Metropolis: A Review of the Film

It opens with music, and title card reading, "It serves no tendency, party or class. It has a moral that grows on the pillar of understanding: 'The mediator between brain and muscle must be the heart."' These are the words of Thea von Harbou, author of the novel on which the film Metropolis is based. It depicts an architectural marvel of a city towers above underground slums. It is a glace into a possible future. Maybe Thea von Harbou did not mean to server any "tendency, party or class," but the films does. Metropolis is filled with Marxist ideologies, portrayals of gender, and fears of technology that filled Europe at the time.

One of the first things the audience sees it an "Eternal Garden" filled with fountains, exotic animals, and carefree young men and woman. It is a light, beautiful place of beautiful people far above the world. The next is also striking, but not in the same way. The workers march on to screen dressed identically in black with their head down cast. The beautiful garden is a far cry form the dark elevator they walk into.

Maria tells the story of the Tower of Babel. The rulers used the workers to build the tower then ignored them. Her story mirrors the plight of the worker and foreshadowed their disastrous uprising. It also gives a clearer picture of the very unequal class system that was feared to come to pass though out Europe. This imagery, of the garden opposed to the dark elevator and the story, sets up the inequality between the works and the owners.

The film portrays those in the high class, the owners, as evil and abusive. It is Joh Frederson himself who tells Dr. Rotwang to use his robot to impersonate Maria. He wished to cause distraction and violence among the workers. He knew of their secret meetings and worried about them, but he knew that they were peaceful. No reasons for his actions are ever really given. Only that he had that kind of power.