Why Metropolis Matters
“The Mediator between the Head and the Hands must be the Heart.” – Metropolis
In Fritz Lang’s 1927 opus, this line is the refrain. It is the first line, it is the last line, and it hangs over the entirety of the film. It’s a simple metaphor, obvious even. The head is the leadership, be it government or corporations; the hands are the workers that put the head’s plans into action.
The heart is someone who understands both the leadership and the workers and shows them the way to coexist. If the heart is good, the head and the hands can work together and do amazing things. If the heart is corrupt, the head and the hands will destroy each other and anything they had previously built together. Simple enough.
On Friday night, I saw the newly restored version of Metropolis at the Coolidge Corner Theater with live accompaniment. With 25 minutes of footage added, it is the most complete version to exist since it’s original release. There are still some missing scenes (only about 5 minutes worth or footage is still missing), but the film is now more or less intact.
Perhaps it was seeing it complete for the first time; perhaps it was seeing it surrounded by hundreds of Boston’s Own Very Liberal Elite ®; perhaps it was simply seeing it now as opposed to 4 years ago, but watching Metropolis on Friday night, I couldn’t help but see how much it parallel’s the American political climate for the last year or so.
Let me explain: for those of you who haven’t seen it, Metropolis tells the story of Freder, son of the leader of the urban utopia that lends the film its title, and Maria, a lovely school teacher from the working class. Freder sees Maria while frolicking in the Eternal Gardens, which are pretty much what you’d expect them to be (if you hadn’t noticed by now, Lang and Thea von Harbou, his wife and writer of the screenplay/novel, weren’t exactly subtle about their themes here), and follows her into the worker’s city, deep below the sprawling perfection that runs on the tasks the men who live and work perform.
What Freder sees in this underworld shocks him. The workers are destitute and beatific, the conditions dangerous, and the hours long. He did not know that such horrible things went in to his most simple pleasures. He is so moved, he decides to trade positions with a worker for the day, and after a grueling shift, he goes to a secret meeting in the catacombs led by Maria, who repeats the heart and hands metaphor, and after the meeting, realizes the Freder is the Heart that she needs.
Unfortunately, Joh Frederson, Freder’s father and the Head in our epigraph, witnesses this meeting, thanks to his father-in-law, the prototypical mad scientist Rotwang. With a name like Rotwang, you can guess that this guy is no Errol Flynn. Rotwang has designed a magnificent robot in the image of his dead daughter Hel, and with Frederson, he plots to disguise the robot as Maria to quash the worker uprising. Little does Frederson know that Rotwang wants to do much more than that. He wants to destroy everything Frederson has: his city, his life, and most of all, his son.
Rotwang kidnaps Maria and disguises his “machine-man” in her image. The evil Maria first seduces the Metropolis elite as an erotic dancer, corrupting them into acts of violence in her name. Convinced of Maria’s sexual power, Frederson sends her into the depths of the catacombs to lead the workers astray.
Of course, instead of ending the rebellion, Maria incites the workers to destroy the machines that enslave them. The bad part? Destroying the Heart Machine (so subtle) floods the worker city and halts the Metropolis above. The good part? Every worker, man and woman, has escaped the worker city to the surface to tear it down. Oh wait, that’s also a bad part, because in all their fury, they forgot about their children.
Now, I’m going to leave off the rest of the story, since I don’t want to spoil any acts of derring-do for anyone who hasn’t seen it, and this is as far into the plot as I need to explain to you why Metropolis matters today as much as it did in 1927.
There is a line, spoken by the appropriately named Grot, guardian of the Heart Machine, which particularly struck me. He looks out at the crowd of workers, just broken from their hysteria when he told them that their children, to his knowledge, had been drowned in the workers’ city below. “Who told you to attack the machines, you idiots?” He says via title card, “Without them you’ll all die!”
This line, I think, gets to the heart of Metropolis, and applies to the world we live in today. With so many people complaining about taxes and the strength of the federal government in America today, people often lose sight of the fact that without taxes, without a strong government, we may not all die, but we will certainly be sacrificing a lot more than a portion of our paychecks every week (it doesn’t hurt that the next title card refers to the evil Maria as “the witch”. A witch/android who leads a group in irrational reactionary rebellion with a pretty face and misinformation…hmm…sounds kind of familiar to me).
At the same time, there needs to be balance. The workers strike too quick against the autocrats above and risk losing everything, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that their argument isn’t valid. The two sides: Joh Frederson, the head, and Grot, the hands, need Freder, the heart, to bring them together. Their destructive, violent tendencies nearly lead to their own destruction, but oppression can’t stand either.
Metropolis, as great works of art tend to do, reflects the viewer’s era. It is universal, and is therefore specific within each eye that beholds it. As I sat in that dark theater Friday night, listening to the Alloy Orchestra’s sound effects and score, I couldn’t help thinking of what we’ve seen on the news every night for the past 12 months, and that, perhaps, what we all need is a mediator.
Well said.