" (literally and figuratively) character Jon Frederson's son Freder leaves the privileged confines of his world, and goes to the center of the city where the workers are enclosed in the pits. Freder is horrified by the conditions of the workers, and a dangerous explosion that robs many of the workers of their lives before his very eyes, further reinforcing his sense of injustice and outrage. Freder falls in love with Maria, the worker who is an inspiring rallying voice to these victims of modern industrialism. Maria symbolizes unionization, but also a more enlightened and harmonious view of humanity beyond the narrow divisions that exist in the world of "Metropolis." Angry at the identification that his son feels with the ordinary workers, with the help of the evil, demented scientist Rotwang, Frederson decides to make a duplicate, evil copy of Maria who advocates policies that are contrary to the beliefs of real, just, and socially egalitarian Maria. The idea is that the new Maria can serve as a mouthpiece of the elites, as presumably the workers simply follow the woman mindlessly, without any real regard for the policies she advocates.

However, by the end of the film, Jon Frederson has become converted to the more humane policies of workers' rights advocated by the true Maria and his son. The younger generation and policies of compassion and tolerance reign supreme over the forces of mechanization and darkness. In the eerie, metallic and totalitarian world where all human figures, even the powerful representations of the leisure class, seem dwarfed by man-created structures and man-created machines, humanity can find a voice of love and compassion and understanding.

On the surface of its freewheeling and impressionistic narrative, "Metropolis" may seem to be more of a fable of proto-socialist or Marxist upheaval -- "workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your technological chains." In such a reading, the society of the film is merely a kind of coded version of industrialization, with the polarized classes merely a new version of the haves and the have-nots of every society. The laborers are the urban proletariat, and the leisured class the factory owners/members of the old aristocracy. Freder functions as a kind of positive 'class traitor' who brings the two together, and Maria acts like a new force for justice.

But the film's aesthetic brings forth another Marxist tenant even more effectively, perhaps, than Marx ever could, that the technological capabilities and innovations born of the Industrial Revolution have polarized the haves and have-nots even more effectively. The leisured classes enjoy more leisure, while the workers toil on machines, the leisured classes enjoy more manufactured goods and services produced upon the property they own, enjoying the benefits of technology while those who work hardest profit least from technology. Industrialization and the technological revolution that enabled the factory system to exist made class divisions even more permanent and inexorable, even while the idea that 'anyone' could work hard and prosper through labor and achieve land ownership is a myth that sustained many workers, though only a few could accomplish this dream of becoming part of the non-laboring middle classes.

On an even more pervasive level, technology has created a divide between the haves and have-nots in modern society that "Metropolis" gestures at even more presciently than Marx. Unbelievable as it may sound, there are some people who do not have access to computers at a young age, which substantially inhibits their ability to access educational and vocational resources -- the 'digital divide' has only reinforced, rather than collapsed class divisions in many ways, even though it has created cultural connections between members of the modern bourgeois on an international level.

But what may haunt the mind of the modern viewer, much more so than the Marxist implications of the story or its disquieting view of the economic implications of technology, is the way that it explores how technology can create an image of "personhood" that is false. Think of how often we communicate with our loved ones virtually, online or through the receiver a cell phone rather than face-to-face or how many 'friends' we have whom we have met online that exist as a series of photographs and words, not as real, bodily, experienced images. How real are these identities, or are they simply a creation of machines and the melding of a man human mind with the digital world?