Metropolis, Then and Now

Reflections on what is between the mind and the hand.

There is now a very well done, colorized version of the silent film classic “Metropolis” available free on Youtube. See it while it is there. Increasingly, good things disappear or get paywalled on the net.

I became interested in the old silent movies a few years back. These are things created a century ago now. They are products of the time they were made.

Some of them stand the test of time well. They are time capsules back into the ethos of that time. Some of them are testaments to the ugliest aspects of the time.

“The Klansman” is like a recruiting film for the KKK. It should never be shown. “Napoleon” is into this chauvanistic French nationalism and needs to be taken with a big dose of salt.

“The Battleship Potemkin” is very much into “yahoo!” Bolshevik propaganda. It does have some very inventive scenes. “Alexander Nevsky” is somewhat propagandistic, but very good.

The thing about these films is that they require you to really watch them. You do not just sit back and listen to the actors doing their lines, just to set up the next jolt of action. You have to sit up and observe.

The closest you get to these in the more modern era is the Stanley Kubrick films. Or, maybe some of the best horror film directors. You do not just wait for the next sensation to blast through your head; you get to think through what is happening, what just happened, what might be about to happen.

What is really interesting about Metropolis is that it seems so ahead of its time in some ways, and very much of its time in others. In fact, to me it says a lot about our times. This may just be because the place and era in which it was made has so many parallels to our present time and space.

It came out in 1927 in Weimar Germany. The whole world was in a time of rapid, destabilizing economic change, but also of political deadlock. Germany had its special problems within that reality.

They had recently been defeated in a war which they did not cause. They were made the scapegoats for it.

They had developed a very advanced economy before the war. Then economic progress was frustrated by the conditions imposed on them by the victorious finance capitalist powers.

Something is still not fully apparent to most people considering this politics then and there, and relating it back to today. There was a fight going on between the German industrial capitalists, and the forces loyal to global finance. Communists had almost succeeded in taking power right at the end of the war, but had been infiltrated and disrupted by globalist agents.

Communists at that time, all over the world, had begun fighting with each other over petty ideological differences. They were talking in ridiculous rhetoric which put off the working classes who had been looking to them for leadership. The tone of this is eerily similar to the “woke” nonsense we are hearing from the present day ‘fake left’ in western countries.

A fake, ‘representational’ democracy had been foisted on Germany at the end of the war. It was similar to what was developing in other western countries. People had still not been convinced that this was how democracy worked, and that other ways may have been possible.

But the kind of political system Germany was stuck with made effective government impossible. Governments changed about every six months. People started to want a ‘strong leader’ who could sort things out and reestablish the county’s independence.

The German industrial class also wanted change. They wanted the industrial machine they had built over the previous generation to be free to work at full capacity, and to grow again. It is really trite to point out that the first world war had been primarily about preventing Germany’s highly efficient industry from competing with the Anglo-American complex.

So this was the context in which the film “Metropolis” was conceived and produced. The moral was “between the mind and hand must be the heart”. This comes from a very naive, ‘fairy tale’ view of the world.

The film was written by Thea Von Harbou, the wife of the director, Fritz Lang. It was based on her novel of the same name. The world she imagines is clearly a metaphor of the world she lived in, as she saw it.

She clearly imagined the problem as class war between industrial capitalism and a privileged elite living off it, and a suppressed labouring class. The two need to see each other’s perspective and agree to ‘make friends’. However, if they cannot, then this must be mediated by ‘the heart’, some wise and kind ruler.

She does pick up on the various elements of a class war and maintaining control over populations. Many of these resonate today. They can serve as a warning about such things as libertarianism and artificial intelligence and robotization.

I am not going to do a chronology of the plot. You might want to see the movie yourself and I do not want to spoil it for you.

But we must wonder about some of the apparent subliminal messaging in the film. It includes all sorts of symbolism and metaphors.

A ‘Star of David’ is connected with the ‘Club of the Sons’, a private area for the privileged in the ‘Metropolis’. Deep in the catacombs below the Metropolis, where the subordinated classes meet to discuss their situation, Christian crosses are everywhere, along with skulls.

Yet the film does not have any overtly religious or antisemitic messages. It seems to reject violence and any kind of antiauthoritarianism. In Marxian terms, the message is progressive and reformist, calling for everyone to ‘play nice’, rather than to violently rebel against systems rigged against them.

My favorite ‘message’ scene in the film was where the rioting mob, having destroyed much of the Metropolis, comes for the ‘heart machine’, the power source that keeps everything running. The superintendent of the underground finally gets through to them that they are destroying what enables them to live. If they now wreck the heart machine, they and their families are all going to die.

Metropolis is considered the mother of science fiction films. It pioneered so many conventions of the genre. Harbou said it was not intended to be set in any place or time.

