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gozerLast night, I caught the fully restored Metropolis (1927) on Turner Movie Classics. It was the most recent and updated version, almost completed to its uncut original glory using some 30 minutes of footage recently found in Argentina and New Zealand film vaults. It's an excellent film, and a fascinating study in the way Some Things Never Change.
* * *
Metropolis is a vast futuristic city founded by plutocrat Joh Fredersen. The city is run as an oligarchy by the elite few, who live a luxurious life in the penthouses of skyscrapers. A vast, down-trodden army of workers support it all by living and toiling underground, in the worst conditions imaginable. So, yeah; timely!
Our tall, square-jawed, white, cis-gendered male hero is Freder, the son of the previously mentioned Joh Fredersen (yup, Freder Fredersen, poor guy.) Freder is your basic privileged frat boy, hanging out and havin' a good time with the other beautiful people of his class in fancy theaters watching mindless Ziegfield-esque entertainment, wasting his time cheering on sports from the skyboxes of opulent stadiums, or boozing it up in the Eternal Gardens.
Our heroine, Maria -- a lower-class but still classy chick with fluffy blonde hair and way too much mascara -- shows up at the Eternal Gardens surrounded by a gang of cute but grubby lower-class children. (To be honest, she looks what you might call "middle class", but I'm not sure that was the film maker's intention.) Maria is filmed surrounded by children and glowing like a Madonna, reminiscent of that picture of Jesus with the kids that the Illustrated Bible always uses for "suffer the little children to come unto me." Maria wants to show the children what a garden looks like, as there are no gardens underground. It's love at first sight; Freder becomes infatuated with Maria and follows her down to the workers' underworld after she and her gang of hungry-eyed kiddies are shoo'ed away.
Once underground, Freder is shocked to see how craptastic the workers' lives are, as it's no Wonderland down there. Unluckily for him, he went below on a day when a huge machine blows up (like an oil rig platform in the Gulf!) and he witnesses the death of dozens of (apparently extremely replaceable) workers. The mess is cleaned it up and life goes on, everybody back to work, nothing to see here! I get the feeling this sort of thing is not uncommon.
Freder immediately goes to find his father where he lives in the New Tower of Babel, the biggest skyscraper in the city. The design of the tower is based on a famous painting (circa 1563) of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel. Personally, I would not call my skyscraper that name, as I know what happened to the first one. There, Freder confronts Papa Fredersen and weeps about the terrible accident he witnessed, but dear old dad is more annoyed about hearing about it from his kid and not from his clerk, Josephat, who's supposed to have his finger on the pulse. Papa Fredersen fires Josephat. Grot, a factory foreman for the "Heart Machine" (the single most important machine in the city that makes the city run, you can see where this is going), informs Papa F of papers found in the dead workers' pockets that worry him, because they look like plans, and workers with plans are bad for business. Don't forget Grot, he is important later on.
Freder stops Josephat from committing suicide (if you're fired by the ultimate boss of the city, you're utterly ruined) and hires him to help with his quest to help the workers. Freder descends to the workers' underworld again and meets someone named Georgy 11811, who works a machine that directs electrical power to the enormous elevators in the New Tower of Babel. In a scene straight out of Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper, Freder persuades Georgy to swap clothes with him and let Freder work at the machine. Georgy, who finds a huge chunk of money in Freder's pocket, goes to Yoshiwara, the city's red-light district, for some wild partying. Freder slaves away at the machine until he becomes delirious, having visions of being crucified to the factory clock. Yes, Jesus symbolism; it was not yet a film school cliche in 1927! (I actually remember this from a viewing of Metropolis when I was in Junior High School, the image of Freder crucified to the clock really stayed with me.)
