Metropolis Emboweled

I’ve just finished the complete version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (minus one short scene which is still lost) and was in the first American audience to ever view the complete film, which was cool. It’s more easily watchable than what we’d previously inherited as a lot of gaps in the narrative are restored, along with many short interspersed shots that bring coherence to the multiple big action scenes that take place simultaneously and converge on one another in the film’s second half. The whole flow of underground worker-drones smashing big machines and then line-dancing around their carcasses, earnest Dudley Do-Rights saving hundreds of abandoned children from a biblical flood, nefarious Thin Men and menacing mad scientists plotting mass destruction, and trashed flappers partying on the concrete skyways during a citywide blackout with empty cars littered all around them flow together more seamlessly and make a lot more sense now.

The cuts that were ordered by the studios to make it more commercially accessible are weird. There’s nothing especially esoteric about the recovered footage, and hacking away at key turns in the narrative can’t have been helpful in terms of the public reception. Disemboweled Metropolis was a movie only an art critic or film geek could love, as strange and surreally nonsensical as Last Year at Marienbad. And the corny action sequences interspersed throughout could only be taken as ironic and deconstructive in the mode of Jean-Luc Godard in the previous version. The full feature film is more the kind of swashbuckling, ass-kicking action-romance that you associate with big-budget Hollywood crap even in the silent era. You can’t help wondering if the studio editor was even more avant-garde (or stoned?) than the people who put the film together in the first place. As far as action-packed silent-film spectaculars go, though, I’d have to say that the original Ben-Hur still wins.

In the end though it’s easy to see why the movie’s commercial disfigurement did little to detract from its reputation. What’s so singularly hip about Metropolis is still the film’s look & feel, its massive deco statues and sets, its ritualized roaring twenties costumes that turn coke-girl flapper outfits into a modernist take on Native American headgear, above all its great big Moloch machines and its robot woman tied down to a gurney in Rotwang’s proto-Dr Frankenstein lab full of boiling beakers and functionally puzzling, electricity-conducting contraptions. The narrative makes all this more digestible, but has little of value to offer us aside from making it easier for our grandmothers to follow along as we watch it together.

Viewed again after so many years, it’s surprising to see how such a visually forward-looking film embraces traditional family values circa 1927. In that day and age this apparently entailed exhorting the proletariat to hark back to the wholesome, old-timey values of their agrarian peasant past, with the church as final arbiter of the struggle between industrial worker and latter-day aristocrat (i.e. Communist and Fascist). A valuable clue in the interpretation of behavior and meaning in the conservative religious movement today. Not Church with a capital “C”, but rather the constantly reincarnating multiple strains of grassroots populist religion that kept cropping up like mushrooms after rain and sweeping across Europe in the Middle Ages, sometimes doing significant damage. For it is a freelance incarnation of the Virgin Mary hiding out in the sewers of dystopia that brings sanity to the masses of Metropolis.

This highlights the great irony of Christianity in Western culture; promoted to official religion largely because its central authority and single deity are so useful in the forging of Empire, its clearly documented roots are so firmly on the side of anti-urban, anti-central authority rural Bronze Age class values that the Bible acts as a sort of permanent Trojan horse for the disenfranchised – not merely an opiate but also empowering, an insurance policy of sorts. And potentially dangerous as well – most medieval Jewish pogroms were enacted spontaneously by the masses in moments of aristocratic weakness: all is not sunshine and light in the old-timey agrarian values of our forebears, which the Nazi Party married to corporate fascism with ugly results. It’s hard not to interpret the workers’ suicidal frenzy at the end of the film as a disturbingly prescient take on Kristallnacht, still ten years in the future. The church was not especially helpful in restoring sanity in that particular use-case.

Speaking of religion, how about that hotty whorenun Brigitte Helm?! This is why every woman-loving human on Earth prefers Roman Catholics. Their religious upbringing has twisted them irrevocably in all the right ways. The only downside is that classic silent film acting methods – which seem closer to kabuki or koodiyattam than what we think of as movie acting today – dictate that her slutty evil doppelganger persona be performed with a facial asymmetry that makes it look like she's suffered a stroke.

Man-lovers have much less to pine for in Metropolis; Freder the corn-fed protagonist fights like a little girl, makes love with all the worldliness of a pimply teenage waiter at Friendly’s, and wears at least twelve geological strata of cake make-up that collectively make him resemble the embalmed corpse of a Swedish farmhand. Freder is less a Jesus figure than a modernist manifestation of the Buddha, cosseted away on a groovy Jazz Age roof deck banging bobbed-haired courtesans when Virginal Brigitte Helm busts in with a clatch of Dickensian waifs and explains that poverty exists. At this point everything changes. Does he want to end the social injustices wrought by his father the industrial tycoon, or is he merely burning to bag Brigitte? The two seem inextricably linked through the course of the film, and the rest of us can only let out a long sigh of relief that we’ve never fallen in love with a woman who made us end world poverty before she would sleep with us.

I’m getting too snarky and should probably stop. But to be honest it’s the occasional imperfect goofiness of Metropolis that breathes life into it & makes it more than a jaw-dropping exercise in social realist statue gardening. It allows us to roam the film and examine at will the operatic scope & perfection of its visual poetry and still puncture the self-importance a bit so we can laugh here and there at both it and ourselves.

PS you can still see Metropolis for the next two weeks at Film Forum: http://www.filmforum.org/films/metropolis.html