Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: An Analysis
by NATHAN GILMORE. Originally published in Issue #5.
A gleaming android stares mechanically at the viewer, its round, lidless eyes glowing with the light of some unexplained inner mechanism. A subterranean city peopled by the poor, ruled by a totalitarian state above. A wild-haired scientist bedecked in a white lab coat works feverishly at the controls of some mysterious apparatus. These scenes might be taken from any of a number of science fiction films spanning 30 years—Frankenstein (1931), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Star Wars (1977), Blade Runner (1982), and The Matrix (1999). Yet they are all indelible images found in a strange, seminal film that predates them by over half a century: Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi masterpiece, Metropolis.
Lang’s film is now a part of the cultural lexicon, in the West at least, having made its influence felt in every medium from manga to heavy metal. Artists as disparate as Lady Gaga (in her top-ten hit “Applause”) and Brazilian thrash metal band Sepultura have drawn inspiration from Metropolis’s motifs. Most of that influence is drawn from the film’s unforgettable visuals. Some of literature and film’s most recognizable tropes are taken from this film.
As late as the millennium, Metropolis made waves. Thanks to a groundbreaking effort of research and restoration, spanning two years and three continents, Fritz Lang’s Complete Metropolis made its debut, simultaneously airing in Frankfurt and Berlin in 2001, seventy-four years after its original premiere.
Metropolis is a film concerned with liminality: spaces in between. The space between in Metropolis is the void between what is real and unreal, leisure and labor, and creator and created. In this essay, I use the term to signify the concept of gaps, specific tensions between opposing ideas, and the line between reality and simulation. While most criticism of the film is concerned with Metropolis’ cultural impact, I am interested in the film’s genesis, its exploration of the dualities it presents, and its political applications.
The film’s power, if not its popularity, has hardly waned, nearly a century after its premier, partly because of its strangeness, partly because its themes apply to a wide range of political agendas. The original Marxist subtext has been mostly forgotten, while the powerful indictment of an authoritarian, unjust society remains. The film may also be read as a warning against the perils of unfettered technological progress and the dangerous uncertainties inherent in the perfecting of artificial intelligence, thirty-four years before the invention of any computer chip.
Coming to the movie fairly late, I wasn’t prepared for the mix of strangeness and familiarity which Metropolis offers. The images are familiar—we’ve seen these figures before, we recognize these tropes from later movies. Second and third viewings reveal the heavy-handed political subtext. The true power of Metropolis became most apparent on the fourth and fifth viewing: one moves past the overblown acting, shallow characterization, and the clanging, insistent score and sees a new film, one concerned with themes of justice, power, marginalization and representation. Like all great films, it grows on the viewer and with the viewer.
From the start, Metropolis was a controversial, enigmatic, and ultimately incomplete entity. Its director added to the movie’s legend. Perhaps the original auteur, Lang embellished the facts of his life, directing his public persona the way he did his films. Lang served in the Russian and Romanian campaigns and sustained several injuries, including the loss of his right eye. He used his year-long convalescence to try his hand at writing screenplays. The British Film Institute bestowed on him the title “the Master of Darkness,” which might apply as well to his cloaked persona as his pioneering use of chiaroscuro lighting. Rumors flew of a domineering autocrat who berated his actresses, recklessly exposed them to physical dangers on his lavish and expensive sets, and wore a monocle for the offbeat and debonair air it gave him.
An archetype of the German Expressionist movement, Metropolis was birthed in the travails of Germany’s cataclysmic defeat in the First World War. Lang, always carefully curating his public perception, claimed that the inspiration for Metropolis came from a view of New York’s harbor from the deck of his ferry. This soundbite was mostly for American consumption. Vienna newspapers had announced the film by name three months before Lang’s arrival. Metropolis had far more substance than could easily be explained by a mere sightseeing trip to New York City.
This was 1927: the first volume of Mein Kampf had been published two years before. The Nazi Party took a keen interest in Lang’s films, even arranging a meeting in 1933 between the filmmaker and Reichsminister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Half Jewish by way of his mother, Lang understandably entered the meeting with some trepidation. His previous film, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, had been banned. The Nazis saw too much criticism of themselves in its portrayal of a madman and his servile henchmen. Metropolis, however, seemed to fit Nazi purposes, from certain points of view. Nazism was, in one sense, the application of scientific rationality to social engineering. The film’s glittering spires, colossal clocktowers, the mechanization of the working class in the apparatus of society, and the socialist underpinnings of class conflict appealed to Nazi sensibilities. Goebbels offered Lang a job in the Ministry of Propaganda, which Lang politely declined. Subsequently Lang fled to France, then to America.
