Essay by Jason Nu


"Metropolis, you know, was born from my first sight of the skyscrapers of New York in October 1924… I thought that it was the crossroads of multiple and confused human forces, blinded and knocking into one another, in an irresistible desire for exploitation, and living in perpetual anxiety."
– Fritz Lang 1

"A great artist contains multitudes, and Lang packed a host of contradictory longings into a single allegory… Lang celebrates the power of architecture to elevate humanity while he simultaneously laments its capacity to stifle it."
– David Edelstein, Slate.com 2

The introductory decades of the 20th century in the United States and Europe saw a rapid and sustained economic expansion, bolstered by new forms of technology, Fordist mass industrial production, and Taylorist scientific management principles. These developments had a profound impact on the physical form and function of the city. Metropolises like New York, Chicago and Berlin experienced a breathless pace of change that must have been at once heady, alluring, repulsive, disorienting, fascinating and shocking. New developments like mass transit, automobiles, highways, skyscrapers and electric lights transformed the faces of these cities in but a few decades. This new vision of the city as a teeming, high-tech, fast paced, pulsating industrial machine captured the popular imagination and virtually demanded to be interpreted and debated in the arts. What better way to capture the dynamism and novelty of the emerging technocity than by portraying it in the new and dynamic medium of the motion picture? Indeed, the city proved to be an endlessly fascinating subject for early filmmakers. Films like Walter Rutmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City and Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera portrayed Berlin and Moscow as swirling, fast-paced, kaleidoscopes of riotous action, stages for man and machine to march forward in irrepressible, mechanistic lockstep. Perhaps no other film better captured this brand of futurist aesthetic than Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927). Lang’s striking vision of a 21st century technocity is still recognizable to us today as an archetype of The Futuristic City. The film’s images of towering biomorphic pinnacles and the web of suspended highways linking them had become sci-fi cliché by mid-century.

Lang claimed that the spark of inspiration for Metropolis came to him when he first caught glimpse of the Manhattan skyline as he entered New York harbor for the first time in 1924. Lang had a vision of a city that was at once Utopian and Dystopian, and he would express this ambivalence in Metropolis. Matthew Gandy, in Chapter 3 of Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City, discusses this dialectic between competing views of the technocity as a sublime, awe inspiring symbol of rejuvenation and hope on the one hand and on the other a dehumanizing, nightmarish symbol of economic oppression and an idealistic trust in technology that would ultimately prove foolish.

In his film, Lang envisioned a city that was a utopia for the privileged and powerful. At the start of the film, our hero, Freder, who is the pampered son of the leader of Metropolis, spends his day frolicking in a sunbathed artificial pleasure garden built in the dome of the city’s tallest skyscraper, replete with flowers, fountains and fluttering peacocks. This artificial, technologically created nature is made possible however, only through the labor of the working class, who slave away in a subterranean dystopia. The technocratic structure of Metropolis keeps the two worlds carefully separated. Gandy discusses how Robert Moses’ vision of the technological city sought to meld technology and nature into a seamless package through his parkway system, but that this system was ultimately reserved for the privileged. Gandy argues that the technocity as Moses envisioned played an important role in social separation between the rich and the poor. He quotes Marshall Berman, who writes that the parkway system “was a distinctively techno-pastoral garden, open only to those who possessed the latest modern machines… a uniquely privatized form of public space.” If the privileged get to enjoy a technologically rendered version of nature, in Metropolis, the working class is relegated to a technological landscape devoid of nature. Their quarters are filled with cogs, gears and belching smoke. The workers are so beat down by their mechanistic, rationalized factory work that their goose-stepping movements resemble that of automatons. Such dystopias, where the privileged and underprivileged experience vastly different versions of modernity, can be seen in films as diverse as Robocop, Bladerunner, and even Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. In Metropolis, Lang takes the dehumanizing nature of the technocity one step further by depicting the actual melding of man (or in this case woman!) and machine. The mad scientist Rotwang breathes life into his mechanical creation and gives it the form of our heroine, Maria. This is one of the first and most memorable depictions of a robot in the movies. And she is some robot! Sexy, seductive, lascivious, power hungry and ultimately evil.

