Commentary: METROPOLIS (1927)

By WALLACE McBRIDE

Science fiction certainly existed before Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS, but it had never before been rendered with such finality of vision on the silver screen. The movie is something more than ground breaking ... it is ground making, a cinematic equivalent of the Rosetta Stone for fantasy films.

Based on a novel by Thea von Harbou, the story is a not-too-subtle criticism of the “realities” of labor. The movie is about a class-struggle between the two populations of a mythic city: a class of people that toil endlessly underground, and the “Masters of Metropolis” who live in the peaks of the city’s vast skyline.


The meat of the tale concerns Johhan Frederson, a young master of Metropolis who begins to doubt the merit of his lifestyle. After a mysterious woman named Maria shows him some of the wretched youth of the city, Frederson ventures below to get a better look at how the other 99 percent live. The children he sees are as different from Frederson’s people as the living are from the dead, and the world below comes across as an industrial-strength Hieronymus Bosch painting.

During his visit, he watches as workers struggle to keep up with the vague demands of the city’s machinery. Disaster strikes and, as workers begin to die, Frederson takes the place of one and learns first-hand the rigors of hard labor.

Frederson doesn’t operate the machine as much as battle it, and barely survives the experience.
After the disaster, the city’s elite learn that the workers are planning a revolt, and Frederson’s father puts a plan into motion that he thinks will weed out the malcontents. Rotwang, a wizard/inventor, supplies him with a robot that merges man with machine. “Now we have no further use for living workers,” he proclaims and unveils the real star of the show: a decidedly feminine robot seated at the base of a giant, inverted pentagram.

Rotwang eventually replaces Maria with a humanized version of his robot, who stirs the workers to violent revolt rather than peaceful resolution. Frederson gets caught up in the revolt, trying to establish peaceful change as the masses threaten his own father and family.

If the setting doesn’t make much sense, it’s with good reason. “Metropolis” isn’t as much a movie as a window into the dreams and anxieties of a long-passed and foreign world. While the method is dated, the message is not. The threat of Rotwang’s vision of inhuman humanity, as well as the need for a careful balance between society and industry, is possibly more relevant today than it was in 1927.

For mostly external reasons, it’s a very difficult movie to evaluate. So much of it’s grace may be found in the quaint nature of silent films, with its broad pantomimes and exaggerated gesturing. But Lang created a world with an endless landscape ... not many people ever question the location of the story. Where is Metropolis? How big is the city, and does it have any boundaries? How can the majority of a city’s population be employed by a single entity, and what exactly are they producing? None of these questions have ever really mattered because Lang knew the story — as do all stories — takes place entirely in the heads of his audience.