First there was the huge city itself, built in layers, with the new layers on top of old ones. Below everything seemed to be the ruins of an earlier civilization. The city seemed to be sealed off from its surrounding environment.

A privileged elite lived in the sunlight at the upper levels. In the rigid class stratification, the laboring classes lived below the city’s mechanical guts. They were brought up to work in the machinery by elevators, and were sent back down at their shift’s end.

When these people finally become too old or disabled to work, they were fed into the ‘Moloch’. This seemed to digest them into something. It is not clear what.

The entire complex was ruled over by an autocrat called Joh. He sat in his command post above the city, watching read-outs of production from the mechanical level. This level was overseen by his superintendent, Grot.

There was a beautiful young reformer called Maria, played by Brigette Helm. She kept showing up at the Club of the Sons with a few children from ‘down below’, trying to convince the sons to change things. Joh did nothing about her, but ordered this very tall man to keep an eye on her.

Tall man learned that Maria is the person holding the meetings down in the catacombs. She is urging the denizens to be patient a little longer. She will continue to try to convince the ruling classes to not be so mean.

And we have a robot in the film. In a corner of the city is Rotwang the inventor, Joh’s friend and chief engineer. Rotwang has been working to create the “machine man”, who can do all the work without causing problems.

Rotwang reports that he is now ready to create the first one. Joh abducts Maria and tells him to give it her likeness, so he can use it to create confusion among the workers. So Rotwang, in a striking scene, creates the metal skeleton, and fleshes it out with the fake Maria.

Joh has apparently decided he is tired of running this huge industrial plant, and probably of having to keep the club of the sons happy and supplied with luxuries. He wants bad Maria to change the message to the proletarians downstairs, so that they destroy the machinery which keeps their spaces habitable, and themselves alive.

However, Rotwang has a secret grudge against Joh, and it seems, society in general. Bad Maria is his tool, not Joh’s. So she convinces the slaves that it is now time to revolt, and shows them how to get up into the mechanical levels.

Before this, Bad Maria does a good job of corrupting the morals of many of the young sons in the club. They start to think they should be able to indulge any desires. Joh is getting in their way.

Joh realizes his plan is going wrong. He confronts Rotwang and they fight. Maria escapes and gets down to the lower levels. There she finds Joh’s son, Freder, who had fallen in love with her.

Freder is also trying to stop the fiasco. He was appalled by the Moloch, and the way people lived down below. He somehow evaded the tall man and his agents.

Together they manage to get all the children out of the lower level before it floods. However, Grot the superintendent does not know this. He blames Maria for drowning all their children and leads them in hunting her down and burning her alive. It is not clear at first whether they got the bad Maria or the real one. Suspense, suspense.

There are a few things about the plot which are left loose, because parts of the film are missing. No script has ever been found. The film has many differences from the novel.

It is unclear what finally happened to Rotwang. It is unclear exactly why Joh wanted to destroy most of his work force at that moment. There are a couple of characters which seem to have no purpose in the story.

However, they all meet in the end at the Club of the Sons. Grot is now very angry with Joh. Maria tries to get Grot and Joh to make up. Finally she persuades Freder to be the heart mediating between the mind and hand.

Freder and Maria do a big movie kiss. I assume now they will conceive a new line of rulers in Metropolis, with more heart and less mind. We would assume they will be able to repair the damaged parts of the Metropolis, preserving the population’s means of survival.

Okay, I have given away most of the film. Sorry.

Old movies usually say a lot about the time and place in which they are made. This one is no exception. However, this one speaks exceptionally to our own time.

We have a selfish rentier class, who can be easily turned into a destructive force. They think they are being suppressed because they cannot have anything they want. They are even more dangerous to the rulers than the slaves down below.

As ruler, we have an archetypal soulless technocrat. He finally had an artificial person who could work in his system and not talk back or make trouble, who did not have to be fed and housed. He decided he could just eliminate a lot of his proles which he no longer needed.

Better yet, he could trigger them to destroy themselves, along with some obsolete plant he no longer needed. All this blew up on him. He almost destroyed everything.

He found that his rentier class was even harder to control. He was almost done in by his mad inventor. In the end, his ever loyal chief superintendent turned on him, as well as the Tall Man.

So here are even more reasons to worry about robotization and artificial intelligence. It gets so that you cannot tell them from humans. It is not clear who is really controlling them, and for what aims.

So, between the mind and hand must be the heart. However, the heart would have its problems as a mediator. I have a different suggestion for what to put between mind and hand.

That is, a little real wisdom. A permanent, privileged ruling class is not a good thing. They inevitably lose touch with reality, become contemptuous of humanity.

The big persistent theme of my blog is the need for a meritocracy. We need to train a cadre of able people to govern. They do have to be watched over, and removed when they stop serving the public and start trying to accumulate wealth and power to themselves.