Papa Fredersen, wondering about the papers found in the dead workers' pockets, decides to consult the scientist Rotwang, his old collaborator, who lives in an old house in the lower levels of the city. The two were friends but became rivals over the love of a woman, like you do. Rotwang loved a girl named Hel but when he introduced her to his good buddy, Fredersen, Hel dumped him to marry the rich guy. Hel subsequently died giving birth to Freder, as women in films often do, leaving both Rotwang and Fredersen heartbroken and loathing one other. (Yes, it's the "a woman dies to motivate the actions of the mens" trope, which was already old in 1927, as it was seen in literature.) While Papa F has moved on with his life (due to having a ton of cash, a city to run, and a kid), Rotwang has been obsessing over the woman he loved and his hatred for Papa F, and he's a balloon that's about to pop. Rotwang introduces Papa F to his robot/android (please note, neither word had been invented yet and it's called a "Machine Man") that he has constructed. Rotwang intends to give the image of Hel and marry it. o.O
FYI, this is the famous robot that C3PO is based on, tall and golden and Art Deco. The director, Fritz Lang, made the actress playing Maria wear the robot suit in scenes where it moved, and it was quite painful for her. My second thought was to consider all the creepy fanboys who would love to create the perfect android woman and marry her, what with real women being such pains in the asses and refusing to date them and all. Frankly, I always figured that taking their sperm out of the gene pool would one day do wonders for the human race, but that's just me. But don't worry, I'm sure when science gets to the point that this is possible there will be Conservative politicians going bug-fuck about it and passin' laws agin it, as it is not in God's Plan. Of course later on we will find out that they all own their very own AI Stepford Wives.
When Papa Fredersen shows Rotwang the papers from the dead workers' pockets, Rotwang explains that they are maps to the 2,000-year old catacombs that the city was built on. Men of action, they decide to explore the catacombs right then and there and climb down a tunnel. From a gap in the rocks, they observe the workers gathering in a cathedral cut from the rock. There, Maria appears and begins preaching to the workers (our hero, Freder, is in the crowd, listening raptly) about the Tower of Babel and about how they must wait for the coming Mediator. She tells them that the heart must be mediator between the mind (the planners) and the hands (the workers.) It's a very Edith Keeler moment, and I wonder if Harlan Ellison found inspiration in this scene for the character in The City on the Edge of Forever.
At the end of the sermon, Papa Fredersen and Rotwang watch as Freder reveals himself to Maria. In a Neo-in-the-Matrix moment, Freder tells Maria that, as the son of the city's creator, he believes that *he* is the Mediator that the workers have been waiting for. Papa F orders Rotwang to give his android the image of Maria in order to sow distrust between her and the workers. Rotwang agrees but has ulterior motives, intending to use his android to ruin Papa F's life. Rotwang kidnaps Maria and uses her to transform the android to look exactly like her. He then instructs New Maria to destroy the city and murder the hero of our story, Freder -- these being the two things that mean the most to Papa Fredersen. Dastardly!
Hilariously (to my modern sensibilities), Rotwang demonstrates the New Maria's abilities to Papa F by dressing it up as an erotic dancer at the Yoshiwara, where it drives the sons of the owners into homicidal fits of sexual jealousy. I do not kid, a pasty-faced woman wearing sequined pasties, a loin cloth, and a funky fan-hat tosses herself around gracelessly on the stage and everybody goes nuts. This isn't even a Hathor (SG-1) moment where she's exuding a pheromone or emitting a signal that clouds men's minds, it's just raw sexuality that takes them down. It's a trope I could do without for the rest of my life, the "women and their uncontrollable sexuality make men do stuff they wouldn't ordinarily do" trope, or Eve syndrome. We already saw it earlier in the film when we learned that Hel made two good friends become enemies. Anyway, proving Darwin right, the frat boy body count is enormous; meanwhile, the New Maria visits the workers' city and encourages the workers to rebel. A mob of workers storms out of the workers' city in a full-scale riot and destroys the Heart Machine, the city's power generator, resulting in a complete hydraulic breakdown. The city's reservoirs overflow and flood the workers' below-ground city to the brim, and seemingly drown the children of the workers. In fact, the children were saved by Real Maria and Freder in a stirring and heroic rescue!
When the workers realize that they have inadvertently killed their children, they blame Maria. Under Grot's leadership (remember him?), they dash to the upper city and run through the streets, chasing the real and very terrified Maria. Coincidentally, she runs past Yoshiwara where the New Maria is sitting on a frat boy's shoulders and throwing her arms up into the air in a very "flaming youth" manner, and the mob grabs it, allowing the real Maria to escape. In the ensuing confusion, the New Maria robot is tied to a stake atop a huge bonfire and, laughing and grinning as it burns, it turns back into the golden robot/android before our eyes. I'm not even sure the mindless mob notices as it rampages around the city.
