HAS ANY movie ever changed anybody’s life? The art or craft of the cinema has had, like any other mode of expression, the chance to modify the ways we think, feel, see, hear, even believe, but it has missed it, muffed it, failed. Books are different; so is music. Spend an evening reading the sixth book of Milton’s Paradise Lost, or listening to Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, and you can feel your attitude to life being changed. This is probably because you are placed in contact with a powerful sensibility, allied to a towering intellect, that is unified and knows what it believes. But movies are not individual works; they are the products of a collective, and, as such, they bristle with compromise. Reputable scriptwriters weep to find their best scenes discarded. Great directors howl with rage at brutal cuts. The film is a commercial form, and it cannot permit genius to rage untrammelled, for the general public does not care much for genius. Originality is dangerous, so is the naked truth. We have had movies that approached greatness – like Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane – but always had to yield to what the box office would permit.
I speak, of course, of Hollywood, the world centre, as it once was, of commercial cinema. Hollywood produced very efficient artefacts, but it was short on courage – which, anyway, would always be damped by the censors. The situation in Europe has been different, though the American philosophy of film, along with American finance, has finally prevailed. Things were different when Buñuel and Dali concocted Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau produced Le Sang d’un Poète on a shoestring. And, as long ago as 1926, before Fritz Lang emigrated to the United States, it was possible to approach greatness with the film Metropolis.
If any movie got near to changing my life, it was this. It cost a lot of money to make and nearly ruined the German organisation, Ufa, that financed it. But the expense was justified. I still look at it on videocassette – unfortunately in superadded crude tints with the accompaniment of wretched rock music (both of which, thank the Lord, can be eliminated) – and, in 1975, I had the chance to improvise music for it on the piano at a cinema club showing in Iowa City. My father had done the same thing professionally (that is, for enough money to buy a couple of beers) at the film’s first showing in Manchester, England. I remember that occasion. It is, as they say, etched on my brain. I was nine years old, and the publicity of stills and handouts affected me powerfully before viewing it in the sixpenny stalls. The movie itself was a revelation.
In 1926, my generation drew its childish myths from two sources – the far past and the far future. The far past was really for the palaeontologists – the lost world of the brontosaurus, the tyrannosaurus, and the pterodactyl. This was explored in boy’s magazines, in a novel by A. Conan Doyle, even in a crude film based on the latter’s The Lost World. The fascination was still alive when, in the middle 1930s, King Kong was made. The recent re-make of that masterpiece is a disgrace: the computerised technology that makes Kong into a credible giant simian at the same time diminishes him by killing the mythical component. That old black-and-white original was visually crude, trying to cheat us, but we didn’t care. We accepted the limitations of the art-form as we accept the limitations of opera and Shakespearean drama. We make adjustments, we use imagination. The De Laurentiis version of King Kong killed imagination by being too explicit, and there were no adjustments to make. Kong had become a kind of personification of the ecology; there was no room for the ambiguous.
The imaginary future was, as I say, the other side of our mythical coin. We had been given the future long before, in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine and When the Sleeper Walks, and our boy’s magazines presented a cruder version of it, with spaceships, robots, skyscrapers and even the End of the World. Both the future and the past had in common this capacity to stimulate the fancy, and this was not easily stimulated by the 1920s, despite Scott Fitzgerald (I saw the first film version of The Great Gatsby), the Black Bottom, short skirts and fancy garters. If we British kids had been given the money for a trip to New York, we would have seen the skyline of the future, but we were stuck in dull suburbia, feeding on subliterary trash and the trash of the cinema. But Metropolis was not trash.
The novel on which the movie was based was written by Fritz Lang’s wife, Thea Von Harbou. One could buy it in Woolworths for five cents. I have recently re-read it, though in German: it is a piece of competent popular literature that refuses to die. It’s a pretty melodramatic story. Let me summarise it. Sometime in the future there is a great city, ruled by one man, a kind of super-capitalist named Joh Fredersen. The community is divided into the workers and the consumers. The consumers live in great luxury, while the workers dwell underground and shuffle to work at the blast of the whistle. These do not seem to require the discipline of a police force: they are inured to the miserable labour of the factory – probably their constraints are purely economic.
