Metropolis

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Gazing intently at the woman in a glass case, Rotwang, the mad scientist-inventor in Fritz Lang's classic silent filmMetropolis (1927) is about to turn levers in his lab and launch a startling change: he will create an exact duplicate of the good-hearted Maria, who lies imprisoned with electrodes on her head. In this pivotal scene, pictured on the cover of this issue of T&C, Maria's features will soon be transferred to the wired metal robot in the background. A close-up of the robot's face magically dissolves into the face of Maria, her eyes suddenly open, and she turns into a dangerous temptress who will lead the city's workers astray.

With its dramatic, overheated plot, striking set designs, and innovative special effects, Metropolis is in many ways a film about the uses of science and technology to create transformations—the transformation of the city into a marvel of modernity, the transformation of Metropolis's workers into robotic slaves, and the transformation of the saintly Maria into a diabolical and destructive femme fatale.

In the film, with its screenplay by Lang's wife Thea von Harbou, the "good"Maria offers kindness and comfort to the beleaguered workers, who move with numbing clock-like regularity in this ruthlessly industrialized world. Joh Fredersen, the master of Metropolis, fears that the workers might rebel and decides that Maria's influence must be undermined. He asks Rotwang to create a duplicate or false Maria to challenge the real Maria's credibility and destroy the workers' belief in her. Fredersen's son Freder, meanwhile, becomes entranced with the real Maria and horrified when Rotwang captures her to serve his evil purposes.

The facsimile or false Maria soon becomes an alluring siren at the city's upper-city Yoshiwara nightclub; she also leads the workers in the underground city in a rampage where they smash the power station, causing a flood. Later, the workers burn the false Maria at the stake, and at the film's end Maria is united with Freder, and the two, as well as Joh, join hands in reconciliation.

Scene from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927).

From its dramatic opening montage of pounding pistons to its brilliant scenic designs capturing the marvels of the modern city to its grim scenes of factory enslavement, Metropolis offers a revealing look at Lang's own conflicted and equivocal views of twentieth-century technology and mechanization. The futuristic, aboveground Metropolis, with its skyscrapers, airplanes, and streams of automobiles, is pictured as the essence of modernity and well-designed machine-age efficiency—a vision echoing the machine aesthetic seen in the art, architecture, and photography of the 1920s. In 1927, the same year Metropolis was first introduced to audiences in Berlin, the city of New York hosted the Machine-Age Exposition, in which visitors could admire the clean geometries of large ship propellers, steel ball bearings, and other emblems of modern technology on display.

Yet in a much more dystopian view, Lang's film also presents the Metropolis workers as mere cogs in the wheels of industry—men who have been turned into anonymous slaves whose rote actions mirror the movements of machines. The view is nightmarish: at the beginning of the film there is a destructive explosion in the machine rooms, and in a later, hallucinatory scene the Moloch Machine devours workers in its ghastly jaws.

But perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of the film is how it portrays the creation of an artificial woman by using science and technology, as Rotwang's metallic female robot is transformed into Maria's demonic double. With his tousled shock of hair, his deranged eyes, and his lab full of bubbling beakers and electrical equipment, Rotwang is the film's archetypal mad scientist, a descendent of Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein and a precursor of Dr. Pretorius in British director James Whale's campy 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein and Peter Sellers's later hilarious rendition of Dr. Strange love in Stanley Kubrick's satirical film about the cold war...