by Philipp Blom
Wells was clearly more than a little annoyed about the work, which had been advertised as the greatest German film of all time, as well as the most expensive. With Metropolis, the UFA studios wanted to rival Hollywood and demonstrate to the world that they had all the technology, know-how, trick photography, and other niceties Hollywood had to offer, but could in addition give their films real cultural import, not to say spiritual content. It was here that they went wrong, as Wells pointed out with obvious glee. The problem, as he saw it, was that there was too much murky, Faustian romanticism in what was supposed to be a thoroughly modern fable: “Perhaps Germans will never get right away from the Brocken. Walpurgis Night is the name day of the German poetic imagination, and the national fantasy capers insecurely forever with a broomstick between its legs.”
Metropolis was artistically a mess and commercially a disaster. Its pharaonic cost, five million marks, though modest by today’s standards, drove UFA to the brink of bankruptcy and forced them to collaborate with US studios, making them financially dependent on their transatlantic partners and putting an end to their dreams of challenging Hollywood’s dominant position. But even though the film flopped at the box office even in the severely cut rerelease concocted after the difficult German premiere, it is still an important historical and artistic document. Furthermore, its very failure is fascinating.
Directed by Fritz Lang after a script by his wife and collaborator, Thea von Harbou, the movie tells a fable of love and redemption in a dictatorship “some hundred years in the future,” in which society is split sharply into two classes, the haves and the have-nots. On the higher levels of the dazzling futurist city with its seventy-floor skyscrapers, multilevel roads, and planes floating between buildings lives a class of rich and leisured beautiful people whose lives are dedicated to sport and lavish celebrations, while in the lightless catacombs below, an army of slave workers is stoking the gigantic machines that keep the huge city running. Above it all, in an office in the “new tower of Babel,” is Joh Fredersen, the undisputed ruler of Metropolis, whose technological vision and authority have created this futurist world.
What happens next is almost inevitable. Freder, the dictator’s son, wanders into the lower city because he has spotted an attractive girl, Maria, who is one of the work slaves. There he witnesses an accident when an exhausted worker breaks down and a machine explodes, killing some of his colleagues. Shocked by the accident and by the general hardship he has witnessed, he decides to help, and eventually the workers revolt, egged on not by the noble Freder but by a robot built to resemble Maria and sent by the wicked Joh Fredersen to lead them astray while the real Maria, the spiritual leader of the workers, is imprisoned. Eventually the workers burn the false Maria at the stake, young Freder appears as their champion, and the real Maria is liberated. The father relents and shakes hands with the leader of the rebellion. “The heart must mediate between brain and hands,” as the film declares.
Ambitious and endlessly imaginative, Lang was not much interested in the moral of the story, or indeed in any part of the story, which may account for its patchy realization and sentimental end. To him, Metropolis was an opportunity to create a new cinematic world composed of gigantic sets, innovative trick filming, and thousands of extras, who often had to work under terrible conditions, lining up for take after take until the director was satisfied. One scene, in which the workers have to struggle with a flood, was shot with an army of extras—altogether the film would use twenty-seven thousand men, women, and children—who had to brave the icy water time and again. In the quest to realize his artistic vision, Lang was pitiless, and during the 310 days and 60 nights of filming, usually for more than twelve hours per day, the crew, not to mention the shivering extras, came to resent him bitterly.
If the film flopped in spite of its impressive technical wizardry, the creation of an entire futurist city, dramatic crowd scenes, and amazing sequences, Lang’s indifference and the script had a great deal to do with it. As Wells had so caustically remarked, von Harbou had created a scenario that was prophetic in many ways, not all of them intentional.
Apart from the obvious Christian allusions—the cruel father, the son as mediator between him and the desperate mortals, the tower of Babel, the holy virgin Maria, and so on—there were other, more disturbingly contemporary resonances. The oppressed workers were waiting for a leader, a Führer, to rise up against the injustice of their lot; the masses are whipped up by speeches given by the false Maria, and they break the city’s “heart machine” in order to force things to a total standstill. The public is invited to sympathize with their quest and with the idea that only a charismatic figure can save the day and rescue the people from the dictatorship of a decadent elite.