Some countries in the present world have made some progress toward such a system.

So, the movie has been restored as well as it could be. It was the most expensive film ever made up to that time. Even today, the sets and effects are impressive.

It certainly was a precursor of many science fiction conventions. It has people trapped inside a self contained artificial reality with its own rules. It has robots indistinguishable from real people. It even had these monitors which look much like modern LED displays.

It was very popular when it came out. It was shown all over the world. It is still considered the world’s first real ‘blockbuster.’

However, many countries, especially the USA, found it to be communist propaganda. It had to be completely re-edited before it could be shown there. The plot was completely reversed.

Gradually it was forgotten about. Sound and color films began after 1929. The Nazis liked the film. This led to it being often identified with them. This led to German prints being destroyed after the war.

Gradually, interest revived in the old silent movies. ‘Metropolis’ came to be seen as a masterpiece of the genre. Great efforts were made to find and reconstruct footage from it.

We now have the final result of this effort. Much of it depends on one complete but damaged print found in Argentina. Some parts of it were lost forever.

All the people who had anything to do with making the film are long dead. Weimar Germany, where it was made, soon after collapsed into the Nazi tyranny.

The lives of many of the people involved in the film were badly effected by the tumult of the Nazi period. Brigette Helm, who played good and bad Maria, immediately left the movie business when the Nazis took power, moved to Switzerland, and stayed there.

Helm was nineteen when she made this, her first film. She described it as hell; hounded by a perfectionist director, wearing very uncomfortable robot suits, swimming in cold water. Despite her short career, she is thought to have been one of the best of the silent film actresses.

Heinrich George played Grot the mechanic. He was one of these people who was a big communist until the Nazi takeover. Then after some discussions with Nazi officials, he became a big Nazi and acted in some of their uglier propaganda films.

Then he tried to convince the Soviets he was never really a Nazi. The Soviets did not buy that. He died in one of their camps.

Alfred Abel played Joh. His career ended with the advent of the Nazis. His wife could not prove she was not Jewish.

Other actors simply dropped out of sight when sound films began, or after the Nazis came into power. The Nazis took tight control of the German language film industry. You worked for them or you left the business.

Many people left to work abroad. Few ever came back. Then, if you had worked for the Nazis, you had no film career after the war.

The German language cinema had been brilliant in the Weimar period. Many other film industries benefited from talented German refugees from the Nazis. The German film industry had to start from scratch after the Nazi period.

One of these refugees was the director of ‘Metropolis’, Fritz Lang. He was married to the writer, Thea Von Harbou. Their stories are interesting.

Lang was disgusted by Nazism. Von Harbou began to be interested in them. She was also interested in some aspects of Indian culture. She wrote a novel called “The Indian Tomb”.

She also became interested in an Indian man living in Germany. This led to Lang divorcing her for adultery.

Just before the Nazis took power, Lang make a film called “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse”. It was considered as a criticism of Nazis. As well, Lang was found to have Jewish ancestry.

So, Lang had a talk with Doctor Goebbels. Soon after, he left Germany in secret, leaving most of his money behind him.

Lang made one film in France, then moved to Hollywood. There, he had a long career, making many of Hollywood's golden age classics. Some had an anti Nazi theme. He also helped found the Hollywood anti Nazi committee.

Meanwhile, Von Harbou joined the Nazi party. She did a lot of writing work for them. Yet she also secretly married her Indian lover.

After the war, she of course insisted she was not really a Nazi, just trying to protect Indian refugees in Germany. The British did not buy this, but they only locked her up for a few months. After the war, her health failed, she fell into poverty, and she died in a hostel.

Years after her death, Lang returned to Germany for awhile. He made the film of “The Indian Tomb” which Von Harbou had always wanted to make. He also made a sequel to his “Dr. Mabuse“ film.

One final thing. Many people, then and now, called Metropolis a Communist film. There are also many people who called it a Nazi film. What such people reveal is their own biases and lack of awareness of them.

What it really was, was a very naive film. I would even call it a liberal film. That is, from a mentality that people may come to accept being slotted into categories and treated according to them, if everyone was just polite and reasonable about it.

It was made a century ago now. The world was more naive and simplistic then.

The moral I would take from it is this; we need to watch out for people trying to trigger us to destroy the structures which keep us alive. This is so even if these structures are also used to oppress us.

I have one more moral; anyone trying to create machines which are in any way undetectable from humans, is not doing it for a good purpose. Such things must be outlawed.

Right, climate scientists? Right, Libertarians and Anarchists?

Hello, tech billionaires and their groupies? Hello, Basic Income promoters?

Overseeing the hand and mind must be, not sentimentality, but wisdom.

See the movie.