A girl named Maria (played by Brigitte Helm) appears one day in the gorgeous gardens of the Club of the Sons – the sons, that is, of the ruling leisured class. She brings a group of miserable-looking children who gape in wonder at the peacocks and the flowers, and she looks the son of Joh Fredersen in the eye, saying, ‘These are your brothers and sisters’. She and her charges are bundled off by major-domos and lesser flunkeys, but young Fredersen has a moment of intense revelation. Metropolis is founded on injustice, he realises, and he rushes to his father’s office to tell him this. His father is not pleased, and he sets a spy to follow him around to see that he does not get into socialist mischief.
But the young man descends to the grim world of the workers, where he sees vast machines that appear to him to be incarnations of the god Moloch, swallowing human fodder alive. The technology is, by our standards, pretty primitive. It unloads a lot of steam, but the steam is appropriate to this vision of hell.
Young Freder Fredersen is struck particularly by the sight of a young slave crucified, as it were, on a huge ten-hour clock, on whose periphery lights flash in unpredictable places: the sweating worker’s task is to touch the lights with two prongs like clock-hands. If he fails, the red rises in a vast thermometer and the whole factory is threatened with an explosion. Freder takes over the young man’s task and frees him.
In the medieval quarter of Metropolis lives an inventor named Rotwang. He was once a contestant of Joh Fredersen’s for the hand of Hel, a beautiful young woman who died giving birth to Freder. The loss and ultimate death of Hel have unbalanced him somewhat – he has even erected a stone monument to her – but his inventive faculty is sharp enough. He has created a robot, all metal body and metallic brain, and this he proudly shows to Joh Fredersen. The two men hate each other but are bound together in a kind of hostile symbiosis: inventive brain and autocratic power are joined in mutual need. But Joh Fredersen’s visit to Rotwang concerns a matter of pure politics. Rotwang’s cellar leads to the old catacombs, where Peterson suspects subversive meetings are taking place. The two men descend into a region of old bones and, hidden in the shadows, they observe such a meeting.
The meeting is less political than ethico-religious. Maria is in charge. She tells to the assembled workers the story of the Tower of Babel and how the construction collapsed because there was no mediation between the hands of the builders and the brains of the entrepreneurs. ‘Mittler swischen Hirn und Händen muss das Herz sein’ – between the brain and the hands there must be a heart. Young Freder, among the attentive listeners, knows that he must be the mediator, a kind of Christ. In Maria, for whom he feels an immense and complicated love, he sees the eternal mother and the eternal virgin. He declares love to her when the meeting is over; she chastely kisses him.
Joh Fredersen tells Rotwang that the workers must by confirmed in their servitude, with no nonsense about human feeling (which might mean strikes and machine-smashing) and that the robot must be given Maria’s face and form and programmed to preach obedience to the Master of Metropolis. So Maria is captured and, in an impressive but implausible Frankenstein sequence, we see the metal robot take on the appearance of flesh and the face of Maria. She has no heart but she seems to have sexuality. Made to dance before the rich habitués of the club called Yoshiwara, she fires glands and provokes duels to the death in the German manner. Then she tells the workers to smash the machines. This was never in the programme. A robot can, apparently, go mad.
Smashing the machines means flooding the workers’ subterranean city. There is panic. Rotwang, now mad himself, sees in the captured Maria the lineaments of the dead Hel. She escapes but he chases her into the cathedral, where lifesize effigies of the Seven Deadly Sins come to life for an instant. Young Freder, now disclosed as a kind of god who has descended into hell to redeem dead souls, finds the levels which control the machines that stop the flooding. The workers decide to burn the creature they think is Maria as a witch. She laughs through the flames, the synthetic flesh burns off, and there, in metallic indifference, stands the robot. Meanwhile Rotwang is chasing Maria over the roof of the cathedral. Freder gets up there too, hurls the inventor to his death, and rescues the virgin-mother who will now, presumably, be his wife. It does not look as though the social inequalities of Metropolis are going to change much, despite the fact that Freder joins the hands of the Master and the representative of the workers. He is the heart, and brain and hands have found their mediator. There is no talk of trade unions, better housing, fairer wages. A mythological point has been made, and the film comes to an end.