Meanwhile, the real Maria escapes only to be found and chased by Rotwang, who thinks she's the android and now wants to give his creation the likeness of Hel. Waste not, want not, I always say! In a climactic scene, Papa Fredersen watches in horror as his son and Rotwang fight on the city's rooftops. Rotwang falls to his death, and Freder and Maria return to the street and unite Papa Fredersen (the mind) and Grot (the hands), thus ending the brutality of the city. I think it's something of a salute to unionism and the worker finally getting a voice. I also wonder if Rotwang-the-scientist's death is meant to be a swipe at Technology and Going Too Far Against God's Plans, but who knows. Having the hero beat up a bad guy that's been molesting the semi-fainting heroine was a very powerful trope in silent films. You can see it spoofed in the early B&W Popeye cartoons when he beats up Bluto after he's grabbed Olive Oyl, who puts the back of her hand to her forehead and moans, "OooOooh, saaaave meeeee!" as she's being dragged around.
Trivia: in the Australian/New Zealand version of Metropolis, the guy who distributed it in that part of the world took a shot of the city from the beginning of the film and put it at the end along with a card telling the audience that the city was repaired and enjoyed by all, which is a kind of nice way to end the film. Another bit of trivia: Lang expressed extreme disappointment in and dislike of this film years later, probably as a reaction the fact that the Nazis absolutely adored it. He'd had to divorce his wife soon after she enthusiastically joined the Nazi party.
So, that's my (long but extremely truncated, believe me) synopsis of Metropolis. One thing I found interesting about Metropolis was that pop culture's idea of "What Is Sexy" has been refined over many generations of visual entertainment. While on paper "half-dressed young woman dancing seductively" still works, what that means in the flesh has changed. Check out New Maria's sexy-dancing in this Metropolis trailer:
It's kind of hilarious how men who are supposed to be jaded, degenerate playboys suddenly act like repressed virgins with a wad of cash and the Pope's blessing let loose in a whore house when New Maria starts flopping around.
Here's Fox's preview of Glee's "Britney/Brittany" episode shown earlier this year:
I think Brittany in the green top dancing with the snake pretty much approximates what Lang was going for, bless his heart. She looks awesomely sexy, and I'm sure men would snap to attention if they saw her dancing at Yoshiwara (or anywhere else), but doubt that anybody would kill anybody else over her. One of the side-benefits of internet Pr0n available to all is that nobody faints over the sight of a bare ankle anymore, let alone tries to kill anyone over it.
Bonus vid:
Queen! Radio Ga Ga!
Metropolis is a vast futuristic city founded by plutocrat Joh Fredersen. The city is run as an oligarchy by the elite few, who live a luxurious life in the penthouses of skyscrapers. A vast, down-trodden army of workers support it all by living and toiling underground, in the worst conditions imaginable. So, yeah; timely!
Our tall, square-jawed, white, cis-gendered male hero is Freder, the son of the previously mentioned Joh Fredersen (yup, Freder Fredersen, poor guy.) Freder is your basic privileged frat boy, hanging out and havin' a good time with the other beautiful people of his class in fancy theaters watching mindless Ziegfield-esque entertainment, wasting his time cheering on sports from the skyboxes of opulent stadiums, or boozing it up in the Eternal Gardens.
Our heroine, Maria -- a lower-class but still classy chick with fluffy blonde hair and way too much mascara -- shows up at the Eternal Gardens surrounded by a gang of cute but grubby lower-class children. (To be honest, she looks what you might call "middle class", but I'm not sure that was the film maker's intention.) Maria is filmed surrounded by children and glowing like a Madonna, reminiscent of that picture of Jesus with the kids that the Illustrated Bible always uses for "suffer the little children to come unto me." Maria wants to show the children what a garden looks like, as there are no gardens underground. It's love at first sight; Freder becomes infatuated with Maria and follows her down to the workers' underworld after she and her gang of hungry-eyed kiddies are shoo'ed away.
Once underground, Freder is shocked to see how craptastic the workers' lives are, as it's no Wonderland down there. Unluckily for him, he went below on a day when a huge machine blows up (like an oil rig platform in the Gulf!) and he witnesses the death of dozens of (apparently extremely replaceable) workers. The mess is cleaned it up and life goes on, everybody back to work, nothing to see here! I get the feeling this sort of thing is not uncommon.
