The Politics of a New Metropolis

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from In These Times:



The Politics of a New Metropolis
Fritz Lang’s newly expanded dystopian classic looks better than ever. Its vision of humanity? Not so much.

By Michael Atkinson


“Death to the machines!” The cry goes out once again as the longest-ever restored form of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) now lands on DVD, as dense and crazy and maddening as ever. So much of our culture has its fungal roots in Lang’s dystopian landmark—including any film or comic doped on visions of future cityscapes and humanoid automatons, including the entire Star Wars virus—that for many of us, it may seem as though we’ve seen the movie without actually having seen it.

It was the first dystopian movie and a box office catastrophe, at a time when German expressionist cinema ruled the world aesthetically. Lang made smaller but remarkable films for a few years into the sound period before his marriage to Metropolis screenwriter Thea von Harbou, an unrepentant Nazi sympathizer, fell apart. Supposedly, on the strength of Metropolis, Lang was asked to head the national film industry under the Third Reich in 1934, but got on a train that night instead, heading to Paris, then Hollywood.

The fact that Metropolis was a Nazi house movie, and the unchallenged favorite of Hitler’s, remains a pickle, because the film’s politics are messy, spectacularly naive and not particularly Fascist. The story is simple, though full of the thriller curlicues (many much clearer now due to the film’s 148 minute running time, including the 25 minutes of newly discovered footage) that Lang and von Harbou had adopted from serials for their earlier masterworks.

In the city of the future, a privileged, hedonistic elite class cavorts in the sun and plays Olympic games and frequents decadent nightclubs as the vast majority of the populace lives underground and works to maintain the city’s monstrous machinery. Metropolis’ leader, Joh Fredersen, is a cold-blooded but grief-stricken widower whose sheltered son, Freder, longs to find out more about how the city works, and at what human cost. He vanishes into the prole throng, pursuing Maria, a beautiful worker-prophetess who implores the discontented worker to await the “Mediator,” a mythic figure able to act as the “heart” uniting the society’s “head” and “hands.” ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/6649/the_politics_of_a_newi_metropolis_i