Metropolis: film treatment of modernity, men, and technology

Metropolis

Fritz Lang's, Metropolis, is perhaps the most iconic of all anti-technology, post-industrial films. At its core, there exists an absolute penetrating distrust and fear of a technocratic society where people are nothing but cogs in a machine, and their distance from the products of their labor is so great that they are actually living their entire lives underground. Lang's use of communist rhetoric, Plato's cave allegory, and modernist art combined to make Metropolis a truly unique creation for its time. While anti-industrial sentiment had been readily voiced across the social landscape, it was only along the fringe that such rhetoric had any grip. but, within the context of film, and within the structure of the first true science-fiction movie, people could not help but see the plight of the faceless worker, could not help but loathe the self-indulgence and egregious profit-taking of the owners, nor could they help but feel a deep and common sympathy with the desire of the workers to have, if nothing else, their lives in their own hands.

Metropolis is an early 19th century propaganda film for the communist argument against industrialization because of its effect of distancing man from the products of his labor. Technology then, as it consistently does now, both enhances and hurts our position within the workplace. Greater levels of productivity are achieved, while that same increase in productivity caused by technological advancement reduces the requirement for people.

Metropolis, presents a world where the worker no longer sees daylight, cannot exercise free will, is nothing but a slave to the machinery, the sole purpose of which is to provide a fantastically opulent life for those who manage the machinery. This, of course, is exactly the kind of situation that prompted Marx to form his particular brand of political socialism. In a Capitalist system (which Metropolis exemplifies), "the worker sings to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all," (Marx). Lang, however, was not a communist. Instead he fell more in the camp of the secular humanists who observed that industrialized Germany was turning citizens into cogs and recognized that, at least in some part, German's loss of World War I was an indication of a broader social failure of the rampant industrial capitalism that became more than an economic system, but the core of the political system as well.

Metropolis, paints a world of industrial dominance, of absolute control of the people, society, and the future by a small handful of management-types who sit, literally, at the top of the world while the subjects are kept in the figurative dark, doomed to a life of constant work. This world, where the gears of machines are at times several stories high, where people's clothes are all the same, and they all move with the same kind of lethargic slump that fits, almost exactly, the image of the people in Plato's cave. In that world, what the people are experiencing is a secondary existence. For the people in the cave, as it is for the workers of Metropolis, life begins and ends with only the cave, work, and the shadows on the wall. There is no substance to life, no joy, no excitement and certainly absolutely no personal fulfillment. What Lang paints is a picture of a life without meaning other than to serve the machinery of the city - which is exactly what Marx meant when he wrote about the disconnection of the worker from the product of his labor.

Lang's particular approach is not just to attack the corporate structures that put people in the position to have no choice in their life but to work in a meaningless and demeaning position, but also the individuals who have compromised their own independence so much that they can only achieve "success" by breaking the backs of others. The intent, then, is to demonstrate that when individuals are given enormous economic (and thus political and social) power, that power corrupts. The relationship between man and machine has long been a fearful one. From the dawn of industry there have been visions of the machines rising, one day, to destroy us all. For Lang, this was a core philosophical argument. Within the stifling confines of the city, the urban landscape itself is machine-like, and thus the entire world becomes nothing but a man-controlled environment the sole purpose of which is to provide for the luxuries and lives of the owners at the absolute cost of the workers.

The underground world of Metropolis serves several significant purposes. First, it provides a level of unfamiliar mystery: who are these people? Why do they work like this? How did they get there? The psychological effect is to create a sense of the fantastic but with an absolute belief of the possible. Because they are below ground, we experience a seemingly irrevocable distancing between the workers and the owners. The viewing screens maintained by the foreman and Herr Frederson become the only way to view the rebellion that eventually takes place. The machines separate man from life. This theme of separation is incredibly important not only then, but now as well. Hobbes wrote that a community without God cannot be sustained, that in order for man to achieve his most basic drive - that of community - he must be allowed to access the deeper spirituality within (Thomas). We live in a society of increasing social separation between people. Email, instant messaging, and cell phones have reduced the necessity for face-to-face contact. Without the ability to socialize, we lose our humanity - is the message then and now in relation to technology.

Is, then, Lang's vision of a technocratic society that destroys individuality and makes slaves of the populace either fair or accurate? As with many doom-sayers, in that mood, Lang was making the equivalent of his own allegorical tale. Maria's first appearance has deep resonance to that of the Virgin Mary: she is unique, separated from the rest and yet part of them. She comes to represent the purity of humanity - the hope. In Metropolis, we see that when man is stripped of his ability to worship a genuine God, when he cannot live out his life on his own terms, he eventually rebels. Of course most rebellions fail because of a lack of organization and adequate materiels with which to fight. but, when it comes to workers, the strike is the only method that truly gets the attention of the bosses. The worker's rebellion in Metropolis, is a metaphorical strike - it is Lang's way of saying to the proletariat that they must take ownership of their lives, stop living without purpose.