Another obvious strand was, paradoxically, the blatant anti-modernism lying at the heart of the sci-fi narrative. Ultimately, the huge, gleaming city is nothing but a new Babel, and its creature, the false Maria, is the ultimate temptress, the Whore of Babylon in action. Brigitte Helm, who played both the flesh-and-blood Maria and the automatic, false one, was careful to portray the real heroine as chaste and motherly, while the machine Maria was a harlot in human form, wantonly sensual and seductive as she dances semi-naked for the privileged young men, who fall into a collective frenzy over her desirable body.
Man and machine: still from the transformation scene in Metropolis.
Maria, who can be seen celebrating candlelit masses for the masses in the lower city, is the ideal German woman, and she looks conspicuously medieval. Wells, who did not suffer fools gladly, was particularly scornful of this anti-technological utopia, in which machines and innovation stood for a soulless dictatorship, while salvation apparently lies in turning to the past. “That reversion to torches is quite typical of the spirit of this show,” he scoffed in his review. “Torches are Christian, we are asked to suppose; torches are human. Torches have hearts. But electric hand-lamps are wicked, mechanical, heartless things. The bad, bad inventor uses quite a big one.”
While the film portrayed the ideal of womanhood as chaste, pious, and rooted in the soil of history, the false Maria can also be read as a cipher for many of the anti-Semitic stereotypes of the time. Like the Jews of contemporary anti-Semitic caricature, she is quite literally a product of an urban, technological, ultramodern world of industry and capitalism, devoid of feelings and originality, and dedicated to corrupting the purity of the people. She is not rooted in anything and merely mimics the soulfulness of those around her while in reality seducing them with her neurotic sexuality and leading them to their destruction. These were all accusations leveled at the Jews by anti-Semitic writers, and it is no accident that von Harbou would go on to have a successful career under the Nazi regime.
Metropolis was to be a metaphor of the threat of a world ruled by soulless technology, a theme that was particularly popular among conservative and right-wing thinkers and politicians. The anti-Semitic dimension of the story, which is not immediately obvious anymore, is all the more disturbing in that the liberation of the enslaved people becomes possible only when the false Maria is burned at the stake and the flames sear off the simulacrum of flesh to reveal the automaton’s iron physique.
Half high-tech tale and half medieval legend, Metropolis betrays a very German ambivalence toward the rush of modernization that had swept the country along for a generation and had covered more ground in less time than anywhere else. Europe’s technologically most highly developed and most highly industrialized country, the home of the avant-garde aesthetics of the Bauhaus as well as a hub of scientific research, Germany was obviously not at ease with the rapid unfolding of the new. The city of Metropolis and its rulers are decadent, cruel, and technocratic, while true spirituality and indeed salvation lie in the quasi-medieval piety of Maria and her followers.
Mechanical Golems
WITH THEIR GREATEST FILM TO DATE, Lang and von Harbou had given the popular discussions about progress and its perils a distinctly German spin, des
pite the fact that their ideas were not necessarily German in origin. Not only is the mechanical Maria a seemingly innocuous metaphor for the anti-Semitic fantasy of a Jewish world conspiracy, but the figure touches a nerve of this highly body-conscious period, in which the image of the automaton had become an important part of the popular imagination. As Wells pointed out in his review, the writer and director had plagiarized not only his own futurist novels but also a play by the Czech author Karel apek that had premiered six years before the release of Metropolis.
Enigmatically entitled R.U.R., apek’s drama was another very conventional love story in technological garb, though this time without a happy end. In the play, an inventor on an island invents human-like robots out of a synthetic protoplasm, and his son, who is in it only for the money, launches mass production. Soon a race of useful automata in human form populates the earth. Because they do humanity’s dirty work, they are referred to as “robots,” after a Czech word indicating hard labor. Eventually the robots rebel against their masters, begin a bloody war against mankind, and finally extinguish almost all human life on earth.
