Watching Metropolis In the Time of Trump Part 2
I was surprised when I learned that H G Wells hated Metropolis. All my life it has been presented as the mother of the modern science fiction film. I’ve seen dozens of films that drew inspiration from it, and not just in the genre. My favorite example is Pink Floyd’s The Wall, which is almost a shot for shot recreation of the shift change scene, except with children.
“When you spoke to your poor brothers, you spoke of peace, Maria… Today a mouthpiece of Joh Frederson is inciting them to rebel against him.”
Rotwang tells Maria that her twin will destroy the workers’ belief in a mediator. Down below, Evil Maria is speaking:
“You know that I have always spoken of peace… but your Mediator has not come… You have waited long enough! Your time has come!”
By talking of revolution. The Evil Maria is convincing the workers to rise up. Instead of trying to work within the system, she advocates for its total destruction, because those are Rotwang’s secret instructions for her.
“Who is this living food for the machines? Who lubricates the machine joints with their own blood?”
This is how Freder discovers that his Maria has changed. I never noticed before that he seems to be wearing some kind of robe, in preparation to be introduced as their Messiah or whatever. Shocked, he shouts, “YOU ARE NOT MARIA!” And all the workers turn, regarding Freder and Evil (yet sexy!) Maria.
He offers some evidence, “Maria talks of peace, not killing.” But one of the workers recognizes him “That’s Joh Fredersen’s son!… Kill him, the dog in his white silken fur-!!!”
There is a brawl, but Freder, son of Joh Fredersen, has spent his life in gyms and gardens, while these guys work 10 hour days to exhaustion. He holds his own as Josaphat tries to help and we see a man making his way through the crowd… it’s Georgy! He throws himself in front of Freder just in time to get shivved by one of the angry mob. Abruptly, they lose interest, sweeping up Evil Maria, “Get your women, your sons, from the workers’ city! Let no one stay behind! Death to the machines!”
Back at Rotwang’s, he is helpfully explaining his entire evil plan to the real Maria, unaware that Joh Fredersen can hear him through the window. This part of the movie is still lost, so we are told by cards that Joh breaks in to fight Rotwang, allowing Maria to escape. And below, Josaphat finds Freder cradling the mortally wounded Georgy. But Georgy dies happily, knowing he sacrificed himself faithfully, eventually, for his Mittler. Josaphat and Freder race after the mob, which has gathered in the square at the worker’s city. All the workers and their wives, who evidently just stay home all day, come running out to join them.
“Women and Men, let no one miss today! Death to the machines!”
It fascinates me to see that Evil Maria rallies everyone. Good Maria only ever addressed men on camera, telling them to wait for the mediator. Evil Maria though, has gone full demagogue, stoking the (legitimate) anger of all the people in the worker’s city and channeling it into destruction. This is a crucial clue about the philosophy that Metropolis is tapping into. Though modern audiences have viewed Metropolis as a socialist allegory, it is actually a story depicting Volkisch themes. (I am completely indebted here to this excellent blog by Mercouris, who lays out a compelling analysis of Metropolis as Volkisch art)
I had never heard the word “Volkisch”. I stumbled into it trying to answer the question, “What did German people in the 20s think of this film?” The Volkisch movement was part nationalism, part romanticism and part reaction to the Industrial revolution. This explains so much of the symbolism in Metropolis: the evil, demonic machines eating workers were not only metaphors for “social inequality”, they were also literal machines.
That is also why the gender division is no accident: the reason the good Maria is depicted as blond and virginal and pacifist, is as I earlier discussed, because she is a symbol, not a character. She can’t be, because according to Volkisch ideology, her place is not leading the revolution, it is to care for the home and children because that is the natural, romantic vision of a woman’s place in society. And that is why her “leadership” is resolutely passive: her role is to tell the workers, “Yes, your lives are terrible, but you are not empowered to change that. Your role is to wait for your savior.”
That is the crucial difference between Socialist ideology, and what later becomes Nazi ideology. Socialism, whatever your opinion of its merits, is actually supposed to be about worker empowerment.
And that is why it is imperative to apply these lessons to Trump. His movement is relentlessly Volkisch.
Underground, Maria leads the workers and their wives and sons up the elevators. Again and again, these elevators rise with more and more of the frenzied mob, climbing over the gates. “Not one man or woman stays behind!” shrieks the third female character with a speaking part in the entire movie.
