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Fritz Lang\u2019s \u201cMetropolis\u201d is considered<\/a> to be the first feature-length science fiction film ever made. Its influence can be felt in many modern genre classics: \u201cBlade Runner<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Fifth Element<\/a>,\u201d \u201cThe Matrix<\/a>\u201d \u2014 basically anything set in a megacity of the future owes a little something to Lang\u2019s masterpiece. While its plot and characters may have been lost to the public memory, the film\u2019s lineage is so significant that it\u2019s worth talking about, even 98 years later.<\/p>\n \u201cMetropolis\u201d 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 \u201cThe Worker\u2019s City,\u201d where a lower class toils on machines to create the city\u2019s wealth. Metropolis is mechanized, full of towering enginery and robotic doppelg\u00e4ngers, 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 \u2014 if it\u2019s so important, what is \u201cMetropolis\u201d actually about? If it\u2019s the grandfather of all science fiction, what do its futuristic visions comment on?<\/p>\n Much of the message can be summated by the text on its final intertitle, where it is proclaimed that \u201cThe mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart!\u201d Here, the \u201chead\u201d is the intellectual planners of the city; the \u201chands,\u201d the workers; and the \u201cheart,\u201d 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\u2019t just portray a future world of extreme class division, but one where the organization of society has been animated. The metropolis in \u201cMetropolis,\u201d itself called Metropolis, isn\u2019t 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 \u2014 the film\u2019s robots \u2014 are given mechanical life, the city is given agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n While the visual style of \u201cMetropolis\u201d 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 \u201cBlade Runner,\u201d pushed 37 years in the future. Like Metropolis in \u201cMetropolis,\u201d the city is vertical, stratified by class, with a \u201chead\u201d \u2014 the Tyrell Corporation, creating its replicant androids \u2014 and \u201chands,\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/a>, everyone behaves as if they are constantly being examined. Though the city\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n