With his trademark obsession over detail Lang demanded take after take, moving sets and models constantly. Rumors of the production were leaked judiciously to the weekly media by Lang himself or by his bewildered actors. He plied the cast with alcohol to loosen their inhibitions. One scene of an actress falling on her knees was reshot so many times that she bled. Lang’s style became legendary, blurring the line between director and dictator, mirroring the plot of his own film.
Metropolis is a technical marvel, a true first in the realm of science fiction film. Chief Photographer Eugen Schüfftan devised an ingenious technique, now known as the Schüfftan Process, used for the very first time in Metropolis. The process requires taking a mirror, scraping a portion off, and setting miniatures to be reflected in the untouched remainder. The camera is focused at an angle on the clear (scraped) portion of the mirror, giving the illusion that the miniature backgrounds are the same scale as the live action in the foreground.
Metropolis is now considered among the greatest films ever made, but at its debut in 1927 it polarized audiences and performed disastrously at the box office. H.G. Wells called it “the silliest film… [ridden with] foolishness, cliche, platitude.” The New Yorker lambasted it as “unconvincing and overlong…as soulless as the city of its tale.”
The film nearly bankrupted the studio, and even Lang admitted he thought it “silly and stupid.” As late as 1965 Lang complained to magazine interviewers, “I cannot today accept the leitmotif of the message of the film… the problem is social, not moral.” But he never fully retracted his views, and in the last year of his life, he concluded, “I was right, and I was wrong.”
The film brought such universal disdain at the time that an hour was cut before being withdrawn from circulation altogether. It continued to be cut and recut after it left Lang’s hands, by less talented editors. How we came by the final version is a story of men and technology that rivals the interest of the film itself.
Whether motivated by time constraints or arcane moral codes, theaters hacked away, snipping more from the complete vision by Lang. Paramount Pictures, responsible for the film’s American release, made the most drastic excisions, worried that the sprawling length would be too difficult for American audiences. They fretted over potential offenses in the film’s political outlook. Subtitles deemed too politically provocative were deleted in the American version, as were most of the religious scenes.
A complete Metropolis became cinema’s white whale. Rumors abounded: an untouched copy existed. Yet, other than an unknown film archivist by the name of Fernando Peña, no research was done. Peña heard that the original cut had found its way to the archives of the Museo del Cine, in Buenos Aires. The movie was regarded with indifference by the Argentinian government, and interest in Metropolis seemed largely confined to Western critics.
Peña all but gave up his search until another film archivist—improbably, his ex-wife—called him up to search for the film in person. The lost reels were perched on a dusty museum shelf, once part of the private collection of Adolfo Wilson, an Argentine film collector who bought distribution rights at the film’s Berlin premiere and hauled the reels home in his luggage. A few scenes were damaged beyond repair, but the current 148-minute version we now have is as close as we'll ever see.
What survives is one of the strangest films in all of cinema. The plot revolves around the fortunes of Freder, son of Joh Fredersen, the master of Metropolis, and his attempt to bridge the divide between the city’s upper class and underclass in the year 2030. Freder is the Workers are expendable, laborers trapped under the earth’s surface who serve the wealthy elite above. The elite pleasure palaces are powered from below—the luxuries they enjoy are possible through the labor of the underclass.
Freder is a dandy in every sense: he flirts with passing girls, frolicking in his pleasure gardens. This blasé existence is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of Maria, a beautiful woman from the under-city, with a group of poor children in tow. Freder is immediately smitten with her and heeds her impassioned message: “These are your brothers!”
Freder goes below in search of her. Instead he stumbles upon a terrible scene (cut from subsequent versions): a man working slavishly at a massive machine, turning wheels and throwing switches. The pressure from the machine rises and he faints mid-labor. Amid the smoke appears a terrifying face of wrought iron, and the title card identifies it as Moloch. Workers are sacrificed to this being, led into its maw. Horrified, Freder returns to his house. Because the scene of Moloch was cut from the original, Freder’s facial reaction was confusingly understood to be excited love, not shock and terror. The expressionist acting style makes the two emotions nearly interchangeable.
Freder tells his father he wants to be among the workers. The cold capriciousness in the capitalist system countenances no threats to the established order. Joh, impassioned pleas for the workers are met with implacability.
