Metropolis's prophetic vision of chaotic skylines and unequal social conditions still resonates
It's 2026 – the year imagined in Fritz Lang's sci-fi epic Metropolis almost a century ago. Despite its laboured plot the film got a lot right about the future city, writes Catherine Slessor.
Some years ago, I used to work for a company called Metropolis. As a kind of corporate in-joke, the management had tacked up Boris Bilinsky's famous poster for the 1927 film of the same name in the lift lobby, depicting an artfully nightmarish skyline. Inescapable ironies abounded.
Notably, Metropolis (the company) perhaps hadn't fully grasped how Metropolis (the film) is predicated on an infernal vision of hyper-capitalism and technological progress, in which ordinary workers are little more than disposable cogs in a vast and voracious machine. Not exactly "Live, Laugh, Love".
Metropolis is a literally exalted, skyscraping realm populated by a rich elite
When Fritz Lang began filming Metropolis in the mid-1920s, modernist fantasies of the new mechanised city, in which architecture would rationalise and civilise society, were already gripping the public imagination. Lang himself was beguiled by the panorama of Manhattan, thrusting imperiously ever upwards.
"I peered into the streets – the dazzling lights and the enormous skyscrapers – and there I created Metropolis," he said of a trip to New York in 1924. "The structures appeared to be a vertical sail, sparkling and incredibly light… hanging in the black sky to dazzle, divert, and mesmerise."
In his cinematic epic, set in a fictional 2026, the actual Metropolis is a literally exalted, skyscraping realm populated by a rich elite with a monstrous, Bruegal-esque New Tower of Babel at its heart. Lang instructed his set designers, Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl Vollbrecht, to confect a cityscape that turned out to be a blaring, surreal cacophony of historic and contemporary elements.
There's fun to be had in spotting the influences and mash-ups, from an atmospheric seam of German Expressionism, to Mies van der Rohe's crystalline towers, the Chicago School and the then-excitingly novel art deco. Overall, its impact lay not so much in representing a break with the past, but in the continuation and amplification of the present.
At the time of Metropolis's release, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel declared: "Now and forever the architect will replace the set designer. Film will be the faithful translator of the architect's boldest dreams."
Others were less enthusiastic. HG Wells proclaimed it "the silliest film" that "gives in one eddying concentration almost every possible foolishness, cliché, platitude and muddlement about mechanical progress and progress in general".
Metropolis cemented forever the image of the city as a hallucinatory hell of technological ingenuity and human despair
For all its architectural allure, the set dressing is intended to connote more profound ruptures. Physical stratification denotes social division. Basking in a rarefied, New Jerusalem-style radiance, the portrayed Metropolis is superficially emblematic of progress, yet reeks of decadence, corruption and oppression.
Beneath its gleaming spires lurks the foetid darkness of a subterranean workers' city, heaving with unceasingly toiling untermensch. As the original science-fiction film giving shape to an entirely new thematic and cultural genre, Metropolis cemented forever the image of the city as a hallucinatory hell of technological ingenuity and human despair.
A century on, its prophetic vision of chaotic skylines and direly unequal social conditions still resonates in the present realities of Emirati city states, American downtowns, Asian megacities and even foggy old London, busily terraforming itself into Dubai-on-Thames, with buildings reduced to extruded capital and power invisibly wielded through a surveillance state.
Other parallels can be discerned. Metropolis features a pampered and domineering Master of Metropolis, whose sneer of cold command oversees the city's operations. Choose from any one of the clutch of today's emotionally stunted centibillionaires, squatting on obscene amounts of wealth, gurning as the world burns.
There's also a mad scientist, a melange of Doctors Frankenstein and Strangelove, obsessed with creating artificial intelligence in the form of a robot woman. More human than human, the Metropolis cyborg is both an object of lust and instigator of revolution.
Naturally, she meets a sticky end, burned at the stake as a modern witch, while her saintly human double heroically saves the day. But as Lang intuited, the most effective means of domination is not necessarily the one that commands, but the one that captivates; an obvious antecedent of today's ubiquitous digital avatars and virtual influencers, who simulate empathy, induce dopamine hits and subtly manipulate behaviour.
Its speculations still reverberate, through the rise of algorithmic order, the drive for optimisation, the "intelligence" of machines, and, crucially, who controls them
Though Metropolis's pioneering visual effects are unsurpassed – cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan invented the Schüfftan process involving the use of mirrors to superimpose actors onto miniature sets – its plot is preposterous, held together by a glutinous love story and simplistic social message.
Ultimately, "good" prevails in the final reel, with the injunction that "the mediator between head and hands must be the heart!". A plea for the intelligentsia to find solidarity with the labouring classes, and vice versa.
Undercut by Weimar-era political anxieties and the destabilisation of traditional hierarchies, Metropolis's reflection of social turmoil had wider reverberations. Although Lang saw his film as anti-authoritarian, the Nazis liked it enough to offer him control of Germany's leading production studio UFA.
Instead, he fled to America. Yet many of the radical ideas in Metropolis found their way into Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 propaganda odyssey Triumph of the Will, in which modernity's fever dream morphs into the horrific reality of the Nazi regime.
In conjuring a milieu so strikingly in and of itself, Metropolis has become part of the way we imagine the world. But over time, atomised and absorbed into everyday culture (a poster languishing in a lift lobby), it has also become an exhausted cliché, the fetish-image of all urban and cyborg futures, invariably deployed to illustrate the perils of things to come.
Nonetheless, its speculations still reverberate, through the rise of algorithmic order, the drive for optimisation, the "intelligence" of machines, and, crucially, who controls them. As a searing reflection on the human cost of progress, Metropolis remains both of and ahead of its time.
Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is currently acting architecture critic for The Guardian and is a former editor of The Architectural Review and the former president of architectural charity the Twentieth Century Society.
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