Term Paper on "Metropolis Fritz Lang"

Term Paper 4 pages (1304 words) Sources: 1 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Metropolis

Fritz Lang's, Metropolis, is perhaps the most iconic of all anti-technology, post-industrial films. At its core, there exists an absolute penetrating distrust and fear of a technocratic society where people are nothing but cogs in a machine, and their distance from the products of their labor is so great that they are actually living their entire lives underground. Lang's use of communist rhetoric, Plato's cave allegory, and modernist art combined to make Metropolis a truly unique creation for its time. While anti-industrial sentiment had been readily voiced across the social landscape, it was only along the fringe that such rhetoric had any grip. but, within the context of film, and within the structure of the first true science-fiction movie, people could not help but see the plight of the faceless worker, could not help but loathe the self-indulgence and egregious profit-taking of the owners, nor could they help but feel a deep and common sympathy with the desire of the workers to have, if nothing else, their lives in their own hands.

Metropolis is an early 19th century propaganda film for the communist argument against industrialization because of its effect of distancing man from the products of his labor. Technology then, as it consistently does now, both enhances and hurts our position within the workplace. Greater levels of productivity are achieved, while that same increase in productivity caused by technological advancement reduces the requirement for people.

Metropolis, presents a world where the worker no longer sees daylight, cannot exercise free will, is nothing but a slave to the machinery, the sole purpose of which is to provide a fantastically opulent life for those who manage the machinery. This, of course, is exactly the kind of situation that prompted Marx to form his particular brand of political socialism. In a Capitalist system (which Metropolis exemplifies), "the worker sings to the level of a commodity, and moreover the most wretched commodity of all," (Marx). Lang, however, was not a communist. Instead he fell more in the camp of the secular humanists who observed that industrialized Germany was turning citizens into cogs and recognized that, at least in some part, German's loss of World War I was an indication of a broader social failure of the rampant industrial capitalism that became more than an economic system, but the core of the political system as well.

Metropolis, paints a world of industrial dominance, of absolute control of the people, society, and the future by a small handful of management-types who sit, literally, at the top of the world while the subjects are kept in the figurative dark, doomed to a life of constant work. This world, where the gears of machines are at times several stories high, where people's clothes are all the same, and they all move with the same kind of lethargic slump that fits, almost exactly, the image of the people in Plato's cave. In that world, what the people are experiencing is a secondary existence. For the people in the cave, as it is for the workers of Metropolis, life begins and ends with only the cave, work, and the shadows on the wall. There is no substance to life, no joy, no excitement and certainly absolutely no personal fulfillment. What Lang paints is a picture of a life without meaning other than to serve the machinery of the city - which is exactly what Marx meant when he wrote about the disconnection of the worker from the product of his labor.

Lang's particular approach is not just to attack the corporate structures that put people in the position to have no choice in their life but to work in a meaningless and demeaning position, but also the individuals who have compromised their own independence so much that they can only achieve "success" by breaking the backs of others. The intent, then, is to demonstrate that when individuals are given enormous… READ MORE

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