Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” is considered to be the first feature-length science fiction film ever made. Its influence can be felt in many modern genre classics: “Blade Runner,” “The Fifth Element,” “The Matrix” — basically anything set in a megacity of the future owes a little something to Lang’s masterpiece. While its plot and characters may have been lost to the public memory, the film’s lineage is so significant that it’s worth talking about, even 98 years later.
“Metropolis” presents a vision of a city of the future, purposely built and split into two levels: above ground, grand and opulent, full of the well-off, and below ground, or “The Worker’s City,” where a lower class toils on machines to create the city’s wealth. Metropolis is mechanized, full of towering enginery and robotic doppelgängers, all tropes that may seem tired now, but ones that had never been captured on the screen at the time. But put all that historical novelty aside — if it’s so important, what is “Metropolis” actually about? If it’s the grandfather of all science fiction, what do its futuristic visions comment on?
Much of the message can be summated by the text on its final intertitle, where it is proclaimed that “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart!” Here, the “head” is the intellectual planners of the city; the “hands,” the workers; and the “heart,” the collective compassion each must have for the other to create an ideal society. In bypassing this metaphor so readily, however, we miss a crucial implication of the line. Of all the comparisons that could be used, Lang purposefully chooses to evoke the human body. His film doesn’t just portray a future world of extreme class division, but one where the organization of society has been animated. The metropolis in “Metropolis,” itself called Metropolis, isn’t just a character by way of setting mood and tone, but a much more literal force of managing, operating and controlling its citizens. Just like the Maschinenmensch — the film’s robots — are given mechanical life, the city is given agency.
While the visual style of “Metropolis” has been studied, copied and used as a reference in films for decades, its influential portrayal of the city as an adaptive, near-living organism has been overlooked in comparison. Once you notice it, though, it begins to pop up in nearly every science-fiction megacity. Take the Los Angeles we see in “Blade Runner,” pushed 37 years in the future. Like Metropolis in “Metropolis,” the city is vertical, stratified by class, with a “head” — the Tyrell Corporation, creating its replicant androids — and “hands,” the working class who live in the slums below. Of course, there are visual cues that evoke the sense of city-as-body here: flows of people and vehicles streaming like a circulatory system, constant lights flashing like neurons, smoke pouring out into the air like weakened breathing and the all-encompassing, exitless nature of the place. But it’s the structural agency of the city that identifies it as a living thing. Future Los Angeles is defined by its ability to monitor its inhabitants. Billboards watch, people are tracked and like in a panopticon, everyone behaves as if they are constantly being examined. Though the city’s designers may have put these boundaries in place, the metropolis has become a controlling force even over their own lives, mutating and gaining power beyond their grasp.
Look at the Wachowski sisters’ “The Matrix.” The constructed world where the film’s victims think they’re living — literally called Mega City — is completely mediated and controlled by robotic overlords, implanting reality into human brains while harvesting them for battery life. Here, the control of the city is personified by the sinister Agents, virtual avatars of the human-hating sentinels. Mega City is grimy, cold and just as hostile to the health and happiness of its inhabitants as the famous Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving, “How to Make Gravy”) is to protagonist Neo (Keanu Reeves, “Ballerina”). Once again, the fabrication of a society designed without your well-being in mind becomes an active entity, with the sole purpose of either regulating your actions to fit into the system or destroying you.
There’s a problem with these arguments, though. These concepts — the panopticon of the city, the physical separation based on social order, the structure of a place gaining control over its inhabitants — aren’t very futuristic at all. That description of future Los Angeles: How different is it from any modern cityscape, really? Your city may not be controlled by evil artificial intelligence, but can you argue that you aren’t controlled, in some way, by the structural norms of your community? While the literal interpretations of an alive and mutating mastermind of an urban plan aren’t entirely accurate, what these films evoke is true to life.
So, have these kinds of films simply proven themselves to be extremely prophetic? Not entirely. Audiences often associate advanced technology with the harbinger of dystopian authoritarianism; as soon as we see RoboCop walking down the street, we know we’re in trouble, but until then, we can rest easy knowing that all is well. But this, unfortunately, is a fallacy. It is not even the fact that the creeping implementation of automation happens under our radar that makes these movies feel prescient, but rather that the discontent they highlight isn’t technology-dependent at all. Industrialization may amplify how apparent such control is, but the social conditions that create it have stayed constant. This leads us to a darker interpretation of films in the vein of “Metropolis”: They are not meant to show what could come to be, but rather, a sharper picture of what already is.
Though it might seem surprising, Fritz Lang’s film was not created to show the dangers of a future society in shambles. Rather, it was inspired by the feeling of seeing New York City for the first time. Sure, the autonomous capabilities of the city may have been more advanced than what the Big Apple had available at the time, but its messaging intended to reveal the feeling of living in a place so large and inhuman. Like almost all great science fiction, the truth was extended to its logical extreme to show a clearer picture of the present, not a distant dystopia. Cities already watch your every move. They already intentionally separate the rich and poor. They already unconsciously encourage you to make certain choices. If these things mark a dystopia, then bad news: We’re already there.
We cannot allow ourselves to wait for the extremities of these movies to be a guiding signal on when to panic regarding the state of our cities. Instead, their core messages remain their most potent warning: Awful things are happening all around us, and we cannot allow them to continue. There is no nightmarish city of the future to be feared, only the city of today to be reckoned with.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at gsielins@umich.edu.
