“Metropolis” doesn’t really resolve anything. At its conclusion, the worker village underneath the Earth has been destroyed, the luxurious Garden of Eden is abandoned and the majestic city to represent all cities has been brought to a stand still.
The people of “Metropolis” have only reestablished human morality for the moment. Man is equal once more, but there is no sense things are about to change.
Fritz Lang used the most money ever spent on a German film to make an epic about mankind’s scary dependence on technology, the massive rift between social classes and the rapid decline of humanity when posed with our own ego, sin and anger. This civilization can only thrive with the gifts of modern engineering. What’s more, the wealth inequality will remain intact and sin has not been eradicated. The story ends happily, but you can see how Lang would leave the eventual fate of the world somewhat tentative.
“Metropolis” was butchered and never to be seen appropriately due to its length, its poor box office appeal, its religious overtones and its confusing imagery for American audiences, but one gets the idea that some of the themes Lang was engaging here were just a bit too much for some people to handle.
It’s an impossible gift then that Lang’s film still exists at all, and now with additional footage such that Lang’s vision can be fully understood. It’s a pivotal film because of its scale and its visionary glimpse of the future, but it’s been so captivating through the years because it capitalizes on so many fears, all of which are universal.
That’s because nothing in “Metropolis” is specific. Much of it is metaphorical, and more memorable and vivid for it. Take one of the film’s most famous early moments: Freder (Gustav Frohlic), the wealthy son of Metropolis’s most powerful authority figure, Joh Frederson (Alfred Abel), wanders into the depths of the city only to stumble across the machinery powering everything. The laborers move mechanically at knobs and levers, proving to be no more than mindless robots themselves. The staircase leading up to gears and pistons spewing smoke and dust looks ominous enough, but after an explosion, Freder hallucinates the passageway has morphed into a giant dragon’s head. Hundreds of chained and barely clothed slaves trudge up the stairs only to tumble into the cave’s abyss as human sacrifices.
Lang’s visual parallel is strikingly obvious. We’re slaves to these tools. The more we’ve advanced in technology, the more we’ve moved backwards into servitude. Take from it what you will. But Lang isn’t going to come out and say it.
His approach is much more visceral and avant-garde. Even for a silent film, Lang’s camera and set dressing are expressive, his editing is surreal and his effects are cosmic. Notice the raised eyebrow on Brigitte Helm’s face to let the audience know that this is not the same Maria we’ve seen before. Watch then how these miniscule gestures inflame the rich socialites’ libidos. The swirling, kaleidoscope aesthetic on play recalls “Vertigo” and seem years ahead of their time. We get emotions of sadism, perversion and voyeurism all in Maria’s burlesque dance. No intertitles are needed to understand her haunting sex appeal.
Some of the film’s other visual draws were less obvious at the time. For ages, “Metropolis” was billed primarily as the first sci-fi because the film’s butchered edit placed the Machine Man at the center. In terms of plot, “Metropolis” doesn’t necessarily fit into the genre we know today, but miniscule visuals inspired countless sci-fi B-movies to come. The circular rings that surround the Machine Man are so otherworldly. They seem to create an entirely new genre out of thin air. Even the bizarre tubes and bubbling capsules inside the evil scientist Rotwang’s (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) lab would become cliché set dressing.
And yet much of it is for look and creating a mood, not overwhelming substance. These things could be anything and everything. The hands on the circular machine Freder is responsible to monitor? Meaningless. The cityscape? A conglomeration of sketches and models of plans for actual buildings. Lang and a massive team constructed this miniature play set by hand and moved toy cars and planes mere millimeters at a time. They spent eight days of work for 10 seconds of film.
But I took great notice of the tinier set pieces, like the elevator entering into Freder’s apartment. It’s a constantly cycling set of platforms that go up and down, carrying a single person as someone steps into an open space. What a clever little innovation, I thought, but then Lang surprises us by using it for a purpose. Just as Freder goes down, The Thin Man tailing him steps off the platform coming up.
Or what about Lang’s camera? When they started shooting in 1925, the graceful movements seen in “Sunrise” were not yet imagined, so Lang’s camera is mostly stationary. But one of the best shots is so quick that a modern audience would take it for granted. It’s a POV shot of Rotwang’s hand reaching out toward a desperate Maria. Such rapid camera movement is innovative for the time, and Lang has a lot of these modern touches in his composition. His starkly centered framing of key figures has a look that would carry through to many horror movie glaring, and later to hilariously awkward discomfort in Wes Anderson films.
These cinematic elements provide seamless transitions between style and substance. Lang’s experimenting with a new look, and that’s what critics at the time felt of it, but he’s not just doing it for his health. What’s impressive then is how quickly “Metropolis” changes from a shadowy horror film to a grandiose disaster epic. Lang is working on a level of sheer cinematic enormity, wrangling over 36,000 extras wearing over 200,000 costumes, all to imagine a feeling of complete anarchy. How do you organize people to go crazy?
The irony is that Lang was a strict perfectionist. To achieve the appropriately nightmarish shots of children standing in pools of water reaching towards their savior, Lang forced his extras to do dozens of takes in genuinely freezing and horrid conditions. He ruled his set with an iron fist, and that’s why his film has such distinct personal vision.
It’s sad then that all of that power was stripped away from him at the editing room. The Paramount edit removed an entire segment of Freder speaking with a bishop in a church, the monument to Joh Frederson’s lost wife Hel (because Americans wouldn’t understand the difference between ‘hell’) and Frederson’s mysterious henchman, The Thin Man (Fritz Rasp, not William Powell). These portions provide pivotal plot details that were lost for generations. But they also add to Lang’s overall mystique and sense of spectacle.
For years, people have watched “Metropolis” in awe of the trance like vision of the future it provides. They latch on to the film’s epic third act, which unlike action blockbusters of today engages its characters in plot developments as well as action. Whether the workers destroy the heart machine is of great consequence (and it even fits the Head/Heart/Hands analogy), not just a plot device. It creates suspense instead of just mayhem, and it accentuates the film’s broader artistry, not draw it out.
And yet a common criticism of “Metropolis” is that it is just too massive. Lang is juggling a lot of themes and passing them down fairly heavy-handed. It is a film more analyzed than enjoyed.
Even a thesis could be written about the depiction of women in silent films, and “Metropolis” would serve as a good template for how an entire generation of movies put their women on pedestals. Here, the presence of a woman is that of a Goddess. In the city’s Eden-like gardens, women line up to entertain and amuse Freder. Later, we see Maria framed, illuminated and figuratively elevated by her children disciples. The next time we see her, she’s literally on a pedestal, first as a preacher showing the workers the way, and again as the whore of Babylon dancing and seducing the men of Yoshiwara. She’s the instigator for all of the workers’ and socialites’ actions, and it fits with how Rotwang used Hel as a motivation to build the Machine Man and fight for her survival.
But “Metropolis’s” technical perfection has not reduced it to thousands of cogs in a well-oiled piece of machinery. Such an experience would be exactly what “Metropolis” is against.