Freder immediately goes to find his father where he lives in the New Tower of Babel, the biggest skyscraper in the city. The design of the tower is based on a famous painting (circa 1563) of the Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel. Personally, I would not call my skyscraper that name, as I know what happened to the first one. There, Freder confronts Papa Fredersen and weeps about the terrible accident he witnessed, but dear old dad is more annoyed about hearing about it from his kid and not from his clerk, Josephat, who's supposed to have his finger on the pulse. Papa Fredersen fires Josephat. Grot, a factory foreman for the "Heart Machine" (the single most important machine in the city that makes the city run, you can see where this is going), informs Papa F of papers found in the dead workers' pockets that worry him, because they look like plans, and workers with plans are bad for business. Don't forget Grot, he is important later on.
Freder stops Josephat from committing suicide (if you're fired by the ultimate boss of the city, you're utterly ruined) and hires him to help with his quest to help the workers. Freder descends to the workers' underworld again and meets someone named Georgy 11811, who works a machine that directs electrical power to the enormous elevators in the New Tower of Babel. In a scene straight out of Mark Twain's Prince and the Pauper, Freder persuades Georgy to swap clothes with him and let Freder work at the machine. Georgy, who finds a huge chunk of money in Freder's pocket, goes to Yoshiwara, the city's red-light district, for some wild partying. Freder slaves away at the machine until he becomes delirious, having visions of being crucified to the factory clock. Yes, Jesus symbolism; it was not yet a film school cliche in 1927! (I actually remember this from a viewing of Metropolis when I was in Junior High School, the image of Freder crucified to the clock really stayed with me.)
Papa Fredersen, wondering about the papers found in the dead workers' pockets, decides to consult the scientist Rotwang, his old collaborator, who lives in an old house in the lower levels of the city. The two were friends but became rivals over the love of a woman, like you do. Rotwang loved a girl named Hel but when he introduced her to his good buddy, Fredersen, Hel dumped him to marry the rich guy. Hel subsequently died giving birth to Freder, as women in films often do, leaving both Rotwang and Fredersen heartbroken and loathing one other. (Yes, it's the "a woman dies to motivate the actions of the mens" trope, which was already old in 1927, as it was seen in literature.) While Papa F has moved on with his life (due to having a ton of cash, a city to run, and a kid), Rotwang has been obsessing over the woman he loved and his hatred for Papa F, and he's a balloon that's about to pop. Rotwang introduces Papa F to his robot/android (please note, neither word had been invented yet and it's called a "Machine Man") that he has constructed. Rotwang intends to give the image of Hel and marry it. o.O
FYI, this is the famous robot that C3PO is based on, tall and golden and Art Deco. The director, Fritz Lang, made the actress playing Maria wear the robot suit in scenes where it moved, and it was quite painful for her. My second thought was to consider all the creepy fanboys who would love to create the perfect android woman and marry her, what with real women being such pains in the asses and refusing to date them and all. Frankly, I always figured that taking their sperm out of the gene pool would one day do wonders for the human race, but that's just me. But don't worry, I'm sure when science gets to the point that this is possible there will be Conservative politicians going bug-fuck about it and passin' laws agin it, as it is not in God's Plan. Of course later on we will find out that they all own their very own AI Stepford Wives.
When Papa Fredersen shows Rotwang the papers from the dead workers' pockets, Rotwang explains that they are maps to the 2,000-year old catacombs that the city was built on. Men of action, they decide to explore the catacombs right then and there and climb down a tunnel. From a gap in the rocks, they observe the workers gathering in a cathedral cut from the rock. There, Maria appears and begins preaching to the workers (our hero, Freder, is in the crowd, listening raptly) about the Tower of Babel and about how they must wait for the coming Mediator. She tells them that the heart must be mediator between the mind (the planners) and the hands (the workers.) It's a very Edith Keeler moment, and I wonder if Harlan Ellison found inspiration in this scene for the character in The City on the Edge of Forever.
At the end of the sermon, Papa Fredersen and Rotwang watch as Freder reveals himself to Maria. In a Neo-in-the-Matrix moment, Freder tells Maria that, as the son of the city's creator, he believes that *he* is the Mediator that the workers have been waiting for. Papa F orders Rotwang to give his android the image of Maria in order to sow distrust between her and the workers. Rotwang agrees but has ulterior motives, intending to use his android to ruin Papa F's life. Rotwang kidnaps Maria and uses her to transform the android to look exactly like her. He then instructs New Maria to destroy the city and murder the hero of our story, Freder -- these being the two things that mean the most to Papa Fredersen. Dastardly!
