H. G. Wells reviews "Metropolis" (1927)
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Lang wasn’t saying, “This is the future,” but rather, “we need to beware of a future that bends this way.” And he was right. The mechanizations that were meant, as Wells says, to liberate us didn’t entirely. We’re no longer marching shoulder to shoulder to the caves to work mechanically, but half of us go to low paid jobs that are not somehow more human than what he depicted. An Amazon or Uber driver may not look like a fleshy cog in an oversized machine but he or she might certainly feel that way.
Lang was sitting us down as children and telling us a fable and the fable had a moral: in the future we need to take care lest we the humans are reduced to machinery and the machinery sublimated to human. And Lang was prescient because, 100 years later, that is what we’ve found.
And half of us go to high paid jobs that are not somehow more human than what he depicted.
Beware the cultural, subconscious lie that "more money means you're happier". Plenty of low-paid people are happier at their jobs than plenty of millionaires.
"Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you be miserable in comfort."
Money may not bring you fulfillment, or love, etc. But currently, it can decisively solve most of Maslow's hierarchy-of-needs (with a few exceptions like illness). The unhappiness from having a hole in Maslow's hierarchy is a pretty bitter, cruel thing - especially if reaches the point of losing family members or friends.
('Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему.'), for the purists.)
The argument is about the future and what it could look like. The hope of machinery is that it can free us. And yet if we look around, much of labor is rote and serves merely to sustain existence. Instead of freeing us, we are incorporated into the machine framework, and it has reduced our humanity. That's what Lang warned us about and that's what we're finding.
Earlier today I spent some time to read about "Lawrence of Arabia" (I watched it a couple of days ago, essentially for the first time in my life), and I discovered so many interesting things, such as:
1) The movie received 7 oscars!
2) It was based on the life of T.E. Lawrence
3) The director, David Lean, also directed "Bridge on the river Kwai" in 1957 (which also won some oscars), before working on Lawrence of Arabia.
4) There's no love story. The movie lasts for almost 4 hours! It was shot in 70mm.
5) It's interesting how the protagonist's sexuality is never openly discussed, but it's hinted that he might have been homosexual.
Etc. So, after half an hour reading about it, I realized how much more there is, besides the movie itself.
Your comment on Metropolis gave me similar insights about that movie. Thanks again for sharing it.
"Thea von Harbou invents an impossible plot that is crammed with motifs. Nothing but emotional phrases. Dreadful. A serious topic cruelly kitsched up. Effects not because the story demands them, but because the film wants to show its tricks. The end, the tearful reconciliation between employer and employee - awful."
"Take ten tons of horror, pour a tenth of sentimentality over it, cook it up with social sensitivity and spice it up with mysticism as needed, stir it up with marks (seven million) and you get a topnotch colossal film."
"The director apparently had an utopian film in mind that should contain the major contemporary currents. Something for everyone: the "Metropolis" for the bourgeoisie, the assault on the machines for the workers, the collective for the Social Democrats, a good heart and the spirit of the savior for the Christians. Apart from the kitschy content, the film's technical performance is undoubtedly excellent and unmatched to date."
As a huge Fritz Lang fan, I strongly disagree.
M is a darling of mainstream film critics, but in my opinion it's absolutely atrocious, massively overrated, and not worthy of shining Metropolis' boots.
That said, Lang has some other masterpieces I would recommend, like Kremhild's Revenge and the Dr Mabuse series. I'd watch those long before touching M.
Back to those German reviews of Metropolis, I wouldn't put a lot of stock in to proto-Nazi Germany's discounting "sentimentality" in Metropolis. We know where hard-hearted disavowals of sentimentality led.
I get why your assumption they disregarded sentiments exists; we are living in very similar times where undue public importance is given to sentiments. And we would like to think they were completely different to us, but the reality is we live in similarly sentimental times.
Edit: looked up on the author of that review, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Ihering, apparently liberal-left leaning and not a darling of the Nazis.
PS. if you want a trip into weirdness, watch the uncut version of Metropolis. Weird mystic religion they got over there.
But also, as ideology, they did looked down on huge range of sentiments. Feelings related to empathy, sadness, actual romance anything like that was seen as weakness and feminine. They were not ok with sentimentality as we normally mean the word. Sentimental movies were not what they approved, because that makes you feel empathetic and gentle and that was bad.
They were ok with only some emotions, notably the ones that makes you more likely to join the fight. Like, relatedly, they were homophobic a lot, but Triumph of Will has clear aspects of homoeroticism.
(For the record, it is not nazi only thing. Any movement that seeks military domination and genocide is going to have similar preferences. Emphaty does not go well with the plans, irrational loyalty to state/party/whatever does. )
A fairly good transfer is available on Netflix DVD.