Both helpful and potentially threatening, robots were everywhere in the culture of the 1920s. In the United States, the view of these technological helpmates was generally optimistic. Newspapers carried stories about thousand-foot-high robots secretly being developed by governments around the world to fight humanity’s wars. In a 1930 advertisement for Westinghouse’s “mechanical wonder maid,” Katrina Van Televox, the marketers of the $22,000 machine promised, apparently without irony: “Katrina talks . . . answers the phone . . . runs a vacuum cleaner . . . makes coffee and toast . . . turns the lights on and off and does it all willingly at command from Mr. T. Barnard the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Expert who is accompanying her on her tour.” In the same year, the scientist Samuel Montgomery Kintner introduced the world to a robot of his own devising, Rastus, a laborer who was, rather significantly, a “mechanical negro.”
Robots had commercial potential. While the real contraptions of steel and tubes were still too primitive to do significantly more than automata had done for centuries, the possibilities were endlessly exciting. When would it be possible, as the San Antonio Light asked in 1928, that a “romantic old maid” could keep a fully functioning robot under her bed for sentimental moments—and, by implication, even for amorous hours? The writer hoped that this day would not be too far away. “In this happy future, no old maid need look under the bed for a man, in vain,” the article explained. “He would always be there and such a nice man, a perfect imitation of her favorite matinee idol or film star, with blond or dark hair, moustache or clean shaven, anything her heart desired. These would be stock models, turned out in quantity production and quite reasonable in price.”2
Stories such as these made good copy and were entertaining without being scientific. At the same time, however, the real and progressing mechanization of factory work was a source of anxiety. Utopian writers had sketched a future in which all work would be done by machines that would have to be only occasionally supervised or repaired by humans, a golden dream. As the Depression began to bite after 1929, however, it began to look more like a nightmare, a competition between man and machine for the few precious jobs left. The mood of the press changed together with the anxieties of its readership, and now robot stories began to take a nasty turn verging on hysteria. When in 1932 the British inventor Harry May gave a demonstration of a robot he had constructed to be able to shoot a gun, he accidentally fired the weapon while putting it in the automaton’s hand. The story was immediately reported in the United States, where it took on a life of its own, with various sources writing that the robot had intentionally shot and wounded May, or even killed him—the first robot to rise against its maker and attack it.
The fact that the story of the murdering robot was an invention did nothing to stop it from spreading. This was a time when more and more people felt vulnerable to the huge success of machines. “Is Man Doomed by the Machine Age?” asked the magazine Modern Mechanics and Inventions in 1931, illustrating its story with the image of a huge robot at a switchboard, menacingly glowering down at the tiny human figures toiling below. In the same publication, boxing champion Jack Dempsey promised to come to the rescue, claiming that “I can whip any mechanical robot.” The terrible and treacherous false Maria in Metropolis had simply come too early to tap into the fears of the public.
The Iron Fist of Progress
IF ROBOTS CLAIMED such a large part of the popular imagination in the 1920s and 1930s, it was not just because technological progress appeared to bring a dream as old as humanity almost within reach. In Europe at least, bodies enhanced and to some extent created by science were already part of everyday life. Tens of thousands of mutilated veterans had received reconstructive surgery for their horrific and often disfiguring injuries or were forced to wear masks covering part of their face to give a naturalistic imitation of their previous appearance, and hundreds of thousands lived with increasingly sophisticated prosthetic limbs replacing their hands or even entire arms and legs. The fusion of biology and technology was already taking place.
The medical establishment bandaged, cut, grafted, shaped, re-educated, and experimented, all in an effort to enable their mutilated patients to lead a life as close to normal as possible. But in doing so, doctors were steering close to what was still widely considered the inviolable border between human ingenuity and divine creation. To the public, this was irresistible, as it provoked age-old superstitions as well as ageless curiosity. Again, films were ideally placed to capitalize on the thirst for sensational stories arising from this situation. The 1924 Austrian movie Orlacs Hände (The Hands of Orlac) adapted a 1920 novel by the French writer Maurice Renard in which a concert pianist loses his hands in a train crash and receives the hands of a freshly executed murderer by transplantation. Soon afterward, the otherwise gentle Orlac finds himself irresistibly drawn to knives and feels an intense desire to kill. In 1935 the film was remade in Hollywood under the title Mad Love, starring Peter Lorre.