“Do you know what it means to be dismissed by you?” Freder tells him. “It means: Go below!...into the depths!”
Joh’s identification with the workers is fluid—he ventures into their world and takes the place of a man overcome by exhaustion. Restored footage shows Josaphat, one of Joh’s servant, driving through the Pleasure District, representing the wealth of the upper class with scenes of moneyed leisure: dancing, parties, gambling, and romantic dalliances.
In a mysterious house “overlooked by the centuries”, Joh Fredersen, master of the city, is in the house of the inventor Rotwang. Rotwang has built a monument to Hel, the woman he and Rotwang once loved. Excited by his own artifice, and impelled by unrequited love, Rotwang tells Joh he can bring her to life.
Rotwang exists outside the boundaries of reality and established order. He is a liminal character even in a liminal world: a loner and an outcast living below the underworld. Rotwang is not evil, per se, he is a figure outside the realm of ruled and ruler. Lang is in some way saying that to exist outside the established order is perhaps more free than to be within it.
Might liminality be a good thing? Where others in the film deceive, they are not themselves deceived. Rotwang knows exactly who he is and what he wants. With his brains and his technology, he is in control of his own destiny. There is something to live for outside of class—there is science, knowledge and technology.
Joh Fredersen’s intentions for the robot are purely propagandistic, as his intentions on his people are exploitative. The robot is designed to demonstrate to the workers that he may do away with human labor. The dehumanizing element of the system is the major threat. Absent from Metropolis’ political critique is whether the use of robots might liberate the workers. Would not the advent of robotic labor prove to be the event that sets the working class free? Metropolis does not explore this possibility.
H.G. Wells complained that Joh inexplicably grows richer while the working class never seem to produce a concrete commodity. But this is not an illogicality or plot hole, but the essential nature of the political economy which is the target of Metropolis’ critique. The superficial value imposed on the product of the worker by the ruling class—the commodity fetish—is depicted in the utter drudgery of the under-citizens’ toil. The workers strain against giant levers, and the unintelligibility of the product they create is a vague, unidentifiable power. Work for work’s sake, Lang seems to say, is the tool of the upper class to control and occupy the worker, regardless of any concrete value that work creates. Consider Freder’s encounter with the clock, his introduction to the life of labor in the underworld. Impelled by goodwill, he takes the place of a coworker to perform an inherently meaningless action: move the hands of a colossal clock back and forth, defeating the purpose the clock already fulfills, producing nothing whatsoever of substance. The ruling class’s commodification of time itself is inherently absurd.
At the end of the day Freder retires with his fellow laborers and attends a speech given by the saintly Maria, against a backdrop of crosses. The Marxist dictum that “religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world” is in full effect here. Missing is Marx’s dismissal of religion as counterrevolutionary. In Metropolis, religion, Christianity in particular, is revolutionary. Maria retells the story of the Tower of Babel, reiterating the opening titlecard’s message: “The mediator between the head and hands must be the heart.”
Freder reveals himself to Maria who tells him he must be the mediator, the bridge between “head and hands” (upper class and lower class), and present a deeper truth represented by the heart: love of humanity.
Joh Fredersen, covertly watching this interplay, orders Rotwang to construct a machine-man with Maria’s likeness, to “sow discord between them and her” and thus destroy the hope Maria brings to the working class. Using language deliberately reminiscent of Genesis, Joh Fredersen positions himself as anti-Creator, bringing a studied, satanic aspect to the false Maria. Maria, bearing the name of the Theotokos through whom salvation was made flesh, is now opposed by a false Maria who has no flesh. The salvation offered by technology is inauthentic. Technology is to be a tool for evil. Even at this early date, sounds a familiar warning about technology: we cannot know who we are if we merely look to technology.
Freder, wandering the subterranean halls of Metropolis, stumbles upon a chapel containing statues representing the Seven Deadly Sins. He listens to a sermon from a monk quoting Revelation, describing the whore of Babylon. Freder is a changed man, declaring to the statuary of the Seven Deadly Sins, “If you had come earlier, you wouldn’t have scared me…but now I beg you: stay away from me and my beloved!” Freder can no longer distinguish between artificiality and reality, even as he becomes more human in his fear. The organic, human emotion once absent in a real person is brought to life by “false people.”
