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,...
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?
The method by which Rotwang creates the false Maria, by capturing her and putting her face on that of the robot seems like a kind of prototypical 'avatar' or computer representation of a real person. Given that biotechnology has enabled a 'face transplant' to take place and plastic surgery has enabled individuals to treat their bodies as infinitely pliable in a variety of ways, if anything Lang may have been too conservative in his estimation of the power of technology to change the human form, and human society. Only now our transformations through technology are accomplished through our own desires and dimes, rather than imposed upon us by scientists -- unless it is argued that culture forces or motivates us to change our bodies to make ourselves more culturally acceptable to an ideal.
The body and identity are plastic in "Metropolis" even though the divides between the two worlds seem titanic and inexorable. Yet because it is humanity that has created these structures, humanity can still undo these structures. "Metropolis" is often classified as an early work of science fiction, but rather than aliens sweeping down to change human society, it is human intelligence that has created a world that ultimately does not support the best, most human aspects of the species. The world created by scientists is just as false as the copy of Maria is but a pale imitation of the real, living and breathing woman. This is why "Metropolis" may really be a romance, not science fiction. Feeling triumphs over fact and mind, and technology inhibits the functioning of real life rather than supports it.