The Robot Maria’s autocratic tendencies are but one reflection of a fascist component in Lang’s vision of the technocity. The architecture in Metropolis is large, monumental and awe-inspiring. Vehicles and people move with speed and patterned, predetermined precision. This vision of the city as a technologic dynamo where people and machines meld into one, all striving and straining in patterned ecstasy, is very close to the dangerously alluring fascist aesthetic described by Susan Sontag in her essay, “Fascinating Fascism.” This aesthetic is exemplified in obviously pro-fascist works such as Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films Triumph of the Will and the Olympia series, but they can be also seen in films with different political bents, such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, or the Koyaanisqatsi series. But what all these films have in common is that they illicit conflicting emotions in the viewer – should we let ourselves be impressed and mesmerized by this fascinating display of Brobdingnagian patterns, technical ingenuity and collective movement, or should we recoil in horror in how such an aesthetic dehumanizes the individual? Gandy describes how Moses’s public works projects sometimes came uncomfortably close to adopting this fascist form, and how they also elicited ambivalent reactions at the time. Gandy writes, “These new features of the urban environment were met with a kind of strange fascination, as powerful public sculptures embodying the promise of a new technological age but also a sense of dislocation and foreboding.”

Gandy describes how this disquiet and displeasure over Moses’s vision of the technological modernist city grew to such a fever pitch during the 1960s and 70s that eventually his program proved unsustainable and was brought to an end. Was this vision then entirely a failure? Could we single out Moses as the Evil Robot Maria? I would answer in the negative. First of all, many of the projects carried out during Moses’s tenure are still admired today, both functionally and aesthetically. I for one love the Art Deco lines of the WPA era bridges that gracefully span the Merritt Parkway in Westchester and Connecticut, and the clean cut, intellectually satisfying cadre of International Style skyscrapers on Park Avenue north of Grand Central. Furthermore, I agree with Gandy that Moses’s agency in shaping the face of New York City, although significant, was not unlimited and was backed by the interests of economic elites who were far more powerful than he. As Mies van der Rohe once said, “architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” Cities throughout the world were eagerly undertaking this technological modernist redevelopment, with some experiencing a far more dramatic transformation than New York. Stockholm, for instance, razed several square miles of its historic inner city of cobblestone streets and plastered houses, within the span of a few years in the 1950s, in order to put up modernist glass and steel skyscrapers, a number of traffic circles, and a subway system. These steps later proved to be unpopular, yet was also in many ways a necessary step in the city’s development. Past experience never prepared anyone for the kind of technological progress that the industrialized world experienced during the 20th century. We weren’t quite aware of all the pitfalls that could come with such a radical modernization program.

The project of the technocity is an experiment that, although suffered blows, revisions and sobering reality checks, is still with us today. We have not and will not likely abandon large public works projects and technological solutions to urban problems in the future. At the end of Metropolis, the workers, whipped up into a frenzy by the Evil Robot Maria, destroy the power plant that to them symbolizes their oppression by the rich. This unfortunately unbalances the city’s public works system and unleashes a flood that threatens to drown the workers’ children. It is up to our hero Freder, who has experienced Metropolis from the top of the skyscrapers down to the depths of the slums, to save the children and restore order, acting as an intermediary between the workers and the rulers of Metropolis, who both depend upon the technological infrastructure they have built for their own survival. In the real world, the survival of our cities too is inexorably wedded to the engineered structures we have put in place over the past century. Perhaps the lesson learned from the Moses era and from Metropolis is that we have to consider the effects of each new innovation in the cityscape carefully, and make sure modernization happens in a socially sensitive and context appropriate manner.

Notes:

1. Fritz Lang, and Barry Keith Grant, ed., Fritz Lang Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2003, pg. 68. 2. David Edelstein, “Radiant City: The Timely Return of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, One of the Greatest Ballets Ever Put on Film,” Slate.com, Sept. 18, 2002. http://www.slate.com/?id=2071036