A Film Canon

The prototypical cinematic vision of a futuristic dystopia, Metropolis articulates its world in astonishing detail - partly because that world is itself subdivided into a number of discrete, stratified microcosms, including the capitalists' elevated pleasure-gardens, the streetscape, the subterranean factories and workers' quarters and, beneath it all, the prehistoric (or at least pre-industrial) catacombs, from which the workers organise their resistance movement. Lang's capacity to enliven his sets and props culminates with his depiction of machinery, which assumes an aggressive agency that characterises labour as a kind of pathetic, futile warfare, beautifully explicated in a montage sequence that transforms the central power source into the mouth of Moloch, relentlessly consuming an endless stream of human sacrifices. There is, however, a disjunction between the world of Metropolis and the narrative Lang locates within it, which is too ideologically overdetermined and, ultimately, opaque, to conform to the simple allegory of class relations suggested by this stratification. Instead, Lang mines Marxism, Christianity and esoteric Judaism to produce an overwhelming sense of apocalyptic expectation, which finds its strongest expression in the spectacular destruction of the subterranean world (and, in particular, the flooding of the workers' quarters), rather than the generic chase sequence and contrived symbolism that conclude the film. Lang also provides an elegant compromise between the Expressionist obsession with split (female) identifies and his sci-fi mileu in the form of the evangelical, prophetic Maria and her robotic double, easily the most intriguing character(s) in the film.