Metropolis

The disparate elements that make up Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" don't sum to a whole. They can't: this is the point of Lang's monstrous parable. Labor and management are conceived as completely autonomous blocks of humanity -- comprised by types so distinct as to seem separate species. Head and hands, in Lang's political allegory, are severed and without mediation of the heart between those organs. Lang's delirious staging illustrates this theme on all levels: glittering pleasure domes with strange Gaudi-influenced groves of trees occupy a different reality from the subterranean industrial mills or the austere worker barracks. Rotwang's cottage is pre-medieval, neolithic, a black, windowless ark that looks like the ancient synagogue in Prague incongruously set between huge glass skyscrapers. Ancient catacombs lie under spacious Art Deco office suites, all light and streamlined control consoles. A Gothic cathedral looms over Yoshiwara's brothel, a Circus Maximus-sized whorehouse with Japanese portals. Discontinuity is the film's principle and the movie is constructed episodically, as a series of bravura set-pieces shot in different styles and building to individual climaxes: the Heart-Machine's explosion and metamorphosis into Moloch, Maria pursued by Rotwang's searchlight in the catacombs, the Tower of Babel and the whore of Babylon interpolations into the narrative, the creation of the robot in Maria's form, the false Maria's dance at Yoshiwara's followed by the hero's hallucinations and the Totentanz in the Cathedraal. Each episode is self-contained, drawing to its own climax and separated from adjacent sequences by motionless tableaux that sometimes look like freeze-frames or exquisitely staged still photographs. Many of the film's visions climax with people swooning, fainting, collapsing under the sheer pressure of excited sensation. Lang's drive to make every sequence terminate in a separate and vivid climax seems to originate in his early education in making crime films like that involving Dr. Mabuse constructed from endlessly replicating plots that are serial in form. And his technique can be more than a little overwhelming and exhausting -- for instance, a scene in which the hero breaks into Rotwang's lair involves basements and subbasements terminating in a delirious sequence set in a round room inexplicably equipped with many different locked doors. The hero batters himself into unconsciousness at the locked doors -- the episode is startling, emotionally powerful, disturbing and Kafkaesque and totally meaningless; ten minutes later, the protagonist simply leaves the cottage none the wiser (and the plot not advanced one bit) by the exciting activity in the sinister cellar. Modernity means hysteria, agitation, all styles and every type of human being and form of life, all the cities of the world and all its villages, all its religions and cults, everything in wild collision but nothing intersecting in such a way as to form a coherent society or, even, landscape. The climax of "Metropolis" is a climax of climaxes, all possible climaxes, mashed together: "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" with "The Tale of Two Cities", a frenzied collage of fistfights, people endlessly chasing one another, floods and fires but none of it really synthesized. Babel falls into discordant fragments. The condition of the future is to live among the scattered and isolate ruins of a thousand disconnected pasts. Every movie ever made is shot through with fragments of "Metropolis".