As the workers destroy the gates and stream through the machines, pulling others away from their posts and leaving the machines to destroy themselves, a light begins to blink on a machine we’ve not seen before. There is Krot. It must be the Heart Machine. The light warns “Danger” and he uses a lever to bring two massive walls down to protect the machine. The mob outside is blocked, but Krot paces, uncertain what to do. Above, Joh Fredersen leaves the body of Rotwang and returns to his office. He fiddles with some knobs on a machine and a screen shows him views of the machines down below. He calls Krot on the videophone.
He tells Krot to open the gates. Krot is shocked, “If the Heart Machine is destroyed, the entire machine district will end up in ruins!”
Joh Fredersen is a bastard. Krot’s choice is terrible, but what can he do? He kicks open the lever. As the mob approaches, he paces at the top of the stairs like an angry giant, wielding a huge wrench. “Have you gone mad? If the Heart Machine is destroyed, the entire worker’s city will be flooded!”
But the mob is long past the point of rational self-interest. Krot is overpowered and Evil Maria destroys the machine with just a couple switches. As the machine blows up, lit by lightning and fire, the ceiling starts to cave in. Elsewhere, all the machines are in turmoil, and we get a glimpse of the massive cisterns under the worker’s city. Evil Maria sneaks away as the crowd dances in circles around the smoldering wreckage. And in the workers city, we see water beginning to bubble up through cracks in the ground. Their children are still there, and their enraptured parents have no idea they are in danger.
It is interesting to me that “children” were not included when evil Maria said, “Leave no one behind.”
The good Maria has fled Rotwang’s house and takes an elevator down below. As she steps out of the elevator, we see all the workers elevators come crashing down the shafts. The machinery of the city is failing. The children and more water come pouring out of the workers apartments. In the center, Maria has climbed on to a giant gong. With great effort, she sounds the alarm. And above, Joh is watching the city, glittering and bright, out his window. He sees all the lights go dark. Then, his spy arrives. He looks pale and shaken. He grabs Joh, “Do you know your son is with the workers?”
The children surround Maria in the center of the city as the water keeps rising. Eventually, Freder finds Maria and they embrace. They decide to lead the children up through the air shafts to safety. Freder will take them to the Club of the Sons, the place he first met Maria and realized his privilege.
Krot regains consciousness by the Heart Machine and finally, the workers can hear him, without the influence of Evil Maria. “Where are your children?!” This is mirrored above as Joh, horrified, asks his spy, “Where is my son?!”
He replies, “Tomorrow, thousands will ask in fury and desperation: Joh Fredersen, where is my son?”
Joh and the workers are mad with grief. And Krot points a finger, “Who told you to attack the machines?” This is when they begin referring to Maria as “the witch.”
Above, Evil Maria is back at Yoshiwara, born on the shoulders of the affluent crowd who doesn’t seem to care that the lights are all out. They carry exotic looking lanterns and run out gleefully to watch the world burn. Rotwang awakens and visits his monument to Hel, then apparently becomes a zombie or something.
Krot leads the crowd on the hunt for Maria. Who, for some reason necessary to the plot, didn’t go into the Club with Freder and the children. Naturally the crowd finds the wrong Maria. Freder and Josaphat hear the commotion, and come out of the Club. Eventually, they split up.
The crazed mob chases a terrified Maria through the streets. Meanwhile, the Yoshiwara endtimes revelers are dancing through the streets. Rotwang hides at the cathedral to watch and the two crowds collide. One Maria hides and the other is caught by Krot. Obviously it’s the Evil Maria, because she cackles the entire time. The crowd cheers and celebrates as they tie her to a stake and light it.
Freder finds the angry mob, who grab him and bring him to stake to watch his love burn. The crowd delights in his pain. The real Maria, who was huddled behind a statue in the cathedral’s entrance, comes out to watch, transfixed. Rotwang leaps out, convinced she is his Hel. He chases her into the cathedral. He chases her up the stairs, but she escapes by leaping over the railing and grabbing the ropes of the church bells. As the bells toll, the crowd outside sees the Evil Maria transform into the robot Hel. Rotwang reaches out and captures Maria again. Below, the crowd is shocked and horrified, releasing Freder, but then they look up to see Rotwang chasing the real Maria around the roof of the cathedral. Freder charges up there.