This is the prescience of Metropolis: technological representation (Greek tekton: art, craft), whether statues or robots, induces in human beings real reactions and emotions. Rotwang’s False Maria is a perfect technological facsimile. Her indistinguishability from a human is not chalked up to technological advances, it is integral to the moral conflict that the liminal space between real and false, organic and mechanical is all too readily bridged by those innately human qualities of passion and imagination. We want to believe: the ghost of our imaginations unconsciously and instinctively inhabits the gaps between reality and artificiality.
Restored footage shows Joh Fredersen invited to Rotwang’s party that night, where the False Maria will dance for “the upper ten thousand.” Freder and Joh are aware of Rotwang’s deception from the beginning, and Rotwang makes no attempt to fool them as he fools the others. Absent this footage, the unrestored version achieves the same effect—the False Maria enchants and titillates, but the power signified is greater when we are aware of the double-play, that illusions are so powerful that even those in on the trick can be swayed. The False Maria's hypnotic power overcomes knowledge.
The False Maria dances suggestively—this robot is far more sensual than her organic counterpart. The faces of her male audience leer hungrily, more animalistic than any character has been in the film thus far. Nor is Freder, watching along with the others, immune: hero, yes, but bound by human nature.
Riots break out over the False Maria, “sowing enmity between man,” echoing and inverting Genesis: the serpent’s enmity with man is mediated by Eve, but here Mary (the new Eve) sows discord and creates a rift between men.
The False Maria preaches to the workers that “your mediator has not come!” Again, a sort of inverted Magnificat—in scripture Mary the mother of God proclaims a coming salvation for her people. Here, the False Maria rejects and denies the liberation foretold in the film’s beginning. This speech is given against the backdrop of the crosses where the real Maria gave her speech. The new speech is incendiary, urging the people to kill. Notably, the score here includes the signature phrase of La Marseillaise transposed to a minor scale, distorting the theme of Liberty.
Freder fights and defeats Rotwang and frees the real Maria. Along with the newly released workers he takes over the city. The False Maria leads the Mob to the main power source of the city, and pushes it into overdrive. The city begins to crumble, and the dam upon which it is built begins to flood. The real Maria sounds the alarm, and with the help of Freder and the workers, saves the children of the city. In the commotion they are separated, and Maria is pursued by Rotwang, who believes she is his lost love, Hel.
Rotwang’s great flaw is dissemblance, and his downfall is being self-deception. For all his megalomania (he is easily the most flamboyant and high-pitched character) Rotwang is not evil. He deceives and connives, but his motives are selfish at worst, pitiable at best. He seeks power through knowledge and is driven by unrequited love. Our antipathy towards him comes entirely from his strangeness and his existence outside established order. He is not, as others are, beholden to class dichotomy. More so than Freder, he is an independent agent. The False Maria is made not primarily for Joh Fredersen’s purposes, but as a monument to the woman Rotwang loved.
The False Maria deceives the elite of the Pleasure District and turns them against the real Maria. The real Maria knows the android is responsible for the riots. As the workers break into the Pleasure District, they accidentally capture the False Maria and burn her at the stake. Her facade melts away and they recognize her for what she is: a construct.
At last the workers are reunited—the leader of the workers, with Freder as mediator, shakes hands with Joh Fredersen. The film’s resolution lies in the closing of the class gap, the weakest aspect of the film, reducing it to a Marxist morality play that belies the rich and layered subtext of the liminality.
Is Metropolis ultimately a political film whose subtext concerns the boundaries between reality and artificiality, or is it a philosophical exploration with a political resolution? Putting aside the well-worn political approach, and reaching for a different lens, the film is a meditation on the erasure of the boundary between human and machine, artifice and actuality. The deceptive possibilities of artistic representation are at play: the boundaries are negligible and manipulable. Metropolis warns of the deceptive potential of creative power when we remake reality in our image. We mislead others, and in turn are misled ourselves.
Bibliography
Catalan, Cristobal. “Metropolis at 90: You’ll Never See Another Movie Like This Again” The American Conservative. 2 November 2017. <<https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/metropolis-at-90-youll-never-see-a-movie-like-this-again/>>.
Hoffman, Elly. “Fritz Lang’s Monster: Was Metropolis a Pro-Nazi Film?” Medium. 18 December 2017. <<https://medium.com/science-technoculture-in-film/fritz-langs-monster-was-metropolis-a-pro-nazi-film-f9cbe0ff5fd5>>.
McGilligan, Patrick. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