I think this is being way too harsh on the critics. Sadly, I forgot to add the sources above. The first quote is from a liberal newspaper, the second is from a satirical magazine (Simplicissimus [0], certainly above suspicion when it cames to Nazism) and the last one is from a communist newspaper. H. G. Wells himself notices a "sauce of sentimentality".
> We know where hard-hearted disavowals of sentimentality led.
I don't want to start the discussion whether Metropolis is a pro-Nazi film (it isn't), but we certainly know where a hard-hearted embrace of kitsch sentimentality led.
No, I won't name one as it would ironically dilute my point.
Perfect summary.
[0] George Orwell: https://orwell.ru/library/reviews/wells/english/e_whws
Having said that, yes, the film is not what we would today call "hard sci-fi". But a lot of the things that Wells criticizes as unrealistic are clearly intentional and meant to be symbolic, like the machines not serving any visible purpose. H. G. Wells obviously recognized this, which makes the review read a bit unfair and bitter. I wonder if there's a story behind this.
It really brings the film to a whole other level, far beyond what you'd get when watching it with a pre-recorded soundtrack.
Fun fact: the first part is said to have been Stalin's favourite movie, while the second was censored
> And what this film anticipates is not unemployment, but drudge employment, which is precisely what is passing away. Its fabricators have not even realized that the machine ousts the drudge. [...] 'Efficiency' means large-scale productions, machinery as fully developed as possible, and high wages.
Of course, he ended up being wrong and Metropolis (along with Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times) ended up being eerily right. Modern life is a drudge. People don't toil in the fields, but they waste away in office buildings. The internet wasn't the harbinger of a new Enlightenment, but often does the opposite: it proliferates ignorance.
That didn't age well...
https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Theory-David-Graeber/dp...
I don't believe he did, though he certainly saw it up close and personal.
Wells wrote extensively during WWI, publishing many articles and pieces about what he called a necessary evil, as well as writing condolence letters to soldiers.
To write "War and the Future: Italy, France and Britain at War", he was invited to tour the French and Italian fronts, but initially resisted the idea (before finally relenting):
> For my own part I did not want to go. I evaded a suggestion that I should go in 1915. I travel badly, I spread French and Italian with incredible atrocity, and am extreme Pacifist. I hate soldiering. And also I did not want to write anything "under instruction"
And yet we have the highest rates of literacy ever, and Wikipedia is one the most visited sites ever: Amusing how someone can make blanket claims without checking the data.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/literate-and-illiterate-w...
Let's not proliferate ignorance further.
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-age-of-ignorance_b_116666...
[2] https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/the-internet-isnt-making-us-d...
He was too old to fight in WW1. He was born in 1866, so he was 48 when the war started. He did work at Wellington House (the War Propaganda Bureau) towards the end of the war, though.
As Monty Python says, “Always look on the bright side of life!”
An important bit of context for the book is that it was written by a woman who moved from an agrarian village in Germany —where nothing had changed for hundreds of years— to height-of-the-Industrial-Revolution New York. It was quite a shock. And, imagine the book is from her extrapolations.
A fun bit is that it was written long before the invention of computers. So, this vision of a technologically advanced society has no concept of computerization and substitutes mind-numbing, body-crushing proletariat labor as the means of automation.
True, to a slight extent. OTOH, Lang starting filming only 23 years after Méliès. 'Trip to the Moon'. It's quite a leap from a 12-minute short to spending 17 months and 5+M Reichsmarks to make a 151-minute monsterpiece. Is it over the top? Compare to US silents of the time (UFA partnered with Paramount and MGM for financing to finish it).
Imagine how Wells, a major geek, have moaned about the all the needless sentiment and emotion in George Pal's wonderful realizations of his greatest works? Compare them to his 1936 baby, 'Things to Come' with its cold, mechanical dialog, 'awkward pace and uninvolving characters'. I've seen Pal's dozens of times, 'Things' one-half time.
> 'Efficiency' means large-scale productions, machinery as fully developed as possible, and __high__ __wages__. The British Government delegation sent to study success in America has reported unanimously to that effect.
> The increasingly efficient industrialism of America has so little need of drudges that it has set up the severest barriers against the flooding of the United States by drudge immigration.
The experience was much different. One with local band was awesome, one of best movies ever. The one in tv was boring and meh. It was interesting to see how much difference the backround can make.
Fond memories, thanks to my father.
Maybe H.G. would've rocked out to it.
Here's one that might be described as electro-blues...
> That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly, highly improbable.
Interestingly, in his own movie, "Things to come" from 1936, we see that exact same idea.
While some of the themes are obvious—rich living in the sky, poor toiling underground… I had trouble fully understanding the point of the lady robot and "heart mediating between the head and the hand" angle. Wells' helped me come to a better understanding, thanks for that.
I think he gets much right, about art's fear of technology. I found his complaints about car and plane models nitpicky however. (They had already spent too much, I suppose they could have spent more.) I am generally pro-technology/efficiency, however there are negative aspects that often need to be addressed for the good of society, and aren't.
