A Cinematic odyssey

After watching many Stanley Kubrick movies, we began our new foray into cinema with the masterpiece Metropolis. This film was made in 1927 and is therefore silent and in black and white. Despite, or maybe because of these factors, I can easily say that it is way more epic than Avatar.

It’s half–past the future in a breathtakingly massive, technologically and sociologically sophisticated city. This utopia does not come cheaply though. It is fueled by an underground dystopia where people with numbers for names get worked, literally, to death. Everyone turns a blind eye to these atrocities unto mankind until Freder Fredersen, the son of the mayor, sneaks into the “City of the Workers” and sees them for himself. He falls for a rebel leader and visionary preacher named Maria, who orates about the tower of Babel and how, eventually, Metropolis will meet its demise.
Pause for a second. It’s 1927 and whoever directed this movie has given a woman this much power? One would surely expect the leader to be a man for whom the mayor’s daughter would fall in love with. Well, the writer of the screenplay was married to the director, Fritz Lang. Back to the plot: the slaves of Metropolis ask Maria why they shouldn’t revolt just as the slaves in the tale of the tower of Babel did. She replies, “The mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.” Fredersen volunteers to be that mediator, but the mayor loves his utopia and doesn’t like where this is heading, so he gets his inventor friend to make a robo–anti–Maria to seduce the masses against their own self–interest.

Religious connotations were prominent throughout the movie, with themes including the main storyline of the Tower of Babel and Maria, a Jesus–esque peaceful leader of the tired, cold and huddled masses. It was all good until Alex hit me with a bombshell: the screenwriter was a Nazi.

Should I dislike this movie because it may have been Nazi propaganda? Was it Nazi propaganda? How could something this righteous come from the mind of a Nazi? By answering the last question, I may answer the previous two questions. Think about pre–World War II and how Hitler managed to arouse the commoners. All of Germany felt overworked, poor, and hopeless, much like those workers in Metropolis. The Nazis flourished in this mindset and found a scapegoat for Germany’s suffering: the Jews.

So to answer the second question: No, it was not Nazi propaganda, because it didn’t glorify the Nazi method of obtaining equilibrium through violence. Lang, who divorced his wife after she came out as a Nazi, is no Joseph Goebbels and Metropolis is no propaganda.

To see a movie that has as much technical majesty and tenfold more narrative value than Academy Award loser (thank G–d!), Avatar, rent “the fusion of spectacle and imagination that has never been equaled in the 100 years of cinema,” Metropolis!