During the war and in its immediate aftermath, victims of shell shock had been successfully treated not only with hypnosis but also with electric shocks to reactivate bodies rendered painfully useless by the trauma of bombardment and butchery. The British actor and director James Whale, a veteran of the Western Front, had directed the war drama Journey’s End in London in 1928 to great acclaim. Soon after, he was invited to Hollywood, signed to a contract by Universal Studios, and given the choice of any story he wanted to make. He picked Mary Shelley’s classic tale Frankenstein and selected as his leading man another Englishman, William Henry Pratt, whose dramatic features meant that he was often hired to play oriental villains. Pratt had emphasized this exotic appeal by choosing a more alluring stage name, Boris Karloff.
Released in 1931, Frankenstein immediately established itself as a paradigmatic film. The story of a mad scientist using body parts reclaimed from the grave and exposing them to electricity and mysterious rays to create a monster that turns into a murderous nightmare when awakened obviously struck a chord with the thrilled audience. The ill-begotten creature, it was revealed, had the brain of a criminal but was not malicious from the outset. Instead, Dr. Frankenstein’s misunderstanding and ill treatment of the monster make it more and more angry and desperate until at last it breaks free from its dungeon and inadvertently kills a young girl. In the end, the monster is being burned alive—much like the false Maria in Metropolis—by an angry mob, restoring the balance of nature.
The expiatory ritual of a public burning is profoundly disturbing, but it also reflected a psychological truth dramatized by another film released in 1931, Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, starring Fredric March, in which yet another scientist turns bad, this time by imbibing a potion that allows him to live out his primitive instincts without any moral restraint by transforming him into the ruthless and lecherous Mr. Hyde, who does not stop at murder to get his way
. When Dr. Jekyll finds that he is no longer able to control his violent alter ego, the situation deteriorates, and he is finally, as Hyde, shot by the police.
Based on a classic story by Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always lent itself to Freudian readings, which were certainly popular at the time. But popular movie villains such as Jekyll/Hyde, Orlac, Frankenstein’s monster, the terrifying Nosferatu, and characters such as Dr. Jack Griffin in The Invisible Man, a 1933 film based on a story by H. G. Wells, also spoke to their audience in a different way. Millions of soldiers had gone into the war believing that they were fighting for a good cause, only to be terribly disillusioned once they reached the trenches. The war had not only shattered, mutilated, and disfigured their bodies but also made them kill as horribly, anonymously, and senselessly as the men on the other side were killing them. Like Frankenstein’s initially meek monster or the false Maria, they had been made into something abhorrent by their masters, and now they had blood on their hands.
The dead on both sides still haunted the war’s veterans, as the Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, who had lost an arm on the Western Front in 1915, described in his story “J’ai Tué” (I Have Killed), written in 1918. The tale is a moving and masterful evocation of the experience of warfare in dense, modernist prose, a deeply disturbing verbal approximation of the unsayable:
Total conflagration. Lightning’s striking. Fires, blazes, explosions. Avalanches of cannon shells. Rollings. Barrages. Rock-drills. In this shivering electric glow frantic profiles of swerving men, a finger on a billboard, a lunatic horse. . . . We’re right in the arc of the falling shells. We can hear the big Granddaddies coming home. There are locomotives in the air, invisible freight trains, collisions, smash-ups. . . . Sounds come out of it in couples, male and female. Gnashings. Shooooshings. Creakings. Yowlings. Coughs, spits, yells, grunts, whines. Terrific chimeras of steel, mastodons in heat. Apocalyptic mouth, slit pouch from which indistinct syllables come lurching downward, enormous as cavorting whales.3