Hilariously (to my modern sensibilities), Rotwang demonstrates the New Maria's abilities to Papa F by dressing it up as an erotic dancer at the Yoshiwara, where it drives the sons of the owners into homicidal fits of sexual jealousy. I do not kid, a pasty-faced woman wearing sequined pasties, a loin cloth, and a funky fan-hat tosses herself around gracelessly on the stage and everybody goes nuts. This isn't even a Hathor (SG-1) moment where she's exuding a pheromone or emitting a signal that clouds men's minds, it's just raw sexuality that takes them down. It's a trope I could do without for the rest of my life, the "women and their uncontrollable sexuality make men do stuff they wouldn't ordinarily do" trope, or Eve syndrome. We already saw it earlier in the film when we learned that Hel made two good friends become enemies. Anyway, proving Darwin right, the frat boy body count is enormous; meanwhile, the New Maria visits the workers' city and encourages the workers to rebel. A mob of workers storms out of the workers' city in a full-scale riot and destroys the Heart Machine, the city's power generator, resulting in a complete hydraulic breakdown. The city's reservoirs overflow and flood the workers' below-ground city to the brim, and seemingly drown the children of the workers. In fact, the children were saved by Real Maria and Freder in a stirring and heroic rescue!
When the workers realize that they have inadvertently killed their children, they blame Maria. Under Grot's leadership (remember him?), they dash to the upper city and run through the streets, chasing the real and very terrified Maria. Coincidentally, she runs past Yoshiwara where the New Maria is sitting on a frat boy's shoulders and throwing her arms up into the air in a very "flaming youth" manner, and the mob grabs it, allowing the real Maria to escape. In the ensuing confusion, the New Maria robot is tied to a stake atop a huge bonfire and, laughing and grinning as it burns, it turns back into the golden robot/android before our eyes. I'm not even sure the mindless mob notices as it rampages around the city.
Meanwhile, the real Maria escapes only to be found and chased by Rotwang, who thinks she's the android and now wants to give his creation the likeness of Hel. Waste not, want not, I always say! In a climactic scene, Papa Fredersen watches in horror as his son and Rotwang fight on the city's rooftops. Rotwang falls to his death, and Freder and Maria return to the street and unite Papa Fredersen (the mind) and Grot (the hands), thus ending the brutality of the city. I think it's something of a salute to unionism and the worker finally getting a voice. I also wonder if Rotwang-the-scientist's death is meant to be a swipe at Technology and Going Too Far Against God's Plans, but who knows. Having the hero beat up a bad guy that's been molesting the semi-fainting heroine was a very powerful trope in silent films. You can see it spoofed in the early B&W Popeye cartoons when he beats up Bluto after he's grabbed Olive Oyl, who puts the back of her hand to her forehead and moans, "OooOooh, saaaave meeeee!" as she's being dragged around.
Trivia: in the Australian/New Zealand version of Metropolis, the guy who distributed it in that part of the world took a shot of the city from the beginning of the film and put it at the end along with a card telling the audience that the city was repaired and enjoyed by all, which is a kind of nice way to end the film. Another bit of trivia: Lang expressed extreme disappointment in and dislike of this film years later, probably as a reaction the fact that the Nazis absolutely adored it. He'd had to divorce his wife soon after she enthusiastically joined the Nazi party.
So, that's my (long but extremely truncated, believe me) synopsis of Metropolis. One thing I found interesting about Metropolis was that pop culture's idea of "What Is Sexy" has been refined over many generations of visual entertainment. While on paper "half-dressed young woman dancing seductively" still works, what that means in the flesh has changed. Check out New Maria's sexy-dancing in this Metropolis trailer:
It's kind of hilarious how men who are supposed to be jaded, degenerate playboys suddenly act like repressed virgins with a wad of cash and the Pope's blessing let loose in a whore house when New Maria starts flopping around.
Here's Fox's preview of Glee's "Britney/Brittany" episode shown earlier this year:
I think Brittany in the green top dancing with the snake pretty much approximates what Lang was going for, bless his heart. She looks awesomely sexy, and I'm sure men would snap to attention if they saw her dancing at Yoshiwara (or anywhere else), but doubt that anybody would kill anybody else over her. One of the side-benefits of internet Pr0n available to all is that nobody faints over the sight of a bare ankle anymore, let alone tries to kill anyone over it.
Bonus vid:
Queen! Radio Ga Ga!