It is a melodramatic plot, and the implausibilities stick out like sore thumbs. Some of the acting would be booed even on an old-time barnstorming circuit. But realism is not wanted here: Fritz Lang is working in the German tradition of Expressionismus. The aim of that movement, whose best German exponent is Ernst Toller and whose lasting theatrical monument is Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, was to thud home a thesis, usually political, with every possible device – symbolism, song, choral chant, stylised movement, décor – and a total abandonment of such traditional dramatic properties as character. If the only personage in Metropolis that has any allure is the robot as Maria, that is because sexuality has pushed its impertinent way in, and not even sex has any place in Expressionism.
The film is, for all its faults, one of our few cinematic classics, and this is because it provides ikons. The visual exaggerations are metaphors that stick in the mind. Lang first saw the towers of Metropolis when he approached the New York skyline from the sea, but his own imagined city borrows only the Babel aspect – ‘Let us build a tower that will reach the sky’. His pasteboard architecture chills because of its beauty: the Paternoster Tower has, in its structure as well as its name, a biblical resonance, a cathedral-like quality which announces a new religion. The worship of power and money is seen in New York not in an architectural philosophy: the skyscrapers are not bound together in an urban plan, they are each a monument to individual thrust, and, in New York, individualism is rampant. But in Lang’s Metropolis individualism is the property of one man only, the Master. We are in a totalitarian state, and the architecture is totalitarian.
Lang’s vision is, of course, prophetic, but the prophecy has never been fulfilled. Hitler came to power seven years after the film was completed, but his tyranny took a form different from Joh Fredersen’s. Fredersen’s power is at least sane in the American manner. It is based on money and is totally American. There is nothing militaristic or racial in it. He has never read the philosopher Hegel, with his forecast of the World Soul manifesting itself in the Aryan race. There is no anti-Semitism, and the only uniforms are the drab ones of the workers, who probably owe something to the state-slaves of Zamyatin’s novel We, who are called ‘unifs’ – they are their uniforms and nothing more. Hitler’s Germany was a nightmare which not even Lang could foresee, but his own nightmare is more terrible because it creates myth, which the mechanised Nazis never could. All the Nazis could ultimately give to us in the arts is the material of rather vapid adventure movies – dodging the Gestapo, blowing up the heavy water works at Peenemünde. The racial policy was demented and is fitter for psychological probing than for art. The proletarian slavery that Lang depicts is rational: men will submit to anything in order to earn bread. It is American rationalism, Taylorism if you like, and a world away from the Teutonic dreams of Hitler.
None of this is really the point. Film is a visual medium, and, if the task of literature is to stud the brain with quotations, cinema’s job is to cram it with images which transcend story-line and feed the need for myth. There are very few films which have done this. King Kong is one of them, and so is The Incredible Shrinking Man, whose makers could never have foreseen its mythical impact. We are told by the French post-structuralists that the writer doesn’t write: the writer is written, is controlled by the language he uses. And so Lang was controlled by the limitations of black and white, by mocked-up urban landscapes which never pretended to be real, and probably by the strange ambiguous beauty of Brigitte Helm. The film can never be remade, though a musical version of it has enjoyed a limited run in London. Its retinting has maimed its essence, and the addition of aspirational pop-songs about setting people free is an impertinence. The film was never meant to be political propaganda. Lang admits that he was primarily fascinated by machines, above all perhaps by the huge machine which is the film-making complex.
When I say, though with many reservations, that Metropolis is a movie that changed my life I perhaps really mean that it changed my childhood. ‘In the lost childhood of Judas,’ wrote George Russell, ‘Christ was betrayed.’ Perhaps our adult lives are nothing more than sophisticated replays of our extreme youth. The myths which nourish our childhood are implanted for ever. I can never free myself from Metropolis.
Previously unpublished and undated