But then he drops square into urban planning and the density/NIMBY debate, which affects many parts of society today:
That vertical city of the future we know now is, to put it mildly,
highly improbable. Even in New York and Chicago, where the pressure on
the central sites is exceptionally great, it is only the central office
and entertainment region that soars and excavates. And the same
centripetal pressure that leads to the utmost exploitation of site
values at the centre leads also to the driving out of industrialism and
labour from the population center to cheaper areas, and of residential
life to more open and airy surroundings.
That was all discussed and written about before 1900. Somewhere about
1930 the geniuses of Ufa studios will come up to a book of
Anticipations which was written more than a quarter of a century ago.
The British census returns of 1901 proved clearly that city populations
were becoming centrifugal, and that every increase in horizontal
traffic facilities produced a further distribution.
This vertical social stratification is stale old stuff. So far from
being 'a hundred years hence,' Metropolis, in its forms and shapes, is
already, as a possibility, a third of a century out of date.
Interestingly, Wells also gets bogged down in the details of mechanical efficiency, which have put numbers of folks out of work. But when we watched it, my brain immediately converted the factory to a metaphor of modern work, not the physical production of cheap goods. We see today it is quite possible to fleece the poor and increase homelessness by limiting housing and inflating assets, cheap goods or not. Manipulating the masses has never been easier, as well. In any case, lots to think about.
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-011-the-film-expe...
I subscribed to the Criterion Channel after watching the lectures, which has a number of the movies referenced in the course. I developed a new appreciation for Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. There is a lecture on German film:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-011-the-film-expe...
Prof. Thorburn doesn't seem to like Metropolis either:
> It's much admired by certain film scholars, although not by me.
That said, I don't know what Lang's political views were, and Serfdom has been abolished in Germany for about 100 years when the movie was made.
I actually like like the movie quite a bit, but I've always been disappointed with the ending.
That's my main impression from a lot of texts written by Wells about the "modern" world. Reading them, it's easy not only to recognize that he had wrong predictions, but even that he didn't have a good enough idea about the world of his time. Interestingly enough, in spite of that, some of his observation and conclusions based on them, when they were correct as far as his myopic view reached, can be indeed lucid.
Still, I'm very sure that he's not at all unique, neither in his time nor in our current. Most of us are myopic as soon as we start to write about the "big" topics, and even more when our political biases are to be present. In many decades, whatever we saw wrong will be much more obvious.
“In him I realised that Communism could after all, in spite of Marx, be enormously creative. After the tiresome class-war fanatics I had been encountering among the Communists, […], this amazing little man, with his frank admission of the immensity and complication of the project of Communism and his simple concentration upon its realisation, was very refreshing. He at least has a vision of a world changed over and planned and built afresh,”
Anyone who has romantic illusions about that period should read Montefiore's `Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar`.
Reminds me of when I used to fly for work a dozen times a year. A 737 is basically a bus with wings. Probably even less so. And a further point like me sitting a 737 back in the 80's Metropolis's denizens I think don't find their technology dazzling.
"Fritz Lang's Monster: Was Metropolis a Pro-Nazi Film"[1] by Elly Hoffman is one of these, and it echoes the conclusions of the others:
"Thea Von Harbou may very well have attempted to slip her pro-Nazi opinions into Metropolis, but ultimately Metropolis not only does not reflect how Nazi Germany operated in practice -- -- the Nazis' failure to truly uplift the working class -- -but it actively disregards and objects to the pillars of Nazism. The Führerprinzip is rejected in Metropolis' critique of Joh Fredersen, the Volksgemeinschaft is contradicted in its promotion of general equality and its lack of a 'racial enemy', and the Judenkampf is contradicted in the absence of an all-evil Jewish caricature, as well in Metropolis' portrayal of the beauty of technology not lying in its use for exterminating the enemy, the Jew, but instead as being the very goal when building Utopia. The Nazi ideals, the Nazi vision of Utopia, not only does not exist in New Babylon, but Maria and Freder's mission ends up casting such ideals and visions into the gutter."
[1] - https://medium.com/science-technoculture-in-film/fritz-langs...
> while Metropolis might posit some ideas with regard to cooperation between the classes for the ‘greater good’
But the movie does not stop there. It actually says "Gee, wouldn't it be nice if there was some Mediator guy that made everyone get along?". That's the "slight nod" I was referring to.
And the thesis that a movie is not leaning towards a certain ideology because it does not present all of its principles in spades is untenable. Olympia and Triumph of the Will also lack an "evil Jewish caricature" and "enemy-exterminating technology", but does that means they "object to the pillars of Nazism"?
Edit: I should clarify, I do not want to diminish the artistic value of Metropolis, which I love. I am just pointing out that it's better seen as a "fairy tale" (as Lang himself said) than as a "political" movie.