Josaphat has gone to get Joh. Joh Fredersen, Josaphat and the Thin Man all race to the cathedral, where they find Freder battling Rotwang on the roof. Joh falls to his knees, but then the crowd recognizes him and begins to press in. When Krot charges him, Josaphat intervenes, “Your children… saved!!”
Lang highlights the reactions of the women here. The relieved mothers weep and fall into each others’ arms. Joh’s son is still in danger. He stares as Rotwang throws his son against the stone wall, then begins to climb higher up the roof of the cathedral with a stricken Maria. Finally Freder defeats an old, crazy man with wild hair, who falls to his death. Freder and Maria are reunited.
As the film ends, we see the workers, led by Krot, march up the steps of the cathedral. Maria, Freder and Joh come out of the cathedral. Joh and Krot confront each other, still unable to come to terms. Probably because Krot knows that Joh was specifically trying to get the workers to murder their own children, but, you know, whatever. Maria urges Freder to get to mediatin’. He stands between them, placing their hands together. And that’s it: the end of the movie.
As I read the articles from people trying to make sense of Trump’s ascension, a few things stand out. First, everyone is struggling with how to make sense of his base. Are they Nazis? White supremacists? Misogynists? The answer is, it doesn’t matter. They’re the same inchoate mass that spawned Hitler because they represent a confluence of the most dangerous strains of populism in our culture. It’s not a movement so much as it’s opportunism. He didn’t speak directly to them, so much as establish a kind of resonance with their awful views.
When people are trying to figure out why alt-right figures are calling for a boycott of Star Wars, or enamored with the Matrix, they’re making the same mistake H G Wells made in viewing Metropolis. He thought it was a childish, anti-technology movie and considered it derivative of his own works. It’s important to note that he probably only saw the 90 minute version, but even so, I struggled with the same problem: how did the people who made Metropolis manage to elect the bad guy only a few years later? The answer is found in the bubble.
“American capitalism is predatory, and American politics are corrupt: The same thing is true in England and the same in France; but in all these three countries the dominating fact is that whenever the people get ready to change the government, they can change it. The same thing is not true of Germany, and until it was made true in Germany, there could be no free political democracy anywhere else in the world — to say nothing of any free social democracy.”
This was written in 1918, by Upton Sinclair in a letter about the end of WW1. I snickered when I read it, wishing I could have shown it to some of my third party voting progressive friends months ago. It’s such a wonderful illustration of why, frustrating though our system is, cynicism fixes nothing. It is easy to believe the whole world is equally corrupt, equally biased or equally dangerous. And this is very apparent in the international press covering the ascent of Hitler.
It is also in H G Wells’ review of Metropolis. The things he says about mechanization and wealth are, well...
“A vast, penniless, slave population may be necessary for wealth where there are no mass production machines, but it is preposterous with mass production machines. You find such a real proletariat in China still — it existed in the great cities of the ancient world — but you do not find it in America, which has gone furthest in the direction of mechanical industry, and there is no grain of reason for supposing it will exist in the future.”
The weird thing is that H.G. Wells was also a socialist. He was such an outspoken socialist that he was actually listed in the Nazi death book, marked for execution after their planned invasion of Britain. But ok, Metropolis was not his cup of tea. It wasn’t written for him. It was written for the people Sinclair feared, the raging and depressed citizens who were misled by their leaders, browbeaten by the international communities and struggling to survive.
This is how I always understood Hitler. A man who could only gain power through a rare confluence of financial depression, thwarted national ambition and most importantly, as part of a political alliance based in a parliamentary system. Because Hitler was never really elected: his party gained dominance by securing the largest minority of votes and then he was appointed chancellor. He benefited from angry voters, but he won because of a disfunctional system that was too anxious to fill a power vacuum.
And that is the saddest statement I can make in comparing Hitler to Trump. Americans voted for Trump in a time when we are one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We aren’t making the phones in that video, we are buying the phones and voting for the guy who villifies the people commiting suicide in a factory they also have to live at. This is not to say that there are not people being treated unfairly in America: that’s a ludicrous idea. But unless we notice and value the ways in which we are objectively better off than people in other markets or other times, we are very susceptible to this kind of victim campaigning. We are empowered to use better tools instead of flinging ourselves at angry demagogues. The question is, why don’t we use them?
How have we managed to stray so far from the ideals we celebrate and consider American? We’ll tackle that in part 3, but it all has to do with how we consume our fiction.
