h2etropolis
Lang’s utopian rallying cry, written in Germany during the editing of Metropolis, is well worth recalling today. It’s relevant as an acknowledgment of the lack of mutual understanding between nations that currently threatens our planet–and by extension, of the lack of mutual understanding between classes that threatens our country and planet. And it’s relevant as a double-edged expression of hope (“We will realize it!”) and despair (“such difficulty understanding each other in all too many languages”)–responses that form the warp and woof of Metropolis itself. Yet Lang’s dream of mutual understanding between nations seems to have distracted him from finding a satisfactory resolution of class issues in Metropolis, much as the xenophobic warmongering of the Bush administration is distracting Americans from a legitimate class resentment of recent capitalist swindles.
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In its own time Metropolis was clearly more of an event than Kubrick’s masterwork was in 1968–an attempt to beat Hollywood at its own game that took well over a year to shoot, reportedly used up to 30,000 extras, and sabotaged the career of the most talented and prestigious producer of silent German cinema, Erich Pommer, who lost his job at UFA after the film went so far over budget it could never earn back its investment. The astonishing thing is that Metropolis seems much more relevant to current events than 2001, which assumed that the cold war would still be going on. Metropolis emphasizes not merely class divisions, but the emotional confusion underlying the creation of androids–also a major theme of A.I. Artificial Intelligence. 2001 dramatizes some of the same confusion, but the female robot in Metropolis, the false Maria, has much more in common with A.I.’s Gigolo Joe than she (or it) has with 2001’s talking computer HAL (though someone ought to examine HAL’s and Gigolo Joe’s sexual ambiguities).
Not that the film was a flawless masterpiece in 1927. Indeed, Metropolis has one of the lamest endings of any great film I can think of, and this has survived intact in virtually all of the intermediate versions–a dopey reconciliation between management (Joh) and “labor” (ludicrously represented by an informer employed by Joh) brought about by the soulful hero, Freder (Gustav Frohlich), with the encouragement of the angelic Maria (Brigitte Helm) that illustrates the film’s opening and closing motto, “The mediator between brains and hands must be the heart!” The sappy ending might be partially the result of pandering to the American market, but it might also be simply a casualty of the mind-set that favors symmetry of design over political smarts and common sense. This ending, the generally wimpy Freder (a sensitive youth in knickerbockers who seems ready to faint at regular intervals), and a lot of confusing plot points have led most critics to regard the film as irredeemably silly, even when they admire the breathtaking visuals. Lang’s own disparagement of the film did nothing to discourage this verdict.
Gunning tellingly cites Peter Bogdanovich’s extended interview with Lang in the 60s, in which Lang recalls an early version of the script that accounts for much of the medieval imagery: “Mrs. von Harbou and I put in the script for Metropolis a battle between modern science and occultism, the science of the medieval ages. The magician was the evil behind all the things that happened: in one scene all the bridges were falling down, there were flames, and out of a Gothic church came all these ghosts and ghouls and beasties. And I said, ‘No, I cannot do this.’ Today I would do it, but in those days I did not have the courage. Slowly we cut out all the magic, and perhaps for that reason I had the feeling that Metropolis was patched together.”
The myth of Babel leads one straight back to the pessimism and despair lying just under the surface of the utopian optimism of Lang’s 1926 statement about the “internationalism of filmic language”–his version of cinema as redemption and vision as enlightenment. This is played out with particular fierceness in the sequence in which Rotwang tracks down Maria in the dark catacombs with a flashlight, intending to kidnap her to use as a model for the false Maria; the flashlight, like a film projector’s beam, becomes a precise illustration of vision as voyeurism and as an act of violent aggression.
